This number could change everything. A new paper estimates a social cost of carbon of over 1000 dollars per tonne. And every degree of warming decreasing global GDP by 12%. This is 5-20 times higher than previous estimates. It is still just a working paper but *if* these results become widely accepted it would have enormous effects on climate policy. Suddenly it will be profitable to address climate change for large countries like the US and China, regardless of what the rest of the world does! I.e. the harm caused to the US economy (The "domestic cost of carbon", a fraction of the social cost of carbon) would be higher than the mitigation cost. It would also turn carbon removal very cost-effective, making large-scale CDR to bring temperatures back down quite likely to happen. With the lower estimates of the social cost of carbon, (50-200 USD) a lot of mitigation is profitable on a global level, but not necessarily for a single country. And, disturbingly, parts of the climate transition do not look worth doing from a strictly cost-efficiency point of view when the costs of carbon is so low. The reason the authors reach these much higher results is they estimate harm based on global rather than national temperature change. They argue that global change has a more significant and direct correlation with extreme climatic events and economic impacts. They use statistical methods looking at time series of GDP and temperature, trying to weed out confounders. Interestingly the paper is not using a low discount rate, a 2% rate is used in the 1000 USD result and 4% yield over 500 USD. Their results also indicate that "world GDP per capita would be 37% higher today had no warming occurred between 1960 and 2019 instead of the 0.75°C observed increase in global mean temperature". The paper "The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature" by the economists @AdrienBilal and @drkaenzig can be found here: nber.org/papers/w32450 Looking forward to hearing what other scholars have to say about it. Another paper from last month also showed record-high estimates of damages from climate, a 19% reduction in global income by 2049 due to past emissions, so there is a trend in the direction of climate costing more than economists previously thought. "The economic commitment of climate change" nature.com/articles/s41586-0…