Why do I say those are startling results? Because the Institute of Actuaries is sending a clarion call here. To...institutions across the world. Banks, central banks, investment funds, insurance companies, politicians. It's saying that nobody much has taken the costs of climate change seriously yet--this is the first proper, thorough, rigorous estimate of where we're headed. When we do serious math, not just spitball convenient fantasies like a Hothouse Earth will somehowincreaseGDP, troubling conclusions emerge. Combining climate science with actuarial statistics says that the damages heading our way appear to be, could be, land in estimates of...astronomical.
What's "astronomical"? During the Great Depression, GDP fell by 10-15% in real terms. During the Great Recession of '08, it fell by about 5%. Covid, about 4%. We're talking about an event at a completely different scale, off those charts, in another economic universe altogether. Something ten times the magnitude of what happened during 2008, or the early years of the pandemic. That's the economic equivalent of mega-scale weather: something we've never really seen before, like continent-scale megafires we don't know how to put out. It's bigger than anything in history, by a very,verylong way.
