Global warming and income disparity: WSJ

Mark Whitehouse of the Wall Street Journal reports that researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University have discovered yet another contributing factor to global income inequality: the onset of climate change. According to their report, a temperature increase of one degree Celsius can reduce annual export growth by 5.7% and overall economic growth by as much as 2%-- and this contraction is only observable in poor countries. Wealthy countries were not negatively affected by the study's climate change model; if anything, climate change has the potential to accelerate leading economies, as they will be the nations making innovations to combat warming.

According to the WSJ article, the reasons for this phenomenon are unclear, but the report postulates that the agricultural problems supposedly caused by climate change may be a factor. These can be disastrous in poor countries since many of them depend on farming as a leading industry. In any case, it appears that worldwide temperature increases of up to five degrees Celsius by 2100 (as predicted by the field's leading scientists) may have especially dire economic consequences for developing nations, and may directly widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

EDIT: Comments on the article indicate suspicion of the Northwestern/MIT study's grasp of the logical principle of correlation not implying causation among WSJ readers. One wonders if such comments may be politically charged; user "some_knowledge_of_stats" suggested "it would be interesting to know if these poor countries have socialistic government. Maybe the problem is that a 1 degree rise in the temp leads to socialism and that socialism leads to poverty."