Trends in distributional characteristics: Existence of global warming

María Dolores Gadea Rivas and Jesus Gonzalo

Journal of Econometrics, 2020, vol. 214, issue 1, 153-174

Abstract: What type of global warming exists? This study introduces a novel methodology to answer this question, which is the starting point for all issues related to climate change analyses. Global warming is defined as an increasing trend in certain distributional characteristics (moments, quantiles, etc.) of global temperatures, in addition to simply examining the average values. Temperatures are viewed as a functional stochastic process from which we obtain distributional characteristics as time series objects. Here, we present a simple robust trend test and prove that it is able to detect the existence of an unknown trend component (deterministic or stochastic) in these characteristics. Applying this trend test to daily temperatures in Central England (for the period 1772–2017) and to global cross-sectional temperatures (1880–2015), we obtain the same strong conclusions: (i) there is an increasing trend in all distributional characteristics (time series and cross-sectional), and this trend is larger in the lower quantiles than it is in the mean, median, and upper quantiles; (ii) there is a negative trend in the characteristics that measure dispersion (i.e., lower temperatures approach the median faster than higher temperatures do). This type of global warming has more serious consequences than those found by analyzing only the average.

Keywords: Climate change; Global–Local warming; Functional stochastic process; Distributional characteristic; Trend; Quantile; Temperature distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 C32 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Working Paper: Trends in distributional characteristics: Existence of global warming (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:econom:v:214:y:2020:i:1:p:153-174

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeconom.2019.05.009

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