I recommend you follow the link below but here is an excerpt with only the analysis cut out:
How much can climate change impact the economy?
No matter who you are or what your thoughts are about the topic of climate change, whether very well reasoned or not, this is a real question that real people need to be able to answer because the economy is where it will have a real impact on their lives.
But how can you measure the economic impact of climate change?
It occurred to us that one way we might do it is to consider the impact that a climate change event actually had on the modern economy, and more specifically, on the part of the economy that is most sensitive to climate change: agriculture.
That changes in the climate have an effect on agriculture is something that has been well established by real world observations over the last several thousand years and was even recently reaffirmed for the modern era by academic research.
For our purposes, we wanted to consider the economic impact of a climate changing event that had a prolonged effect - something more than a singular meteorological disaster that lasted for much longer than a single season or year, but also something that overwhelmed the abilities of modern farmers using the most advance agricultural technology available today to compensate.
The climate changing event we chose to consider is the 2010-2016 drought in the state of Kansas, which only just officially ended in all of the state's counties last month. At its peak in 2012, the severity of the drought has been described as the second driest on record since 1895, and was the longest sustained drought in the state since the 1950s.
... as the drought in Kansas intensified, it became a dominant factor affecting agricultural output beginning in 2011, especially as its severity soon strained the ability of the state's farmers to compensate for it with the technology and systems they had in place.
At its worst in 2012, the extreme drought conditions deprived the state of at least $1.94 billion in its GDP for that year, in the real terms of constant 2009 U.S. dollars as measured from the peak of Kansas' agricultural contribution to the state's GDP. In reality, it was far worse than that, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates the drought's damage to crops grown within the state to total $3 billion, or about $2.8 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars.
For 2012, that would have meant an economic contribution to the state's GDP that would have been double what was actually recorded at its trough.
Extending nearly three and half years, the most severe portion of the state's drought from October 2010 through June 2014 ensured that the state's large agricultural sector would not see any sustained growth above its March 2011 contribution to GDP until after June 2014, when significant rainfall finally began to return to the state. Update 16 June 2016: Newly revised GDP data for the state indicates that there was a much longer lasting impact that resulted from the climate change shock of prolonged severe-to-exceptional drought. We'll revisit this analysis soon!
If you think about it though, while the worse of Kansas' 2010-2016 drought had a large and clear impact on the state's agricultural output, and by obvious extension, its economy, the thing that really caused farmers the most problems in the years since the fourth quarter of 2010 when the drought arrived in force was that they didn't expect it. They didn't expect it to either become as severe as it became or to last for as long as it lasted.
That's really where the real economic impact from climate change is to be found. If people expect it, they can plan for it, and are therefore better able to cope with the consequences.
In real life, it is the stuff you didn't expect or prepare for that hurts the most.
via politicalcalculations.blogspot.com
Yet, how can you prepare for it if you deny that there is a high probability that it exists? Note: uncertainty about future climate change is not much different than uncertainty other bad future events. They might happen, they might not. It is typically poor planning to deny that something bad could happen and proceed as if it won't.
