Last Updated 2.6.25. 

The insane financial costs of escalating climate change consequences will eventually destroy the world's economy. Here is why.

No banks, corporations, or governments are currently planning, budgeting for, or setting aside adequate reserves to cover the losses and damages of our accelerating climate change nightmare.

 

Below is a partial list of climate change consequences to help you visualize the escalating financial costs of climate change consequences described in detail below.

 

 

Rising climate change consequences costs may be the greatest threat to the world economy

If temperatures continue to rise as they are doing now and increase only as over “optimistically” projected by current global warming authorities until the turn-of-the-century:

1. Average global income will shrink by 23%. (1)

2. Global warming will facilitate a massive transfer of value and wealth from the hotter parts of the earth to the cooler parts. At least initially, countries like Russia, Mongolia, Canada, and possibly the northernmost parts of the U.S. will see significant economic benefits. Most of Europe will do slightly better, even though parts will suffer severe droughts. The U.S. and China will do slightly worse, mainly because the southern and western parts of the United States will be in a heat and/or drought crisis. All of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East will be economically ravaged.

3. U.S. gross domestic product per person will drop by 36%. (2)

4. Inflation will continually rise (reaching up to 100% in the final phases of the Climageddon Scenario) (3). This rising inflation is due to having to repair the ever-escalating, near-continuous damage from ever-more global warming-related natural disasters as they expand across local, regional, national, and global areas. Repairing these continuous and escalating natural disasters will create an ever-increasing need for resources that will grow ever-scarcer. The needed repairs and the resource scarcity will continually push prices and inflation higher and higher.

The financial costs of global warming will rise with each rising degree of average global temperature. However, global warming costs are likely to increase rapidly in an exponential curve rather than linearly. 

The estimated differences in total global warming costs are derived from different inputs, assumptions, and computer models. As you will soon discover, no matter what estimates you choose to use, the escalating costs of global warming will put an unbearable, steadily increasing burden on the citizens and nations of the world. When you read these cost estimates, remember that none of these estimates place any dollar value on the massive predicted loss of human life. 

It will be horrendously costly to repair, rebuild, relocate, or construct both current and new infrastructure, homes, and businesses for the first time. The Stern Review in 2006 estimated that the rising costs of escalating global warming will grow to 5% or more of the gross domestic product of all the nations on Earth. (Gross domestic product [GDP] is a monetary measure of the value of all goods and services produced in a given period [quarterly or yearly].) 

This means that 5% of the world’s gross domestic product will be lost to emergency recovery from global warming-related consequences. For an economic comparison and perspective, consider that the Great Depression of the 1930s in the United States resulted from only a 4% loss in the U.S. gross domestic product.

 

It gets FAR more costly as climate consequences accelerate over time

Newer studies from 2015 project that if the average global temperature increase reaches 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the nations of the world will be spending from 10% up to a possible 30% of their total gross domestic product recovering from an endless stream of mega global warming-related consequences and catastrophes on the final road to extinction. The current GDP of the world is about $100 trillion a year; by 2100, it may double or triple that. This means we could be spending one-third of the world’s GDP in 2100—about $100 trillion a year—to try to survive extinction from global warming. 

If we can avoid global warming extinction, the total estimated costs of all related global warming destruction could be between $400 and $600 trillion—about eight years of the current total gross domestic product for every nation onhis in perspective, if we fail to resolve global warming successfully now, sometime in the near future, we will have to dedicate 5 to 8 times the total current value of all annual global human productivity to recover from climate change consequences. 

Worse yet, that is only what we may have to pay if we are lucky. What will the cost be if we experience runaway, irreversible, or extinction-level climate change destabilization? 

Additionally, the financial costs of global warming-related catastrophes and emergencies will rapidly diminish any existing national emergency recovery safety net for the unprepared, causing unthinkable suffering and economic loss.

 

No person, corporation, or nation will be able to cope with the ever-increasing global warming and remain economically viable, as so much of their income or GDP will go toward climate change costs and recovery 

Here is only a tiny sample of costs already happening with global warming-influenced extreme weather. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tracks U.S. billion-dollar disaster events resulting from extreme weather, has found that severe storms caused losses of $8 billion in the 1980s, $26 billion in the 1990s, $43 billion in the 2000s, and $78 billion thus far in the 2010s. (4)  In the past few years, the United States has experienced nearly 50 climate-related disasters, costing taxpayers over $1 billion.

 

A global financial catastrophe is coming if we do not fix climate change before we cross the carbon 450 ppm level

In 2017 alone, the total combined costs for all US global warming-aggravated disasters was about 500 billion dollars. Hurricane Harvey alone exceeded 300 billion, and hurricanes Irma and Marie and California's many wildfires and mudslides made up the difference.) This 300 billion dollar cost was predicted in the new Climageddon Scenario climate model in phase 2 (described in the new book Climageddon, The Global Warming Emergency and How To Survive It).

 

The costs of climate change consequences will quickly reach insane levels

In the illustration below, you can see the predicted future single incident increasing costs of global warming aggravated disasters through the six stages of the Climageddon Scenario climate model. You can also see how much worse our single incident global warming aggravated disaster costs will become as we move from phase to phase.

Click here to learn why we cannot cross the carbon 425 to 450 ppm threshold and tipping point. 

 

 

If we continue on the path of escalating global warming, we will soon be facing a new kind of superstorm, what can be called a millennial superstorm. Millennial superstorms are storms of such severity that they have not been present on Earth for thousands of years. These new millennial superstorms are essential to consider because almost all of our infrastructure has been built based on surviving the worst storm that occurs about once every 100 years. Our current infrastructure is not prepared to survive these 1,000-year millennial superstorms. For more data on increasingly extreme storms, read this article by Paul Douglas. (5)

Who are the biggest financial losers as global warming increases?

There will be massive financial losers as global warming escalates. A few of the biggest losers will be:

a. Home and business owners in global warming unsafe catastrophe zones. Those living near river or lake floodplains or close to oceans or areas vulnerable to wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, or tornadoes will be subject to huge real estate valuation losses and insurance premium increases. Insurance companies will be forced to raise prices about 5% per year for customers in the escalating global warming medium danger zones, or they will cancel policies and offload the risks and the unpredictable costs onto national government relief programs and safety nets. In high danger zones, insurance companies will raise insurance rates as much as 20 to 40% regularly and sometimes annually to keep up with climate change disaster costs

It would also not be unreasonable to estimate that real estate prices in affected global warming high-risk areas will soon drop 1-3% per year as savvy buyers realize the risk and potential losses involved in such properties. In extremely high-risk regions, real estate prices could crash drastically, similar to how the prices of homes, businesses, and local farms crashed when toxic pollution was discovered in the water and soils at Love Canal, New York. (See this article on the new rules for buying real estate in the world of increasing global warming and the vast new global warming unsafe zones.)

b. Fossil fuel companies and related industries cannot hide or secretly offload the pollution and health costs onto unsuspecting taxpayers for the worst effects of their products. Fossil fuel subsidies totaling $5.3 trillion a year will soon disappear, and special global warming reduction carbon tax fees from $40-$100 a ton or more will be added to their operational costs. Fossil fuel companies will suffer massive stock divestment actions and massive numbers of individual and class-action lawsuits holding them responsible for global warming damages, and they will be hindered by governments with new regulations and taxes on profits to reduce fossil fuel use further. 

On the other hand, green energy will become highly subsidized, and fossil fuel energy generation will become highly unprofitable by comparison. This does not consider the momentum building behind the rapidly growing movement to divest from fossil fuel holdings.

c. Countries in the Southern hemisphere will be most affected by the worst of escalating global warming. They will experience soaring heat, the rapid spread of tropical diseases, and economic, social, and political instability. Needless to say, such countries whose economies are dependent on tourism will see those revenues steadily disappear. The irony is that many undeveloped nations that have produced only a tiny fraction of global warming will get poorer as northern countries responsible for most global warming will initially get richer and experience other benefits.

d. Millennials and the younger generations will be financially punished the most by escalating global warming. Click here for a shocking article about the trillions of dollars the younger generations will lose. (6)

e. Average individuals from every generation in unsafe zones caused by global warming will watch their monthly budgets, reserves, and personal and business equity be destroyed. This is because global warming-related inflation and “natural” disasters and their recovery costs will continue rising as the temperature increases. Part of the reason for this loss of equity is that as the emergency worsens, individuals cannot find relief from either insurance or government emergency programs. Eventually, those funds will also be exhausted by the ever-widening drain in the bathtub of global warming costs. To add further hardship, these individuals will endure steadily increasing new taxes, which their governments will be forced to impose as insurance companies go bankrupt due to the continuous, worsening “natural” disasters caused by global warming. To learn more about global warming unsafe zones, see the Migrating North or South of the 45 Parallel map and copy near the bottom of this page.

f. People with low incomes and the middle class will be the first to suffer, and they will suffer the most. In addition to the pain of dwindling personal equity and rapidly increasing taxes from ever-escalating global warming disasters, people experiencing poverty and the middle class will also watch their government social security and safety net benefits continually cut back and finally disappear as their governments try to cope with dwindling and overburdened resources themselves (i.e. retirement and unemployment benefits, food assistance, assistance for older people or physically or mentally handicapped, worker’s compensation, etc.). Click here for a glimpse of how bad it will get for low-income people. (7)

 

The worst financial losers will be 

Banks, corporations, and governments worldwide did not plan for, budget for, or set aside adequate reserves for the ever-increasing costs of escalating climate change. Thus, they will be blindsided yearly with ever-increasing surprise liabilities and fewer resources for future productivity.

In the early to mid phases of the Climageddon Scenario described here, it is fair to say that almost everyone will begin watching the process of their wealth dwindling and disappearing. More will be said about the many costs of escalating global warming here.

 

Who is responsible for global climate change, and who should pay for all the home business and farm damages caused by climate change?

Click here to read about the real cause of global climate change. It is not you as an individual or an individual business or farm. Once you know who and what the real cause of global climate change is, you can join one of the thousands of worldwide lawsuits to collect restitution for any damage you may have received because of climate change. Click here for one of the most important pages on our website. It will show you how to get restitution for your losses.

 

Here are some additional climate change costs that most people typically do not consider

The following is from our annual climate change forecast. Much more cost-related information is found in this annual forecast:

Food costs will never go down again if climate change continues to increase. Farmers will increasingly experience lower crop yields or complete crop failures because of the many climate consequences. Fisheries will suffer because of warming water and other climate-related consequences. Animal livestock for food will also rise in price continually because of increased heat, drought, and other climate consequences, and plant feed used to feed domestic animals will also be subject to low crop yields and crop failures. Both food plants and animal livestock will also suffer more diseases and insect infestations because of more diseases and insects migrating into warmer climates where they have never been before. These food production problems and expenses will also increase year by year as the temperature continues to rise.

In 2025, because of the many accelerating consequences of climate change listed above and below, which directly and indirectly affect all categories of food prices, expect your food bill to go up by 2 to 4 percent more than the previous average food inflation rate average. This increase in food prices will also include food distribution cost increases and food labor production increases as climate change consequences will raise those expenses as well.

This will devastate poor families and put paycheck-to-paycheck middle-class families under much higher stress. We estimate that poor families will spend 15% of their income on food. Middle-class families will spend less of their total income, but there will still be a significant increase of several percent. Food prices will go up far more by percentage and by the percent of total household income in Phase 2 and Phase 3 of climate change, which are described further down the page.

Because of increasing climate change consequence costs, homeowners and business owners will be particularly hard hit by unpredictable and near-continuous rises in property insurance costs. Over the past seven years, property insurance has risen 30% in the US alone. In high climate change risk areas where property insurance is still available, the average cost of an insurance policy has risen by 50%.

Property insurance rate uncertainty and increases will devastate new and existing home and business owners and home and business sales because their monthly/yearly overhead involving property insurance will continually increase out of their control. Unpredictable climate change-driven property insurance rate increases are the hardest on first-time homebuyers because they usually spend every penny they have just to move in. This will make it impossible for many first-time homeowners to remain in their homes as climate change worsens and climate change-related property insurance continues to soar as the climate change emergency accelerates. (A recent New York Times article estimated that one and ten homes in the US would soon become financially uninsurable because of accelerating climate change.)

The real estate market and the business sales market will be hardest hit by the huge home and business property insurance increases. Soon, all new buyers will be factoring in accelerating property insurance rates in every home or business purchase decision. Within 5-10 years, states will require full disclosure of climate change risks and projected property insurance costs for all home and business sales. (More about this in the insurance section further below.)

Home and business expenses will dramatically increase for those individuals and businesses who make the wise decision to move out of medium to high-risk climate change areas. They will make this decision because continual rebuilding will be too expensive, and ever-increasing property insurance will make a living in those homes or operating those businesses financially unviable sooner rather than later. Additionally, the psychological and emotional stress of continuing to rebuild when climate change is predicted to continue to worsen at even faster rates for many decades is unbearable as well as irrational.

In 2025, expect more sudden and temporary severe spikes in prices for your energy bills and other critical commodities because of the sudden changes in climate change-driven extreme weather consequences. Unprecedented sudden weather extremes will drastically affect product distribution and the prices of all kinds of energy (electric, gasoline, home heating oil, diesel, etc.) and other critical commodity inventories, reserves, and transportation. 

More states and nations will require energy-efficient air-conditioning in all new homes, businesses, and even in many older homes as temperatures and heat deaths continue to rise.

There will be increases in taxes worldwide directly due to rapidly rising city, county, state, and national government costs relating to repairs and rebuilding required by the increasing frequency, severity, and scale of climate change disasters.

City, county, state, and national deficits will increase not only in the poor nations but also in the rich nations. These rising deficits will occur because the cost of climate change consequences will rise dramatically faster than in previous years. Very few cities, counties, states, or nations are budgeting anywhere close to the actual cost of accelerating climate change consequences in their annual budgets. This denial of the actual accelerating costs of climate change consequences will force ever-larger city, county, state, and national deficits to be experienced as the climate emergency accelerates. No city, county, state, or national government is discussing the projected 3 to 5% or more of the total GDP that accelerating climate change consequences will soon cost.

More people are going deeper into debt and having bill-paying problems after being impacted by climate change-driven extreme weather events, especially since most of the damages will no longer be paid by the government's emergency relief organizations as the sheer number and severity of these climate catastrophes continue to rise.

More frequent, extreme weather-caused temporary and long-term evacuations from affected areas will occur. These ordered evacuations will cause great hardship and costs to those evacuated.

The fossil fuel industries will continue to be able to export and transfer the above-listed financial costs and losses for the damages and suffering their products cause unfairly to the citizens of every nation. It will be you who will pay the higher local state and national taxes and higher insurance rates. Because of the above climate change effects, you will also have to pay personally for any climate-related damages and losses not covered fully by your insurance.

The most expensive single-incident global climate change disaster in 2025 will approach or exceed 300 billion dollars in total cost. The total cost of ALL global climate change-related damages will significantly exceed 1-2 trillion dollars. In 2025, the US and many other countries will, directly and indirectly, be forced to spend about 3-5% of their total gross domestic product (GDP) on climate change-related consequences. These accelerating climate damage expenses have not been planned into any national budget we know about. (The current US GDP is just over 28 trillion dollars.)

More individuals and businesses will be forced to purchase expensive backup generator systems and other backup power sources because of increasing power outages due to extreme weather. Extreme weather power outages will increase so much that without a backup power source, individual lives and business operations will be seriously compromised.

The disabled and less affluent will suffer disproportionately more because of climate change consequence costs.

In the US, in 2025, the total cost from all climate change-related consequences will exceed $300 billion. Worldwide total climate change related consequences will exceed several trillion dollars. We know of no nation on earth that has yet set up a climate change damage budget for accelerating climate change-related costs. This means the nations of the Earth will continue to have surprise larger and larger budget deficits annually as the climate change emergency continues to accelerate.

In 2025, you will hear the term Managed Retreat more often in the media. To be politically correct, this is the term politicians will use instead of saying climate change-related relocation,  even though more people will be choosing to relocate or be forced to relocate because they have run out of repair and rebuilding money or the current government emergency programs or the insurance companies refuse to rebuild their homes, businesses or farms the second or third time. Paradoxically, voluntary or Managed Retreat relocation will create crashing home, business, and farm prices (70-90+%) in medium to high-risk climate change areas. This will create many new home, business, and farm ownership opportunities for low-income individuals willing to buy these properties at drastic fire sale losses and still live or do business without any property insurance. Ironically, the climate change emergency will create more low-income housing, low-income business, and low-income farm opportunities that would've never been possible in the current market had not many individuals continued to deny the obvious and accelerating climate change reality and consequences and then waited too long to relocate out of medium to high-risk climate change areas, which had become uninsurable at viable insurance rates.

One of the worst economic effects of accelerating climate change will be on national and global inflation rates. Because of increasing low crop yields, crop failures, increasing property insurance (in medium to high-risk climate change areas,) as well as the continually rising costs of repairing and rebuilding necessary government and private infrastructure after climate change disaster after climate change disaster (described in this page), no government or state will be able to lower its inflation rates no matter how they try. Inflation rates will stay high, and in many areas, they will continue to rise.

Government deficits, whether budgeted or not, will also continue to rise steeply because the costs of climate change consequences and critical infrastructure repairs nationally and globally will continue to rise. This will force governments to raise taxes to cover ever-increasing climate change disaster costs.

One of the worst cost-related things that will happen in 2025 and beyond is that reinsurance companies (those companies that insure individual insurance companies to spread and share their risks) will also begin canceling reinsurance coverage for the insurance companies they insure who also hold property insurance coverages in medium to high-risk climate change areas. This will make it impossible for insurance companies to carry even the most expensive property insurance for homes and businesses in medium to high-risk climate change areas.

When reinsurance companies cancel the property insurance coverage of insurance companies, no government will be able to force any individual insurance company into carrying property insurance in medium to high-risk climate change areas because they will have to individually assume all of the risk themselves and put their insurance company at risk of sudden bankruptcy as climate change consequences continue to accelerate.  As more worldwide reinsurance companies say no to all climate change medium to high-risk policy coverage, insurance companies will have to follow suit. What will follow is a crash in the availability of financially viable home, business, and farm insurance worldwide. This will eventually cause a crash in home, business, and farm prices worldwide in medium to high-risk climate change consequence areas due to their uninsurability.

As more and more home and property insurance rates skyrocket or are canceled, it may turn out that nothing may be more powerful to end global and national climate change denial and begin honest climate change reduction than the costs and problems of having home or business property insurance become so expensive (or be canceled) causing homeowners and business owners into unsustainable and unviable financial hardships including eventual relocations. Sooner or later, the painful and loud complaints of homeowners and business owners (and the industries that serve them like realtors) will be so powerful that even the most climate change-denying politicians will need to change course.

In 2025, we estimate that the total cost of climate change consequences in the US alone will range from $500 billion to $700 billion or more. The US government, US businesses, and individual families Will not be planning for or budgeting for most of these costs. Climate change will become a bigger, mostly undiscussed, and financially unmanaged cause of growing national, business, and personal financial losses and deficits. The costs of growing climate change consequences will be the hidden and unmanageable source of inflation. 

(If you value what you are discovering, please share this page with your friends because much of this uncensored climate change information is actively being censored by the media and even by many environmental groups due to its highly unsettling nature.)

 

Please donate any amount to help keep our 100% publicly funded nonprofit think tank free for everyone! Please help us to keep providing uncensored climate change forecasts, facts, and solutions to the public.

With every donation of any amount, you will receive amazing gifts! Click the donate image below to see what these gifts are.

 

 

 

End Notes

1. Ben Gruber. "Unmitigated climate change to shrink global economy by 23 percent, researchers find." Reuters. November 16, 2015.
2. Kenneth Rapoza. "Climate change will be disastrous for these economies." Forbes. October 26, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/10/26/climate-change-will-be-disastrous-for-these-economies/#246817eb4052
3. Tim Garrett, interview by Alex Smith, Radio Ecoshock, October 19, 2011, transcript. http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/climate2010/ES_Garrett_101119_LoFi.mp3
4. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. "U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters." NOAA.gov. 2016. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
5. Paul Douglas. "Meteorologists are seeing global warming's effect on the weather." The Guardian. May 27, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/may/27/meteorologists-are-seeing-global-warmings-effect-on-the-weather
6. Maria Gallucci. "Climate change could be worse than student debt, Great Recession for millennials' income." Mashable. August 22, 2016. http://mashable.com/2016/08/22/climate-change-cost-millennials-trillions/#MPVks6RnU8q6
7. Megan Darby. "Climate change could push 100m into extreme poverty." Climate Change News. August 11, 2015. http://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/11/08/climate-change-could-push-100m-into-extreme-poverty/
8. Lawrence Wollersheim. Book Climageddon 2016.