Speaking at EmTech MIT 2016, Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directs the Lab, presented recent research suggesting that climate change will lead to troubling social and economic damages, including a severe drop in global GDP. Hsiang warned that “temperature is immensely influential” on many different aspects of our lives. Extreme hot temperatures negatively impact everything from manufacturing productivity to infant mortality to individual and group violence. Adaptation will be needed, Hsiang said, but it "is hard because it is expensive.”