by Ross McKitrick
I have a new paper out in the journal Nature Scientific Reports in which I re-examine some empirical work regarding agricultural yield changes under CO2-induced climate warming. An influential 2017 study had argued that warming would cause large losses in agricultural outputs on a global scale, and this played a large role in an upward revision to the Biden Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimate, which drives regulatory decision in US climate rulemaking. I show that a lot of data had been left out of the statistical modeling, and once it is included there was no evidence of yield losses even out to 5 C warming.
