Last Updated 10.25.23

Overview 

The following overview will give you a quick, broad sense of the scope of severe financial losses associated with accelerating global warming and climate change. This overview is explained in more detail in the sections that follow it. However, to grasp the reasonableness of the consequence cost estimates and financial losses below, at some point, you will need to read about the primary and secondary consequences of global warming and how they will cause and accelerate mass extinction and global collapse.

The absolute scariest thing about the following loss estimates and timetables for coming global warming-related financial losses is that there are almost no compensatory calculations or allowances for them currently being used by:

A. our national governments in their annual budgets or budget projections for future years.

b. the biggest investment banks, hedge funds, and national and national and international reserve banks in their balance sheet risk decisions and economic projections for individual, corporate, or national customers!

This failure to plan for these well-predicted consequence losses in the budgets of individuals, businesses, banking institutions, and nations is the near-certain recipe for tremendous individual and global financial unpredictability, instability, and disaster.

The cost estimates and time frames below will have some variables based on location. 

How the costs of the primary and secondary related consequences of global warming will affect global finances: 

a. Currently, all disclosed and undisclosed global warming-related consequences are costing the world about 2-3% of national and global GDPs. (Gross domestic product [GDP] is a monetary measure of the value of all goods and services produced in a given period [quarterly or yearly].)

b. By 2025, all disclosed and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 4-5% of national and global GDPs.

c. By 2030-2031, all disclosed and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 6-7% of national global GDPs. (Soon after 2030, global warming consequences go from accelerating steadily, gradually, and quickly-rising mostly linear line to climbing in a rapidly increasing exponential curve.)

After about 2031, national and global climate change-related costs continue to skyrocket because we cross ever more extinction-accelerating climate change tipping points and amplifying feedback loops.

d. By 2035, all disclosed, and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 8-12% of national global GDPs.

e. By 2040, all disclosed, and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 13-17% of national and global GDPs.

g. By 2045, all disclosed, and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 18-23% of national and global GDPs.

g. By 2050, all disclosed and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 24-29% of national and global GDPs.

h. By 2070, all disclosed, and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost the world an estimated 30% or more of national and global GDPs.

i. By 2100, if we are still around, all disclosed, and undisclosed global warming-related consequences will cost your nation and the world most of its GDP.

It will be all but impossible for any individual, business, or nation to function sustainably with costs from global warming-related consequences rising as described above. But, on the other hand, it is not unreasonable to believe that a global economic collapse could slow down global fossil fuel use so much that it could paradoxically also save humanity from total extinction.

Other members-only pages of this website will provide more financial detail and clearer timetables on how escalating global warming, if left unresolved, will slowly but steadily create economic chaos and finally collapse the global economy.

Introduction

The personal, business and national financial costs of global warming are essential because financial costs and losses from financial disasters are something that most people are intimately concerned about and constantly monitor for their future well-being. 

If temperatures continue to rise as they are doing now and rise 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 large economic benefits. Most of Europe will do slightly better even though parts of it will suffer severe droughts. The U.S. and China south of the 45th parallel north will do slightly worse, mostly because the southern and western parts of the United States will be in a heat, wildfire, and rain bomb flooding 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)

3. Inflation will continually rise ( eventually reaching up to near 100% in the near-final phases of the Climageddon Scenario (about 2070+). 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 continue to 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 resource scarcity will continually push prices and inflation higher and higher.

But, the optimistic projections for the rise in global temperature have already been proven wrong.

More detail on how global warming will negatively affect financial costs for individuals, businesses, and nations

The financial costs of global warming will go up with each rising degree of average global temperature. It is highly probable that global warming costs will not rise only in a linear fashion, but more likely, they will rise in an exponential curve as the process continues.

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 and 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.

The Stern Review completed in 2006 estimated that the rising costs of escalating global warming will grow to 5% or more of the gross domestic product of every nation on Earth. 

This means that 5% of the world’s total 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 U.S. gross domestic product.

Newer studies from 2015 project that if the average global temperature increase reaches 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) by 2070 to 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 $80 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 and accelerating global warming consequences. (Please note that these newer cost estimate studies appear to have not factored in the issues on this page.)

Our Climageddon Scenario calculations indicate we will hit a 5 °C average global temperature increase as soon as 2050 to 2060. At 4°C increase, organized society cannot function. Therefore, the costs of the global warming emergency will be far greater and far sooner than we are prepared for.

If we can avoid global warming extinction and keep the average global temperature increase at about 3°C, the total estimated costs of all related global warming-related destruction could be in the range of $400-$600 trillion—about eight years of the current total gross domestic product for every nation on Earth.

To put this in perspective, this means that if we fail to successfully resolve global warming now, farther down the road we will have to dedicate 5 to 8 times the total current value of all annual global human productivity to try to recover from the global warming consequences.

Worse yet, that is only what we may have to pay if we are lucky. If we go into near extinction (5°C,) or extinction-level climate destabilization (6°C,) what will the cost be then?

Additionally, all of the related financial costs of global warming-related catastrophes and emergencies will rapidly diminish any existing national emergency recovery safety nets. This will cause unthinkable suffering among those who are not prepared and who will consequently have no governmental safety net.

It is clear that no person, corporation, or nation will be able to cope with these ever-increasing levels of economic losses caused by accelerating global warming.

Here is only a small sample of costs happening already 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, each costing taxpayers over $1 billion.

In 2017 alone, the total combined costs of 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 exactly what was predicted in the new Climageddon Scenario extinction model in phase 2 (described in the new book Climageddon, The Global Warming Emergency and How To Survive It.)

In the illustration below, you can see the predicted single incident increasing costs of global warming aggravated disasters through the six stages of the Climageddon Scenario extinction model anywhere in the world. As we move from phase to phase, you can also see how much worse our single incident global warming-aggravated disaster costs will become.

(Please keep in mind that the global warming disaster costs in the chart above are only for single disasters during phases 1-4. In phase 5 you see the total cost to the world.)

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 important to consider because almost all of our infrastructure has been built on the basis of surviving the worst storm that occurs about once every 100 years. Our current infrastructure is in no way prepared to survive these 1,000-year millennial superstorms. Once these millennial superstorms start hitting on a regular basis, the damages to our infrastructure will be far beyond our recovery capabilities, particularly our financial resources. (For more data on the coming increasingly extreme storms, read this article by Paul Douglas.) (5)

It will be horrendously costly to repair, rebuild, relocate, or construct both current and new infrastructure, homes, and businesses for the first time as global warming consequences increase in frequency, severity, and scale.

Who are the biggest financial losers as climate change increases?

There will be very big 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 a 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 by 5 - 10 % per year for any customers in the escalating global warming high-danger zones, or they will cancel policies and offload the risks and the unpredictable costs onto national government relief programs and safety nets.

It would also not be unreasonable to estimate that real estate prices in affected global warming high-risk areas will soon begin dropping 1-3% per year as savvy buyers realize the risk and potential losses involved in such properties. In extremely high-risk areas, real estate prices could crash drastically, similar to the way the prices of homes and businesses 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 will not be able to hide or secretly offload the pollution and health costs onto unsuspecting taxpayers for the worst effects of their products. Fossil fuel subsidies that now total $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, 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 further reduce fossil fuel use. 

On the other hand, green energy will become highly subsidized, and fossil fuel energy generation will become highly unprofitable by comparison. This does not take into consideration 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 here is that many of the undeveloped nations that have produced only a tiny fraction of total global warming will get poorer as northern countries responsible for most of the 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 to learn more for a shocking article about the trillions of dollars the younger generations will lose. (6)

e. Average individuals from every generation in global warming unsafe zones 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 rises. Part of the reason for this loss of equity is that as the emergency worsens, individuals will not be able to find relief from either insurance or government emergency programs because 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 maps and copy near the bottom of this page.

f. The poor 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, the poor 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 the elderly or physically or mentally handicapped, worker’s compensation, etc.). Click here to see a small glimpse of how bad it will get for the poor. (7)

g. Nations mostly in high-risk climate zones or having large coastal areas. Costa area will be a huge financial loss because of crossed climate tipping points like the Thwaites doomsday glacier, which is predicted to collapse within the next few decades or as soon as 2025- 2028. 

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 personal wealth dwindling and disappearing. More will be said about the many costs of escalating global warming here.

(The stability of finances and climate-related costs in many countries are already being affected by the climate. This rising instability is in part due to the severe climate consequence prediction and remedial solution errors of the IPCC of the UN. Click here to read about how those serious IPCC climate consequence prediction and remedy errors could further affect future forecasts in this area.)

Background documentation

After about 2031, national and global climate change-related costs will skyrocket because we cross ever more extinction-accelerating climate change tipping points and amplifying feedback loops.

To fully grasp the reasonableness of the above climate consequence-related cost estimates and financial losses listed above, be sure to read about the many primary and secondary consequences of global warming and how they will cause and accelerate an insanely costly mass extinction and global collapse.

If you are interested in understanding the climate science and analysis procedures we used at our climate change think tank for the above information, click here for a technical explanation of our climate research and analysis processes.

For answers to all of your remaining questions about climate change and global warming, click here for our new climate change FAQ. It has over one hundred of the most asked questions and answers about climate change.