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Recent research suggests climate change will lead to troubling social and economic damages, including a severe drop in global GDP.
What will a planet plagued by escalating climate change look like? No one really knows. But speaking at EmTech MIT 2016, Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, presented results based on his recent analysis of economic and climate data that begin to more clearly define what the world might look like as it gets hotter.
It's not a pretty picture. Rising temperatures will dramatically damage agricultural yields and human health, and will significantly reduce overall economic growth. In fact, Hsiang said, data suggests global GDP will be reduced by 23 percent by the end of the century if climate change progresses largely unabated, compared to a world without global warming.
That decrease in economic output will hit the poorest 60 percent of the population disproportionately hard, said Hsiang. In doing so, it will surely exacerbate inequality, as many rich regions of the world that have lower average annual temperatures, such as northern Europe, benefit from the changes. Hotter areas around the tropics, including large parts of south Asia and Africa, already tend to be poorer and will suffer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Monday October 24 2016, @04:16AM
Crops getting less water? Engineer them to need less.
Hell, solve the energy issue and everything else will follow. Desalination, air conditioning, and turbo transport will make everything cheap. And our electronic circuses will keep population down.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @04:58AM
> Genetic Engineering will Save Us
That is ridiculous. We can't re-engineer the entire environment. Crops do not exist in a vacuum. Everything is interconnected, re-jiggering the species most visible to us won't do a damn thing except let us fool ourselves into thinking there is a shortcut.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @07:58AM
Give me a kernel of Zea mays, and I can save the Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @09:34AM
Well, then just genetically engineer vacuum crops. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @04:58AM
How much improvement is left in our crops? Maybe yield per acre can be improved, but will it require more water/energy/fertilizers?
(Score: 3, Touché) by mhajicek on Monday October 24 2016, @05:53AM
So what you're saying is "nerd harder"?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Touché) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday October 24 2016, @11:31AM
Who are you calling scraffy-looking?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @04:27PM
...and controlled by a large multi national like monsanto.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by t-3 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:47AM
Easier and more effective to engineer the land in most cases than to engineer plants I think. Anyway, the issue is less water than heat. Plant more trees to shade the more sensitive plants, and make rain more regular and temperatures cooler through tranpiration.