Climate change. 5 notes.

It’s all fine! Nothing to see here!

Obvious but…

This article reviews recent economic studies on the causal effects of temperature on labor productivity. The negative effects of extreme temperatures are widespread, and the magnitudes of the impact differ across social and economic factors. In addition to physical outputs, extreme temperatures also impair mental productivity, including cognition and learning. In utero exposure to extreme temperatures has profound effects on human development. Although the literature has detected various adaptation strategies, the conclusions are mixed. We discuss some limitations of existing studies and propose several directions for future research.

Economic liberalisation reduces emissions and deaths from pollution:

There is a large literature showing that liberalizations boost economic growth. Do these gains come with environmental costs? In this paper, we use 49 cases of large-scale liberalization – as proxied by large discrete jumps on the Economic Freedom of the World Index – to study the effects of liberalizations on greenhouse gas emissions (total, per capita and per dollar of GDP) and deaths from outdoor air pollution. Using matching methods between liberalizers and non-liberalizers, we find that liberalizations have no consistent effect on total emissions or emissions per capita. However, they do reduce emissions per dollar of GDP and reduce mortality from outdoor air pollution. We then employ synthetic control methods on the largest three liberalizers and the largest de-liberalizer and find the same pattern of results.

A nice analysis of long term temperature trends in India.

From Insurance Catastrophe Resilience Report 2023-24: The cost of extreme weather in Australia is rising. Three new graphs show just how much the cost of extreme weather is increasing, the growth of extreme weather costs as a proportion of the economy, and the impact on insurer sustaina The cost of extreme weather is…