It’s taken me a couple of weeks to process it, but here’s a new model of climate change costs in a recent Nature article The economic comm

You’re underreacting to climate change

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2024-04-29 07:00:03

It’s taken me a couple of weeks to process it, but here’s a new model of climate change costs in a recent Nature article The economic commitment of climate change. From the abstract (emphasis mine):

Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty).

Those are huge losses already baked-in: if anything, our current emission path and actual investment are moving in the opposite direction, meaning that we are looking forward to a generation of income headwinds of more than 1% a year in income growth every single year – and after that it gets bad.