A new report, co-authored by a combination of McKinsey consultants and scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center, describes how physical climate risks will affect socioeconomic systems in the next few decades. The report emphasizes that future climate will not resemble the relatively stable climate of the past ten thousand years, which accounts for the full span of human civilization. All the physical climate impacts and thresholds—lethal heat waves preventing outdoor labor and destroying harvests, floods imperiling infrastructure and shutting down electric grids—will not just decrease economic activity slightly, they are more structural and impact on the factors of production that drive G.D.P.
By Carolyn Kormann. New Yorker. February 4, 2020.
