Publication: Trends in distributional characteristics: existence of global warming
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2020-01-01
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Elsevier
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Abstract
What type of global warming exists? This study introduces a novel methodology
to answer this question, which is the starting point for all issues related to
climate change analyses. Global warming is defined as an increasing trend in
certain distributional characteristics (moments, quantiles, etc.) of global temperatures,
in addition to simply examining the average values. Temperatures
are viewed as a functional stochastic process from which we obtain distributional
characteristics as time series objects. Here, we present a simple robust
trend test and prove that it is able to detect the existence of an unknown trend
component (deterministic or stochastic) in these characteristics. Applying this
trend test to daily temperatures in Central England (for the period 1772-2017)
and to global cross-sectional temperatures (1880-2015), we obtain the same
strong conclusions: (i) there is an increasing trend in all distributional characteristics
(time series and cross-sectional), and this trend is larger in the lower
quantiles than it is in the mean, median, and upper quantiles; (ii) there is a
negative trend in the characteristics that measure dispersion (i.e., lower temperatures
approach the median faster than higher temperatures do). This type
of global warming has more serious consequences than those found by analyzing
only the average.
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Keywords
Climate change, Distributional characteristic, Functional stochastic process, Global local warming, Quantile, Temperature distribution, Trend
Bibliographic citation
Gadea Rivas, M. D., & Gonzalo, J. (2020). Trends in distributional characteristics: Existence of global warming. Journal of Econometrics, 214, pp. 153–174