04/01/2018

Investors, Now We Have Your Attention On Climate Change

Fairfax - Julien Vincent*

A clarion call from within the industry, and a costly taste of climate reality, saw investors finally wake up to global warming in 2017.
Investors have tended to downplay their role in combating climate change, preferring to cast themselves as helpless bystanders against a lack of stable and clear policy.


The costs of climate change impacts, and the transformation to a low-carbon economy, present an array of financial risks for investors. Photo: Jessica Shapiro JLS
In Australia, you can see why this argument is effective.
Last year, our climate and energy debate has included the Treasurer Scott Morrison gleefully waving a lump of coal around in parliament as Australia suffers a record-breaking heatwave, the Resources Minister Matt Canavan championing the idea of using public money to build a new coal power station, and renewable energy incentives cut against the advice of our Chief Scientist.


Already over 1ºC of warming, the rate of temperature increase is accelerating, making the challenge of outpacing the threat with remedial action even greater.
But the reality is this argument from investors is bogus, regardless of how stable or chaotic the policy context is.
Aside from the principle that the owners of the economy should shoulder some responsibility for its outcomes, a far more compelling argument to investors took hold in 2017: climate risk.
The costs of climate change impacts, and the transformation to a low-carbon economy present an array of financial risks that manifest in the portfolios of investors.
This was the case put by the Financial Stability Board, which set up a Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) to guide investors on how to assess climate risk.
Its final recommendations were released in June and by December the TCFD had the support of over 150 financial firms, responsible for assets of over $US81.7 trillion.
The increased expectation was also starting to get results from companies.
After several failed attempts, investors successfully passed a resolution calling on Exxon Mobil to disclose the risks to its business if the world succeeds in holding global warming below 2ºC.
Australian companies were also starting to move.
By the end of 2017, seven companies had produced scenario analyses of how they stack up in a low carbon economy, with another 12 committed to implement the TCFD recommendations in some form.
Increasing awareness of climate risk also made for a stronger argument that investors divest or withhold finance from companies and projects that have no place in a low-carbon economy.
Banks that had already excluded lending to coal mines and power stations also ruled out extreme oil projects such as tar sands.
NAB and Westpac formally restricted lending to coal, while Commonwealth Bank and ANZ signalled their exposure to coal would continue to fall over time.
The World Bank, which had already excluded coal lending, would do the same for upstream oil and gas from 2019.
AXA made one of the last and the largest divestment announcements of 2017 as the global insurer sold €3.1 billion worth of coal and tar sands stocks.
Financial institutions also received a taste of what physical climate change risk looks like.
Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, which battered the Caribbean and US Gulf Coast last year, resulted in over a dozen insurance companies recording massive losses.
European insurer Hannover Re took the dramatic step of selling its entire stock portfolio, worth almost €1 billion, to cover the cost of natural hazard claims, while questions were being asked whether the insurance industry could even survive climate change.
If 2017 was the year when investors woke up to the significance of climate risk, 2018 needs to be when finance and investment shifts en masse away from activities that threaten a safe climate future.
We are seriously running out of time if we want to keep a lid on global warming and avoid the worst climate change impacts. 2017 is already expected to join 2015 and 2016 as the three hottest years on record.
Already over 1ºC of warming, the rate of temperature increase is accelerating, making the challenge of outpacing the threat with remedial action even greater.
Seven Australian companies producing scenario analyses of how they perform in a low-carbon economy is a start, and nothing more.
There are dozens of other companies in the ASX200 that are still not bothering, or openly dismissing the idea of managing climate risk.
Investors might feel good by targeting 100+ companies to lead on climate risk disclosure, but when there are over 770 companies just in the global coal supply chain, this is far too narrow a focus.
And with no room left in the carbon budget to expand the fossil fuel industry, policies of financial institutions need to reflect climate reality, even if that means leaving governments behind.
Whether for moral reasons or sheer self-interest, investors have every reason to kick climate risk out of the economy as quickly as possible.

*Julien Vincent is the executive director of Market Forces.

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Quarter Of Land Will Be Drier Under 2C Warming: Study

AFP

A picture shows low water levels at a reservoir in drought-stricken Entrepenas near Sacedon, Spain on November 24, 2017. AFP/File / PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU
More than a quarter of Earth's land surface will become "significantly" drier even if humanity manages to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, the goal espoused in the Paris Agreement, scientists said on Monday.
But if we contain average warming to 1.5 C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), this will be limited to about a tenth -- sparing two-thirds of the land projected to parch under 2 C, they concluded in a study published in Nature Climate Change.
At 1.5 C, parts of southern Europe, southern Africa, central America, coastal Australia and Southeast Asia -- areas home to more than a fifth of humanity -- "would avoid significant aridification" predicted under 2 C, said study co-author Su-Jong Jeong of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China.
"Accomplishing 1.5 C would be a meaningful action for reducing the likelihood of aridification and related impacts," he told AFP.
Jeong and a team used projections from several climate models, under different warming scenarios, to predict land drying patterns.
Aridification is a major threat, hastening land degradation and desertification, and the loss of plants and trees crucial for absorbing Earth-warming carbon dioxide.
It also boosts droughts and wildfires, and affects water quality for farming and drinking.
The team found that at 2 C, which could arrive any time between 2052 and 2070, between 24 percent and 32 percent of the total land surface will become drier.
This includes land in all five climate categories today -- hyper-arid, arid, semi-arid, dry sub-humid, and humid.
But at 1.5 C -- the lower, aspirational limit also written into the climate-rescue Paris Agreement -- this is reduced to between eight and 10 percent, said Jeong.
Under the pact, signed in the French capital in 2015, countries have filed pledges for reducing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
But these goals place the planet on track for warming of more than 3 C, which scientists warn will lead to life- and asset-threatening superstorms, sea-level rise, floods and drought.
"Because present mitigation policies do not appear to be sufficient to achieve the 1.5 C temperature goal, more efforts to mitigate global warming are therefore urgently needed to reduce the spread of aridification," the study authors said.

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On Its Hundredth Birthday In 1959, Edward Teller Warned The Oil Industry About Global Warming

The Guardian - Benjamin Franta*

Somebody cut the cake – new documents reveal that American oil writ large was warned of global warming at its 100th birthday party.
Physicist Edward Teller pointing at a formula on a blackboard on 22 May 1968. Photograph: STF/AFP/Getty Images
It was a typical November day in New York City. The year: 1959. Robert Dunlop, 50 years old and photographed later as clean-shaven, hair carefully parted, his earnest face donning horn-rimmed glasses, passed under the Ionian columns of Columbia University’s iconic Low Library. He was a guest of honor for a grand occasion: the centennial of the American oil industry.
Over 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, and industry executives were present for the Energy and Man symposium – organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business – and Dunlop was to address the entire congregation on the “prime mover” of the last century – energy – and its major source: oil. As President of the Sun Oil Company, he knew the business well, and as a director of the American Petroleum Institute – the industry’s largest and oldest trade association in the land of Uncle Sam – he was responsible for representing the interests of all those many oilmen gathered around him.
Four others joined Dunlop at the podium that day, one of whom had made the journey from California – and Hungary before that. The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, become ostracized by the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:

At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.
But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.
And so, at its hundredth birthday party, American oil was warned of its civilization-destroying potential.
Talk about a buzzkill.
How did the petroleum industry respond? Eight years later, on a cold, clear day in March, Robert Dunlop walked the halls of the U.S. Congress. The 1967 oil embargo was weeks away, and the Senate was investigating the potential of electric vehicles. Dunlop, testifying now as the Chairman of the Board of the American Petroleum Institute, posed the question, “tomorrow’s car: electric or gasoline powered?” His preferred answer was the latter:

We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-combustion engines will have long since been controlled.
Dunlop went on to describe progress in controlling carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles. Absent from his list? The pollutant he had been warned of years before: carbon dioxide.
We might surmise that the odorless gas simply passed under Robert Dunlop’s nose unnoticed. But less than a year later, the American Petroleum Institute quietly received a report on air pollution it had commissioned from the Stanford Research Institute, and its warning on carbon dioxide was direct:

Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. [...] there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. [...] pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.
Thus, by 1968, American oil held in its hands yet another notice of its products’ world-altering side effects, one affirming that global warming was not just cause for research and concern, but a reality needing corrective action: “Past and present studies of CO2 are detailed,” the Stanford Research Institute advised. “What is lacking, however, is [...] work toward systems in which CO2 emissions would be brought under control.”
This early history illuminates the American petroleum industry’s long-running awareness of the planetary warming caused by its products. Teller’s warning, revealed in documentation I found while searching archives, is another brick in a growing wall of evidence.
In the closing days of those optimistic 1950s, Robert Dunlop may have been one of the first oilmen to be warned of the tragedy now looming before us. By the time he departed this world in 1995, the American Petroleum Institute he once led was denying the climate science it had been informed of decades before, attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and fighting climate policies wherever they arose.
This is a history of choices made, paths not taken, and the fall from grace of one of the greatest enterprises – oil, the “prime mover” – ever to tread the earth. Whether it’s also a history of redemption, however partial, remains to be seen.
American oil’s awareness of global warming – and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction – goes further than any one company. It extends beyond (though includes) ExxonMobil. The industry is implicated to its core by the history of its largest representative, the American Petroleum Institute.
It is now too late to stop a great deal of change to our planet’s climate and its global payload of disease, destruction, and death. But we can fight to halt climate change as quickly as possible, and we can uncover the history of how we got here. There are lessons to be learned, and there is justice to be served.

*Benjamin Franta (@BenFranta) is a PhD student in history of science at Stanford University who studies the history of climate change science and politics. He has a PhD in applied physics from Harvard University and is a former research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

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03/01/2018

2017 Was The Hottest Year On Record Without An El Niño, Thanks To Global Warming

The Guardian - 

Climate scientists predicted the rapid rise in global surface temperatures that we’re now seeing
Firefighters lighting backfires as they try to contain the Thomas wildfire in Ojai, California on on December 09, 2017. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
2017 was the second-hottest year on record according to Nasa data, and was the hottest year without the short-term warming influence of an El Niño event:



Global surface temperature data 1964–2017 from NASA GISS, broken out by years with El Niño warming influence, La Niña cooling, or neutral, with linear trends for each category. Trends are 0.17–0.18°C per decade for each category.

In fact, 2017 was the hottest year without an El Niño by a wide margin – a whopping 0.17°C hotter than 2014, which previously held that record. Remarkably, 2017 was also hotter than 2015, which at the time was by far the hottest year on record thanks in part to a strong El Niño event that year.
For comparison, the neutral El Niño conditions and the level of solar activity in 1972 were quite similar to those in 2017. 45 years later, the latter was 0.9°C hotter than the former. For each type of year – La Niña, El Niño, and neutral – the global surface warming trend between 1964 and 2017 is 0.17–0.18°C per decade, which is consistent with climate model predictions.
1964–2017 global surface temperature data from NASA, divided into El Niño (red), La Niña (blue), and neutral (black) years, with linear trends added. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli
It’s déjà vu all over again
I’ve been writing for the Guardian for almost 5 years now, and every year I’ve had to write a similar headline or two:
Those early years were the height of the denier frenzy about the mythical global warming ‘hiatus.’ At the time, John Abraham and I frequently wrote pieces pointing out that while various factors were temporarily dampening global surface warming, the oceans (which absorb over 90% of the excess heat from the increased greenhouse effect) continued warming rapidly.

Climate scientists predicted this rapid temperature rise
It was only a matter of time until short-term effects stopped holding back the rise of Earth’s surface temperatures. That’s now happened, and as a result we’re seeing unleashed global warming causing record temperatures year after year. In fact, in February 2014 I wrote about a study that predicted this would happen:

the [ocean] heat uptake is by no means permanent: when the trade wind strength returns to normal - as it inevitably will - our research suggests heat will quickly accumulate in the atmosphere. So global temperatures look set to rise rapidly out of the hiatus, returning to the levels projected within as little as a decade.
Temperatures have in fact risen so quickly, it appears to have taken just a few years for that prediction to come true and for the denier focus on the short-term surface warming slowdown to look quite foolish.

2017 – a year of climate denial
Speaking of climate denial, on the 362nd day of the hottest year on record without an El Niño, the US president tweeted this:
IMAGE
Climate scientist Sarah Myhre aptly described the tweet as “Phenomenally dumb,” for several obvious reasons.
Trump also began the process of withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, leaving America as the only country in the world denying the urgent need to address global warming. Fortunately, every other nation is taking action to mitigate this existential threat, but there’s a shocking gap between reality and the ‘fake news’ beliefs of arguably the most powerful man in the world.

Feeling the burn of climate change consequences
America was also battered by climate-fueled extreme weather events in 2017. Research has already shown that global warming boosted Hurricane Harvey’s record rainfall (and associated flooding) by about 38%. California’s record wildfire season was similarly fueled by the state’s hot summer. The southwestern states were cooked by record hot summer temperatures this year, and global warming is making droughts in America and Europe worse. America was hit by 15 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2017, and it will likely be the costliest such year on record once all of the hurricane damages are tallied.

Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the US in 2017. Illustration: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
These extreme weather events are expensive, and they’re a mere taste of what’s to come. Until we manage to cut global carbon pollution, temperatures will continue to rise and climate change consequences will become more severe. While it broke many of today’s records, 2017 is just a taste of what’s to come.

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It’s Not Too Late: A Climate Change New Year’s Resolution

InsideClimate News - Nicholas Kusnetz

The technology exists to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and avoid the worst of climate change, scientists say. What’s missing is the ambition.
Among the recommendations for cutting greenhouse gas emissions quickly: boost renewable energy and expand the use of electric vehicles. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images
How's this for a New Year's resolution: Act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—while there's still time to prevent a level of global warming that would make parts of the planet too hot to inhabit, melt glaciers that provide water to billions, flood many of the world's coastal cities and push mass migration to a full blown crisis.
It can't be accomplished in a single year, of course. But there isn't much time.
We have about three years left to bend global greenhouse gas emissions to a downward trajectory if we hope to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, a group of leading climate experts warned in the journal Nature last June. In an article that was both urgent and optimistic, they argued that the daunting task can be met using technologies that are already at hand.
"When it comes to climate, timing is everything," the group, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wrote. "If we delay, the conditions for human prosperity will be severely curtailed."
So, as 2018 begins, here are some of the goals for 2020 that the optimists presented:
  • Boost the world's renewable electricity generation to 30 percent of total supply.
  • Begin to retire all remaining coal-fired power plants.
  • Expand sales of electric vehicles to 15 percent of new cars.
  • Provide $1 trillion in financing each year—public and private—for climate action.
Those efforts can help reach a peak in global emissions by 2020, but it's only a start.
To have a good chance of avoiding dangerous warming, scientists say, emissions of greenhouse gases must effectively hit zero within the next few decades—at the latest, sometime in the second half of this century. If we can't halt the burning of fossil fuels that rapidly, and many people think we won't, we'll likely need widespread use of technologies that capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and bury it in the ground, or find other ways of removing it from the atmosphere.

We Are Not on Track
An International Energy Agency analysis, which assumes all nations will meet the pledges they made as part of the Paris climate agreement, projects global CO2 emissions in 2040 will be slightly higher than today.
The most recent "gap report" of the United Nations Environment Program, an annual estimate of how far we are falling short, found that without further cuts, the world would likely warm 3 degrees by 2100. The Paris goal is to limit warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial era.

According to the World Resources Institute, the United States is very likely to fall short of its targets, which the Trump administration has abandoned. It would have fallen short even under President Obama's policies, which Trump is now working hard to undo, including its centerpiece, the Clean Power Plan, which was designed to regulate emissions from power plants.


 Signs of Hope
There are glimmers of hope, however. In the United States, many states, cities and companies have pledged that they are "still in" for meeting the Paris goals.
Global emissions from fossil fuels, cement and other industrial sources, which make up about 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, had held steady for three consecutive years—before increasing again last year by an estimated 2 percent.
Anthony Hobley, chief executive of Carbon Tracker, a British research and advocacy group, said we're in the midst of an energy "paradigm shift" as wind, solar and natural gas become cheaper than coal.

"I think the good news is the direction of travel is clear," said Hobley, one of the authors of the Nature paper. "The challenge is to speed up that transition and make it go faster, and that's where all the efforts on policy and advocacy should be focused."


Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, said that while there are some modeling scenarios suggesting it's still possible to limit warming to less than 2 degrees even if we delay action, it would require more drastic cuts that would imply much greater costs and risk of economic disruption.
That would probably involve a greater reliance on what are called "negative emissions technologies," such as carbon capture and sequestration, or far-reaching changes in agriculture and forestry. It's a tempting idea—for the first time, it got a chapter in the UN's gap report. There's just one problem: despite decades of research and pilot projects, no one has yet been able to make this technology work on a larger scale at a cost that's practical.
So, watch closely to see if emissions continue rising this year.
"We are going to have to deal with a lot of disruption, and of course the people who will get hit the hardest are the poorest and most vulnerable," Hobley said. All the other pressing global issues—poverty, migration, disease—he said, "all of those things will suffer, and we'll lose progress in all those areas if we have an unstable and disruptive climate."
For now, it's not too late.

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Building Code Not Ready For Climate Change

The Australian - Robyn Ironside

The Nest House by architect Shaun Lockyer





Australia’s building design rules need a major overhaul to help future-proof homes and buildings for climate change.
The national president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Richard Kirk, said regulations did not allow for the types of innovation needed to mitigate the anticipated climate shift.
“The most important issue facing Australia is getting authorities to appreciate the very short time frame in which our climate will change,” Mr Kirk said.
“It’s very real, and it’s very tangible and we need to make sure the community as a whole is developing housing stock for climate change. It’s not about red tape, it’s about education and getting people prepared for the dramatic change in climate.”
He said as well as a doubling of insulation, regulators needed to consider innovations like “precinct cooling systems” through cities.
“To build a house now that’s not anticipating a shift in temperature is crazy,” said Mr Kirk.
“The great thing about regulation is it’s a way of getting a critical mass so when you go to market the actual cost doesn’t shift dramatically.”
Other changes Mr Kirk would like to see ingrained in the building code related to sustainability and energy generation.
“The Paris Accord seeks to have every new building carbon-neutral,” Mr Kirk said. “One of the great initiatives we’ve been undertaking with our work is to try to open buildings up. All buildings should be able to be opened so you can use natural ventilation. It’s not only more efficient, it’s healthier.”
His views were shared by Brisbane-based residential architect Shaun Lockyer, who said regulations were not in step with modern, sustainable design.
“A lot of legislation tries to prevent the worst thing happening rather than encouraging the best design solutions,” Mr Lockyer said.
“The most highly awarded architects in the country, lauded as innovators of residential design, most of their houses can’t get building approval because they simply don’t comply with any of the deemed regulations.
“Instead they have to manipulate interpretations in the code to scrape through the certification process and get finance.”
He said an example was the requirement for any windows opening to a void in the house to be restricted to a 120-millimetre gap.
“You can have a hole in the wall but if you have a window in that same hole, it cannot open more than 120 millimetres,” Mr Lockyer said.
“That’s what we’re dealing with.”
He said building codes tended to look back rather than ahead.
“A lot of the planning schemes in our cities talk about how houses should emulate something else that was built 100 years ago; they’re all about retaining the character,” said Mr Lockyer.
“We need to have planning schemes that talk about how will live in 100 years.”
But Master Builders deputy executive director Paul Bidwell said the current code worked well, and ensured new homes were built to a “six star environmental standard”.
He said any further changes to make new houses carbon-neutral would probably mean extra costs.
“Our experience is in many of these things the costs far outweigh the benefits, so a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis would need to be done,” Mr Bidwell said. “At the heart of the building code is safety and we think it responds very well to the risk of more floods and cyclones.”

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02/01/2018

Climate Change Places A Major Economic Burden On Future Generations

Futurism - Brad Bergan | Chelsea Gohd


Climate Stability
It’s no secret that climate change has already started to impact human health. In fact, there is a growing body of research concerned with how rising temperatures will specifically affect humans: from heat stroke to decreased productivity — even an increased risk of violence. It’s becoming clear that climate change will leave a mark on more than just our planet.
A new study is looking even farther ahead at how rising temperatures might affect our children — but not so much in terms of their physical health. Rather, the researchers ask ho might climate change impact their financial health as adults.
Published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was conducted by researchers at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The results lead researchers to conclude there could be a link between heat waves during childhood and lower earnings in adulthood.


The study found that for every day in a child’s life between conception and age one when temperatures rose above 32 ˚C (roughly 90 ˚F) is associated with a 0.1 percent decrease in average income at age 30. It sounds abstract, but this means that too many sweltering days of youth corresponds to a slightly lower chance of ultimately achieving a higher income.
While these findings might seem, at first, possibly coincidental or accidental, as they are so astounding, Patrick L. Kinney, Sc.D., a Beverly A. Brown Professor of Urban Health and Sustainability in the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, first reacted to these findings in a phone call to Futurism, stating simply: “that’s bizarre.”
But Kinney later explained, in an email to Futurism, that this ” study is very intriguing and as noted in the commentary, is significant in suggesting that climate warming has long-term negative consequences for wage earnings.” He continued that “we know that health is closely tied to economic status.  Until now, most studies only show short-term effects on health outcomes.  The long-term aspect is what’s new. Very interesting and seemingly well-done study.”
As global temperatures continue to rise, we may see this correspondence become a more noticeable phenomenon. The paper notes that fetuses and infants are “especially sensitive to hot temperatures because their thermoregulatory and sympathetic nervous systems are not fully developed.” While the research doesn’t directly explain how this sensitivity leads to financial instability later in life, there is a fairly extensive body of research exploring how the conditions of our early life affect our health later on.
Such research also links exposure to extreme temperatures in that time-frame to lower birth rate and higher infant mortality. While the new study didn’t explicitly conclude the nature of the relationship, that nature could certainly be further explored through existing and continued research.

Facing the Repercussions
UC Berkeley public policy professor Solomon Hsiang, who explored how hotter temperatures will push global inequalities in a 2015 Nature paper, told MIT Technology Review, “We know that high temperatures have numerous damaging consequences for current economic productivity, at the time that the high temperatures occur.”
Click to View Full Infographic
These consequences will not only worsen as climate change progresses — they will disproportionately affect poor families and those living in developing nations. Maya Rossin-Slater, a co-author of the study and assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Health Research and Policy, explained that “In poor countries in hot climates that don’t have air conditioning, we could imagine these effects being even more dramatic.”
If the effects of global warming were presented as an economic issue, perhaps it could nudge lawmakers who do not typically vote in favor of climate-change-fighting movements to consider the issue with due urgency. On a more positive note, the field of renewable resources booming and causing global economic growth.
But even with this silver lining to the portentous global climate change cloud, the issue of confronting a real and dangerous impact on our financial security remains. And, if we aren’t motivated by self-interest, we would do well to understand that it is not only our own earning potential under threat — as with so many other things in life, our children may inherit our mistakes.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative