Climate Change Slams Global Economy in a New Study From Stanford and Berkeley

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/climate-change-slams-global-economy-in-new-study-from-stanford-and-berkeley

Eric Roston
Oct. 21, 2015

Climate change could cause 10 times as much damage to the global economy as previously estimated, slashing output as much as 23 percent by the end of the century, a new research paper from Stanford and Berkeley finds.

Looking at 166 countries from 1960 to 2010, the researchers identified an optimal average annual temperature that coincides with peak productivity of, for example, labor and crops. It's 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius), or approximately the climate of San Francisco's bay area. The paper appears in the new issue of Nature.

Countries in the tropics, already hotter than this optimal temperature, are likely to face the most dramatic economic pain from warming, the study found. Countries at or just past the 55-degree annual average, such as the U.S., China, and Japan, may be increasingly vulnerable to losses as the temperature warms.

Northern countries well below the ideal average may see benefits as opportunities open up for agriculture and industry. But this was the least robust finding. And even if the warming improves the lot of Scandinavia and Canada, such nations may not have many healthy trading partners left as others suffer. Also, higher temperatures in northern countries don't take into account changes in precipitation, more extreme weather, and the many other risks in a warming world.

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the study looks at national temperature records through time.

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They found that if the economies continue to respond to heat the way they have in the past, most of the world is in for a rough ride.

What they are not doing, Burke said, is making an argument that temperature is necessarily the most important factor driving national economies. "Climate is not fate," he said. "Countries can do a lot, and there many other factors beyond temperature that matter," such as geography, culture, and governance institutions.

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"Their findings are startling," said Trevor Houser, an energy climate expert at the Rhodium Group, a research firm. "In their base-case estimate, the global economic price tag is more than 20 percent of GDP, several times higher than previous estimates."

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Another takeaway from the study is that over the past six decades, economies haven't adapted well to hotter temperatures. "We're optimistic on adaptation and its long-run potential," Burke said. [Appears when he said "We", he was talking about most humans, not his personal feelings.] "Looking historically, we don't see a lot of evidence that we're good at that."

A cliché repeated in some scientific circles suggests that there are three possible responses to climate change: mitigation (the word wonks like to use instead of prevention), adaptation, and suffering. If the new study means our mitigation efforts are even weaker than previously thought, and we don't have a proven track record of adaptation, are we setting ourselves up for suffering?

"That's exactly right," Burke said. "That's exactly right."

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