The popular imagination around the future consequences of our heating planet can at times veer into the apocalyptic. Planetary devastations, cataclysmic natural disasters, and urgent intergalactic quests to find alternative hospitable planets fill movie screens and televisions alike. But some worry that such depictions of climate change fail to shock the collective consciousness out of its stupor, but rather fuel apathetic and defeatist outlooks—or worse, nihilism in the face of impending doom. Is there another approach to framing the consequences of climate change?

In Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World, R. Jisung Park addresses these climate catastrophe narratives and dispassionately charts a more tempered middle path by emphasizing the imperceptible and pervasive ways that the heating planet inflicts social and economic costs today. Buttressed by extensive environmental economic research that leverages large datasets and causal inference tools, Park argues that the cost-benefit analysis of climate mitigation favors forceful carbon emission reductions, even without the doomsday scenarios. This is because, as Slow Burn shows, marginal increases in temperature are already producing widespread human consequences. For instance, research points to how natural disasters’ downstream costs to education and health may outstrip the immediate physical and material damages they cause.

Inequality both across and within countries may also be widening in subtle ways as a result of gradually warming temperatures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, populations from poorer countries face a disproportionate brunt of the costs. Yet even in richer, industrialized countries, lower-income households, workers, and students are already grappling with the consequences of hotter days. Such conclusions, Park posits, should shape how policy makers and the public think about climate policy moving forward. This shift entails embracing adaption alongside mitigation strategies, such as capitalizing climate-focused banks, easing access to insurance in relation to agricultural failures or natural disasters, and retrofitting existing homes with fire-resilient materials.

Today’s climate catastrophe narratives, Park contends, fail to offer concrete, actionable tools to help the most vulnerable adapt to the hotter temperatures they are already experiencing. Many climate justice advocates focus on the “moral indignation” we should feel over historical injustices, but doing so risks obfuscating our collective understanding of who suffers the most from planetary heating today and how to reduce these vulnerabilities (p. 209). Similarly, the growing corpus of climate science dedicated to quantifying the extent human-caused climate change contributes to extreme weather events may be beneficial in silencing the climate change deniers or skeptics, but tells us little about the “human consequences” of such warming temperatures (p. 147).

The statistical and methodological innovations employed by economists are a central thrust of the book. Slow Burn draws from a deep well of microeconomic research—produced by Park himself and other applied economists—that leverages novel large datasets, natural and quasi-natural experiments, and causal inference tools with the goal of isolating the impact of extreme temperatures on a range of human domains. Park holds such causal inference tools in high regard, at one point comparing them to the “Rosetta Stone” for researchers seeking to confidently make claims around the effects of hotter temperatures (p. 115). In one case, several studies found an increased likelihood that current government heat-related mortality statistics may be severely underestimated.

One of the book’s limitations, as several reviewers in this symposium highlight, is its lack of serious engagement with the political science literature on climate policy. Michael Ross points to a corpus of political science studies Park overlooks, which examine the relationship between scientific findings and public policy. He is skeptical that additional sophisticated microeconomic research, by itself, will yield a public more committed to climate mitigation. Fergus Green expresses similar doubts about Park’s framing, stressing that political scientists primarily understand climate policy not through economic cost-benefit analysis, but rather through the political problem of distributive conflicts. Nonetheless, both reviewers commend Park’s rich synthesis of complex statistical findings and his valuable elevation of the slow-moving, invisible costs of climate change, alongside the more striking consequences. Nicolas Longuet-Marx praises Slow Burn for its thoughtful engagement with society’s uneven capacity to adapt across climate change’s multidimensional repercussions.

Slow Burn brings tremendous value to the public by guiding readers through sophisticated research in environmental economics and by drawing attention to climate change’s often-overlooked quotidian costs. With the strength of its research and methodological rigor, Park makes a strong pragmatic case for not only aggressively mitigating future warming, but also for protecting and supporting society’s most vulnerable who are already facing the costs of hotter temperatures.