Will it make a difference? Maybe. Certainly the fact that the Risky Business Project is fronted by a bipartisan and big-money bunch gives a high-profile twist to the U.S. climate-change discussion, at least in the short term.

Led by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, the aim is to bring the cold, hard science of risk management to a policy challenge that too often plays out as culture war. Such an analysis, the Risky Business partners say, points to the necessity for urgent action – led by business, which has much to lose.

“A huge takeaway here is that taking a cautious approach, waiting for more information, a business as usual approach, is actually radical risk-taking,” Paulson, a Wall Street veteran, said at a Tuesday press conference held to introduce the Risky Business report. “Because if you do [that], you give us no opportunity to avoid the very worst outcomes.”

The 58-page Risky Business report draws from a longer, more technical document also released Tuesday – the “American Climate Prospectus” [PDF] –  from a Rhodium Group team led by Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and UC Berkeley’s Solomon Hsiang and critiqued by an “Expert Review Panel” (among them: former McCain economic policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin).

So Risky Business has done what it can to pierce the partisan wall that has largely blocked climate-change action – while not shying away from a fairly terrifying assessment of the damage that climate change could bring to different regions of the country and the businesses that operate there.

In the report, “likely” translates to at least a two-in-three chance, and Risky Business says that in the Northeast, “additional projected sea level rise will likely increase average annual property losses from hurricanes and other coastal storms for the region by $6 billion to $9 billion by 2100.” Further, with between 5 and 16 extremely hot days likely every year by mid-century, “increasingly hot summers will have serious negative effects on health, mortality, and labor productivity.”

In the Southeast the risk from rising seas goes beyond enhancing storm damage: “Under current projections, between $15 billion and $23 billion of existing property will likely be underwater by 2050, a number that grows to between $53 billion and $208 billion by the end of the century.”

Heat will also become increasingly severe, with consequences beyond discomfort. Instead of eight days over 95 degrees each year, “the average Southeast resident will likely experience an additional 17 to 52 extremely hot days per year by mid-century and an additional 48 to 130 days per year by the end of the century,” with devastating impacts to “high-risk sectors like construction, mining, utilities, transportation, agriculture and manufacturing.”

In the Midwest, the changing climate will likely trim yields in many places, and require adaptations nearly everywhere. “But the real story in this region,” the report says, “is the combined impact of heat and humidity.” On the current path, by the end of the century there are likely to be a couple of days when it becomes so hot and humid that sweat literally can’t evaporate, making it “functionally impossible to be outdoors.”

And so it goes, region by region… Northeast, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast, Great Plains and Northwest, and in Alaska and Hawaii as well.

Perversely, the rise in temperatures brought on by our greenhouse-gas additions to the atmosphere – much of it from fossil-fuel-burning power plants – “will likely necessitate the construction of up to 95 gigawatts of new power generation capacity over the next 5 to 25 years,” at a cost of up to $12 billion, the report asserts.

The report assiduously avoids recommending a particular approach to taking on climate change, although Paulson, in a New York Times op-ed earlier this week – in which he portrayed climate change as a bubble ready to pop, much like the finance bubble that was largely overlooked before the 2008 crash – endorsed a carbon tax.

Instead, the focus now is to turn more business leaders, like Cargill Chairman Gregory Page, a Risky Business member, to advocate for action – as Bloomberg put it, “to mobilize the business community and forge a consensus for national action across the aisle.”