25 Devastating Effects Of Climate Change (Part 1 of 5)

1. Climate change will cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Asset destruction, forced relocations, droughts, extinctions, and all of the other bad things we’re going to discuss will add up in costs to the global economy. Already the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that the US Climate Disruption Budget — i.e., stuff related to drought, storms, and growing climate disruptions — was nearly $100 billion. And that’s just the start.

By 2030, climate change costs are projected to cost the global economy $700 billion annually, according to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor.

As climate change continues, costs will go up. Indeed, the release of a 50-billion-ton reservoir of methane from melting Arctic ice, which may advance global warming by 15-to-35 years, could by itself cost $60 trillion to the global economy, researchers told Nature last summer.

Stopping the damage won’t be cheap either. For instance, putting the world on a path for sustainable energy production will cost $53 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment Outlook.

But in the long run, these investments could wind up saving money, says a new report from The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. By spending money now on measures like green infrastructure, governments can save themselves the money that would otherwise be spent on damages caused by climate change in the future.

2. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move by 2050.

International Displacement Monitoring Centre “98% of all displacement in 2012 was related to climate- and weather-related events,” according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

Climate change may become the biggest driver of displaced people, according to António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

In 2008, 36 million people were displaced by natural disasters. At least 20 million of those people were driven from their homes by disasters related to climate change, like drought and rising sea level, Guterres said.

He anticipates that countries in the Southern Hemisphere will be most affected by displacement in the future. If this happens, “not only states, but cultures and identities will be drowned,” Guterres said at a 2009 conference.

The Internal Organization for Migration estimates that 200 million people by 2050 could be forced to leave due to environmental changes.

Even more alarming, a 2014 study published in Environmental Research Letters predicted that sea level rise created by a temperature increase of 3 degrees C would force more than than 600 million people to find new homes.

3. Dangerous infectious diseases could spread in the U.S.

The deadliest vector-borne disease is malaria, claiming 627,000 lives in 2012. (A vector-borne disease is one carried from one person to another through a third organism, like a blood-sucking bug). “However, the world’s fastest growing vector-borne disease is dengue, with a 30-fold increase in disease incidence over the last 50 years,” the World Health Organization wrote.

As summers become longer, temperatures go up, and rainfall patterns change along with species patterns. Mosquitoes carrying diseases will likely have a longer season in a wider area, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The same is true on a global scale: increases in heat, precipitation, and humidity can allow tropical and subtropical insects to move from regions where infectious diseases thrive into new places,” they wrote. Increases in international travel, “means that the U.S. is increasingly at risk for becoming home to these new diseases.”

Without proper management, waterborne diseases could also spread as floods become more common. Floodwaters can contain disease-causing bacteria or viruses, including noroviruses and enteroviruses.

4. Western wildfires could burn up to eight times as much land by 2100.

For each one degree Celsius of warming, the area burned by western wildfires will increase by a factor of two to four, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences.

Temperatures in the Southwest have increased by more than one degree Celsius since the 1970s, according to the National Climate Assessment.

The major fire increases will occur in the northern Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, according to a 2012 report for firescience.gov. The fire season could also become several months longer.

5. Water scarcity will hit hundreds of millions of additional people by 2100.

In 2013, about 1.3 billion people lived in water-scarce regions, according to one study. The researchers calculated that an additional 8% of the population would enter a state of “new or aggravated water scarcity” solely due to climate change with a temperature increase of 2 degrees C by 2100.

The National Climate Assessment detailed some of our nation’s record-breaking droughts. In 2011, Texas and Oklahoma saw more than 100 days over almost 28 degrees C and also set records for the hottest summer since 1895, when people began keeping reliable climate records.

“Rates of water loss, due in part to evaporation, were double the long-term average. The heat and drought depleted water resources and contributed to more than $10 billion in direct losses to agriculture alone,” said the Assessment.

When parched areas do get rain, it does not necessarily make it into groundwater supplies since dry ground is not good at absorbing water, according to the convention report.

While some places are becoming drier, others are in danger of serious floods.

Sources: Yahoo, businessinsider.com