Average Person Will Be 40% Poorer If World Warms By 4C, New Research Shows (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0176892729
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/01/135253/average-person-will-be-40-poorer-if-world-warms-by-4c-new-research-shows
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/01/average-person-will-be-40-poorer-if-world-warms-by-4c-new-research-shows
> The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%.
>
> Scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C even if countries hit short-term and long-term climate targets. Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) -- used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions -- have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events. The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/01/average-person-will-be-40-poorer-if-world-warms-by-4c-new-research-shows
Luckily, I am an American (Score:2)
I have no idea how hot 4C is.
Re: (Score:2)
> I have no idea how hot 4C is.
Don't worry. It's but a few degrees short of The Last of Us becoming reality.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You will have a very real idea when Hollywood scripts are no longer comfortably sitting in fiction.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ5iO8wWCEM
Re: (Score:2)
It's 277.15 Kelvin, or about -4 degrees in [1]Real Celsius [explainxkcd.com].
If you have any other questions you'd like me to answer helpfully, please let me know.
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3001:_Temperature_Scales
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's 4 Kelvin because it's a delta, not an absolute value.
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> I have no idea how hot 4C is.
It's the (yearly average) difference between Michigan and Florida.
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Your wife/girlfriend won't like a 4C change on the thermostat, in either direction.
Actuaries confirm (Score:2)
Actuaries, the people assessing risk for insurers, say the same. The report is here: [1]https://actuaries.org.uk/plane... [actuaries.org.uk]
Economists essentially said "anything with a roof won't be affected" . And won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for it. And now thanks to Nordhaus, we're screwed policy-wise.
[1] https://actuaries.org.uk/planetary-solvency
That's OK. (Score:4, Insightful)
A few billionaires will continue to increase their net worth, so it all works out just fine. We all need to suffer so the uber-wealthy can continue to prosper.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, I was going to say that 40% is an underestimate because billionaires will exploit climate change to become richer still.
The important thing is to know that decision makers are not average, they are rich. The rich do not care about climate change or how much the average person suffers, they care about what they get out of it. Many of them view life as zero sum, that the average person suffering means they are getting ahead.
How much poorer will the average person be ... (Score:2, Insightful)
after 4 years of Trump's presidency ? NB: I am talking about the common man, not one of his billionaire mates.
Re: (Score:2)
If 5% of global GDP is spent on reducing emissions?
Really, I want to know?
LAMBO (Score:5, Funny)
So if we cool the earth by 4C, will we be all 40% richer? What's the temperature need to be for everyone to get a lambo?
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, but you've seen Happy Days - you only get a motorbike.
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Our education system has truly failed.
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Cold enough to flash-freeze Davos during the WEF? :-P
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A somewhat more serious answer to this: While there is unfortunately no temperature that will selectively stop our capitalist overlords from bleeding our civilizations dry, there are ideal temperatures for human labor and industrial processes. A relevant study:
[1]https://laislanetwork.org/what... [laislanetwork.org]
[1] https://laislanetwork.org/what-a-monumental-study-says-about-the-relationship-between-labor-productivity-and-temperature/
Re: (Score:2)
> So if we cool the earth by 4C, will we be all 40% richer? What's the temperature need to be for everyone to get a lambo?
Just maintaining progress and not having to waste a lot of money on climate mitigation would kind of naturally take care of that. If you look at first Lamborghini, in 1964, and compare its performance to what you can get for a middling new car price now... other than status, I'll bet you'd rather have the modern middling-priced new car.
April 1 (Score:2, Funny)
These April Fools threads are getting out of hand.
"according to a new study" (Score:4, Insightful)
Global warming is indeed the biggest current threat to mankind (*), but it is always sensible to ignore any post that begins "according to a new study".
(*) Although Trump and Musk are working hard on this.
Re: (Score:2)
> Global warming is indeed the biggest current threat to mankind (*), but it is always sensible to ignore any post that begins "according to a new study".
Too bad I don't have mod points, this is insightful.
The way science works is, don't credit a result until it's replicated, or at a minimum has withstood scrutiny by people knowledgable about the field.
(And... the phrase "people knowledgable about the field" is not synonymous with "people posting on slashdot".)
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So ... people knowledgeable about the field say that people knowledgeable about the field say that people not knowledgeable about the field should not trust unreplicated results.
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> Global warming is indeed the biggest current threat to mankind
It's not. Climate change is a threat to our wealth and has the potential to reduce human population by a non-trivial percentage, but it doesn't really threaten us with extinction, unlike some other threats. For a good overview of existential threats to humanity (including climate change) I recommend [1]The Precipice [amazon.com].
> Although Trump and Musk are working hard on this.
Although they're doing a lot of damage, they really don't rate on the scale of threats to humanity. They're part of a global ongoing decline in democracy which is very harmful but not existentia
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/031648492X
the latest episode of climate hysteria (Score:1)
People are getting poorer because central banks are printing money, it has nothing to do with the weather. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's hilarious how they keep inventing excuses for why people are getting poorer, let's blame climate change so we can hit two birds with one stone
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F94jGTWNWsA
Every day is April Fools day at The Guardian (Score:1)
April Fool's Day jokes are indistinguishable from regular The Guardian content.
Sheer bollocks (Score:2)
if things warm to 4 degrees above normal most life will be extinct.
But nobody ever said The Guardian was a reputable rag.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe some very small pockets or extremophiles will survive, but it is not OUR right do choose their fate, nor is there any coming back from this. This civilisation will be done in 5-15yrs.
At 2 degrees rise the base of our food chain will be unable to survive and be functionally extinct - Coral Reef ecosystems .. Gone.
Even at 2 degrees phytoplankton and oceanic chemistry will be irreversably altered and acidified.
Larger ocean creatures therefore will have no food, they will already be closing in on extincti
Meanwhile (Score:2)
The wealthy will see it as an opportunity to buy up more real estate from their air conditioned, mini reactor powered, island bunkers.
Wow, those people were rich (Score:2)
During the Ice Age!!!!
Trust the models (Score:1)
I'm sure the economic models are just as accurate as the climate models.
Let me make a wild guess (Score:2)
Without even looking at the study I'm going to make the guess that the study assumes negative impacts from climate change and assumes humanity and the economy have no way to adjust to these changes and that the warming will not, for example, allow farming and a reduced need for heating in more Northern areas. I'm also going to guess the study assumes there will be no improvements in technology, farming or transportation in the next 50 years.
Excellent metrics (Score:2)
I really do love these sort of figures. Often based on shoddy data, inaccurate assessments or just plain wrong in considering life is static.
Remember when the internet was going to run out of bandwidth? If bandwidth demand continued to grow at rate X and supply is rate Y which is lower than X then congestion, everything gets "stuck"...but it didn't happen.
This is like a bath. If you keep filling water at a constant rate the bath will overflow at some point. Of course as we notice some signs of issues we
Global Ecological Tilt & Demographic Collapse (Score:2)
Both pretty much guaranteed at this point. I hope modern civilization can survive anyway and not go off the rails and fall into some bizarre post-apocalyptic dark age (again).
There is a cost to CO2 (Score:2)
What amazes me is that some people still think that emitting CO2 should be unlimited and free. With that logic people will continue to use coal to generate electricity even if it's dumb.
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People will even continue to breathe.
Ovious nonsenscal clickbait (Score:2)
is obvious
Global Economies (Score:2)
Ftom TFA:
> But Neal said global heating would hit countries everywhere, because global economies are linked by trade.
"Not any more." - D. J. Trump
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
> Average person will be 40% more sweaty and probably die 40% faster, so 40% more poor is just a given.
Bullshit studies are bullshit because the audience cannot discern.
Define "average person" for me. On a global scale that includes those Third Worlds everyone in the First World assumes about, but has no actual fucking idea.
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"Define "average person" for me."
If you need that defined for you, you're far too ignorant to participate in the topic.
"On a global scale that includes those Third Worlds"
You mean it includes people you don't care about.
"Bullshit studies are bullshit because the audience cannot discern."
Stupid calling information they don't understand "bullshit". Says it all about you.
Re: (Score:3)
>> Define "average person" for me.
> If you need that defined for you, you're far too ignorant to participate in the topic.
Actually, no, this turns out to.be a critical question to ask.
And the exact wording also makes a difference. Dividing the total wealth in the world by the world population will give you the average wealth per person, but "average wealth per person" is not the same as "wealth per average person."
(If this is not obvious, consider a case of a hundred people, 99 with assets of $1000, and one with a million dollars. The average wealth per person is $11,000, but an average person has wealth of $1000.)
For weal
Re: (Score:2)
Good news, they just divided the estimated amount of wealth by the estimated number of people in two scenarios.
Unfortunately, my tendency is to view it as bullshit, not because of the climate science, but because of the economic models, where mitigated climate change is depicted as a simple differential equation of reduced exponential growth and unmitigated climate change is rendered as the same thing but with a new factor in the form of supply chain disruption estimation, which is essentially derived from
Re: (Score:2)
> Unfortunately, my tendency is to view it as bullshit, not because of the climate science, but because of the economic models,
I'm not sure if I would quite call it "bullshit," but I'm dubious about economic models of thing that are this far out. The uncertainty is simply too high. I also note that the opening phrase "Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people's wealth, according to a new study" basically says that other economic studies don't predict this bad a result. So, which is it? This study is right, and every other study was wrong? Or other studies are right, and this one is wr
Re: (Score:2)
If you think you have immigration problems now, wait until a billion people or more are trying to get away from climate change induced disasters.
The methodology is [probably] flawed (Score:2)
The methodology, as far as I can infer from the article, is they took GDP of various nations. Worked out how much it temperature change would affect it. Then made the leap that on average (rather than the "average person") there would be an economic loss of 40%.
I think if you look at the median individual, rather than average. You'll find the top 50% of people not taking such a big loss. And the bottom 50% taking a much larger loss. With a significant number of individuals losing everything and being destit