Governments and large investors are relying on rosy economic forecasts that dangerously understate the threat climate change poses to the world economy, a group of climate researchers has warned.
Investors and policymakers have been lulled into complacency by projections that global warming will cause only a modest economic drag of 0.5 percent a year or less to global gross domestic product, said Mark Campanale, founder of Carbon Tracker Initiative, a financial think tank.
But the forecasts assume climate impacts are predictable, gradual and mild — assumptions not shared by scientists, says a new analysis released by the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
“Economic models assume the future behaves like the past, just a bit warmer,” Jesse Abrams, an earth scientist who led the research, said in a public event. But most such models “are built on assumptions that no longer hold in a hotter world.”
