Then worry.
MarketWatch’s Silvia Ascarelli wrote:
Your grandchildren may pay a bigger price for global warming than you thought.
A hotter Planet Earth will cool down national economies, according to fresh research from scientists at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Average U.S. income could shrink 36% by 2100 because of climate change from what it would be without global warming, they say. That is more than other, earlier studies have suggested.
But not all countries will suffer. Russia, Canada and countries in Northern Europe should benefit from warmer temperatures, according to the scientists’ models, because they have yet to reach what the scientists called the optimal average temperature for an economy — 55 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly where the U.S. is now.
“We were surprised at how important temperature is for the global economy,” said Solomon Hsiang, an associate professor of public policy at Berkeley and one of the co-authors of the study along with Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in earth system science at Stanford, and Edward Miguel, Oxfam professor in environmental and resource economics at Berkeley.
Global per capita gross domestic product will be down 23% at the turn of the next century if global warming isn’t slowed, the study found. The impact will be more severe in China — average income will shrink 43%—and Mexico, where average income could plunge 73%.
More at MarketWatch.
Should we worry? Can we afford global warming?