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posted by janrinok on Saturday December 31 2016, @03:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the rich-will-become-richer dept.

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."


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 31 2016, @05:20PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday December 31 2016, @05:20PM (#447889) Homepage

    As long as there are guns on those walls shooting the bastids trying to get in, we can kill two proverbal birds with one stone - helping solve the overpopulation problem as well as protecting your nation's quality of life.

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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:21AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:21AM (#448042) Journal

    Now that's the Eth i remember! You're still gonna go to hell, and you're still gonna get reincarnated poor in the Sahel, but because you made us laugh, you might NOT be born with an imperforate anus.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...