As stocks gyrate in response to President Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, the world is understandably focused on the immediate chaos affecting the global economy.

Yet over the past few months a number of signals have pointed to a far more profound disruption on the horizon: the growing economic cost of climate change.

In a recent report about the rising demand for air-conditioning, Morgan Stanley casually observed that the planet was all but certain to blow past the goal of limiting the global average temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold laid out in the Paris Agreement.

The company’s “base case,” the report said, was that the world was moving toward a temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius.

That forecast, once thought of as extreme, is now becoming commonplace. The United Nations’ Emissions Gap report for 2024 said that the world was likely to warm 3.1 degrees Celsius over the course of this century without efforts to rapidly reduce emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has forecast that without drastic action temperatures will be even higher than that by the end of the century.

A constant challenge when talking about global warming is appreciating that little numbers — a rise in temperatures by just a single degree, for example — represent utterly profound changes.