Trump downplayed the costs of carbon pollution. That’s about to change

Perhaps the biggest improvements in the social cost of carbon have come in estimates of the damage done by global warming. Previously, this “damage function” relied on outdated estimates biased toward wealthy and temperate locations. Now, economists at the Climate Impact Lab, an academic consortium, are making these estimates sector by sector, country by country, based on massive data sets that capture, for example, how weather extremes driven by greenhouse warming have already cut agricultural yields or driven up mortality.