Today in the NYTimes, The Price of Climate Change ($$$):
The famous old quip about the weather — everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it — is not as true as it once was. Alarmed by the threat of
global warming, lots of people are actively trying to change human behaviors in order to change the weather.
Even economists are getting into the weather business. Olivier Deschênes of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Michael Greenstone of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology have written a pair of papers that assess some effects of climate change. In the first, they use long-run climatological models — year-by-year temperature and precipitation predictions from 2070 to 2099 — to examine the future of agriculture in the United States. Their findings? The expected rises in temperature and precipitation would actually increase annual agricultural production, and therefore agricultural profits, by about 4 percent, or $1.3 billion. This hardly fulfills the doomsday fears conjured by most conversations about global warming. /.../
Since the weather yields such interesting findings about the past, it makes sense that economists are also tempted to use it to anticipate the future. In their second paper on the potential effects of global warming, Deschênes and Greenstone try to predict mortality rates in the U.S. in the last quarter of the current century.
Unlike in their paper on agriculture, the news in this one isn’t good. They estimate, using one of the latest (and most dire) climatological models, that the predicted rise in temperature will increase the death rate for American men by 1.7 percent (about 21,000 extra fatalities per year) and for American women by 0.4 percent (about 8,000 deaths a year). Most of these excess deaths, they write, will be caused by hot weather that worsens cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. These deaths will translate into an economic loss of roughly $31 billion per year. Deschênes and Greenstone caution that their paper is in a preliminary stage and hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed and that the increased mortality rate may well be offset by such simple (if costly) measures as migration to the Northern states — a repopulation that, even a decade ago, might have seemed unimaginable.
Their paper on agriculture also has some wrinkles. While arguing that global warming would produce a net agricultural gain in the United States, they specify which states would be the big winners and which ones would be the big losers. What’s most intriguing is that winners’ and losers’ lists are a true blend of red states and blue states: New York, along with Georgia and
South Dakota, are among the winners; Nebraska and North Carolina would lose out, but the biggest loser of all would be California. Which suggests that in this most toxic of election seasons, when there seems not a single issue that can unite blue and red staters (or at least the politicians thereof), global warming could turn out to be just the thing to bring us all together.
