Christopher Callahan

Understanding how climate change will affect human welfare must account for how humans will adapt to the changing environment. Adaptations are often local, unobserved, or will only emerge in the future, posing a challenge for attempts to empirically derive climate damage functions and leading to claims that such empirically based functions overestimate the future economic costs of warming. By contrast, here I argue that adaptation to the economic costs of warming is likely to be limited and ineffective. Specifically, I argue both that current climate adaptations are generally limited and that climate change is likely to undermine future adaptive capacity. As a result, future intensification of the climate damage function is as likely as adaptation to it. Effective climate adaptation will require difficult and coordinated political action and is not an inevitable consequence of rising climate damages.