Jeffrey Shrader

SIPA has released a Q&A with me and Stephan Thies on our new paper in PNAS.

Assume we have a time machine and transport ourselves to the year 2100. Would we, with the benefit of decades of extra data, be able to use purely reduced-form econometric methods to estimate the overall economic damage from climate change? I say no. (...more)

New paper in PNAS, joint with the wonderful Sustainable Development PhD student Stephan Thies as well as the usual suspects on my weather forecast work (Derek, Laura, Manuel). Headline findings: More accurate weather forecasts save lives, especially during extreme heat. Continued improvements in short-range temperature forecasts could reduce heat-related mortality in the U.S. by ~20% by the end of the century. That would offset nearly all of the increase in deaths under moderate climate change. But this is also “running to stay in place”: without climate change, these same improvements would lead to substantial declines in heat-related mortality. Surveyed operational meteorologists expect forecasts to keep improving, and realizing those improvements will require sustained investment in weather data and model development (including AI models).

Manuel Linsenmeier and I have a new piece in VoxDev on global inequalities in weather forecasts. As we say in the piece, “Weather forecasts in low-income countries are about 20 years behind those in high-income countries, worsening economic losses and increasing vulnerability to climate-related risks.” We also offer some thoughts on how to make this situation better!

Lots of work on the economics of climate change has sought to estimate climate change damage. As long as these estimates have been produced, there has been a debate about whether we should expect actual damages to be larger or smaller than the estimates.[^1] A common argument that actual damages should be smaller comes from folks focused on *adaptation*---the actions people take to prepare for or adjust to a changing climate. (...more)

I was interviewed for Signals of Change. Check out the episode here. We talk about climate adaptation, weather forecasts, and what environmental economists can do to better understand climate change impacts.