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Rising temperatures due to climate change will strongly affect economic growth around the world, making some countries richer and some poorer.
Extreme heat, it turns out, is very bad for the economy. Crops fail. People work less, and are less productive when they do work.
That's why an increase in extremely hot days is one of the more worrisome prospects of climate change. To predict just how various countries might suffer or benefit, a team of scientists at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, have turned to historical records of how temperature affects key aspects of the economy. When they use this data to estimate how various countries will fare with a warming planet, the news isn't good.
Because poorer countries, including those in much of South America and Africa, already tend to be far hotter than what's ideal for economic growth, the effect of rising temperatures will be particularly damaging to them. Average income for the world's poorest 60 percent of people by century's end will be 70 percent below what it would have been without climate change, conclude Hsiang and his coauthors in a recent Nature paper. The result of the rising temperatures, he says, "will be a huge redistribution of wealth from the global poor to the wealthy."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:56PM
Hot countries do poorly because their weather is so idealistic. It is not hard to survive in Africa, plants thrive year round, something is always bearing fruit, and you can sleep outside every day of the year. So yes people in these societies will work less, because the necessities are taken care of. And the Government will have tentative and unstable grasp on the people because you simply do not have to pool your resources to survive.
But if heat hit countries and people used to climate hardship, and the land suddenly became twice as productive. They would not necessarily descend into savages overnight. Us people who live in countries with cold climates, with stable governments where hardly anything grows, have most of a million years of cultural and biological evolution behind our need for a stable government. While the environment will eventually shape those who populate it, we will not all simply lose our work ethic, and start rioting in the streets simply because the rise in temperature has removed most of the hurdles to survival. And we have reason to believe that we would not. We have an innate and illogical need to hoard wealth for the winter, that is ultimately the driving force behind economies, and these economies are still strong years after we have subjugated this environment and most people no longer have to fear if they will make it through the next winter.
What this story is looking at are countries that are hot, and have always been hot. Specifically have been hot since ancient human ancestors first sent some African explorers their way. They are the type of societies and practices that evolve around a climate that is perfectly suited to primates. But we know that Canada or Finland would not suddenly become like that overnight if the summer was a little too hot. Would it become like that after ten thousand years of increased temperature, maybe, but we have no evidence either way. Since the starting state is completely different there is no reason to assume that we have any idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @05:19PM
That explains the huge demand to live in Africa. Don't need a job, don't need a place to stay. Just picking fruit and sleeping under the stars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @01:07AM
Africa? Don't you mean Santa Cruz??
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 01 2017, @01:51PM
Tell that to the people living in the African deserts.
Humans didn't even start leaving Africa until about 100,000 years ago.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Sunday January 01 2017, @02:02PM
So it was the devil who spread human and pre-human fossils all around Europe a million years ago?