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"It's a great development, and the future of climate economics," said Majkut. "This new study puts us on much more satisfying empirical ground as we consider the relationships between climate change and economic output. For that alone it should be praised." He did question one of the assumptions underlying the project: whether previously observed relationships will continue to hold in a future world. "If the high rates of human mortality can be eliminated or reduced with adaptation (more air conditioning, sports gels, better medicine, or people moving out of the South) then the economic picture really changes and the costs of climate will be reduced dramatically," he said. For that reason, Majkut said, "the research has a long way to go before it approaches anything like a comprehensive estimate of climate risk. Meanwhile, we emit." "SEAGLAS provides a terrific framework to build upon," said Wagner in an email. "We've always known that there are enormous regional disparities across the globe. The fact that damages vary so much within a rich country like the U.S. is striking." So if climate modeling remains imperfect, what's the point of doing it? Researchers have spent the last 25 years trying to forecast the economic damages of climate change. Eventually, they hope to arrive at the social cost of carbon —the damage to the economy dealt by every additional ton of carbon dioxide —which would inform the creation of a carbon tax. Yet across all those years, political opposition to a carbon tax has only hardened, and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has only gone up. Hsiang said that precision is still important. "If we have a rough number, is that good enough ?" he asked. "I definitely think we're never going to know the cost of climate change to seven decimal places. But it's unclear what a rough number means, because there's been very little benchmarking to any real -world data." (An additional paper in this edition of Science clarifies that, so far, SEAGLAS has produced social costs of carbon that are fairly similar to two of the three most - famous economic climate models.) "To be honest, transforming the global energy system is not a cheap task. It's not a small thing," Hsiang said. "And in some places, a lot of the concerns about implementing policy are related to concerns about the reliability of the numbers being used. It's a little like the doctor coming in and saying you're sick and he has some medicine which might work. You'll feel much more comfortable about the medicine if you know there's been clinical research and systematic control trials demonstrating it works." ABOUT THE AUTHOR i 1011,311111 ,,,5t 11 iiWll:: "ell::::: is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers technology. Twitter 11111' Facebook ®® Email