The second study says that the economic benefits of warmer winters in terms of less energy needed for warming homes is economically positive as compared to the costs of cooling homes due to warmer summers etc.

I’m not going to try and fact check the paper, but even accepting it at face value it’s obviously a very narrow view of the overall economic impact of global warming and no one should take this paper and derive the claim that 3C of warming will be good for the economy.

The first link is a response to a criticism of a paper by Richard Tol that has had to be revised twice now and at this point is unclear if, post-correction, it truly supports the thesis, that warming may be good for the economy. Tol is an economist who has stated that warming will be economically positive at higher latitudes and economically negative below these latitudes. His math says if you live north of Montreal you should be better off due to a warmer climate. Those south of Montreal (or Munich/Paris for those of you in Europe) will be negatively affected.

If you live in Alaska, Siberia or Scandinavia you may appreciate this analysis. Myself, not so much. If this is the strength of the support for the case that I shouldn’t be worried about a few degrees of warming, I may be a little less worried than I should be!