The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

The vanguard research on the economics of warming has come from Solomon Hsiang and Marshall Burke and Edward Miguel, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: in a country that’s already relatively warm, every degree Celsius of warming reduces growth, on average, by about one percentage point (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field. Compared to the trajectory of economic growth with no climate change, given a high-end emissions scenario their average projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century. Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier. There is a 51 percent chance, this research suggests, that in a worst-case future climate change will reduce global output by more than 20 percent by 2100, compared with a world without warming, and a 12 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 50 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Depression dropped global GDP by about 15 percent, it is estimated—the numbers weren’t so good back then. The more recent Great Recession lowered it by about 2 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by 2100 that is twenty-five times worse. In 2018, a team led by Thomas Stoerk suggested that these estimates could be dramatic und...