https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/climate-damages-by-2050-will-be-6-times-the-cost-of-limiting-warming-to-2/ Skip to main content * Biz & IT * Tech * Science * Policy * Cars * Gaming & Culture * Store * Forums Subscribe [ ] Close Navigate * Store * Subscribe * Videos * Features * Reviews * RSS Feeds * Mobile Site * About Ars * Staff Directory * Contact Us * Advertise with Ars * Reprints Filter by topic * Biz & IT * Tech * Science * Policy * Cars * Gaming & Culture * Store * Forums Settings Front page layout Grid List Site theme light dark Sign in That's pricey -- Climate damages by 2050 will be 6 times the cost of limiting warming to 2deg Study tracks the past costs of climate events and projects them into the future. John Timmer - Apr 17, 2024 7:06 pm UTC A worker walks between long rows of solar panels. Enlarge Frame Studio reader comments 66 Almost from the start, arguments about mitigating climate change have included an element of cost-benefit analysis: Would it cost more to move the world off fossil fuels than it would to simply try to adapt to a changing world? A strong consensus has built that the answer to the question is a clear no, capped off by a Nobel in Economics given to one of the people whose work was key to building that consensus. While most academics may have considered the argument put to rest, it has enjoyed an extended life in the political sphere. Large unknowns remain about both the costs and benefits, which depend in part on the remaining uncertainties in climate science and in part on the assumptions baked into economic models. In Wednesday's edition of Nature, a small team of researchers analyzed how local economies have responded to the last 40 years of warming and projected those effects forward to 2050. They find that we're already committed to warming that will see the growth of the global economy undercut by 20 percent. That places the cost of even a limited period of climate change at roughly six times the estimated price of putting the world on a path to limit the warming to 2deg C. Linking economics and climate Many economic studies of climate change involve assumptions about the value of spending today to avoid the costs of a warmer climate in the future, as well as the details of those costs. But the people behind the new work, Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann, and Leonie Wenz decided to take an empirical approach. They obtained data about the economic performance of over 1,600 individual regions around the globe, going back 40 years. They then attempted to look for connections between that performance and climate events. Advertisement Previous research already identified a number of climate measures--average temperatures, daily temperature variability, total annual precipitation, the annual number of wet days, and extreme daily rainfall--that have all been linked to economic impacts. Some of these effects, like extreme rainfall, are likely to have immediate effects. Others on this list, like temperature variability, are likely to have a gradual impact that is only felt over time. The researchers tested each factor for lagging effects, meaning an economic impact sometime after their onset. These suggested that temperature factors could have a lagging impact up to eight years after they changed, while precipitation changes were typically felt within four years of climate-driven changes. While this relationship might be in error for some of the economic changes in some regions, the inclusion of so many regions and a long time period should help limit the impact of those spurious correlations. With the climate/economic relationship worked out, the researchers obtained climate projections from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) project. With that in hand, they could look at future climates and estimate their economic costs. Obviously, there are limits to how far into the future this process will work. The uncertainties of the climate models grow with time; the future economy starts looking a lot less like the present, and things like temperature extremes start to reach levels where past economic behavior no longer applies. To deal with that, Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz performed a random sampling to determine the uncertainty in the system they developed. They look for the point where the uncertainties from the two most extreme emissions scenarios overlap. That occurs in 2049; after that, we can't expect the past economic impacts of climate to apply. Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz suggest that this is an indication of warming we're already committed to, in part because the effect of past emissions hasn't been felt in its entirety and partly because the global economy is a boat that turns slowly, so it will take time to implement significant changes in emissions. "Such a focus on the near term limits the large uncertainties about diverging future emission trajectories, the resulting long-term climate response and the validity of applying historically observed climate-economic relations over long timescales during which socio-technical conditions may change considerably," they argue. Page: 1 2 Next - reader comments 66 John Timmer John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica - Previous story Next story - Related Stories Today on Ars * Store * Subscribe * About Us * RSS Feeds * View Mobile Site * Contact Us * Staff * Advertise with us * Reprints Newsletter Signup Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. Sign me up - CNMN Collection WIRED Media Group (c) 2024 Conde Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1 /20) and Ars Technica Addendum (effective 8/21/2018). Ars may earn compensation on sales from links on this site. Read our affiliate link policy. 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