Monday, November 5, 2018

The SHCIT List

Just like George Lucas, I write my literature reviews out of order. But I'm happy to say that after several years of messing around in this field, in collaboration with great coauthors, I've finally finished the tetralogy that I've always wanted to complete.  The latest installment (Episode I) just came out in the JEP (it's designed to be a soft on-ramp for economists who are unfamiliar with climate change science to get acquainted with the problem).

Sol Hsiang's Climate Impacts Tutorial reading list:

  1. An Economist’s Guide to Climate Change Science  (what is the physical problem?)
  2. Using Weather Data and Climate Model Output in Economic Analyses of Climate Change (how do we look at the data for that problem?)
  3. Climate Econometrics (how does one analyze that data to learn about the problem?)
  4. Social and Economic Impacts of Climate (what did we learn when we did that?)

This addition completes the box set that can get any grad student up to speed on the broader climate impacts literature.

I hope this is helpful. I think I'm going to go and do more research on elephant poaching now...


1 comment:

  1. I'm reading your paper and I think I found a couple things of potential interest to you.

    On page 6 you say: "For reference, the energy from the sun reaching the top of Earth’s atmosphere is 342 W/m2".

    This is a minor nit but that is expressed the power per unit area, not the "energy".

    The second issue is more important. The solar constant is 1367 W/m2. This, of course, has to be adjusted for being distributed over half of a sphere rather than a perpendicular plane. The area of a circle, divided by one half the area of a sphere is (pi R2)/((4 pi R2)/2) which is 1/2. Hence this, unless I am missing something, results in there being about 684 W/m2 of solar energy reaching the surface of the atmosphere instead of the 342 you state in your paper.

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