Opinion: Global warming may cost trillions of dollars

When we think about the economic damage of climate change, most of us probably think about the physical destruction wrought by mammoth disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts: Bungalows tumbling into the sea. Houses turned to ash. Acres of dead crops. That sort of thing.

But the quieter, longer-term effects of global warming cut even deeper.

Consider western North Carolina. It’s just beginning to repair the heavy physical damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure caused by Hurricane Helene nearly a month ago. The state’s tab for that could be $53 billion, Gov. Roy Cooper has said. But all of that physical wreckage also means businesses are closed, tourists aren’t visiting, people aren’t working, and few are splurging on luxury goods when many are still struggling just to get drinking water. That adds up to financial damage that dwarfs the physical one.

The total short- and long-term economic impacts of Hurricanes Helene and Milton could amount to roughly $400 billion, the private forecasting firm AccuWeather has estimated. That’s more than twice most assessments of the direct physical damage done by these storms.

Clearing away wreckage could take months. Rebuilding homes, businesses and infrastructure could take years. During that time, the economic losses will pile up, AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist, Jon Porter, noted in an interview. Businesses will close. People will move away forever.

“These places have a long road ahead,” Porter said. “They need a lot of help to rebuild and put lives back together, which tragically changed forever, sometimes in a matter of minutes.”

North Carolina’s pain will also be shared across the country in the form of higher grocery bills. Helene and Milton disrupted agriculture across the Southeast.

Most insidiously, the stress of the disasters will inflict long-term health impacts on millions. Tropical storms cause excess deaths for 15 years after they strike, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The average storm leads to 7,000 to 11,000 extra deaths during that span, compared with the 24 deaths, on average, storms cause directly when they land.

Disasters aren’t the climate’s only source of financial pain. A group of Oregon economists called the Forum on Oregon Climate Economics recently tried to tally all the losses a heating planet is inflicting on their state. As you would expect, they found the 2018 wildfire season and 2021 heat wave wreaked billions of dollars in damage.

“The average household in Oregon can reasonably expect to suffer damages in the tens of thousands of dollars per year under current emissions scenarios,” the economists wrote.

All across the U.S. and the world, increasingly extreme climate conditions are hurting buildings and infrastructure in subtle but devastating ways, Bloomberg’s CityLab noted recently.

Heat and rainfall that were unimaginable at the time of design and construction are causing roofs and HVAC systems to fail, roads and railways to buckle and foundations and plumbing to shift and crack.

All of this adds up to crushing economic cost. By the end of the century, global GDP could be cut in half — an effect comparable to a permanent state of war.

In fact, war is a good analogy for the challenge we face. If Earth faced an alien invasion costing it trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives every year and eroding the foundations of society, we wouldn’t blink at spending $215 trillion to repel it. The war against climate change is no less existential.

— Mark Gongloff

Bloomberg Opinion