Chad Shirley and William Swanson
Introduction
Climate change is expected to affect the United States in a variety of ways in the 21st century. Although those effects will be positive in some ways or in certain areas of the country, the overall effect is expected to be negative: Temperatures will increase, the risk of damage from storms and wildfires will increase, and the productivity of outdoor workers will decline. Lawmakers have expressed an interest in understanding the range of possible outcomes from climate change. CBO recently released a report describing some of those effects.1 In that report, CBO estimated that there is a 5 percent chance that future increases in temperature will cause U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) to be at least 21 percent lower in 2100 than it would be if temperatures remained unchanged. Similarly, there is a 5 percent chance that changes in temperatures will cause GDP in 2100 to be higher by 6 percent or more than it would have been otherwise. The distribution of GDP losses is skewed so that the probability of large negative GDP outcomes relative to the median is higher than the probability of small negative outcomes. The mean of the distribution is a 4 percent GDP loss from climate change.
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