Wall Street heavy hitters warn about climate change

A group of billionaires and former statesmen issued a dire warning Tuesday about the economic and health risks posed by global warming.

Climate change could put up to $23 billion in Florida property underwater by 2050 and cause several thousands more residents to die annually from heat stroke, according to a report backed by former Wall Street titans and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Their proposed fix: put a price on carbon.

The Southeast will likely be hardest hit by heat impacts, according to the report, Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change to the United States.

The Risky Business initiative is led by Mike Bloomberg; Tom Steyer, a hedge fund manager; and Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, from 2006 to 2009, and former CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Two other former treasury secretaries, George Scultz and Robert Rubin, also are among the committee members who contributed to the initiative, as is Donna Shalala, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton.

“I know a lot about financial risk,” Hank Paulson says on a video accompanying the study. “Today I see another type of crisis looming ... While not financial in nature, it threatens our economy just the same.”

In the past 30 years, the Southeastern United States had about 9 days a year at 95 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter. On the current emissions path, the Southeast will see another 17 to 53 extremely hot days per year by mid-century and an additional 47 to 115 days per year by century’s end, according to the report. That’s one-and-a-half to four additional months of extreme heat per year.

Florida faces the biggest risk from rising seas, the report says.

“In Florida, because of the porous limestone on which the major southern cities are built, even modest sea level rise comes at a significant economic cost,” the report says. “Under current projections, between $15 billion and $23 billion of existing property will likely be underwater by 2050, a number that grows to between $53 billion and $208 billion by the end of the century.”

Sea-level rise projections vary, but scientists expect a one-meter rise in the next 100 to 150 years. In some areas of Alaska, however, relative sea level is decreasing because as land-based glaciers and ice sheets melt, land is rising faster than sea levels.

Recent assessments by NASA found that sea level at the Kennedy Space Center could rise from 6 to 25 inches by the 2050s and 10 to 49 inches by the 2080s.

Among the Risky Business report’s other findings for Florida:

•A 1-in-20 chance that more than $346 billion in current Florida property will be underwater by the end of this century, and 1-in-100 chance that more than $682 billion in property will be below mean sea levels by then;

•A 3.1 percent decrease by century’s end in labor productivity in Florida’s high-risk sectors, such as construction, mining, utilities, transportation, agriculture and manufacturing;

•An additional 14 to 45 heat-related deaths per 100,000 people yearly in the Southeastern United States over the course of the century, with urban residents at greater risk due to the heat radiating from pavement. At the current population of the Southeast, that’s 11,000 to 35,000 additional deaths per year.

•By mid-century, Florida is likely to suffer more heat-related deaths due to global warming than any other state, with as many as 5,080 additional annual deaths by 2040-2059, of which 90 percent are expected to affect people over age 64. That’s more than double the number of annual auto fatalities in Florida in 2013.

“It’s an old joke that it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. Actually, it’s both,” Dr. Al Sommer, the former dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, explains in a video accompanying the study.

Heat stroke happens when heat and humidity reach the threshold at which the body can no longer regulate core body temperature.

“The elderly and the frail, if they’re not kept in a cool facility ... there are going to be much higher levels of mortality,” Sommer says.

“Montana’s summers are going to look like New Mexico’s summer’s today,” he adds. “If we don’t start acting quickly, these risks are going to continue to rise at a very, very high rate.”

By 2050, average annual losses in the Southeast from hurricanes and other coastal storms will likely increase by $3.6 to $6.8 billion, the report found.

Florida faces the highest risk of any other state from private, insurable property that could be inundated by high tide, storm surge, and sea level rise, according to the report.

Climate change also could have profound impacts on soybean, corn and other agriculture, the report found.

The Southeast could see a 21 percent drop in corn yields in the over the next 5 to 25 years, the report says, unless farmers take significant steps to adapt.

The Risky Business project tasked the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm, with an independent assessment of the economic risks from global warming in the U.S. The firm put together a research team led by climate scientist Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and economist Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley.

A report last month by the National Parks Service found that sea-level rise puts at risk more than $40 billion in park infrastructure and historic and cultural resources, including almost $90 million in assets at the Canaveral National Seashore.

The Risky Business leaders called for cleaner energy sources and stricter limits on emissions.

In a June 2014 op-ed in the New York Times, Hank Paulson likened climate change to the credit bubble: “We can see the crash coming, and yet we’re sitting on our hands rather than altering course,” he wrote.

Paulson wants a carbon tax, which he says would create incentives for companies to develop cleaner technologies.

Australia nixed its two-year-old, $23-25 per ton carbon tax last year, after mining and other industries pushed for repeal. The Australian government estimates that removing the tax will save households $550 a year.

But Paulson says the economic risks of doing nothing will be severe.

“If we act immediately we can still avoid most of the worst impacts of climate change,” Paulson says in the Risky Business video. “I believe the American business community can and must lead the way in helping to reduce these risks.”

Contact Waymer at 321-242-3663 or jwaymer@floridatoday.com Follow him on Twitter @JWayEnviro

Read the study at http://riskybusiness.org