James A. Rising

The Climate Impact Lab just got a great write-up for our work on the risk of mortality under climate change in Bloomberg Green. There are a bunch of excellent dynamic visualizations that dig into the data.

There are two big messages here. The first is that poor people are going to get hammered by climate change, with some areas experiencing deathrates from the additional heat that are greater than the combined global rates for heart disease, stroke, all forms of cancer, all forms of infectious disease death, and all forms of death from injury.

The other is that we can use this information to start to estimate the total cost of climate change to society at large, because it gives us a lower-bound. Just the effect of additional mortality costs society about $22 per ton of CO2. That’s already more than the total social cost used by the Trump administration and half way to the total cost used by the Obama administration.

Take a look at the summary write-up of the research behind the Bloomberg article, and look forward to the reports that we are going to produce on the effects of climate change on labor productivity, agriculture, energy demand, and coastal impacts.