Over the past decade or so, I have been somewhat engaged at my alma mater, The University of Chicago, with their EPIC (Energy Policy Institute Chicago) program. I had been told of a new tool that was being developed that would be able to model future climate impacts on a very localized basis. The initial product from this endeavor is now public with the results reported below.
I also just read an article about the perceived differences between urban and rural voters. It was interesting to note that on the surface there wasn’t much difference in what one would think. Income and employment levels were similar as were use of opioids. The major difference was cultural. In rural areas there is much less exposure to diversity so attitudes about immigration are significantly different. If you’re interested in the full article you can click here to read it. It is very informative.
The point I want to make is that people often don’t vote in their best interest. Thus, the title of this post: Ironic Southern Strategy. As can be seen by any red/blue map of the states, the South is solidly red Republican. And Republicans are the least likely to believe in climate change or its potential impact on them.
It is quite ironic, therefore, that the people that put the Climate Denier in Chief, Donald Trump, in the White House are exactly the folks in this country that will suffer the most from a hotter climate and more turbulent weather.
Climate Change Could Hurt the South More than New England
Poorer areas of the United States — including much of the South — are likely to be hit harder by climate change than richer areas like New England.
That’s according to a report published yesterday in the journal Science on the effects of climate change in the United States. It lays out a grim outlook for widening economic inequality caused by higher temperatures, as well as the potential long-term financial ramifications of exiting the Paris accords.
Climate losses are targeted in regions that are already poorer on average, meaning that failure to reduce emissions is likely to increase existing inequalities, especially in the South. The Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region and New England are likely to fare better, researchers suggest.
“The places that are currently poorer on average look like they’re getting more damages than the places that are currently richer,” said Amir Jina, one of the co-authors of the paper and an economist at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
The study looks at the economic impact of global warming on multiple sectors over the coming decades. Unabated climate change could mean declining agricultural yields in some farm states, increased crime rates across swaths of the county and, in the Southeast, unbearable heat that leads to more deaths.
Researchers used 116 climate projections to assign a cost to the impacts of climate change, much as insurers or investors might assess risk. The research also factors in the economic effects of higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea levels and more intense tropical storms.
Some regions fare more poorly as the century moves on, but overall, the researchers expect that heat impacts from climate change could lead to an additional five deaths per 100,000 people. Current temperatures matter as much as the change in temperature, Jina said. For example, rising mortality in hot locations more than offsets reductions in cool regions.
“For each degree that you warm, you’re not just increasing your mortality or crime or decreasing your labor productivity in a linear way,” he said. “It’s getting worse as you get hotter. The places in the South are very close to a lot of those thresholds.”
The research is unusually detailed, down to the county level. Until now, most similar work has described average impacts for large regions. Examining county-level impacts reveals patterns of redistribution that can’t be captured by regional or global averages, the authors found. Previous studies simply don’t capture the potential regional restructuring of the U.S. economy on such a detailed level, researchers noted.
Rush to higher ground?
The research comes out of the Climate Impact Lab, a new consortium working to assess the real-world costs of climate change. It’s made up of researchers from the University of Chicago; Rutgers University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Rhodium Group. The research was led by Solomon Hsiang and James Rising of UC Berkeley; Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and Jina.
The framework is designed to continually integrate new findings and new climate model predictions as research advances. It’s also designed to be actionable science people can use to plan for the effects of climate change, Jina said. That means farmers can use it to plan crops that are drought-tolerant, for example. Local governments can use it to project population shifts that might affect their tax bases and how much money they have to adapt to sea-level rise or heat stress. And health care experts can use it to plan how to address some of the heat or other impacts of a warmer planet.
“I think that’s one of the advantages of our approach,” Jina said. “It allows people who are concerned with different factors, different aspects of the economy, to plan differently in different locations.”
The work reflects the explosion in the use of complex socio-economic databases in the past decade, said Maximilian Auffhammer, an environmental economist and professor at UC Berkeley who is familiar with the work but was not involved with the research. Those factors, coupled with computer power and new statistical methods, have enabled researchers to come up with much better ways of characterizing how humans respond to changing climate in the short and long term, he said.
“Climate change is global, but adaptation is local,” Auffhammer said. “So you need to figure out how much should you do, and since we all have a very scarce or limited budget of public dollars to spend on these adaptation-type mechanisms both public and private, we want to put them to the best use. And this will help.”
