Book review of: R. Jisung Park (2024). Slow Burn. The Hidden Costs of a Warming World, Princeton University Press, 336 pp. For a Dutch translation of this review see here.
Dr. G.J. van Bussel
R. Jisung Park is an environmental and labour economist and Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds concurrent appointments within the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School’s Department of Business Economics and Public Policy. His expertise lies in identifying the impact of environmental factors on economic outcomes. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he was a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Employing data analysis, experimental methods, and economic theory, his research examines environmental change, its consequences for economic systems, and the effectiveness of policy responses. Specifically, he investigates issues such as the effects of heat on workers, the impacts of natural disasters on human capital, and the mechanisms through which workers and firms adapt to a changing environment.
In his book Slow Burn. The Hidden Costs of a Warming World, he offers a fresh and compelling perspective on the impact of climate change. The book’s central thesis is that conventional assessments underestimate the true economic, social, and biological costs of a warming planet because they focus on dramatic, discrete catastrophes, such as exceptional hurricanes or acute droughts (‘fast burns’, like, as Park explains, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE).
Park shifts the focus towards the subtle, chronic and everyday consequences that are already occurring, such as the erosion of agricultural crops, the gradual extension of pollen seasons, the strain on public health from prolonged heatwaves, and the combined economic impact of reduced labour productivity and disrupted supply chains. The ‘slow burn’ is the opposite of the ‘fast burn’: the cumulative, incremental and often invisible erosion of human capabilities and economic productivity caused by a gradually changing environment. Park compares this with the gradual decline of the Roman Empire over several centuries.
In essence, Slow Burn argues that we can attain a more comprehensive understanding of the climate crisis by looking beyond sensationalist headlines and instead attending to the inevitable, quiet and growing burdens of a changing climate — those which steadily increase without triggering disaster declarations. Park argues that the most significant economic consequences of climate change will not merely arise from catastrophic property damage, but also from the cumulative, everyday impairments to human health, cognitive function, and labour output — the ‘million cuts’ caused by a warming world. According to Park, this refined understanding enables societies to devise more effective and nuanced policies for both mitigation and adaptation.
Park introduces the ‘slow burn’ metaphor as a means of making ‘the invisible’ visible, shifting focus from property damage to human capability, from disasters to continuous attrition, from future apocalyptic risks to present accumulating costs, and from a narrative of carbon and ecosystems to one of labour, learning, and inequality. Using the metaphor repositions climate change economics and shifts the focus from a cost-benefit analysis of infrastructure to the essential question of the conditions required for human well-being and a just society in a hotter world.
The book is divided into four parts containing thirteen chapters. It is preceded by an introduction that establishes the book’s purpose: to shift the climate debate away from catastrophic scenarios and towards structural consequences in daily life. This shift is a valuable corrective to prevalent narratives. It draws attention to ‘silent’ harms that are often overlooked.
The first part establishes Park’s foundational framework for understanding climate costs. Chapter 1 diagnoses a perceptual flaw: we respond to dramatic events while overlooking gradual degradation. Park likens climate change to chronic inflammation rather than acute trauma, slowly undermining systems until dysfunction becomes undeniable. Rising temperatures quietly compromise productivity, cognitive performance, and learning capacity in ways that remain statistically invisible, their costs uncounted and victims uncompensated.
Chapter 2 introduces a key conceptual contribution: distinguishing between physical and human capital. When environmental change diminishes learning, productivity, and cognitive function, we witness erosion of intangible human capital, the accumulated knowledge, skills, health, and potential driving prosperity. Park critiques climate discourse for fixating on rebuilding physical structures while ignoring deteriorating human capabilities, reframing human wellbeing as the central measure of climate damage rather than a secondary concern.
Chapter 3 extends this analysis through wildfires, showing how impacts reach far beyond disaster zones. Farmworkers under smoke-choked skies experience productivity declines; students hundreds of miles from flames score measurably lower on tests. These nearly invisible diminishments accumulate across populations and time. Through these opening chapters, Park argues that current frameworks for understanding climate costs are dangerously incomplete, missing the pervasive ‘slow burn’ eroding human capacity.
Part II examines heat’s current economic impacts through rigorous evidence. In Chapter 4, Park addresses the methodological difficulty of establishing causation in complex social systems where numerous variables interact simultaneously. By transparently presenting his econometric methods and their limitations, he strengthens his credibility, recognizing that acknowledging uncertainty serves his argument better than overstating certainty.
Chapter 5 provides the empirical core: comprehensive research documenting heat’s measurable effects on human performance and wellbeing. Park grounds statistical findings in physiological reality, showing documented present-day harms: reduced test scores, lower earnings, increased injuries. This evidence, accumulated across diverse contexts from education to manual labour to cognitive work, forms a pattern difficult to dismiss.
Chapter 6 shifts from individual outcomes to macroeconomic patterns, examining how temperature and temperature variability correlate with national economic performance. Rising temperatures appear to widen the productivity gap between hot and cool regions, creating a troubling inequality: nations contributing least to historical emissions suffer disproportionately from climate change’s economic consequences. While the consistency of findings strengthens Park’s case, the precise causal mechanisms and effect magnitudes remain unproven.
Chapter 7 explores climate’s relationship to social stability and mental health, examining research linking higher temperatures to increased violence, crime, aggressive policing, and social tensions. Park positions heat as a stress multiplier rather than a determinant, demonstrating that climate change extends beyond environmental and economic categories into fundamental social and psychological dimensions. The accumulated evidence reveals a consistent pattern: higher temperatures correlate with worse social and psychological outcomes.
Part III examines climate opportunity, inequality, and vulnerability. Chapters 8 and 9 analyse how climate change constrains economic opportunity and upward mobility, particularly for lower-income populations. Because these groups disproportionately work outdoors, hold manual jobs, or live in poorly insulated housing, they suffer greater harm from rising heat and pollution, intensifying socioeconomic inequality.
Chapter 10 focuses on structural determinants of climate vulnerability: income levels, social policies, housing quality, labour regulations, and access to cooling and healthcare. Park reframes vulnerability from an environmental problem to a consequence of unequal social structures, arguing that effective adaptation and mitigation must address underlying social inequalities rather than applying uniform solutions.
Part IV addresses solutions and hope. Park maintains that meaningful action remains possible despite warming’s impacts. Societies can reduce harm through adaptive measures: improved infrastructure, updated building standards, enhanced cooling systems, and supportive social policies, combined with emissions reductions to address climate change’s cumulative effects. He argues that climate challenges require diverse, context-specific interventions rather than a single transformative solution. Park concludes by expanding the discussion beyond economics and human welfare to encompass broader ethical obligations toward all life, adding moral dimension beyond cost-benefit analysis.
A significant weakness in Slow Burn is Park’s insufficient treatment of how multiple climate stressors interact and compound over decades. While he effectively documents current correlations between heat and various harms (mortality, reduced productivity, cognitive impairment), he largely treats these relationships as isolated and stable. Yet measuring today’s heat-mortality rates differs fundamentally from projecting how those rates will evolve as temperatures rise alongside systemic changes.
Future warming will not occur in isolation. Higher temperatures will overlap with agricultural disruption and reduced crop yields, driving food prices upward and potentially causing nutritional stress. Increasingly severe storms will damage or destroy housing, leaving more people in substandard shelter with inadequate cooling or insulation. Electrical grids will face mounting strain from both extreme weather events and surging cooling demand during heat waves, leading to more frequent outages precisely when populations need climate control most. These aren’t separate problems: they are interconnected vulnerabilities that amplify one another. Park’s cited figure of 73 heat-related deaths per 100,000 people annually, based on current conditions, likely represents a substantial underestimate of future impacts. It assumes that societal infrastructure, resource availability, and adaptive capacity will remain constant even as climate pressures intensify. In reality, each stressor magnifies the others, creating nonlinear increases in mortality risk that linear extrapolations cannot capture.
Park could have reinforced his argument by emphasizing how climate change fundamentally restructures existing risk through interacting failures across multiple systems. However, his suggestion that rising incomes enable better climate adaptation and his claim that emission cuts in recent decades mean ‘the likelihood of truly disastrous warming may have declined nontrivially’ (p. 218) appear overly optimistic — if not wishful thinking — given the compounding dynamics he documents elsewhere.
The ‘slow burn’ framing represents a powerful conceptual breakthrough. It reveals tangible, present-day harms systematically overlooked in climate debates fixated on apocalyptic scenarios or catastrophic events. Park demonstrates that climate change is not merely an abstract threat to future generations or distant ecosystems. It is actively diminishing people’s health, cognitive capacity, educational outcomes, economic productivity, and life prospects right now. By redirecting attention from dramatic climate shocks to chronic degradation, Slow Burn fills a gap in climate literature and public discourse.
The book is neither perfect nor complete. Some effects resist precise quantification or causal isolation amid the complexity of social systems. Institutional adaptation varies dramatically across contexts. By design, Park’s framework de-emphasizes catastrophic scenarios, focusing instead on measurable, incremental harms. While this methodological choice strengthens his empirical case, it risks understating the full spectrum of climate risk.
Slow Burn should therefore be read as one essential component of a broader climate conversation, complementing rather than replacing works that explore tipping points, ecological collapse, and extreme warming scenarios. Although Park’s economic lens sheds light on important aspects of climate harm, it cannot capture everything at stake. The book is also rather repetitive and could have been presented more concisely.
Perhaps the book’s most sobering implication emerges not from its analysis but from what implementing its recommendations would require politically. Implementation of Park’s economic framework demands actions that confront the most cherished orthodoxies of modern policies: economic growth, technological optimism, and believe in human adaptability. The difficulty policymakers face in adopting a ’Slow burn’ perspective (or the even more radical ‘energy amputation’ that Jean-Baptiste Fressoz advocates [1]) stems from this fundamental collision with dominant ideologies. Current political and economic systems are oriented toward short-term gains and electoral cycles. The ‘slow burn’ demands long-term thinking, preventive investment, and acceptance of costs today to avoid greater suffering tomorrow, which challenges institutional incentives at every level. Moreover, it threatens deep-rooted interests. A ‘slow burn’ may represent ‘a bridge too far’ for political systems deeply invested in maintaining existing power structures and economic arrangements.
From a scientific-analytical perspective, Slow Burn makes a valuable contribution to the climate discourse. It enriches our understanding of climate change not as merely an environmental phenomenon but as a socioeconomic multiplier of risk, vulnerability, and inequality. The book merits status as essential reading for anyone engaged with climate policy, economic development, or social justice. Slow Burn challenges the dominant perspective, making a persuasive case that we have been systematically miscounting climate’s costs by ignoring its most unescapable effects. That contribution alone makes it indispensable to contemporary climate discourse.
[1] J.B. Fressoz (2024). More and More and More. An All-Consuming History of Energy, Penguin Random House.
