Economic impacts of climate change
The economic effects of climate change could imperil growth in living standards for millions of people around the world, but the precise magnitude and persistence of these economic growth effects remains unclear. I have a number of ongoing projects that use econometric regression techniques and climate model simulations to both better understand the effects of rising temperatures on economic growth. For example, in a 2023 paper, we showed that El Niño events persistently reduce economic growth in tropical countries, economic penalties that could be accelerated if global warming amplifies El Niño. In a 2022 paper, we showed that extreme heat events driven by climate change have substantially reduced economic output in the world’s poorest and warmest regions.
Accountability for climate impacts
Who bears responsibility for the impacts of climate change? The answer to this question has major implications for debates over loss and damage funding as well as climate change litigation. My research combines physical climate models and empirical impact models to assess the responsibility that major emitters, such as countries and fossil fuel firms, bear for the climate crisis. For example, in a 2022 paper, we quantified the responsibility of individual countries to the economic losses from climate change suffered in every other country. Ongoing work is applying a similar methodological framework to individual fossil fuel firms.
Atmospheric stagnation and air pollution
Poor air quality can be incredibly damaging to human health. Harmful air pollutants accumulate most strongly in the near-surface environment under favorable meteorological conditions, including anticyclonic circulation and favorable wind directions. How might climate change affect these meteorological patterns? Previous work examined the influence of climate warming on the occurrence of these favorable meteorological conditions near Beijing, China. In a 2019 paper, we used extreme event attribution techniques to show that warming to date had only a small influence on the occurrence of extreme air pollution in China's January 2013 "airpocalypse." As a follow-up, we showed that internal climate variability plays a significant role in projections of the anticyclonic circulation patterns that govern pollutant accumulation.
