A Simple Endogenous Model of Economic Activity and Climate Change

Climate change, a result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels, may influence public health in innumerable ways including a risk of increased frequency and intensity of heat waves, reduction in cold-related deaths, increase in extreme weather events, changes in the distribution of water-, food-, and vector-borne diseases, and a risk of malnutrition, especially in the poor. These combined effects negatively impact public health (Haines, Kovats, Campbell-Lendrum, & Corvalan, 2006). In contrast, an improvement in public health requires much input of natural and human-built resources, which should raise the emissions of CO2 even more and thus result in an increase in global temperature. Based on this interaction between climate change and public health, a semi-empirical model was built. After that, the model was calibrated with data collected between 1901 and 1960. During the calibration, climate change was represented by global average temperature while public health was represented by life expectancy at birth. Finally, the calibrated model was validated with data from 1961 to 2005. Agreement between the results and the observation data is remarkable, with almost all relative errors less than 6%. The model of climate change and public health can be used to predict trends in climate change and public health and also provide insights into strategies for controlling the rise in temperature and improving public health.

I. INTRODUCTION(1) This article discusses Africa's position (or, more accurately in the author's opinion, lack of position) in the Climate Change Convention negotiations. The article argues that, perhaps more than any other global agreement in recent times, the Climate Change Convention negotiations are an amalgam of a bewildering array of diverse national, economic and environmental and other interests, objectives and perspectives all of which have sought, with varying degrees of success, to find expression in the Convention. Africa, so far, has failed demonstrably to articulate any position unique to it, and has therefore been largely marginal in the negotiations. The article explores some of the reasons for this failure and puts forward some suggestions which might be considered in the effort to improve Africa's position in the negotiations. II. BACKGROUND a. The Phenomenon of Global Warming The advent of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century -- with its reliance on the burning of fossil fuels to generate energy and the cutting down of forests to create farmlands -- marked a turning point in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, along with certain other gases, such as water vapor, methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrous oxide, trap the sun's heat near the earth's surface and cause a rise in the global temperature. Carbon dioxide's contribution to this effect is by far the most significant. This warming effect has been referred to as a greenhouse effect, hence the name greenhouse (GHGs). These gases occur naturally and perform a beneficial role: without them global temperature would be much lower than it is and the Earth would perhaps not be habitable. However the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) for energy generation and other human productive and consumptive activities including industrial, agricultural and waste disposal processes have led to a dramatic increase in human generated (anthropogenic) GHGs. During the decade beginning in 1980 mainstream scientific opinion(2) came to the view that if the world (more particularly, industrialized countries) continued emitting GHGs at present rates both global average temperatures and sea levels would rise much faster than at any time in the history of human civilization. This view was formalized in a 1990 Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Meteorological Organization established to study and report on the issue. However, the report pointed out that unequivocal judgments about the rate of increase could not be made for at least another decade. Global warming on the predicted scale would lead to serious stresses on the planet's ecological system, with far reaching economic, social and environmental consequences. Climatic zones might shift; sea levels might rise following melting of glaciers with serious impacts on low lying islands and coastal areas; rainfall patterns may change; disease carrying vectors may multiply or reappear and so on.(3) Further, the rates of change might be faster than the ability of some species to respond. But crucially scientific reports pointed out that there were (and continue to be) uncertainties and glaring gaps in the international community's knowledge about the nature and extent of impacts that significant global warming could bring about. b. The Climate Change Convention Following the IPCC report the United Nations General Assembly established the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 1990. Its mandate was to negotiate a convention in time for signature at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The negotiating committee met six times between February 1991 and May 1992 and successfully adopted the Climate Change Convention in time for the Rio Summit. …

Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Adaptation: A Case Study of Bangladesh

One problem that is common to the existing research on future climate change is the neglect of the forces of the market mechanism. In order to model the dynamic interaction between economic activities and the climate system, a dynamic two-sector general equilibrium model is constructed. This chapter is organised as follows. Section 6.2 describes the economic and natural environment, and Section 6.3 studies the competitive equilibrium. Section 6.4 analyses the properties of the law of motion of the global temperature. Sections 6.5 and 6.6 consider the equilibrium time-path of temperature under different conditions based on the results obtained in Section 6.4. Section 6.7 investigates the conditions under which a climatic chaos occurs, and Section 6.8 offers concluding remarks.

The 15-minute city offers a new framework for sustainability, liveability, and health

Assessing biodiversity responses to changes in climate and land use

Frontiers in climate change–disease research

New physical science behind climate change: What does IPCC AR6 tell us?

Assessing the vulnerability of Thailand's forest birds to global change

CLIMATE CHANGE: Health Scenarios for a Warming World

The global tropospheric temperature hit an all-time maximum in 2023. While new global average temperature records are routinely set as a result of greenhouse warming, the year-to-year rise in temperature from 2022 to 2023 is infrequently reproduced in climate models (e.g., Raghuraman et al. 2024). It is possible that such a rise in temperature could result from a unique manifestation of internal climate variability (e.g., Cattiaux et al. 2023). Earth recently experienced a transition from a prolonged La Niña event to an El Niño event. This phasing of ENSO variability is associated with increased odds of a spike in global temperature in climate models (e.g., Raghuraman et al. 2024). Other analyses indicate that multi-year trends in low cloud cover, aerosols, and the peak of the 11-year solar cycle are also important factors (e.g., Goessling et al. 2024). Now into 2025, we find that the year-to-year rise in temperature (over 2023 to 2024) is again large and the annual mean global tropospheric temperature anomaly (in 2024) exceeds the record set in the previous year. We examine the rapid and persistent rise in global tropospheric temperature using microwave-based measurements of tropospheric temperature from satellites. We contextualize the exceptional 2023-2024 warmth using model simulations of the a) pre-industrial period and b) the satellite era in order to estimate the effects of internal variability and greenhouse warming. We also explore the sensitivity of our results to model climate sensitivity and the representation of interannual variability with data from several large initial condition ensembles.Cattiaux, J., Ribes, A., & Cariou, E. (2024). How extreme were daily global temperatures in 2023 and early 2024? Geophysical Research Letters, 51(19). https://doi.org/10.1029/2024gl110531Goessling, H. F., Rackow, T., & Jung, T. (2024). Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7280Raghuraman, S. P., Soden, B., Clement, A., Vecchi, G., Menemenlis, S., & Yang, W. (2024). The 2023 global warming spike was driven by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 24(19), 11275–11283. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-11275-2024Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was performed under the auspices of U.S. DOE Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. This research was performed as part of the PCMDI Project, which is funded by the RGMA program area of the Office of Science at DOE.

Professor Lord Hunt, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to open this important scientific meeting on the impacts of climate change on urban areas. As you know, the overwhelming majority of scientific opinion supports the view that human activities are changing the Earth's climate. There really

Avoiding the Doldrums: Evaluating the Need for Change in the Offshore Wind Permitting Process

To mitigate climate change at local, regional, and global scales, we must begin to think beyond greenhouse gases.

When compared to the average annual global temperature record from 1880, no published climate model posited on the assumption that the increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the driver of climate change can accurately replicate the significant variability in the annual temperature record. Therefore, new principles of atmospheric physics are developed for determining changes in the average annual global temperature based on changes in the average atmospheric concentration of water vapor. These new principles prove that: 1) Changes in average global temperature are not driven by changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide; 2) Instead, autonomous changes in the concentration of water vapor, ΔTPW, drive changes in water vapor heating, thus, the average global temperature, ΔTAvg, in accordance with this principle, ΔTAvg=0.4ΔTPW the average accuracy of which is ±0.14%, when compared to the variable annual, 1880-2019, temperature record; 3) Changes in the concentration of water vapor and changes in water vapor heating are not a feedback response to changes in the concentration of CO2; 4) Rather, increases in water vapor heating and increases in the concentration of water vapor drive each other in an autonomous positive feedback loop; 5) This feedback loop can be brought to a halt if the average global rate of precipitation can be brought into balance with the average global rate of evaporation and maintained there; and, 6) The recent increases in average global temperature can be reversed, if average global precipitation can be increased sufficiently to slightly exceed the average rate of evaporation.