Global Toll of Extreme Heat Is Trillions of Dollars: Study

Heat is exhausting. When it’s hot, we honk more when driving and more readily descend into hate speech. Major League Baseball umpires call balls and strikes less accurately. Workers are likelier to fall off ladders.

How heat stress shows up in economic activity overall — and how climate change affects it — continues to draw research attention. A new peer-reviewed analysis by two researchers at Dartmouth College, published today in Science Advances, adds more detail by focusing on the economic effects of extreme heat. It finds that extreme heat caused trillions of dollars in damage to economies around ...