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U of A prof estimates climate change cuts U.S. income by 12%

A University of Arizona economics professor says his research shows climate change has reduced U.S. income by an estimated 12%.

Derek Lemoine, a professor in UA’s Eller College of Management and co-director of the university’s Consortium of Environmentally Resilient Business, said measuring climate change’s current economic impact has large-scale, long-term implications for policy-making and business investment.

“If we can’t figure out what climate change is already costing us with the data we have, projecting the future becomes almost hopeless,” Lemoine, lead author of a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a UA news release. (snip)

“A lot of the real cost comes from how temperature changes across the whole country ripple through prices and trade. It’s not just about the weather where we live. When every region is affected at the same time, the economic consequences add up quickly,” Lemoine said in the release.  (snip)

Lemoine’s research included working with climate model simulations to analyze the world with and without human emissions and figure out how different each county’s weather would have been if there was no climate change.

He then combined county-level data on daily temperatures with county-level personal income per capita from the Bureau of Economic Analysis covering 1969-2019 to measure how income has changed over the years, with the number of hotter and colder days both locally and around the country.

So, he took shady data on climate and combined it using suspect data on earnings and ran it through a computer model? Garbage. There obviously can be no other reason for any decrease in earnings, right? It’s all cult BS.