From Watts Up With That?
Ryan Maue comments on new pager: The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature. He pulls no punches.
The methodology here is wild. Instead of using local climate data to diagnose the impacts of extreme weather events that drive damages, the authors use the global temperature time series. The logic is circular and baseless. The mean global temperature does not cause extreme weather, nor does the variability in global temperature. The climate itself does not cause nor fuel extreme weather.
The authors create a new metric called “global temperature shocks,” which to most climate folks probably looks like a detrended variance of about 0.2°C. Why would global temperature variability (warm or cold) related mainly to tropical temperatures (El Niño & La Niña) be a more appropriate metric to represent climate damages from extreme events rather than the extreme events themselves? We have extensive disaster databases and GDP at the national scale. Why not use those? Because that (more appropriate) analysis does not show much of a climate change damage signal. It’s tiny.
So, the authors find that local temperatures (as in national scale) are not correlated to damages with huge variance, yet global temperatures are b/c of smaller annual variability. At this point of the analysis, the authors should have quit, yet they plowed ahead undaunted.
Here is the original X (formally Twitter) thread
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