Quasi-experimental estimates of the transient climate response using observational data

Giselle Montamat () and James H. Stock
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Giselle Montamat: Harvard University
James H. Stock: Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research

Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 160, issue 3, No 2, 371 pages

Abstract: Abstract The transient climate response (TCR) is the change in global mean temperature at the time of an exogenous doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration increasing at a rate of 1% per year. A problem with estimating the TCR using observational data is that observed CO2 concentrations depend in turn on temperature. Therefore, the observed concentration data are endogenous, potentially leading to simultaneous causation bias of regression estimates of the TCR. We address this problem by employing instrumental variables regression, which uses changes in radiative forcing external to earth systems to provide quasi-experiments that can be used to estimate the TCR. Because the modern instrumental record is short, we focus on decadal fluctuations (up to 30-year changes), which also mitigate some statistical issues associated with highly persistent temperature and concentration data. Our estimates of the TCR for these shorter horizons, normalized to be comparable to the traditional 70-year TCR, fall within the range in the IPCC-AR5 and provide new observational confirmation of model-based estimates.

Keywords: TCR; Endogeneity; Instrumental variables; Radiative forcing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10584-019-02589-1

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