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Looking at 166 countries between 1960 and 2010, the researchers identified an optimal average annual temperature that coincides with peak productivity. It’s 13 degrees celsius, or approximately the climate of San Francisco’s bay area (Sydney’s mean temperature last year was 19.3 degrees).

Countries in the tropics, already hotter than this optimal temperature, are likely to face the most dramatic economic pain from warming, found the study, published in the latest issue of Nature. Countries at or just past the 13-degree annual average, like the US, China, and Japan, may be increasingly vulnerable to losses as the temperature warms. Northern countries well below the ideal average may see benefits as opportunities open up for agriculture and industry.

But this was the least robust finding. And even if the warming improves the lot of Scandinavia and Canada, such nations may not have many healthy trading partners left as others suffer. Also, higher temperatures in northern countries don’t take into account changes in precipitation, more extreme weather, and the many other risks in a warming world. 

The authors made a clever end run around the biggest problem at the core of climate science: There’s only one Earth. Scientists usually like to run “controls,” situations that have identical conditions to the experiment except for the one thing being studied. Unfortunately for climate scientists, there’s no second Earth, filled with identical people doing identical things, where greenhouse gas emissions aren’t a problem.

So the study looks at national temperature records through time. Instead of studying a warming Nigeria and a control Nigeria, the scientists compared Nigerian economic output in average years with that in warming years………..

A dramatically higher damage function changes the cost/benefit analysis and makes potential policies that looked expensive yesterday much cheaper by comparison.

Another takeaway from the study is that over the last six decades, economies haven’t adapted well to hotter temperatures. “We’re optimistic on adaptation and its long-run potential,” Burke said. “Looking historically, we don’t see a lot of evidence that we’re good at that.”

A cliché repeated in some scientific circles suggests that there are three possible responses to climate change: mitigation (the word wonks like to use instead of prevention), adaptation, and suffering.

If the new study means our mitigation efforts are even weaker than previously thought, and we don’t have a proven track record of adaptation, are we setting ourselves up for suffering?

“That’s exactly right,” Burke said. “That’s exactly right.” http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/climate-change-slams-global-economy-study-from-stanford-and-berkeley-shows-20151022-gkfl07.html#ixzz3pcaEBLtj