Click the link for a transcript of “Taking the Temperature on Climate Change."

Climate Policy in the United States

Changes in climate are going to affect most, if not all, of us in the U.S. And public opinion has certainly changed on this in the last 10 years. Many more Americans are on board that the climate is changing and that we should do something about it. There's much more support for climate legislation across the board from Democrats and increasingly from Republicans.

Anyone who works on climate was really excited to see the platform Biden ran on, because it was really the first mainstream presidential campaign where climate had played a fundamental role. There's been a lot of discussion aboutthe importance of climate, the damages from climate that are already happening, and what we need to do is take aggressive action in the future to deal with the problem.

But there are specific industries who are going to be harmed by this legislation, and they are quite organized in fighting this legislation, and in funding politicians who fight it, and in funding organizations, either transparently or not, that are fighting climate legislation.

We are closer than we’ve ever been to really meaningful legislation on climate change. The optimistic view is that we’re on the right trajectory and that we’re going to get some part of this done eventually. But we’re not there yet.
 

COP26: Climate Change on the Global Stage

A “COP” is a “Conference of the Parties,” which is an annual meeting of the signatories of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The main focus of Glasgow was to get countries to be very transparent about how they are going to achieve the ambitions for combating climate change that they articulated at the last major COP summit in Paris.

Was it a success? A lot of countries did come to the table in Glasgow and made commitments in ways that they hadn't done before. There were also new, important agreements on certain greenhouse gasses that we've learned recently are pretty damaging, like methane.

Where we failed to make progress was on something that's called “loss and damage.” Many developing countries argue that they are suffering the damages from climate change even though it is a problem that they have not caused, and they are seeking compensation from developed countries who have been the drivers of climate change. That issue was on the table in Glasgow, but it got put off until next year in Egypt.

The Forecast for the Future

Progress is being made. Emissions are falling in the U.S. They're falling in California. They're falling in the EU. They're pretty flat around the world. And these are not just the per capita emissions, but overall emissions are now going down in many parts of the world, which is a huge success.

Where has that progress come from? In part from government policies that have been successful in mitigation. But the driving factor has really been longer decadal investments by both the public sector and the private sector in technologies that allow us to produce energy in a clean way. It’s a combination of long-term public support through taxes and subsidies for the development of these technologies alongside private sector deployment of these technologies at huge scale.
 

It’s important for people to know about these successes. But it’s also important for us to realize what we don’t know. Emissions in different parts of the world are falling, and that’s fantastic. But it’s also true that people are already getting sick, being harmed, and dying because of the changes we’re already experiencing.  We’re poorly adapted to the climate we live in now, much less the climate of a two-degree warmer or three-degree warmer future, and the science on that needs to be much more widely understood.

I think a huge role for us as academics is not only to do the research to understand those questions, but to get that information out into the world. The great thing about the Freeman Spolgi Institute and institutions like FSI is that it's part of our mandate to translate this research out into the broader world. The translation of what we already know is important, as is the imperitive to drill down on and study the things that we don't.

Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a new study shows that global farming productivity is 21% lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

The future potential impacts of climate change on global crop production has been quantified in many scientific reports, but the historic influence of anthropogenic climate change on the agricultural sector had yet to be modeled. Now, a new study published April 1 in Nature Climate Change provides these insights. 

David Lobell, professor of earth system science at Stanford University and coauthor of the study, said that the results show clearly that adaption efforts must look at the whole supply chain, including labor and livestock. “They also show that even as agriculture becomes more mechanized and sophisticated, the sensitivity to weather does not go away,” he said. “This is counter-intuitive for most people, and we need a deeper understanding of why.”

“We find that climate change has basically wiped out about seven years of improvements in agricultural productivity over the past 60 years,” said Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and lead author of the study. “It is equivalent to pressing the pause button on productivity growth back in 2013 and experiencing no improvements since then. Anthropogenic climate change is already slowing us down.”

The scientists and economists developed an all-encompassing econometric model linking year-to-year changes in weather and productivity measures with output from the latest climate models over six decades to quantify the effect of recent human-caused climate change on what economists call “total factor productivity,” a measure capturing overall productivity of the agricultural sector.

Ortiz-Bobea said they considered more than 200 systematic variations of the econometric model, and the results remained largely consistent. “When we zoom into different parts of the world, we find that the historical impacts of climate change have been larger in areas already warmer, including parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia,” he said.

Humans have already altered the climate system, Ortiz-Bobea said, as climate science indicates the globe is about 1 degree Celsius warmer than without atmospheric greenhouse gases.

“Most people perceive climate change as a distant problem,” Ortiz-Bobea said. “But this is something that is already having an effect. We have to address climate change now so that we can avoid further damage for future generations.”

Ortiz-Bobea and Robert G. Chambers, professor of production economics at the University of Maryland, have been pioneering new productivity calculations in agriculture to include weather data that has not been addressed historically, aiming to bring new accuracy to climate models.

“Productivity is essentially a calculation of your inputs compared to your outputs, and in most industries, the only way to get growth is with new inputs,” Chambers said. “Agricultural productivity measurement hasn’t historically incorporated weather data, but we want to see the trends for these inputs that are out of the farmer’s control.” 

“My sense is that we are just getting better at eliminating all the non-weather constraints on production, but we need to scrutinize various possible explanations,” said Lobell, who examines the impact of climate change on crop production and food security. “This study is a big leap beyond the traditional focus on a few major grain crops,” he said. “By looking at the whole system – the animals, the workers, the specialty crops – we can see that the entire agricultural economy is quite sensitive to weather. It seems that in agriculture, practically everything gets harder when it’s hotter.”

In addition to Ortiz-Bobea, Chambers and Lobell, the co-authors are Toby R. Ault, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Carlos M. Carrillo, research associate in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science. 

Funding was provided by USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

Media Contacts: 

Blaine Friedlander, bpf2@cornell.edu, 607-254-8093

Devon Ryan, devonr@stanford.edu, 650-497-0444