Incorporating Climate Uncertainty into Estimates of Climate Change Impacts, with Applications to U.S. and African Agriculture / Marshall Burke, John Dykema, David Lobell, Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burke, Marshall.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dykema, John.

Lobell, David.

Miguel, Edward.

Satyanath, Shanker.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17092.

NBER working paper series no. w17092

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2011.

Summary:

A growing body of economics research projects the effects of global climate change on economic outcomes. Climate scientists often criticize these articles because nearly all ignore the well-established uncertainty in future temperature and rainfall changes, and therefore appear likely to have downward biased standard errors and potentially misleading point estimates. This paper incorporates climate uncertainty into estimates of climate change impacts on U.S. agriculture. Accounting for climate uncertainty leads to a much wider range of projected impacts on agricultural profits, with the 95% confidence interval featuring drops of between 17% to 88%. An application to African agriculture yields similar results.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2011.