Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to a new study, poor countries are enjoying economic growth, but by comparing observations to a hypothetical growth rate which could have been achieved without climate change, study authors concluded that climate change is slowing progress.
Climate Change Has Already Increased Global Inequality. It Will Only Get Worse
BY JUSTIN WORLAND
APRIL 22, 2019…
A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that in most poor countries, higher temperatures are more than 90% likely to have resulted in decreased economic output, compared to a world without global warming. Meanwhile, the effect has been less dramatic in wealthier nations—with some even potentially benefiting from higher temperatures.
“We’re not arguing that global warming created inequality,” says Noah S. Diffenbaugh, the author of the study and a professor at Stanford University who studies climate change. But “global warming has put a drag on improvement.” The countries most likely to have lost out economically as a result of warmer temperatures have done the least to contribute to the problem, he adds.
…
Many of the world’s developing countries have called foul. “This problem is created somewhere else,” Abdur Rouf Talukder, Bangladesh’s Finance Secretary, told TIME earlier this month. “We are spending more on adaptation because we have to live.”
Bangladesh’s GDP per capita was 12% lower due to global warming than it would have been otherwise in the two decades preceding 2010, according to the study published Monday. The effect is more dramatic elsewhere, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries including Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger, where climate change has driven GDP per capita more than 20% lower that it would have been absent climate change.
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Read more: http://time.com/5575523/climate-change-inequality/
The abstract of the study;
Global warming has increased global economic inequality
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke
PNAS first published April 22, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816020116Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.
Read more: https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816020116
Edited by Ottmar Edenhofer, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Hans J. Schellnhuber March 22, 2019 (received for review September 16, 2018)
The authors don’t appear to have modelled the hypothetical impact not using fossil fuels would have had on economic development in poor countries, though perhaps a follow up study in Venezuela might shed some light on this issue.
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Global inequality is worse because of socialism. Solution? Eradicate socialists. Late term abortion was created to wipeout socialists, they can be aborted at any time and place you locate them. It is the only way the human race will survive.
Remember at the first earth day the mantra was “zero population growth” ?
I suspect fertility rates since then have a higher correlation with poverty than CO2
But zpg isn’t leftist politically correct anymore.
The authors should also have modelled the impact of Global Warming Hysteria on the funding of affordable energy and electricity production in the Third World Countries. They could also model the effect of Socialist policies on countries like Cuba and Venezuela to see where the problems could be coming from. Finally, they could do a study to see if any of the Alarmist Climate Predictions have ever been realised over the past 50 years of hysteria.
Is it just me, or are the ‘airwaves’ being clogged with increasingly desperate CAGW studies/news??
One might think the CAGW bubble is near bursting….and not a moment too soon.
This is utter insanity. It is a terrible symphony of bad science, bad demographics, bad economics, and bad history. It is the synthesis of every error I was trained to detect, analyze, and avoid.
This paper was not meant for you, Evan Jones. It was meant to persuade the ignorant. It was meant to solidify social paradigms of victimhood. It was meant to build an emotional case for justifying the horrible things that are about to come.
As a scholarly work, it is as horrible as you say. As propaganda, it is beautiful.
It does not require scientific equipment to demonstrate that water vapor reduces the rate of cooling of the planet. Common knowledge will do. The simple observation that it cools faster and farther on dry, cloudless desert nights than it does where it is humid demonstrates that water vapor is a ghg and that its increase causes some Global Warming (about half of the total average global temperature increase 1895-2018).
WV increase has been measured and reported by NASA/RSS since 1989. Extrapolated back to 1960, the increase 1960-2002 was 7%. Further extrapolation indicates that it was about 10% lower in 1700 than 2002. WV trend 2002-2014 was flat but the aberration of el Nino action since then is still sorting out. Assessment of the sources of water vapor indicates about 86% from irrigation, 11% from cooling towers and 3% from everything else.
Multiple compelling evidence shows that CO2, in spite of being a ghg, does not contribute significantly to warming. Apparently the increased absorption by surface molecules is compensated by increased emission from CO2 molecules above the troposphere.
Increased WV has contributed to warming but is self-limiting.
Hello William Hausa. That’s very good, I wish that I had written that.
Michael.
MJE VK5ELL
Funny, I thought the inequality was driven by carbon offset trading.
“Sorry, we cannot allow you to start a ceramics factory, Al Gore has sold your entire country’s carbon budget to General Motors”.
Economic inequality is a very bad thing. Some people are rich, some are poor. Very unfair. Everybody should be poor.
What warming? It’s been cooling for the last three years. That ought to make things more equal for the developing nations. It’s all good.
“This problem is created somewhere else,” Abdur Rouf Talukder, Bangladesh’s Finance Secretary, told TIME earlier this month. “We are spending more on adaptation because we have to live.”
“The effect is more dramatic elsewhere, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries including Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger, where climate change has driven GDP per capita more than 20% lower that it would have been absent climate change.”
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Africa’s real problems:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=dcq_XMmlMdvBmwWrrYTIBg&q=who+Africa+malaria+children+mortality&oq=who+Africa+malaria+children+mortality&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
OTOH:
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-population/
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What has utterly destroyed the most impoverished nations in the world is a lack of free-market capitalism…
If one looks at the economic freedom index rankings by country, the poorest countries have the least economic freedom, and are run into the ground by terribly corrupt Socialist/Theocrat/Kleptocrat tyrants who severely restrict economic development and create high-risk economies where foreign investment is restricted:
https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
The most impoverished countries in the world cannot not improve their GDP growth by slapping solar panels on mud huts…
The ONLY way these impoverished countries can achieve sustainable GDP growth is by adopting free-market capitalism, which would naturally lead to economies run on cheap, efficient and abundant fossil fuels.
One just has to look at the situation in Zimbabwe where the country went from being prosperous and ‘the breadbasket of Africa’ to supposed equality and dire poverty.
I met a couple running a business in New Zealand who had a safari business in Zimbabwe, but got closed down.
They decided not to relocate elsewhere in Africa as they said that they didn’t want to go through the same experience in twenty years time.
Good governance is the prime need for sustained development.
Venezuela is achieving “equality” as we speak.
The claim that very small changes in average temperatures can be extracted from all the rest of the much more important influences on economic growth is obviously absurd. As various books have recently described, cities that straddle a border (e.g. Mexico and the US) can be hugely “unequal” despite sharing every geographic, geological, climatic etc etc characteristic.
Once again we see that provided you show that climate change is bad, you can get utter rubbish published and publicised.
Experience has shown that every country that embraces higher energy costs shows lower economic growth over time. Green energy so far has always been more expensive than conventional sources. Economic growth comes from greater efficiency, not less. Replace the ox with a tractor, waterwheel with a motor, a person can produce more for the same level of effort. This paper is a great example of choosing a conclusion and modelling your way to it. Real data say otherwise.
Back in the stone age, the “global equality” index was very high. As technology improved, the inequality index increased drastically. Now, relatively few people own factories, land for farms, etc., but they USE that wealth to produce cheap I-phones, computers, HDTVs, cars, etc. that the rest of us can buy relatively cheaply.
That private sector concentrated wealth makes EVERYBODY richer.
well stated. If you could wave a magic wand and spread all the world’s wealth evenly to every person on the planet and then allowed the people the freedom to do with their portion of that wealth what they wish, within a generation you’d once again have a large and growing inequality gap because some people will use their resources to better themselves and innovate ideas to make the lives of themselves and others better while other people will just fritter away their resources doing nothing productive with them.
You can see it today in every work place across the country. Take any group of workers doing the roughly same work for the same pay. Some of those workers live paycheck to paycheck while others save a small portion of their pay for a “rainy day” and others still invest a good chunk of their pay for future gain. Same starting place (paychecks of equal size) with vastly different outcomes in regards to the wealth they’ll accumulated over a lifetime of work: The paycheck to paycheck guy will likely never reach a point where he can comfortably retire (because he has nothing saved and thus needs to keep working) whereas the guy that invested heavily in his working years gets the option to retire early and comfortably should he so choose.
It would take far less than a generation. Hustlers, theives, brigand and politicians would be busily sucking up as much of that spread out wealth as humanly possible. And that would be damned quick.
I was being generous. Plus I was referring to the gap when it is an undefined “large”. Obviously the gap would start almost immediately for all the reasons you state, but it would take some time to reach the “large” stage (depending on the definition of large).
As my uncle Joseph, a mud Marine who slogged his a$$ across the Pacific, up and down the Korean Peninsula and then all across the Central Highlands and Laos, said, “Never underestimate the potential of unrestrained human stupidity”. And he HATED government. Almost as much as he hated the Japanese till his dying day. Taking all wealth and “redistributing” it would be the largest example of unrestrained human stupidity ever witnessed.
Which is precisely why leftists, and islamists, target it. People are far easier to control when they are in deep poverty.
“global warming has put a drag on improvement.”
More likely the lack of investment by the world bank in it’s refusal to invest in anything that the green blob don’t like has cost more in lives and improvements in living conditions in the developing countries than any change in the climate.
James Bull