With the exception of increasingly frequent severe weather and superstorms, most of us — especially middle-class, working adults — don’t spend an awful lot of time worrying about climate change. But that may change soon as scientists find more and more evidence that warmer average temperatures are going to start taking an economic toll.
A new study released by Tatyana Deryugina and Solomon M. Hsiang from the National Bureau of Economic Research claims that the hotter the world gets, the more expensive every day life will become. Specifically, the researchers draw a comparison between declining economic activity and how high the temperature is on a given day.
By comparing and contrasting economic and climate data from the past 40 years, the study comes to the conclusion that for every degree warmer than 59 Fahrenheit, the country’s economic input decreases by about 1%. As the Associated Press puts it, that means that on a 77-degree day, the average individual’s income drops by $5, as opposed to a day that ended up with a high of 57 degrees.
“While extraordinary achievements in science, technology, politics, and social institutions over the last millennium have lifted modern economies to levels never before achieved, we find that these forces are constantly in opposition to at least one environmental factor, temperature, that continuously slows down economic progress,” the study says. “Personal income per capita increases slightly as temperatures rise from cool to moderate, then declines approximately linearly at temperatures above 15°C (59°F). Relative to a day with an average temperature of 15°C (59°F), a day at 29°C (84.2°F) lowers annual income by roughly 0.065%.”
To reframe the paper’s findings, if climate change continues down its current path and temperatures continue to rise, the impact on the economy could reach into tens of billions of dollars annually.
Read more at Climate Change Is a Tax, and Rates Are Going Up
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