Climate change and agriculture reconsidered
Despite the existence of a large and growing literature on the potential impact of climate change on agriculture, there still exists some disagreement about the magnitude and even the sign. Research suggests that the impact on U.S. agriculture is likely to be strongly negative, based on a series of studies in which link farmland values to climate variables, and crop yields to both climate and yearly weather variables. Results are significant, robust, and consistent across data sets and methods. A recent but influential study by Deschenes and Greenstone reports dramatically different results: based on regressions of agricultural profits and yields on weather variables, they conclude that the impact of climate change will be either insignificant or positive. This paper reconcile these conflicting results.