David Barker decries climate alarmists’ bad ‘science

Via Cafe Hayek. See Climate Alarmists’ Bad Science: Advocates conduct shoddy research in an effort to show that warming will reduce economic growth in The WSJ. Mr. Barker runs a real-estate and finance company. He has taught economics and finance at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa and worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Excerpts:

"I debunked research by the Federal Reserve and top academic economists on the economics of climate change. An author of a paper I debunked then said that three professors from Stanford and Berkeley had done a much better analysis of temperature and growth in an article they published in Nature. I took up the challenge and scrutinized their article. My critique appears in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.

The Nature article is in the top 0.1% of academic economics publications by citations, and it has received glowing press coverage. I downloaded their data and found that, as with the other articles I debunked, the results don’t hold up under scrutiny.

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Rather than uncovering a consistent relationship between growth and temperature around the world, their results are driven by relatively few countries. Dropping Greenland and a group of contiguous northern and central African countries, for example, eliminates the practical and statistical significance of their results.

The authors claim that there is no tendency for their results to diminish over time, because they find that the results for 1961-89 and 1990-2010 are similar. But changing the cutoff year to 1990 instead of 1989 changes this conclusion, because the data from 1991-2010 show no statistically significant relationship between growth and temperature. Because some countries are missing data from early years, a cutoff of 1990 would do a better job of matching the number of observations between the two periods. There is also evidence that if a result is present at all, it is completely reversed the following year.

I also produce simulated data with random numbers representing temperature and growth that are correlated by region, but with no relationship between temperature and growth. I find that the authors’ method is likely to indicate a statistically significant relationship even though the data are constructed to have no such relationship.

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The law of supply and demand applies to tomatoes and also to ideas. Demand for research that bolsters arguments for bad policy leads to supply of research. Truth provides some constraints but doesn’t always prevail.

Fortunately, such publications as Econ Journal Watch give a platform to researchers who challenge reigning propaganda. More academics and independent researchers are uncovering bias, fraud and plagiarism, bringing a bit of discipline to a field greatly in need of it."