The scientific paper published in the June 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change was alarming. Between 1991 and 2018, the peer-reviewed study reported, more than one-third of deaths from heat exposure were linked to global warming. Hundreds of news outlets covered the findings. The message was clear: climate change is here, and it’s already killing people…
…What about the long term? A groundbreaking peer-reviewed study, published in November in Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics, gives us a glimpse. In the study, a team of researchers projected how mortality from temperature would change in the future.
The worldwide temperature-linked mortality rate is projected to stay about the same, but you can see enormous geographic variation: colder, wealthier countries do well, while hotter, poorer countries suffer…
In the medium emissions scenario, Niger, one of the poorest and hottest countries in the world, is projected to suffer the largest increase in temperature-linked mortality, while cold, wealthy Finland sees the largest decrease. That pattern was common, said Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist who co-authored the study.
Greenstone, who over a decade ago helped the Obama administration calculate the “social cost of carbon,” a measure of the damages caused by each ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, was struck by the unfairness the results implied. “Taking $100,000 from a poor person wouldn’t be equal and opposite to how you feel about giving $100,000 to Elon Musk,” he told me. “I think that’s the underbelly of the climate problem.”