My Climate Change News

Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic publication:

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 extremes7,8. 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). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.

That dry language and the arc of the authors' research findings unpacks as evidence-based headlines:

The paper's results will be refined, inevitably. With passing time the empirical, already-experienced evidence the paper relies upon to establish its projections will increasingly include measurable economic impact. Meanwhile other researchers will doubtless be inspired to improve on this effort, "what if the authors are incorrect?" being a reasonable question to ask. Equally it's reasonable to ask "how wrong can they be?" Even supposing that the unfolding truth reveals the authors have delivered a 50% overshoot, 19 trillion dollars is not a trivial amount of economic opportunity to lose. Our ultimate truth may also include underestimation. For the time being, Stanford University's Marshall Burke may have the best assessment of this paper, for guiding our path forward: "I wouldn’t put a ton of weight on their specific numerical estimates, but I think the big picture is basically right." Marshall seems suitably cautious; when starting...