BIGSTOCKPHOTO - The sun shines on a glacier.
“We don’t know,” he replied.
Keller chafes at the notion of climate-change winners. “It’s one thing that, on average, the yield of a few cultivars can increase,” he says. “But heat waves increase mortality, increased drought makes life less enjoyable, and extreme weather events can be quite damaging.”
Keller argues that adaptability is the more important factor in determining how countries will fare. The most obvious and tragic cases of adaptability have to do with elevation. Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, has been among the most vocal proponents of climate-change mitigation, arguing that rising sea levels could leave his island nation underwater.
But in most cases, adaptability largely comes down to money.
India and the United States provide a stark example of this. Michael Greenstone, a professor of environmental economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues have pored over death records for the past several decades in those countries to see how changes in temperature affect national death rates. He found that hotter days have only a modest effect on the U.S. mortality rate. In rural India, however, changing just a single day from a comfortable low 70s to a stifling low 90s increases the annual mortality rate by more than 1 percent. That’s from just one day of additional heat. The scary part of the research is that most climate models predict a far more dramatic change than that, with 30 or more additional days of extreme heat in India by the end of the century.
“When these results are combined with the predictions from one of the more popular climate-change models, they indicate a 50 percent increase in the annual mortality rate in India by 2100,” says Greenstone.
Why does the United States deal so much better with heat than India? We have plentiful access to heating and cooling technologies and the resources to smooth out our consumption patterns, according to Greenstone. If extreme heat — or extreme cold, for the matter — increases the cost of food, most Americans could take out loans to get themselves through the lean time. Indian farmers don’t have that option. Their resources are stretched as far as possible in good times, and they rely on the cash that comes with the harvest. If it falls short, many are pushed to death.
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