|
This article has been assessed not ready for publication.Please see the review comments on the collaboration page. When these things have been done, and the article is ready to be reviewed and fact-checked, Submit for review?Template:Assistant:Submit/formSubmit for review by changing the |
| This article has been assessed not ready for publication.
Please see the review comments on the collaboration page. When these things have been done, and the article is ready to be reviewed and fact-checked, Submit for review?Template:Assistant:Submit/formSubmit for review by changing the |
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
A Stanford University study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports climate change has inhibited economic growth in poorer countries like India and Mexico but fostered it in cooler places like Norway. The gap between rich and poor countries, says the study, is 25% wider than it would have been without climate change, a difference that one author compared to the Great Depression.
In previous works, Earth system scientist Marshall Burke and co-authors checked the gross domestic product of 165 countries against fluctuations in average temperature over the course of 50 years. In the current work, Burke and co-author Noah S. Diffenbaugh used these data with 20 different climate models to create 20,000 estimates of annual economic growth per country and determine how much each economy would have grown if the average global temperature had not changed.
They also recorded the contributions to global warming, such as greenhouse gas emissions, made by each country. They found fourteen out of the nineteen biggest emitters experienced some economic growth attributed to global warming by the terms of this study.
“Our study makes the first accounting of exactly how much each country has been impacted economically by global warming, relative to its historical greenhouse gas contributions,” said Diffenbaugh, who is the Kimmelman Family senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
“The historical data clearly show that crops are more productive, people are healthier and we are more productive at work when temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold,” said Burke. “This means that in cold countries, a little bit of warming can help. The opposite is true in places that are already hot.” Burke went on to call the 25% difference in output “on par with the decline in economic output seen in the U.S. during the Great Depression. It’s a huge loss compared to where these countries would have been otherwise.”
Findings showed that most of Africa, Australia, much of South America, and India experienced less economic growth over the years than they are projected to have enjoyed without global climate change, by up to 25%, and cooler countries such as Canada, Chile, Russia and most of northern Europe showed more.
“It’s almost the worst possible setup for trying to solve the problem,” commented Brown University environmental policy scholar J. Timmons Robert, who did not work on the paper, “to have some group that’s already rich and powerful actually getting some boost from this effect, while the poor sufferers are suffering even more.”
The study also notes that economies at middling latitudes, including China and the United States, have not seen large net gains or losses from climate change.