NEW DELHI: It isn’t hard to understand that global warming is already changing how we live.
In India’s capital, New Delhi, this summer has been so hot – above 40 degrees Celsius even at night – that people are gasping, the tap water is scalding, and the walls of their homes emit heat like radiators.
The Saudi Arabian authorities said that 1,300 pilgrims have already died on this year’s Hajj. Players at the European soccer championships are collapsing due to exhaustion.
CALCULATING THE COST OF CLIMATE CHANGE
And yet economists – clearly able to keep cool heads when everybody else is losing theirs – are in the middle of a fresh debate about the real costs of climate change. A new working paper from two academics at Harvard and Northwestern, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, argues that the macroeconomic damage from climate change might be as much as six times higher than previously estimated.
Their model predicts that a single degree increase “in global mean temperatures leads to a gradual decline in world GDP that peaks at 12 per cent after six years and does not fully mean-revert even 10 years after the shock”.
They point out that this makes unilateral climate action worth it for countries like the US; that argument must surely also hold countries that are poorer but far more exposed to climate change, such as India. Possible to add a couple more countries here?
