https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-alarmists-bad-science-warming-temperature-05846239?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
I debunked research by the Federal Reserve and top academic economists on the economics of climate change. An author of a paper I debunked then said that three professors from Stanford and Berkeley had done a much better analysis of temperature and growth in an article they published in Nature. I took up the challenge and scrutinized their article. My critique appears in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.
The Nature article is in the top 0.1% of academic economics publications by citations, and it has received glowing press coverage. I downloaded their data and found that, as with the other articles I debunked, the results don’t hold up under scrutiny.
The authors claim that there is an optimal average temperature of 55.5 degrees Fahrenheit for economic growth. Countries colder or warmer than that grow more slowly. The authors then use one of the most extreme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates of warming up to the year 2100 and calculate for each country how much more or less growth that warming would cause. They then calculate the difference in world gross domestic product with warming and without.
Greenland, with an average temperature of 25 degrees, would benefit from warming. The U.S., average temperature 56, would be relatively unaffected. Niger, average temperature 83, would see lower growth from warming. Adding up all countries, the authors say warming would reduce world GDP per capita by 23%.
Every country, from St. Vincent in the Caribbean to China has the same influence on their result. Weighting by population nearly eliminates that result, and adjusting for correlated observations and dropping one or two unusual observations eliminates it completely. The observations aren’t independent, because countries clustered in regions and observations close in time have similar patterns of growth and temperature. An example of an unusual observation is Greenland in 1990. A large mine that generated 12% of Greenland’s GDP closed that year, and not because it happened to be 2 degrees cooler than normal.
