Average World Incomes To Drop By Nearly a Fifth By 2050, Study Says (theguardian.com) 123
Average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C. From a report: Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, and whose findings are published in the journal Nature. The hefty toll -- which is far higher than previous estimates -- is already locked into the world economy over the coming decades as a result of the enormous emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere through the burning of gas, oil, coal and trees.
This will inflict crippling losses on almost every country, with a disproportionately severe impact on those least responsible for climate disruption, further worsening inequality. The paper says the permanent average loss of income worldwide will be 19% by 2049. In the United States and Europe the reduction will be about 11%, while in Africa and south Asia it will be 22%, with some individual countries much higher than this. "It's devastating," said Leonie Wenz, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the authors of the study. "I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking."
This will inflict crippling losses on almost every country, with a disproportionately severe impact on those least responsible for climate disruption, further worsening inequality. The paper says the permanent average loss of income worldwide will be 19% by 2049. In the United States and Europe the reduction will be about 11%, while in Africa and south Asia it will be 22%, with some individual countries much higher than this. "It's devastating," said Leonie Wenz, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the authors of the study. "I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking."
Peace and prosperity (Score:2)
What's the opposite of peace and prosperity? Because without reliable long-term leadership we're going to leave future generations worse off than the current generation.
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Generally speaking, populations keep their heads down and try to avoid change or effort so long as they have a choice.
The few in position to force a direction on the mob are usually short-sighted and selfish.
In other words, it seems likely nothing's going to happen until people are ready to riot. As long as we're comfortable enough, it's status quo even as the 1% gather more wealth and the environment becomes more hostile.
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The few in position to force a direction
And that's problem #1. Thinking it's about force. People respond well to choice and when given choices, they will pick the better of the options. When forced, people will respond with resentment and opposition. "You have a choice, you can do A or you can do B" will get you a lot further than, "Do this. Do that."
Re: Peace and prosperity (Score:2)
The choices were plentiful offered over the last 30 years. Plenty of ways to reduce carbon. The options keep reducing. It is clear now that it will only be by force of nature, not government, that anything changes.
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Well, choice number one was to choose to lobby the Congress and state legislators to believe in climate change instead of lobbying to cut funding of science. Choice number two was to believe scientists who said "we have a problem" and not protest at the city councils when things tried to change in small ways to reduce carbon output.
The problem is "viable and better alternative than what you want to replace" was not an option... and still isn't. There were (are) going to have to be changes in lifestyle, but
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Forcing a change doesn't mean making the change at gunpoint, offering choices is the usual method to force a change (eg a competitor "forces" a monopoly to drop their prices).
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>People respond well to choice and when given choices, they will pick the better of the options
I'm not sure if you're young, an idealist, or both... but no, they don't.
The majority of people are selfish and short-sighted - and that's fine when they exist in an environment that makes the better choices the ones that align with their selfish and short-sighted goals, or at least where things are good enough they will put up with the things that don't as a 'cost of doing business'.
But when things get tough a
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Increasing education levels (Score:2)
It's why you're seeing a rash of book bannings in schools. They're trying to stem the tide.
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Hard times causes people to fall back to conservationism, or worse. Look at how many fascist regimes were born during the great depression. Look at the popularity of Trump, among the people who feel things are hopeless.
You are right that it feeds on itself by destroying education.
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Ignore? You mean like ignoring that when you spend $38T that money goes to people for work. They aren't just burning that money.
If I understand the paper correctly, you're not spending $38T (doing so would in fact go to people). That $38T is the value of productivity that has been lost.
What is unclear to me (I need to read the paper more carefully) is whether the paper includes the effects of substitution and adaptation to changed conditions: e.g., changing crops planted in a particular region to better match the changed conditions; abandoning the worst area and starting to plane in formerly unfavorable areas that have become more
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Everyone (including Slashdot) is presenting the study wrong. It's forecasting that world incomes would drop by nearly a fifth relative to what they would have otherwise been, not relative to the present.
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Canadian here, governments are resisting like crazy to make any agricultural changes, instead pumping more and more money into supporting the farmers suffering from drought. I also don't know how more drought will benefit us, there's already close to 50 fires burning, many in the far north.
Huge waves of refugees from those countries close to the equator also doesn't seem like it would be a benefit.
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Back in the old days they'd off the idiot son of the ruler to make room for a more reliable heir. The great thing about dynasties is the family running things has an interest in keeping their reputation. But you still end up fighting to settle grey areas of succession like with Lancaster and York in the War of the Roses.
Mixed Messaging (Score:3)
we're going to leave future generations worse off than the current generation.
Not everywhere. The paper claims that Canada looks like it will have a net 5-20% boost to GDP thanks to climate change.
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Russia should get a little bump too if I'm reading this right. I mean assuming there is no macroeconomic blow back of 90%+ of the world population facing economic hardship.
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Might be beneficial - if people are desperate they will sell what they have at a lower price.
If an authoritarian regime there is willing to enslave or machine gun migrants so that they don't cause disruption, climate change could work out well for some countries.
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People will do with less. Make less money. And live at a lower standard of living. That's what this means.
Let me guess: This is using RCP 8.5 (Score:1, Troll)
Ok, all you climate sleuths, here's your assignment:
1. Find out which scenario this study is based upon.
2. Find out how likely that scenario is
Without looking, I'm guessing it's RCP 8.5.
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Ok, all you climate sleuths, here's your assignment: ... Without looking, I'm guessing it's RCP 8.5.
1. Find out which scenario this study is based upon.
They compare RCP 2.6 and RCP 8.5 (see figure 1). As of 2050, these models have started to diverge, but the economic impacts are still within each others' error bars.
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I think that '-1 Troll' is a little unfair here, but on the other hand how many of your other opinions do you form on the basis of not looking and guessing?
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any prediction beyond 5 years is irrelevant (Score:2)
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This post is clearly intended as parody, but I'm not sure what it's a parody of. Nobody is predicting that humans will die off.
The paper we're discussing says that climate change will have cost consequences, and the paper is attempting the quantify that cost. I'm not at all sure it's a good analysis (I think that there's too many unknowns), but "humans will die off" is not one of those consequences, even in the worst cases analyzed.
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Ok, but you get loud and unhinged people on both sides of every issue. For every 'the seas are going to boil' person there is a 'climate change is faked by the WEF to box us all into 15-minute cities' person.
To further complicate things on this specific issue, some of the radical groups like 'Just Stop Oil' act in exactly the way I'd commission a group to act if I wanted to delegitimise climate protests in general and buy time for me to transition my business away from fossil fuels.
It's a mess, but then it'
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The 'Just Stop Oil' crowd is literally the growing co-hort I'm talking about. Alarmists screaming about a nonsensical doomsday scenario to justify taking actions that would kill a few billion people. They are like Thanos willing to sacrifice people now to pave way for a glorious Utopia in the future.
Behind the actual dooms
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2050?? (Score:1, Insightful)
What kind of nonsense is hat .. we've been getting predictions like this continuously by fools who can't predict anything. In the early 1990s people kept saying the economy would be doomed by the 2000s. They totally missed the fact that the internet would emerge and jobs from that. In the 2000s the same predictions came about especially after the dot com busts. They didn't see the rise of smartphones and social media. Now we have the same shortsighted fools telling us there's not going to be anything new ev
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The weather and the economy are notorious for their bad (often hilariously bad) predictions. It does feel a bit farcical to put much stock in a study purporting to know how one will affect the other 25 years in the future.
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They weren't in the 50s and 60s and 70s when most of Slashdot was growing up listening to their parents bitch about how inaccurate weather predictions are.
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To be fair, I lost my original Slashdot account that I made in the early 2000s when I took a hiatus from this site. I also lost the email (some hotmail account I can't recall) so recovering it wasn't doable.
I'd say the average poster on here is probably 40+. I know I am.
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I think you probably haven't been around long enough.
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Maldives have been under water since 2020, according to prediction from 1990s. Also Africa has lost more than half of its population to mass starvation because of global warming, Great Barrier reef is dead, and so on.
Need to get grants is what causes this sort of "data science", where people just intuit models, plug numbers and then adjust the variables within the model until they get the most outrageous result they can get.
Then they go to their favorite journo and tell him they have a great clickbait story
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Nice try. What do you mean the Maldives is underwater since 2020? I went there to the beaches a couple years ago, so that's just BS. I went to the capital Male and also some islands .. that I have been before. Same old beaches.
Africa lost half its population to mass starvation? Are you crazy or something .. will need a proper source for that. They had starvation in Darfur 10 to 20 years back due to the war.
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The point is that the prediction in 1990s was that global warming would cause massive ice melting that would cause many of the island nations in the Indian and Pacific to go under water. There were even projects in those nations as a result of those predictions to relocate their populations.
Same prediction was made for Africa in late 1990s, as the massive hunger crisis kicked in. That by 2020, there would be such horrific starvation as a result of desertification and other climate related disasters, that Af
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What kind of nonsense is hat .. we've been getting predictions like this continuously by fools who can't predict anything. In the early 1990s people kept saying the economy would be doomed by the 2000s. They totally missed the fact that the internet would emerge and jobs from that.
They weren't wrong though. Subtract the GDP created by the dot.com bubble from the world and we would have been in economic strife. The fact that an emerging unpredicted technology which changed the entire world fundamentally came into play does not invalidate the prediction.
Look maybe in 2045 we'll invent nuclear fusion. Maybe we won't. Hopes and dreams have no bearing on economic indicators. If anything they raise the important point that we need to do *something*.
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Dude, I do not know what your experiences are, but in my experiences, the economy has been in an almost free-fall for 50 years for the regular person.
There is unimaginable wealth within America... and yet, it has become MUCH harder for someone just starting out. I started out at $3.35/hr 4 decades ago. Today, someone starts out at $7.25/hr. Rent was around $300/month, now it is over $1,000/month.
So pay doubled but expenses tripled. This is *NOT* survivable.
The Jack Welch school of socioeconomic theory must
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AI and robotics improve the productivity and profits. How many companies do layoffs when profits are increasing? Most of them find things for their employees to do. Until everyone is living in a mansion with an electric car and, a personal air vehicle, there's a market for stuff. Instead of building a tiny house for $100,000 robots plus some employees can build a mansion. Robots are not going to 100% replace every possible job for at least 150 years. At that point let our descendents figure it out. We don
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If such robots exist why would you even need a job? Goods and services will be super cheap. You'd be able to live on very little money, maybe invest in companies instead of working. That's how retirement works for many people isn't it? Own a few shares in a robotics company and live from those dividends.
Another way (Score:2, Interesting)
Formost it will be worse than that (Score:2)
The average (I assume that they mean "mean") will be skewed by the income of the top 1% which have a vastly greater income than the common person. This skew is getting worse, a trend that I expect to continue, so the "common man" will be much worse off than 1/5th of today's income.
time to go union! (Score:2)
time to go union!
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The average income dropping by 20% due to climate change alone is extremely dubious. If anything it would be far more likely to be the disastrous consequences of horribly misg
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The top 1% are wealthy, but often have no or little income outside of dividends, rents, etc. Much of that wealth (e.g. the company whose stocks they own) is what's paying the incomes of everyone else. They only have substantial income if they sell to someone else, but that's merely wealth exchanging hands and not the creation of it. The average income dropping by 20% due to climate change alone is extremely dubious. If anything it would be far more likely to be the disastrous consequences of horribly misguided policy aimed at addressing climate change. Too much of it is rebranded Marxism, which does actually have a track record of making everyone poorer. This destruction usually happens from the bottom up as well. The rich, might become less wealthy, but not disproportionately so. The bottom 5% on the other hand will likely become completely destitute.
I would expect average incomes compared to cost of living to drop by this much just through general inertia in that amount of time. It's about the same as the drop between about 1980 and today. At least here in America, where we continue to see cost of living rise substantially, for profit companies claiming new record highs in profits year over year, and constant claims when it comes time to look at raises that there just isn't enough to go around. All of that will accelerate as automation makes it easier
Alarmist propaganda (Score:3)
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Relative to a baseline without climate impacts (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual Nature paper indicates they estimate a 20% reduction in income relative to a baseline without climate impacts. Considering worldwide income has increased 120% in real dollars over the past 25 years, if the next 25 years is more of the same they are predicting a 75% increase in average worldwide income (inflation adjusted) by 2050.
I don't feel that should downplay the wasteful economic effects of increased climate change over the next few decades, but the summary and article posted weren't very clear on what the prediction actually was.
Re:Relative to a baseline without climate impacts (Score:5, Informative)
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Did your income increase by 120%? How much of that was eviscerated by inflation? Most people have seen a meager 1-3% raise per year and for about 5 years following the 2009/2010 housing collapse quite a few got 0% raises.
I said in real dollars, which means those increases factor in inflation. I was just entering the workforce 25 years ago and my income has increased about 900% in real dollars since then, but that isn't relevant here because it shows career progression not an increase in average income worldwide. While the world has seen a 120% real income increase over the past 25 years, that is almost all coming from the developing world. Average income in the US has remained flat for the past 25 years. Someone working the
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Not flat, 10% increase. Some of that increase may be due to more dual-income households, but we were already pretty well along that transition by 1999.
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All the most rapidly developing economies are in developing countries (weird huh?). In terms of population Europe+North America is smaller than Africa and 4x smaller than Asia. So predictions about global population stuff means it's not about you.
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Then again, maybe AI will discover cold fusion and cheap carbon sequestration.
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f the next 25 years is more of the same they are predicting a 75% increase in average worldwide income (inflation adjusted) by 2050.
Sure, but for the average person, they will still lose more than they are now. It is GREAT that all this new value is being generated. Why are we generating it though? "We" don't see any benefits to it and in fact, are losing benefits faster than we are gaining them.
Nice.. (Score:2)
I come here for the good news. Not disappointed.
I doubt climate change is the cause (Score:2)
Lack of cheap and abundant fossil fuels to power an advanced economy is more likely. You ain't powering yhe NASDAQ on sunshine and rainbows...
Reduction compared to higher growth (Score:2)
Both the paper and the article are misleading. The funding is that climate change will decrease incomes about 19% compared to the expected growth without climate change. However, even with climate change, incomes will still grow.
Of course, these are all long-term projections with significant assumptions and huge confidence intervals (or rather, no statistical confidence intervals). That effectively means that the results are fungible based on the authors' intentions.
I've got some predictions too .. (Score:2)
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1. Countries that limit government will see their incomes double.
oh so you mean like Port-au-Prince?
Average incomes will fall cause of AI (Score:2)
Misleading Title...again (Score:2)
RTFA. What they are suggesting is that, if we do not change climate policy, and also if nothing else changes, then growth of income relative to GDP will decline by whatever percent. Not that income will go down, but it will go up by less, presuming GDP stays on a relatively stable growth curve.
That's a whole lot of "if nothing changes" (AGI for one?) and assuming global GDP doesn't increase significantly, the latter of which the likes of China, India and others would not like at all.
For a start (Score:2)
We could actually tax the ultrawealthy.
Tell me what one single billionaire does that's worth more than $440k/yr.
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We don't get additional water, the precipitation will behave somewhat differently, in ways potentially we can't cope with.
The additional energy in terms of useful energy is not feasible to improve our harnessing of energy.
Plants are not so few for lack of CO2 today. We have never felt "oh, our agriculture is limited by CO2", it's limited by other factors, none of which are looking to "get better".
The simple fact is that "oh, 16 million years ago there was more CO2 than today" is not vaguely comforting when
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The additional energy is heat. That heat will be plenty useful for planting crops where it was previously too cold. We already see a northward migration of life.
Plants can grow bigger and faster with additional CO2 we've
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You can't keep your alarmist claims straight. There will be more water from the melting ice. Precipitation patterns will change but that doesn't mean there won't be a net increase in water. Sea levels are going to rise but we aren't going to get more water? Come on this is absurd.
Ok, sure, *liquid* water will see a net increase as currently solid water becomes liquid, mostly serving to increase saltwater volume, which is useless. The bigger consequence is how that more cycling through the evaporation/precipitation cycle will manifest, and it would suck if it's mostly moving water through the air to the ocean. Wouldn't be too terrible if it were the other way around, unless it's mostly in unworkably strong hurricanes. The key thing is we aren't sure.
The additional energy is heat. That heat will be plenty useful for planting crops where it was previously too cold. We already see a northward migration of life.
At best, this moves the viable agr
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Yes some places will lose farm land. The models show more places opening up. It's a net gain.
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Yes some places will get drier other places will get wetter, some will even stay the same, see the above comment about alarmists not being able to keep their stories straight. One sec
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Given you don't seem to know about the natural processes of oceans feeding into fresh water supplies I'll hazard a guess you haven't heard about human efforts to convert salt water into usable fresh water either.
Agricultural practices and technology have
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Higher temperatures means more evaporation and more rainfall. Suck it, alarmist. Deprogramming is hard.
Unfortunately, most of that "more rainfall" is rain over the ocean.
On land, global warming increases rainfall some places and decreases it other places. It also may increase the severity of monsoon events, which means too much rainfall.
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It means water from ground will move in different ways. Water in the atmosphere more, moving, well, we aren't sure where. We know how to deal with the hand we are dealt now, we have no idea if the new precipitation pattern will be over the ocean (useless), viable soil or not, etc.
It's not *impossible* that the new conditions will be viable, but if we can keep things as we are used to dealing with them, that would be the safer bet.
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Extra CO2 helps up to a point. Beyond that the ability of the crop to absorb minerals from the soil is impeded, so you grow more bulk with less nutritional value.
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Just go to Youtube and listen to actual experts
Bhahahaha! Good joke!
Oh...wait...you're serious, aren't you?!
Bwhwahahahahahaha!
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Re:There is ZERO climate crisis (Score:5, Interesting)
Real information, you say? [skepticalscience.com]
Nice site with many links to detailed information; thanks.
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