Climate change and the global economy

[image lifted from PBS press coverage]

Sol, Ted Miguel, and I have a new paper out in Nature that looks at at how past and future temperature changes might affect global economic output.  In particular, we study the historical relationship between temperature and country-level output with an eye for potential non-linearities in the macro data (which have cropped up everywhere in the micro literature).  We then combine historical results with global climate model estimates of future warming to come up with some projections of the potential future impacts of warming.  We wrap up by trying to compare our damage estimates to the damage functions currently in the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs).

We get some big numbers.  Looking historically, we see that output in both rich and poor countries alike has been shaped by changes in temperature, and that temperature appears to affect growth rate of per capita GDP and not just the level of GDP (which matters a whole lot when you do the projections).  Importantly, we don't see big differences between rich and poor countries in how they respond to changes in temperature historically.  Differences we do see across countries appear driven more by countries' average temperatures than by their average incomes, with cooler countries growing faster on average during yeas that are warmer-than average for them, and hotter countries growing slower.

This non-linear response peaks at an annual average temperature of around 13C which just so happens to be the annual average temperature of both Palo Alto and New York City.  (For the naysayers: There is nothing mechanical in this fact; we can drop the US from the country-level regressions and we get the same optimum of 13C).   The effect of temperature on growth rates is pretty flat around this peak, but gets pretty steep as you move away from the optimum in either direction.  We find that for really hot or really cold countries, +1C changes in annual temperature have historically moved growth rates up (for cold countries) or down (for hot countries) by a percentage point -- i.e. a hot country goes from growing at 2% per year to 1% a year.  That is a big number.  And for poor countries, it's basically what was shown in the seminal Dell, Jones, Olken piece from a few years ago.  The big difference is we see a lot more action in the richer, cooler countries than DJO found in their earlier paper -- a difference we spend a lot of time exploring in the supplement to our paper.

We then run the world forward under a RCP8.5, a business-as-usual emissions scenario that makes the world pretty hot by end of century (+4.3C is the population-weighted projected temperature increase under RCP8.5 by 2100 that we pull off the models).  Doing this requires three pieces of data, as we describe here [after clicking on a country, scroll down to the "how do we arrive at these numbers" section].  Cool high-latitude countries warm up a bunch (much more than global average) and so could stand to benefit substantially from climate change -- recall the +1%/C marginal effect from above.  Countries at or beyond the optimum are harmed, and increasingly so as the temperature heats up.  Globally, we find that under RCP8.5, the global economy could be more than 20% smaller by 2100 than it would have been had temperatures remained fixed at today's values.  This does not mean that the world will be poorer in 2100.  It almost certainly will not.  It means that it will be less rich than it would have been had temperatures not warmed.

Importantly, our estimates mechanically do not include the potential future effects of stuff we have not observed historically (e.g. sea level rise), nor do they contain non-marketed things we care about that do not show up in GDP (e.g. polar bears).

We built a little website to take people through the paper and let people play with the country-level results.  We've posted all our data and replication code, and would love people to show us where we went wrong.

In the spirit of earlier blog posts, we again want to use this space to respond to some of the early comments and criticism we've gotten on the paper.  This accompanies a related attempt to answer some "frequently asked questions" about our paper that we got from the press and earlier inquirires.  We imagine that we will be updating this blog post as additional criticism rolls in.   But here are some of the "Frequently Heard Criticisms" (FHCs) so far, and some responses:

1.  These results just don't pass the "sniff test" [Alternate version:  Your impacts are too big, and they just can't be true].  As far as I can tell, "this doesn't pass the sniff test" is just a snarky way of saying, "this disagrees strongly with what I thought I knew about the world, and I am uninterested in updating that view".

For those still deciding whether or not to update their views, it seems worthwhile to explicitly lay out the key assumptions in our projection exercise, and then be explicit about why these might or might not be good assumptions.

1. Assumptions about how much future climate might change.  Our only assumption here is that the CMIP5 ensemble is in the ballpark for RCP8.5.  But that doesn't really matter that much either, since we can calculate impacts under any amount of warming you want (see Figure 5d).  But people seem less worried about this one anyway.
2. Assumptions about secular trends in growth.  Again, we pull these from the SSPs and so are just passing-the-assumption-buck, so to speak, onto what the folks who put together the SSPs assume about how countries are going to perform in the future.  But these assumptions don't end up mattering too much for our main headline number (i.e. the impact on global GDP, relative to world without climate change), because that's a relative number.  For comparisons between a high-baseline-growth scenario (SSP5) and a low-growth scenario (SSP3), see Extended data Table 3
3. The assumption that historical responses will be a good guide for understanding future responses.  This is a key one for most folks, and you can see at least two reasons to be uneasy with this assumption.  First, (3a) that our historical estimates are derived from year-to-year variation in temperature, which is potentially hard for agents to anticipate and respond to, whereas future climate change will be a slower-moving, more-predictable, more-anticipate-able shift.  Second, (3b) that there is no way that economies 50 or 85 years from now will look like today's economies, and we can't reasonably expect them to respond similarly. 

We return to (3a) below.  Claim (3b) you hear a lot, and on some level has to be true:  we have no idea what economies are going to look like in 2100 (I'm still trying to figure out what Snapchat is...).  However, what we do have is the experiment over the last 50 years of being able to look at countries at very different points in the development process, and study how both the really advanced ones and the really poor ones respond to environmental change.  And from our vantage point, the news is just not that good:  sensitivity to temperature fluctuations has not changed over time (Fig 2c in the paper, reproduced below), and rich countries appear only marginally less sensitive -- if at all -- than poor countries (Fig 2b and like half of the supplement).  This latter result, as we highlight in the paper, is very consistent with a crap-ton (technical term) of micro-level studies from rich countries -- e.g. see Sol and Tatyana's nice paper on the US.  Even incredibly technologically advance countries, and advanced sectors within those countries, are hurt by higher temperatures.  I just don't see how you can look at these data and be sanguine about our ability to adapt. 

Effect of annual average temperature on economic production. a, Global non-linear relationship between annual average temperature and change in log gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (thick black line, relative to optimum) during 1960–2010 with 90% confidence interval (blue, clustered by country, N= 6,584). Model includes country fixed effects, flexible trends, and precipitation controls. Vertical lines indicate average temperature for selected countries. Histograms show global distribution of temperature exposure (red), population (grey), and income (black). b, Comparing rich (above median, red) and poor (below median, blue) countries. Blue shaded region is 90% confidence interval for poor countries. Histograms show distribution of country–year observations. c, Same as b but for early (1960– 1989) and late (1990–2010) subsamples (all countries). d, Same as b but for agricultural income. e, Same as b but for non-agricultural income.

So, yes, the future world might look different than the current world.  But saying that is a cop-out, unless you can tell a convincing story as to exactly why the future is going to look so different than the past.  Our guess is that you are going to have a hard time telling that story with an appeal to the historical record. 

2. You're studying weather, not climate.  An old saw.  In fact, at every single conference related to  the economics of climate change that I have ever been to, if 5 minutes passed without someone mentioning weather-versus-climate, then with probability 1 someone else would smirk-ingly mention that it had been at least 5 min since someone mentioned weather-versus-climate.

Joking aside, this is still a really important concern.  The worry, already stated above, is that our historical estimates are derived from year-to-year variation in temperature ("weather"), which is potentially hard for agents to anticipate and respond to, whereas "climate" change will be a slower-moving, more-predictable, more-anticipate-able shift.  Whether people respond differently to short- versus longer-run changes in temperature is an empirical question, and one that is often tricky to get a handle on in the data.  Kyle Emerick and I have looked at this some in US agriculture, and we find that responses to slow-moving, multi-decadal changes in temperature don't look very different from responses to "weather" (see earlier blog here) -- hot temperatures are bad whether they show up unexpectedly in one year or whether you're exposed to them a little bit more year after year.  Now whether this result in US agriculture extrapolates to aggregate country-level output in the US or anywhere else is unknown, and to us a key area for future work.  But again, just claiming that responses derived from studying "weather" are a bad guide to understanding "climate" is not that satisfactory.  Show us how long-run responses are going to be different.

3.  All you're picking up is spurious time trends.  This one is annoying.  Please read the paper carefully, and please look at Extended Data Table 1 in the paper (conveniently packaged with the main pdf, so there is no excuse!).  Countries have been getting richer over time, on average, and the world has also been warming over time, on average.  But since all sorts of other crap has been trending over time as well, it's clearly going to be hard to correctly identify the impact of temperature on economic output just by studying trends over time.  So you have to deal with trends somehow.

So we try all sorts of combinations of year- or continent-year fixed effects, and/or linear or non-linear country time trends, to try to see how things hold up under different approaches to taking out both common shocks (the year FE) and trending stuff.   If you're worried about "dynamic effects", we also control in some specifications for multiple lags of the dependent variable.  It doesn't end up mattering too much.  As shown in Extended Data Table 1, we still get a similar looking non-linear response no matter the model.  [And, to be clear for the time series folks, our LHS is differences in log income, not log income]. If you still think we messed this up, then download our data and show us.  The onus is on you at this point, and just making claims about the potential for spurious trends does a disservice to the debate.

4. Who funded you?  The fact that I'm now getting these unsigned emails from anonymous gmail addresses I think means we did something right.   I am mainly funded by Stanford University, who pays my salary.  We had some project support from a $50k grant from the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies.  And I thank the Stanford Institute on Economic Policy Research for giving me a place to sit last year while this paper got written.  Sol and Ted both work at Berkeley, so are paid by that fine institution, but neither received additional project support for this work from anyone.  [Edit 11/23/2015: Sol adds more on his situation here].

5. [Added Oct 27].  You do not account of the effects of development.  Or, verbatim from Richard Tol, "Although Burke and co notice that poorer countries are more vulnerable to climate change, they did not think to adjust their future projections for future development".  Richard, please please read the paper before blogging this sort of stuff.  This is EXACTLY what we do in Figure 5 panels b and d.  "Differentiated response" means that rich and poor countries are allowed to respond differently, per Figure 2b, and that poor countries "graduate" to the rich-country response function in the future if their income rises above the historical median income.  This does reduce the global projected impacts from -23% to -15% (see Fig 5b and Extended Data table 3) -- a meaningful difference, to be sure.  But -15% is still about a factor of 5 larger than what's in any IAM.  

Paul Krugman on Food Economics

Paul Krugman doesn't typically write about food, so I was a little surprised to see this.  Still, I think he got most things right, at least by my way of thinking.  Among the interesting things he discussed.

1. The importance of behavioral economics in healthy food choices
2. That it's hard to know how many actual farmers are out there, but it's a very small number.
3. That we could clean up farming a lot by pricing externalities [also see], or out-right banning of the most heinous practices, but that doesn't mean we're going to go back to the small farms of the pre-industrial era, or anything close to it.
4. Food labels probably don't do all that we might like them to do (see point 1.)
5. How food issues seem to align with Red/Blue politics just a little too much

There's enough to offend and ingratiate most everyones preconceived ideas in some small way, but mostly on the mark, I think.
 

Angus Deaton and Commodity Prices

Angus Deaton just won the Nobel Prize in economics.  He's a brilliant, famous economist who is known for many contributions.  In graduate school I discovered a bunch of his papers and studied them carefully. He is a clear and meticulous writer which made it easy for me to learn a lot of technical machinery, like stochastic dynamic programming.  His care and creativity in statistical matters, and linking data to theory, was especially inspiring. His papers with Christina Paxson inspired me to think long and hard about all the different ways economists might exploit weather as an instrument for identifying important economic phenomena.

One important set of contributions about which I've seen little mention concerns a body of work on commodity prices that he did in collaboration with Guy Laroque.  This is really important research, and I think that many of those who do agricultural economics and climate change might have missed some of its implications, if they are aware of it at all.

Deaton lays out his work on commodity prices like he does in a lot of his papers: he sets out to test a core theory, insists on using only the most reliable data, and then pushes the data and theory hard to see if they can be reconciled with each other.  He ultimately concludes that, while theory can broadly characterize price behavior, there is a critical paradox in the data that the theory cannot reconcile: too much autocorrelation in prices.  (ASIDE 1)

These papers are quite technical and the concluding autocorrelation puzzle is likely to put most economists, and surely all non-economists, into a deep slumber.  Who cares?

Undoubtedly, a lot of the fascination with these papers was about technique.  They were written in the generation following discovery of GMM (generalized method of moments) as a way to estimate models centered on rational expectations, models in which iid errors can have an at least somewhat tangible interpretation as unpredictable "expectation errors."

One thing I always found interesting and useful from these papers was something that Deaton and Larqoue take entirely for granted.  They show that the behavior of commodity prices themselves, without any other data, indicate that their supply and demand are extremely inelastic.  (ASIDE 2)  For, if they weren't, prices would not be as volatile as they are, as autocorrelated as they are, and stored as prevalently as they are.  Deaton writes as much in a number of places, but states this as if it's entirely obvious and not of critical concern. (ASIDE 3)

But here's the thing: the elasticities of supply and demand are really what's critical for thinking about implications of policies, especially those that can affect supply or demand on a large scale, like ethanol mandates and climate change.  Anyone who read and digested Deaton and Laroque and knew the stylized facts about corn prices knew that the ethanol subsidies and mandates were going to cause food prices to spike, maybe a whole lot. But no one doing policy analysis in those areas paid any attention.

Estimated elasticities regularly published in the AJAE for food commodities are typically orders of magnitude larger than are possible given what is plainly clear in price behavior, and the authors typically appear oblivious to the paradox.   Also, if you like to think carefully about identification, it's easy to be skeptical of the larger estimated elasticities.  Sorry aggies--I'm knocking you pretty hard here and I think it's deserved.  I gather there are similar problems in other corners of the literature, say mineral and energy economics.

And it turns out that the autocorrelation puzzle may not be as large a puzzle as Deaton and Laroque let on.  For one, a little refinement of their technique can give rise to greater price autocorrelation, a refinement that also implies even more inelastic supply and demand.  Another simple way to reconcile theory and data is to allow for so-called ``convenience yields," which basically amounts to negative storage costs when inventories are low.  Negative storage costs don't make sense on their face, but might actually reflect the fact that in any one location---where stores are actually held---prices or the marginal value of commodities can be a lot more volatile than posted prices in a market.  Similar puzzles of positive storage when spot prices exceed futures prices can be similarly explained---there might be a lot of uncertain variability in time and space that sit between stored inventories and futures deliveries.

The graph below, from this recent paper by Gouel and Legrand, uses updated techniques to show how inelastic demand needs to be to obtain high price autocorrelation, as we observe in the data (typically well above 0.6).

Adding bells and whistles to the basic theory easily reconciles the puzzle, but only strengthens the conclusion that demand and supply of commodities are extremely steep.  And that basic conclusion should make people a little more thoughtful when it comes to thinking about implications of policies and about the potential impacts of climate change, which could greatly disrupt supply of food commodities.



ASIDE 1:  Papers like Deaton's differ from most of the work that fills up the journals these days.  Today we see a lot more empirical work than in the past, but most of this work is nearly atheoretical, at least relative to Deaton's.  It most typically follows what David Card describes as ``the design-based approach."  I don't think that's bad change.  But I think there's a lot of value in the kind of work Deaton did, too.

ASIDE 2:  The canonical model that Deaton and Laroque use, and much of the subsequent literature, has a perfectly inelastic supply curve that shifts randomly with the weather and a fixed demand curve.  This is because, using only prices, one cannot identify both demand and supply.  Thus, the estimated demand elasticities embody both demand and supply.  And since that one elasticity is clearly very inelastic it also implies the sum of the two elasticities is very inelastic.

ASIDE 3:  Lots of people draw conclusions lightly as if they are obvious without really thinking carefully about lies beneath.  Not Angus Deaton.

El Niño is coming, make this time different

Kyle Meng and I published an op-ed in the Guardian today trying to raise awareness of the potential socioeconomic impacts, and policy responses, to the emerging El Niño.  Forecasts this year are extraordinary.  In particular, for folks who aren't climate wonks and who live in temperate locations, it is challenging to visualize the scale and scope of what might come down the pipeline this year in the tropics and subtropics. Read the op-ed here.

Countries where the majority of the population experience hotter conditions under El Niño are shown in red. Countries that get cooler under El Niño are shown in blue (reproduced from Hsiang and Meng, AER 2015)

Daily or monthly weather data?

We’ve had a few really hot days here in California. It won’t surprise readers of this blog to know the heat has made Marshall unusually violent and Sol unusually unproductive. They practice what they preach. Apart from that, it’s gotten me thinking back to a common issue in our line of work - getting “good” measures of heat exposure. It’s become quite popular to be as precise as possible in doing this – using daily or even hourly measures of temperature to construct things like ‘extreme degree days’ or ‘killing degree days’ (I don’t really like the latter term, but that’s beside the point for now).

I’m all for precision when it is possible, but the reality is that in many parts of the world we still don’t have good daily measures of temperature, at least not for many locations. But in many cases there are more reliable measures of monthly than daily temperatures. For example, the CRU has gridded time series of monthly average max and min temperature at 0.5 degree resolution.

It seems a common view is that you can’t expect to do too well with these “coarse” temporal aggregates. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that sometimes you can. Or at least I think the difference has been overblown, probably because many of the comparisons between monthly and daily weather show the latter working much better. But I think it’s overlooked that most comparisons of regressions using monthly and daily measures of heat have not been a fair fight.

What do I mean? On the one hand, you typically have the daily or hourly measures of heat, such as extreme degree days (EDD) or temperature exposure in individual bins of temperature. Then they enter into some fancy pants model that fits a spline or some other flexible function that capture all sorts of nonlinearities and asymmetries. Then on the other hand, for comparison you have a model with a quadratic response to growing season average temperature. I’m not trying to belittle the fancy approaches (I bin just as much as the next guy), but we should at least give the monthly data a fighting chance. We often restrict it to growing season rather than monthly averages, often using average daily temperatures rather than average maximums and minimums, and, most importantly, we often impose symmetry by using a quadratic. Maybe this is just out of habit, or maybe it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations for those poor monthly data.

As an example, suppose, as we’ve discussed in various other posts, that the best predictor of corn yields in the U.S. is exposure to very high temperatures during July. In particular, suppose that degree days above 30°C (EDD) is the best. Below I show the correlation of this daily measure for a site in Iowa with various growing season and monthly averages. You can see that average season temperature isn’t so good, but July average is a bit better, and July average daily maximum even better. In other words, if a month has a lot of really hot days, then that month's average daily maximum is likely to be pretty high.

You can also see that the relationship isn’t exactly linear. So a model with yields vs. any of these monthly or growing season averages likely wouldn’t do as well as EDD if the monthly data entered in as a linear or quadratic response. But as I described in an old post that I’m pretty sure no one has ever read, one can instead define simple assymetric hinge functions based on monthly temperature and rainfall. In the case of U.S. corn, I suggested these three based on a model fit to simulated data:

This is now what I’d consider more of a fair fight between daily and monthly data. The table below is from what I posted before. It compares the out-of-sample skill of a model using two daily-based measures (GDD and EDD), to a model using the three monthly-based hinge functions above. Both models include county fixed effects and quadratic time trends. In this particular case, the monthly model (3) even works slightly better than the daily model (2). I suspect the fact it’s even better relates less to temperature terms than to the fact that model (2) uses a quadratic in growing season rainfall, which is probably less appropriate than the more assymetric hinge function – which says yields respond up to 450mm of rain and are flat afterwards.

Model	Calibration R2	Average root mean square error for calibration	Average root mean square error for out-of-sample data  (for 500 runs)	% reduction in out-of-sample error
1	0.59	0.270	.285	--
2	0.66	0.241	.259	8.9
3*	0.68	0.235	.254	10.7

Overall, the point is that monthly data may not be so much worse than daily for many applications. I’m sure we can find some examples where it is, but in many important examples it won’t be. I think this is good news given how often we can’t get good daily data. Of course, there’s a chance the heat is making me crazy and I’m wrong about all this. Hopefully at least I've provoked the others to post some counter-examples. There's nothing like a good old fashioned conflict on a hot day.

US weather and corn yields 2015.

Here's the annual update on weather in the US, averaged over the areas where corn is grown.  The preferred model by Michael Roberts and myself [paper] splits daily temperature into beneficial moderate heat (degree days 10-29C, or 50-84F) and harmful extreme heat (degree days above 29C, or 84F). These two variables (especially the one on extreme heat) are surprisingly powerful predictors of annual corn yields.  So how does 2015 look like? Below are the numbers through the end of July.

First, here's the cumulative occurrence of extreme heat for March 1st, 2015 - July 31, 2015. The grey dashed lines are annual time series from 1950-2011, the black line is the average (1950-2010), and the colored lines show the last four years.  2012 (blue) was very hot and had very low yields as predicted by the model.  On the other hand, 2014 (green) had among the lowest number of harmful extreme degree days. The current year, 2015 (magenta line), comes in slightly below normal so far.

Second, beneficial moderate heat is above average. Usually the two are positively correlated (when extreme heat is above normal, so is moderate heat). Lower-than average harmful extreme heat and above-average beneficial moderate heat suggests that we should see another above-average year in terms of crop yields (Qualification: August is still outstanding and farmers planted late this year in many areas due to the cold winter, suggesting that August might be more important than usual). This is supported by the fact that corn futures have been coming down lately.

Finally, Kyle Meng and Solomon Hsiang have just pointed out to me that the very strong El Nino signal likely suggests that other parts of the global will see significant production shortfalls, so hopefully some of this can be mitigated by higher than average US yields - the power of trade.

Answering Matthew Kahn's questions about climate adaptation

Matt has taken the bait and asked me a five good questions about my snarky, contrarian post on climate adaptation.  Here are his questions and my answers.

Question 1.  This paper will be published soon by the JPE. Costinot, Arnaud, Dave Donaldson, and Cory B. Smith. Evolving comparative advantage and the impact of climate change in agricultural markets: Evidence from 1.7 million fields around the world. No. w20079. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014.  http://www10.iadb.org/intal/intalcdi/PE/2014/14183.pdf

It strongly suggests that adaptation will play a key role protecting us. Which parts of their argument do you reject and why?

Answer:  This looks like a solid paper, much more serious than the average paper I get to review, and I have not yet studied it.  I’m slow, so it would take me awhile to unpack all the details and study the data and model.  Although, from a quick look, I think there are a couple points I can make right now. 

First, and most importantly, I think we need to be clear about the differences between (i) adaptation (ii) price response and trade; (iii) innovation that would happen anyway; (iv) climate-change-induced innovation; (v) and price-induced innovation.  I’m pretty sure this paper is mainly about (ii), not about adaptation as conventionally defined within literature, although there appears to be some adaptation too.  I need to study this much more to get a sense of the different magnitudes of elasticities they estimate, and whether I think they are plausible given the data.

To be clear: I think adaptation, as conventionally defined, pertains to changing production behavior when changing climate while holding all other factors (like prices, trade, technology, etc.) constant.  My annoyance is chiefly that people are mixing up concepts.  My second annoyance is that too many are perpetually optimistic--some economists wear it like a badge, and I don’t think evidence or history necessarily backs up that optimism.

Question 2. If farmers know that they face uncertain risks due to climate change, what portfolio choices can they engage in to reduce the variability of their earnings? What futures markets exist to allow for hedging? If a risk averse economic agent knows "that he does not know" what ambiguous risks she faces, she will invest in options to protect herself. Does your empirical work capture this medium term investment rational plan? Or do you embrace the Berkeley behavioral view of economic agents as myopic?

Some farmers have subsidized crop insurance (nearly all in the U.S. do). But I don't think insurance much affects production choices at all. Futures markets seem to “work” pretty well and could be influenced by anticipated climate change.  We actually use a full-blown rational expectations model to estimate how much they might be affected by anticipated climate change right now: about 2% higher than they otherwise would be. 

Do I think people are myopic? Very often, yes.  Do I think markets are myopic?  By and large, no, but maybe sometimes.  I believe less in bubbles than Robert Shiller, even though I'm a great admirer of his work.  Especially for commodity markets (if not the marcoeconomy) I think rational expectations models are a good baseline for thinking about commodity prices, very much including food commodity prices.  And I think rational expectations models can have other useful purposes, too.  I actually do think the Lucas enterprise has created some useful tools, even if I find the RBC center of macro more than a bit delusional.

I think climate and anticipated climate change will affect output (for good and bad), which will affect prices, and that prices will affect what farmers plant, where they plant it, and trade.  But none of this, I would argue, is what economists conventionally refer to as adaptation.  A little more on response to price below...

Again, my beef with the field right now is that we are too blase about miracle of adaptation.  It’s easy to tell horror stories that the data cannot refute.  Much of economist tribe won’t look there—it feels taboo.  JPE won’t publish such an article. We have blinders on when uncertainty is our greatest enemy.

Question 3. If specific farmers at specific locations suffer, why won't farming move to a new area with a new comparative advantage? How has your work made progress on the "extensive margin" of where we grow our food in the future?

The vast majority of arable land is already cropped.  That which isn’t is in extremely remote and/or politically difficult parts of Africa.  Yes, there will be substitution and shifting of land.  But these shifts will come about because of climate-induced changes in productivity.  In other words, first-order intensive margin effects will drive second-order extensive margin effects.  The second order effects—some land will move into production, some out--will roughly amount to zero.  That’s what the envelope theorem says.  To a first approximation, adaptation in response to climate change will have zero aggregate effect, not just with respect to crop choice, but with respect to other management decisions as well.  I think Nordhaus himself made this point a long time ago.

However, there will also be intensive and extensive margin responses to prices.  Those will be larger than zero.  But I think the stylized facts about commodity prices ( from the rational expectations commodity price model, plus other evidence ) tell us that supply and demand are extremely inelastic.

Question 4. The key agriculture issue in adapting to climate change appears to be reducing international trade barriers and improving storage and reducing geographic trade costs. Are you pessimistic on each of these margins? Container ships and refrigeration keep getting better, don't they?

I think storage will improve, because almost anyone can do it, and there’s a healthy profit motive.  It’s a great diversification strategy for deep-pocketed investors. I think many are already into this game and more will get into it soon.  Greater storage should quell a good share of the greater volatility, but it actually causes average prices to rise, because there will be more spoilage.  But I’m very “optimistic” if you will, about the storage response.  I worry some that the storage response will be too great.

But I’m pretty agnostic to pessimistic about everything else.  Look what happened in earlier food price spikes.  Many countries started banning exports.  It created chaos and a huge “bubble” (not sure if it was truly rational or not) in rice prices.  Wheat prices, particularly in the Middle East, shot up much more than world prices because government could no longer retain the subsidized floors. As times get tougher, I worry that politics and conflict could turn crazy.  It’s the crazy that scares me.  We’ve had a taste of this, no?  The Middle East looks much less stable post food price spikes than before. I don’t know how much food prices are too blame, but I think they are a plausible causal factor.

Question 5. With regards to my Climatopolis work, recall that my focus is the urbanized world. The majority of the world already live in cities and cities have a comparative advantage in adapting to climate conditions due to air conditioning, higher income and public goods investments to increase safety.

To be fair: I’m probably picking on the wrong straw man.  What’s bothering me these days has much less to do with your book and more to do with the papers that come across my desk every day.  I think people are being sloppy and a bit closed minded, and yes, perhaps even tribal.  I would agree that adaptation in rich countries is easier.  Max Auffhammer has a nice new working paper looking at air conditioning in California, and how people will use air conditioning more, and people in some areas will install air conditioners that don’t currently have them--that's adaptation.  This kind of adaptation will surely happen, is surely good for people but bad for energy conservation.  It’s a really neat study backed by billions of billing records.   But the adaptation number—an upper bound estimate—is small.

I thought of you and your book because people at AAEA were making the some of the same arguments you made, and because you’re much bigger fish than most of the folks in my little pond.  Also, I think your book embodies many economists’ perhaps correct, but perhaps gravely naïve, what-me-worry attitude.

Why Science for Climate Adaptation is Difficult

Matthew Kahn, author of the cheeky book Climatopolis: How Our Cities will Thrive in the Hotter Future, likes to compliment our research (Schlenker and Roberts, 2009) on potential climate impacts to agriculture by saying it will cause valuable innovation that will prevent its dismal predictions from ever occurring.

Matt has a point, one that has been made many times in other contexts by economists with Chicago School roots.  Although in Matt’s case (and most all of the others), it feels more like a third stage of denial than a serious academic argument.

It’s not just Matt.  Today, the serious climate economist (or Serious?) is supposed to write about adaptation.  It feels taboo to suggest that adaptation is difficult.  Yet, the conventional wisdom here is almost surely wrong.  Everyone seems to ignore or miscomprehend basic microeconomic theory: adaptation is a second or higher-order effect, probably as ignorable as it is unpredictable.

While the theory is clear, the evidence needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Although it seems to me that much of the research so far is either flawed or doesn’t measure adaptation at all.  Instead it confounds adaptation—changes in farming and other activities due to changes in climate—with something else, like technological change that would have happened anyway, response to prices, population growth or other factors.

For example, some farmers may be planting earlier or later due to climate change.   They may also be planting different crops in a few places. But farmers are also changing what, when and where they plant due to innovation of new varieties that would have come about even if Spring weren’t coming a little earlier.  The effects of climate change on farm practices are actually mixed, and in the big picture, look very small to me, at least so far.

The other week the AAEA meetings in San Francisco, our recent guest blogger Jesse Tack was reminding me of Matt’s optimistic views, and in the course of our ensuing conversations about some of his current research, it occurred to me just why crop science surrounding climate-related factors is so difficult. The reason goes back to struggles of early modern crop science, and the birth of modern statistics and hypothesis testing, all of which probably ushered in the Green Revolution.

How’s all that?  Well, modern statistical inference and experimental design have some earlier roots, but most of it can be traced to two books, The Statistical Manual for Research Workers, and The Arrangement of Field Experiments, both written by Ronald Fisher in the 1920s. Fisher developed his ideas while working at Rothamsted, one of the oldest crop experiment stations in the world.  In 1919 he was hired to study the vast amount of data collected since the 1840s, and concluded that all the data was essentially useless because all manner of events affecting crop yields (mostly weather) had hopelessly confounded the many experiments, which we unrandomized and uncontrolled. It was impossible to separate signal from noise. To draw scientific inferences and quantify uncertainties, would require randomized controlled trials, and some new mathematics, which Fisher then developed.  Fisher’s statistical techniques, combined with his novel experimental designs, literally invented modern science. It’s no surprise then that productivity growth in agriculture accelerated a decade or two later.

So what does this have to do with adaptation?  Well, the crux of adaptation involves higher-order effects: the interaction of crop varieties, practices and weather.  It’s not about whether strain X has a typically higher yield than strain Y.  It’s about the relative performance of strain X and strain Y across a wide range weather conditions.

Much like the early days of modern science, this can be very hard to measure because there’s so much variability in the weather and other factors. Scientists cannot easily intervene to control the temperature and CO2 like they can varieties and crop practices.  And when they do, other experimental conditions (like soil moisture) are usually carefully controlled such that no water or pest stresses occur.  Since these other factors are also likely influenced by warming temperatures (like VPD-induced drought, also here), so it’s not really clear whether these experiments tell us what we need to know about the effects of climate change.

(An experiment with controlled temperatures and CO2 concentrations)

Then, of course, is the curse of dimensionality.  To measure interactions of practices, temperature and CO2, requires experimentation on a truly grand scale.   If we constrain ourselves to actual weather events, in most parts of the world we have only one crop per year, so the data accumulate slowly, will be noisy, and discerning cause and effect basically impossible. In the end, it’s not much different from Ronald Fisher trying to discern truth from his pre-1919 experiment station data that lacked randomly assigned treatments and controls.

I would venture to guess that these challenges in the agricultural realm likely apply to other areas as well.

So, given the challenges, the high cost, and basic microeconomic prediction that adaptation is a small deal anyway, how much should we actually spend on adaptation versus prevention?

Effect of warming temperatures on US wheat yields (Guest post by Jesse Tack)

This post discusses research from a paper coauthored with Andrew Barkley and Lanier Nalley in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper can be found here. We utilize Kansas field-trial data for dryland winter wheat yields. A major strength of this data is that we were able to match yield data with daily temperature observations across eleven locations for the years 1985-2013.

So, there is a lot of variation in the data, and we can accurately measure local temperature exposure. Max, Sol, Wolfram, and Adam Sobel have a nice paper on the importance of such accuracy here, and Wolfram has blogged on the importance of daily versus more aggregate (e.g. monthly) measures here.

Although not the main focus of our paper, we find that the frequency at which temperature exposures are measured has a large impact on simulated warming impacts (see the supplementary information here). Any stats geek – myself included – will tell you that accurate identification requires sufficient variation, and the more variation the better! Mike and Wolfram have some great posts on constructing temperature measures here and here.

We follow their prescribed method for interpolating temperature exposures and constructing degree days. However, it is still common in many empirical analyses to use minimum and maximum temperatures to construct a measure of average temperature and call it a day. Don’t do this! You are missing so much important variation in temperature exposure that can be measured using the interpolation approach outlined by Mike and Wolfram.

Another consideration not often taken into account in climate change impact studies is that warming temperatures can have both positive and negative yield impacts. Extreme temperatures on both the low (cold) and high (heat) end of the temperature distribution are typically bad for crops. So if we think of warming as a shifting of the distribution to the right, the result is fewer of the former (positive effect) and more of the latter (negative effect).

So what? Well, we find that the net warming impact is negative for winter wheat in Kansas (more heat trumps less freeze), but omitting the beneficial effects of freeze reduction leads to vastly overestimated impacts (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Predicted warming impacts under alternative uniform temperature changes across the entire Fall-Winter-Spring growing season. Impacts are reported as the percentage change in yield relative to historical climate. The preferred model includes the effects from a reduction in freezing temperatures, while the alternative holds freeze effects at zero. Bars show 95% confidence intervals using standard errors clustered by year and variety.

The upshot here is that an accurate identification of warming impacts for winter wheat requires accounting for both ends of the temperature distribution. It would be interesting to know if this finding applies to other crops as well.

An additional strength of our data is that we observe 268 wheat varieties in-sample, which allows us to estimate heterogeneous heat resistance. As with other crops, winter wheat has experienced a steady increase in yields over time due to successful breeding efforts. Much of this increase is driven by a lengthened grain-filling stage, which increases yield potential under ideal weather conditions but introduces additional susceptibility to high temperature exposure during this critical period. David has some great posts on evolving weather sensitivities here, here, and here.

Essentially, if this line of reasoning holds we should expect to see a tradeoff between average yields and heat resistance across varieties. We group varieties by the year in which they were released to the public and allow the effect of extreme heat to vary across this grouping. [Aside: there are practical reasons why we group by release year that are discussed in the paper, we are experimenting with other grouping schemes in on-going projects].

We find that there does indeed exist a tradeoff between heat resistance and average yield, with higher yielding varieties less able to resist temperatures above 34°C (Figure 2). If the least resistant variety is switched to the most resistant variety, average yield is reduced by 6.6% and heat resistance is increased by 17.1%. We also find that newer varieties are less heat resistant than older varieties. Linear regressions using estimates for the 268 varieties indicate that these relationships are statistically significant (P-values < 0.05).

Figure 2. Mean (average) yields and heat resistance are summarized by release year. Heat resistance is measured as the percentage impact on mean yield from an additional degree day above 34°C. The smaller the number in absolute value the more heat resistant the variety is.

These findings point to a need for future breeding efforts to focus on heat resistance, and there is currently much work being done in this area. Check out the Kansas State University Wheat Genetics Resource Center (WGRC) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) here and here.

From a historical perspective, our results indicate that such advancements will likely come at the expense of higher average yields. However, there is potentially a huge upside to developing a new variety that combines high yields with improved heat resistance. Under such a scenario, reduced freeze exposure could outweigh increased heat, leading to a net positive warming effect.

In the absence of such a silver bullet variety, the average-yield/heat-resistance tradeoff presents an interesting challenge for producer adaptation, which will ultimately be driven by some economic decision-making process. Producers are individuals, or families, and as such they have a certain tolerance for exposing themselves to risk. Much work has been done showing that farmers enjoy smoothing their consumption over time, which is akin to reducing profit variation. Farrell Jensen and Rulon Pope have a nice paper on this here.

So from a climate change adaptation perspective, it is important ask whether producers prefer a variety that offers high average yield but low heat resistance, or a variety with lower average yields coupled with high resistance? Are there important risk preference differences across producers, or are they a fairly homogeneous group? Currently, we don’t have a firm answer for these pertinent questions.

There has been much work in the agricultural economics literature on risk preference heterogeneity and the extent to which producers will trade off average yield for a reduction in yield variance. However, yield variance captures deviations both above and below the average, which might not be the relevant measure of risk under a warming climate since we are largely concerned with negative (i.e. downside) yield effects.

Martin Weitzman refers to this as fat-tailed uncertainty, and has done some really interesting work in this area (e.g. here). Jean Paul Chavas and John Antle are agricultural economists that seem to be working in this direction using the partial moments framework that John developed, see here, here, and here.

Knowledge about the willingness of producers to trade off yield for risk reduction should clearly be an important focus of future breeding efforts. Historically, plant physiologists and geneticists have worked independent of agricultural economists, but this should change as climate change presents a clear need for well-conceived interdisciplinary research.

In closing, it is worth pointing out that public policy will also likely have a strong effect on the welfare implications for producers under warming. Direct funding support for research provides one linkage, but another often overlooked linkage arrives in the form of subsidized agricultural production. For example, do policies that protect producers against large-scale crop losses provide a disincentive to adopt heat resistant varieties? Wolfram and Francis Annan have looked at this issue here and find that U.S. corn and soybean producers’ adaptation potential is skewed by government programs, in turn implying that producers will choose subsidized yield guarantees over costly adaptation measures.

Thus, even if we come to know what the optimal adaptation path is, it is not clear how we will get there. Economists love to talk of the unintended consequences of public policy. Sometimes it seems that every good policy has a dark side. It’s called the dismal science for a reason ;-)