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

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.” Credit: Jonathan Bachman, Reuters

Many of the big economic questions in coming decades will come down to just how extreme the weather will be, and how to value the future versus the present.

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.

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.

View the complete January 17 article by Neil Irwin on The New York Times website here.

Categories: National Issues
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