16 January, 2026

A study stopped us in our tracks this week. It found that climate change has already shaved around 12% off U.S. incomes since 2000, not through dramatic disasters, but through the quiet ways that rising temperatures ripple through the economy. 

The researchers got to that number by doing something simple: they paired 50 years of county‑level income data with nationwide temperature records, then compared our world to a model of what income trends would have looked like without human‑driven warming. Instead of zooming in on hurricanes or wildfires, they looked at how shifts in hot and cold days affect supply chains, worker productivity, and the price of goods moving across the country. It’s a high‑level approach, but one that captures climate change as an economic force woven into almost everything we buy, use, or produce. 

It’s also an approach that can be replicated. Because temperature is one of the most consistently measured climate variables worldwide, and most countries track economic performance at regional levels, this same method could be extended globally, revealing how warming in one place affects income far beyond its borders. 

The study has limitations: it doesn’t include losses from specific extreme events, and the exact percentage reduction will shift with different assumptions used. 

But perhaps the biggest contribution of this work is conceptual. Framing climate change in terms of lost income cuts through abstraction. People understand money. Businesses understand money. And policymakers certainly understand money. When climate damage is seen as a current macroeconomic indicator, not a distant scenario, it shifts climate action from “important someday” to “urgent now.”

By Emma Alajarin