Global Warming To Thrash US Economy

While the international climate change negotiators dithered at the conference last week in Cancún, Mexico, a Met Office report published last week concluded that, even as public and political resolve to tackle global warming has waned since Copenhagen, the evidence that humanity is heating up the planet has become ‘even stronger.’

The consequences of global warming were starkly outlined in the recently-launched Climate Vulnerability Monitor (http://daraint.org), developed jointly by humanitarian organisation DARA and the Climate Vulnerable Forum. The Monitor shows the susceptibility to short-term climate change of 184 countries, assessing the estimated effects of climate change on each country’s health, weather disasters, human habitat loss and economic stresses.

According to DARA, half of all economic losses fall on industrialised countries, with the United States worst hit by overall damage costs. Climate change will also seriously worsen global inequalities. Says DARA Director General Ross Mountain, who has headed large UN field operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, ‘If we let pressures more than triple, or worse, no amount of humanitarian assistance or development aid is going to stem the suffering and devastation. Highly fragile countries will become graveyards over which we pour billions of dollars. Low-lying islands will simply not be viable anymore, then disappear. We will all pay and we will pay big time.’

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