Climate Change’s Giant Impact on the Economy: 4 Key Issues

By now, it’s clear that climate change poses environmental risks beyond anything seen in the modern age. But we’re only starting to come to grips with the potential economic effects.

Wading through flood waters from Tropical Storm Harvey
in Houston in August 2017. “We know we can adapt to slow
 changes,” a Yale economist said. “Rapid changes are the ones
that would be most damaging and painful.”

Using increasingly sophisticated modeling, researchers are calculating how each tenth of a degree of global warming is likely to play out in economic terms. Their projections carry large bands of uncertainty, because of the vagaries of human behavior and the remaining questions about how quickly the planet will respond to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

A government report in November raised the prospect that a warmer planet could mean a big hit to G.D.P. in the coming decades.

Read the story from The New York Times by Neil Irwin - “Climate Change’s Giant Impact on the Economy: 4 Key Issues.”