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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @01:07AM
Africa? Don't you mean Santa Cruz??