Climate change and what it has already done to us

Usually when we think about climate change, we think about the impact it will have on our children, our children’s children, our children’s children’s children, our children’s children’s children’s children….. Maybe we also think about floods, hurricanes, fires, melting glaciers, all of the things happening now that are caused (in part at least) by global warming. We don’t generally think about climate change as something that has already had a major impact.

NOTE: THIS REFLECTS THE PERIOD FROM 1996-2010 BECAUSE DATA WAS NOT AVAILABLE FOR THE FULL PERIOD. SOURCE: NOAH DIFFENBAUGH AND MARSHALL BURKE.

That’s why I was surprised by a new Stanford study that says that climate change has already hurt economic growth and widened income inequality.

The gap between the economic output of the world’s richest and poorest countries is 25 percent larger today than it would have been without global warming

The theory is that certain temperatures are good for economic growth. Richer countries are actually the colder ones right now, and they have benefited from warming. Meanwhile, many hot countries are poor, so that additional warming actually hurts their economic growth.

The majority of the world’s population is worse off. India’s economic growth is 31% lower in the period 1960 to 2010 than it would be. Other big countries have also been hurt a lot: Nigeria (-29%), and Brazil (-25%). But even China (-1.4%) and the US (-0.2%) are worse off. Colder countries like Canada, Norway and Sweden, and even countries that are not really considered to be so cold, like France and Great Britain have all seen higher economic growth since 1960.

ASEAN has been hard hit. Every country has been impacted negatively. Vietnam’s GDP per capita would be 11% better without climate change, while Indonesia is 16% off. But all of the countries have estimated GDP losses, and all are impacted by climate change. Future warming is going to much worse for these countries as well, because they are already hot.

There are a few questions that I have:

How were colder countries richer, if temperature is so determinative of economic growth. My answer would be that there are a number of reasons why these countries grew rich. Also that the change in climate is more important than levels, especially the changes we have seen already in a short time. There is a small hint of this in the write-up of the research:

The study builds on previous research in which Burke and co-authors analyzed 50 years of annual temperature and GDP measurements for 165 countries to estimate the effects of temperature fluctuations on economic growth. They demonstrated that growth during warmer than average years has accelerated in cool nations and slowed in warm nations.

Also, these are just estimates of potential economic growth (decline), not objective measurements. Scientists have a good idea of how much warmer countries are already, and the researchers estimated how GDP changes for each level of warming. They then ran lots of scenarios and came up with potential ranges, of which these numbers represent the median.

But even with these, it seems like the trends are correct and are scary. We will see if this continues to stand. But it is not good for Vietnam or the rest of ASEAN or the world.