The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus recently published “Climate change has now shrunk US salaries by 12%. And worse is to come” by Tom Howarth. The article claims that warming temperatures have already reduced U.S. incomes by roughly 12 percent and warns that future losses will be even greater. This article is not only false, it is absurd. Data show steady growth in incomes, coupled with increased productivity.
The article asserts that “climate change has already cut incomes in the US by around 12 per cent since 2000,” arguing that warming is quietly eroding wages and purchasing power nationwide through complex supply-chain effects. To reach this conclusion, the study imagines a hypothetical United States without man-made greenhouse gas emissions and then estimates how much richer Americans would supposedly be today in that alternate reality.
That is the fatal flaw in the article: these are not observed losses, they are modeled counterfactuals, i.e., guesses about what might have happened in a world where climate change never existed. If climate change were truly shrinking U.S. salaries by anything close to 12 percent, the damage would be visible in real economic indicators. Instead, over the same period the study claims massive losses occurred, the U.S. economy expanded substantially, real GDP increased, productivity rose, and average living standards improved. An economy supposedly being “picked clean” by temperature would not look like this.
Climate Realism has documented this problem repeatedly in its critiques of climate-economics modeling, including in “The New York Times Claim That Climate Change Threatens the Global Economy Is False,” which explains how speculative assumptions about productivity and trade are stacked to generate alarming numbers that do not match observed economic performance. These studies do not measure losses; they assume them, then back-cast them into the present.
The broader empirical record directly contradicts the BBC narrative. The modest warming of roughly one degree Celsius since the late nineteenth century coincided with unprecedented economic growth, longer life expectancy, better nutrition, and vastly improved resilience to weather. Climate at a Glance documents one of the clearest indicators of this reality in “Deaths from Extreme Weather,” showing that climate-related deaths have fallen by more than 95 percent over the past century. If warming were already imposing a large, hidden economic tax, we would expect worsening human outcomes, not dramatic improvement.
The BBC article also ignores the role of CO₂ and modern agriculture in boosting productivity. Climate at a Glance summarizes NASA’s findings on global vegetation increases in “Global Greening,” explaining that rising CO₂ has contributed to increased plant growth and leaf area across large portions of Earth. It also documents surging yields in “Crop Production,” noting that crop yields for staples such as wheat, corn, and rice have risen strongly over recent decades. Those are real-world outcomes, not counterfactual guesses, and they are directly relevant to any claim that modest warming is already imposing large economic losses.
History further undermines the claim. Colder periods, not warmer ones, have consistently been associated with slower growth, food shortages, and poorer health outcomes. The Little Ice Age brought repeated crop failures and widespread hardship across Europe and North America. Warmer periods, by contrast, have generally supported longer growing seasons and higher yields. The BBC article never addresses this historical reality, instead assuming—without evidence—that today’s temperatures are economically harmful despite every major indicator pointing the other way.
Even the study’s authors concede the weakness of their own results, admitting the estimated income loss could plausibly range anywhere from 2 percent to 22 percent and that the exact figure “can move depending on assumptions.” In plain language, the headline number is unstable and assumption-driven. Change the model inputs, and the supposed loss shrinks—or disappears entirely. That is not a measured economic impact.
Most revealing is what the article cannot show: an actual decline in U.S. salaries attributable to climate change. No such decline exists, as seen in the chart below from Our World in Data.
What exists instead is a growing economy, rising productivity, improving agricultural output, and falling climate-related mortality during the very period when temperatures increased modestly. The claim that climate change has already “shrunk U.S. salaries by 12 percent” is not supported by observation, history, or basic economic logic.
By presenting speculative modeling as real-world loss, BBC Science Focus misleads readers into believing climate change is already draining their paychecks. The data say otherwise. The United States has become richer, healthier, and more productive during the modern warming period. Assertions to the contrary are not grounded in evidence, but are artifacts of models untethered from reality.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
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