The effects of global climate change have been known to have an adverse effect …show more content…
According to Melissa Dell from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Benjamin Jones, the Associate Professor of Management and Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management and Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, and Benjamin Olken, the Associate Professor of Economics in the MIT Department of Economics and CEPR Research Affiliate, climate change has shown to affect economic growth in broad regions. The temperature of a country can affect its economy as seen with a cross-section of the world, the national income per-capita decreased an average of 8.5% for every degree Celsius rose in temperature (Dell, Jones, and Olken 2009). This statistic takes into account both agriculture and non-agriculture based income, proving that global warming is harmful to the economy of a nation. However, temperature increase has correlated with increased effects in favor of poor countries. The reason for this is their major dependence on agriculture, unlike rich countries who do not have to solely rely on agriculture as its main source of income. Increased temperatures in an area of agriculture can affect the productivity of the crops; this is due to crops only being able to survive in a specific temperature range. Without the proper temperature range for agriculture, crops will die, therefore halting production and decimating the …show more content…
Robert Mendelsohn, the current Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Yale University, and Professor in the School of Management at Yale University claims the impact of global climate on the global economy will be marginal over the next fifty years. This claim is due to Mendelsohn’s prediction that catastrophic climate change has a low probability and would only occur in the far future. On another hand, opposers of Mendelsohn argue that climate change causes negative effects on low-latitude countries. Low latitude countries contain many developing countries and they would be severely impacted by global climate change due to their dependence on agriculture and forestry. Mendelsohn says, “The low latitudes tend to be too hot for the most profitable agricultural activities and any further warming will further reduce productivity. Up to 80 percent of the damages from climate change may be concentrated in low‐latitude countries.” Not only does this statistic show a correlation between climate change and economic failure, eighty percent of the damages caused by climate change occurs in the low-latitude countries. Therefore, as long as an economy is dependent on agriculture, the effects of increased regional