Rainy days harm the economy
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Economic
growth goes down when the number of wet days and days with extreme rainfall go
up, a team of Potsdam scientists finds. RI's accidental Gov. Dan McKee signs executive order banning rainfall
during the hours small businesses are open. I made that up - WC.
Rich countries are most severely affected and herein the manufacturing and service sectors, according to their study now published as cover story in the journal Nature.
The data
analysis of more than 1,500 regions over the past 40 years shows a clear
connection and suggests that intensified daily rainfall driven by
climate-change from burning oil and coal will harm the global economy.
"This
is about prosperity, and ultimately about people's jobs. Economies across the
world are slowed down by more wet days and extreme daily rainfall -- an
important insight that adds to our growing understanding of the true costs of
climate change," says Leonie Wenz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research (PIK) and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and
Climate Change (MCC) who led the study.
"Macro-economic assessments of climate impacts have so far focused mostly on temperature and considered -- if at all -- changes in rainfall only across longer time scales such as years or months, thus missing the complete picture," explains Wenz.
"While more annual rainfall is generally good for economies,
especially agriculturally dependent ones, the question is also how the rain is
distributed across the days of the year. Intensified daily rainfall turns out
to be bad, especially for wealthy, industrialized countries like the US, Japan,
or Germany."
A
first-of-its-kind global analysis of subnational rainfall effects
"We
identify a number of distinct effects on economic production, yet the most
important one really is from extreme daily rainfall," says Maximilian
Kotz, first author of the study and also at the Potsdam Institute. "This
is because rainfall extremes are where we can already see the influence of
climate change most clearly, and because they are intensifying almost everywhere
across the world."
The
analysis statistically evaluates data of sub-national economic output for 1554
regions worldwide in the period 1979-2019, collected and made publicly
available by MCC and PIK. The scientists combine these with high resolution rainfall
data. The combination of ever increasing detail in climatic and economic data
is of particular importance in the context of rain, a highly local phenomenon,
and revealed the new insights.
"It's
the daily rainfall that poses the threat"
By
loading the Earth's atmosphere with greenhouse gases from fossil power plants
and cars, humanity is heating the planet. Warming air can hold more water
vapour that eventually becomes rain. Although atmospheric dynamics make
regional changes in annual averages more complicated, daily rainfall extremes
are increasing globally due to this water vapour effect.
"Our study reveals that it's precisely the fingerprint of global warming in daily rainfall which have hefty economic effects that have not yet been accounted for but are highly relevant," says co-author Anders Levermann, Head of the Potsdam Institute's Complexity Science domain, professor at Potsdam University and researcher at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, New York.
"Taking a closer look at short time scales instead of annual
averages helps to understand what is going on: it's the daily rainfall which
poses the threat. It's rather the climate shocks from weather extremes that
threaten our way of life than the gradual changes. By destabilizing our climate
we harm our economies. We have to make sure that our burning of fossil fuels
does not destabilize our societies, too."