Climate Change's Impact on U.S Agriculture: An Academic Debate

Recently, environmental economists have debated how costly will climate change be for U.S agriculture. The new "conventional wisdom" was published this year in the American Economic Review. Deschenes and Greenstone use county level data and employ county level fixed effects to present empirical evidence. Their punchline is that climate change's effects on U.S agriculture will be small.

At this Columbia University webpage, Climate Change and Agriculture: A Reassessment of the Reassessment --- you can download the debate that this paper has generated.

In this new working paper,
http://www.columbia.edu/~ws2162/agClimateChange/agClimateChange.pdf

the authors challenge a number of points in the Deschenes and Greenstone study and present their own estimates. This debate is interesting on at least 4 different levels;

1. The policy issue is of 1st order importance so it is important to get the empirical facts straight
2. By sharing data and computer code, each set of authors can show how they generated their results and the other set of authors can study the robustness of the previous results to changes in assumptions and data coding.
3. Future graduate students can build on these studies by taking the data posted here and making their contribution.
4. This is good gossip. Debates between excellent economists help to focus attention on an issue and create the right incentives for researchers to be careful and honest in their empirical work.

I don't know who is right here but at least this feels like a real scientific discussion where assumptions and researcher choices are made clear.