Economists Are Out Of Touch With Climate Change

Fairfax - Noah Smith*

If economists are to help us deal with global warming, they need to start studying science.

Economists are as worried by climate change as anyone but have had little impact on public debate about the threat. Photo: Nic Walker

In the debate over climate change, there is one group from whom you don't hear much: economists. The failure of climate economics to make a difference in the public discussion about climate policy should be a concern for the profession.
Climate economists are just as worried as anyone about the prospect of global warming. A recent survey by the Institute for Policy Integrity found that most climate economists believe climate change is a grave threat. Most supported carbon taxes or cap-and-trade programs to limit emissions, even if these actions were taken unilaterally by the United States. The consensus view was that a catastrophic loss of global gross domestic product – a 25 per cent decline or more – is possible under a "business as usual" scenario.
But for all this concern, economic research has had little impact on the public debate. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that there is a disconnect between climate science and economics. This goes beyond the out-of-date forecasting models used by policy makers. Even within academia, research often uses bad science.
The first climate economics paper I ever read provides a nice illustration of this problem. In 2007, Michael Greenstone, of the University of Chicago, and Olivier Deschenes​, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, published a paper entitled "Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the US". The paper tried to estimate how many people would die as a result of global warming. To do this, the authors calculated how many people now die from random temperature fluctuations, due to things such as heat stroke. They then extrapolated this effect using the expected temperature increase from climate change, and found the probable increase in mortality is small.

But there is an obvious problem with this type of analysis, which even a second-year graduate student took about five seconds to figure out.

Global warming will probably kill people in a lot more ways than days of extreme heat do now. If the climate changes a lot, floods will become more common in low-lying areas. Hurricane Katrina provided an example of how a large flood can cause a lot of deaths. This has nothing to do with the mechanism studied by Deschenes and Greenstone – the authors just leave it out. If they had paid more attention to science, they would have taken more sources of mortality into account.
This paper demonstrates how climate economics can go astray. But it is far from an unusual or solitary example. In 2011, the Stockholm Environment Institute published a report that chided climate economists for their failure to keep up with scientific advances.
They glumly reported: "Regrettably, climate economics tends to lag behind climate science, especially in the slow-paced, peer-reviewed economics literature. The analyses rarely portray the most recent advances in climate science; instead, they often incorporate simplified representations of scientific knowledge that is out of date by several years, if not decades. Moreover, climate economics has often been hampered by its uncritical adoption of a traditional cost-benefit framework, minimising or overlooking the deep theoretical problems posed by uncertainty, intergenerational impacts, and long-term technological change."
The disconnect between economics and natural science is certainly part of the problem. Economists are notoriously unwilling to cite research in other social science fields, and this insularity – sometimes called siloing – probably leads them to ignore the natural sciences as well. But many economic phenomena are critically dependent on natural phenomena, so neglecting science can make economic models spit out ludicrous results. Economic models, like any other, are subject to the problem of rubbish in, rubbish out.
This shortcoming plagued a second paper by Deschenes and Greenstone; when they tried to estimate the impact of climate change on agriculture, they were criticised by some of their colleagues for using out-of-date science.
The Stockholm Environment Institute report goes on to detail ways in which economics could improve by paying more attention to the latest science. I am more pessimistic; if top climate economists are ignoring the potential of deaths from flooding, what are the chances they will keep up to date on state-of-the-art models of flood probability?
I suspect there is an even deeper failing than insularity at work here. Many economists treasure their field's ability to produce counter-intuitive results – to tell people things that contradict their intuition. For example, many people think rent control helps poor people; economists have traditionally delighted in explaining to their students why it actually hurts the poor.
Contrarian results such as these are prized, because they seem to show that economics has something to offer that other disciplines don't. Economists probably have the urge to find results showing that, contrary to popular belief, climate change will be benign, or even beneficial, to humanity.
But bias in favour of counter-intuitive results is as bad as any other form of research bias. If biologists came out with a study showing that eating nuclear waste for breakfast is good for you, it would be both eye-catching and at odds with common knowledge, but it would also be silly. In order to have more relevance to the public debate, climate economics should avoid the temptation to be cute, and just get the science right.

*Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a freelance writer for finance and business publications.

Record-Breaking Heat Shows World 'Losing Battle' Against Climate Change, Alan Finkel Tells Q&A

ABC News

NASA's analysis of satellite data shows extreme hot spots across the Arctic, Russia, and northern North America. (Supplied: NASA/GISS)

Australia's chief scientist has warned the planet is "losing the battle" against climate change, after new data showed February set a "completely unprecedented" record for the hottest month since global records began.

Key points: February was the hottest seasonally adjusted month since records began in 1880 Global temperatures are around 1C warmer than the pre-industrial average Chief scientist Alan Finkel tells Q&A the world is losing battle against climate change

The data released by NASA compared each month going back to 1880 against average temperatures between 1951 and 1980, and confirmed preliminary analysis that February was the hottest month on record.
"You wouldn't want to dismiss it. There is genuine reason for concern," Dr Alan Finkel said during an appearance on the ABC's Q&A program, which focused on science and also discussed AI and gender equality.
"For all the effort we are putting into trying to avoid increases of emission, we are losing.
"What we are doing with solar, wind, changing practices, behavioural practices and things like that, we're not winning the battle."
Meteorologist Dr Jeff Masters said although the absolute hottest month on record was July 2015, July and August tend to be 4C hotter than January and February because the large land mass in the Northern Hemisphere cools the planet during the northern winter.
Writing on the Weather Underground blog, Dr Masters and his co-author Bob Henson said February was exceptional because it was 1.35C hotter than the long-term average, while July was only 0.75C hotter than average.
"Perhaps even more remarkable is that February 2015 crushed the previous February record [set during the peak of the 1997-98 El Nino] by a massive 0.47C," they wrote.
The previous record was January this year, at 1.14C hotter than average, which broke the December 2015 record of 1.10C.
NASA's data also showed that although October 2015 was the first month since 1880 to be more than 1C warmer than average, every month since October has exceeded that mark.
The last month to be colder than average was September 1992, and the last year with two months colder than average was 1978.

Warming 'completely unprecedented', world now in a climate emergency

Dr Masters and Mr Henson described February's result as "an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by," and an "ominous milestone".

"This result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases," they said.
Professor Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research and a visiting professorial fellow at the University of NSW, told Fairfax Media the warming was "completely unprecedented."
"We are in a kind of climate emergency now," he said.
"Governments have promised to act and they need to do better than what they promised in Paris."
The COP21 climate conference in Paris signed an agreement in December 2016 that repeated a 2C target but said the world should pursue a target of limiting warning to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
However, Dr Masters said the world is already 1C warmer than the late nineteenth century, and heat stored in the oceans has already committed us to at least another 0.5 degrees of atmospheric warming.
"In short, we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0C warming over pre-industrial levels," he said.
Dr Masters said the next several months should remain well above the long-term average, and 2016 may top 2015 as the warmest year in global record-keeping.

Links

• February 2016 the hottest month on record: climate scientist
• How a 1.5 degree target overcame the odds in Paris

Climate Change And The 2016 US Election

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Richard C. J. Somerville* | Catherine Gautier*

As this is written, all four remaining candidates in the race for the Republican presidential nomination vehemently reject the fundamental findings of modern climate science. These findings are simple to state:
The Earth's climate is now unequivocally warming. Many chains of evidence demonstrate the warming, including increasing atmospheric and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers and ice sheets, and changing precipitation patterns. The main cause of the warming is human activities, especially burning fossil fuels, which increases the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The effects of man-made climate change are already being felt, and they are mainly harmful. The consequences of climate change will become much more severe in the future, unless global actions are taken soon to drastically reduce the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted into the atmosphere.
These conclusions are the results of decades of research by the international scientific community. They have been endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and by the National Academy of Sciences and leading scientific professional societies in the US and other countries. The great majority of mainstream climate scientists such as ourselves find these results persuasive.
Nevertheless, Ted Cruz heaps scorn on what he has called "a pseudo-scientific theory." He has dismissed it as, "not science, it's a religion." John Kasich says, "I don't believe that humans are the primary cause of climate change." Marco Rubio agrees, stating, "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it." Donald Trump speaks of a "global warming hoax," calling it, "created by and for the Chinese."
These public figures reject mainstream climate science because they view it through a lens that incorporates their firmly held values and convictions. They have a high regard for American capitalism and private industry, or the free enterprise system, and a low regard for taxes and regulation, which they regard as government interference. In rejecting mainstream science, they are expressing their opposition to policies that governments might implement, if the science were accepted.
In the United States, aspiring Republican politicians may also feel the pressure to conform to a litmus test. In order to obtain political and financial support, especially from sources allied with the fossil fuel industry, they may conclude that they must attack mainstream climate science and insist that man-made climate change is not a problem.
However, Mother Nature, or the physical climate system, is not concerned with anybody's values or convictions or political litmus tests. Mother Nature is concerned with natural laws. Heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere do trap heat. That leads to warming. After every politician has expressed an opinion, Mother Nature bats last. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a politician and sociologist, famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."
Yet the Republican Presidential candidates have gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid confronting the facts about climate change. They tirelessly repeat climate myths, the refutations of which are easily found on websites such as www.skepticalscience.com. These politicians like to say, "I am not a scientist," a truth sadly obvious to any scientist. Yet they have refused to learn what science has discovered about climate change. When Republicans in Congress have held hearings on climate change, they produce tired re-runs of political theater. The scientists invited to testify often include the same handful of outlier witnesses whose opinions are known to be compatible with Republican political positions.
Science is the best process that humanity has developed to learn about natural laws. It is self-correcting, based on facts and evidence, not on belief. Marcia McNutt, the distinguished geophysicist who is the incoming president of the US National Academy of Sciences, has said, "Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not."
Most of the world now accepts that climate science can provide useful input to policymaking. Some 196 countries recently produced the Paris agreement. Stabilizing the climate and preventing dangerous levels of climate disruption, the goal of this agreement, will require vigorous international efforts and strong American leadership. Only one major country today has an important political party that overwhelmingly rejects climate science. That country is the United States; the party is Republican.
Science shows that the climate system responds to the cumulative emissions of heat-trapping gases. Today's generation thus has its hands on the thermostat controlling future climate. Failure to sharply reduce emissions can lead to sea level rise that will literally change the map of the world. Electing a president who, head in the sand, rejects modern climate science would be risky and potentially disastrous. It would needlessly increase the likelihood that future generations will be condemned to cope with a severely disrupted climate.

*Catherine Gautier is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has taught classes on climate, energy, and water at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
*Richard Somerville is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

Links

• The psychological impact of climate change
• Elizabeth Kolbert: Covering the hot topic of climate change by going to the ends of the Earth
• Why the success of the Paris climate agreement requires an atmospheric monitoring network
• How should we teach students about climate change?