Quantifying the costs of historical global warming: a case study of crop indemnities in the United States

Abstract:

This presentation in the new AGU Fellows session will present ongoing work exploring approaches to quantification of the financial costs of historical global warming. This effort builds on work in recent years to frame and test hypothesis about the influence of historical global warming on changes in the probability and severity of extreme climate events, as well as work in recent years to quantify the influence of climate variations on various socioeconomic outcomes. The presentation will focus on unpublished, in progress work to quantify the influence of historical warming on US insured crop losses using historical crop insurance data, historical observations of temperature and precipitation, the CMIP5 global climate model ensemble, and fixed effects panel regression. Initial results suggest that historical warming has accounted for >$20 billion (~15%) of total US crop indemnities over the 1991-2017 period, and ~$6 billion (~33%) of total crop indemnities in 2012 (the most extreme year for crop losses in the US).