July 4, 2017, by Tim Radford
Yet another study has exposed the cruel cost of climate change as it increases US poverty. It could be worse than the Great Recession.
LONDON, 4 July, 2017 – US researchers have calculated the detailed cost of climate change for all of the 3,143 counties in the country. The outlook is bleak, and US poverty is set to grow .
If global warming continues unabated, then near the end of this century the poorest third of the counties in the US could suffer economic damage that could cost up to 20% of their income.
Those counties in the south and southern midwest, already poor and hot, will lose the most. Rising temperatures will also have an impact on property crime, violent crime, agriculture, energy, coastal storms and human mortality.
Every 1°C rise in average temperatures could lift death rates by 5.4 per 100,000 and could cost 1.2% of gross domestic product, according to a new study in the journal Science.
More frequent floods
In 2016 Professor Kopp took a long look at sea level change over the last 3,000 years to confirm the unprecedented nature of sea level rises in the 20th century, and the link with human-driven climate change.
Earlier this year he looked at coastal flood risks around the US to predict that the kind of once-in-a-decade flood observed in cities like Charleston could be 173 times more frequent if fossil fuel emissions continued under the notorious “business as usual” scenario.
Professor Hsiang has repeatedly emphasised the economic and social costs of climate change, and used statistical methods to make the connection between violence and rising temperatures.
This time the 12 researchers from seven institutions took the big data approach. They matched state-of-the-art statistical analysis with 116 climate projections for 15 different kinds of impact and ran 29,000 simulations of the US national economy to measure the real world benefits and costs of climate change at the county level, in terms of farming, crime, health, energy demand, labour and the impact on coastal communities from higher temperature, changing rainfall, rising seas and intensifying hurricanes.
I can personally vouch for how bad these climate extremes are playing out in po folk land. Not good.