Date/Time
Date(s) - March 4, 2027
5:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Categories No Categories
Climate change is one of the most complex and divisive challenges confronting the world today. While the scientific basics are well established, many important questions, including those that determine optimal societal responses, remain uncertain and heavily contested.
How accurate are climate model warming projections? How harmful has past warming been, and will the harms get worse in the future? If we conclude that climate change threatens our future well-being, what should we spend trying to stop it?
The Houston Centre invites you to a public discussion of these questions with a lecture by Dr. Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph (UBC Ph.D. 1996) and a prominent expert on climate change economics.
McKitrick will argue that much of the discussion in the media, politics and even in academic settings overstates the threat. For example, he will discuss a recent decision by a subcommittee of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to withdraw the widely used but extreme RCP8.5 climate scenario after conceding its implausibility, suggesting that most past climate impact studies have likewise been exaggerated.
He will also argue that the questions in the title are distinct: even if we conclude climate change is harmful, it does not mean we should try and stop it if the costs of doing so outweigh the social and environmental benefits.
Dr. McKitrick’s lecture will be followed by a substantive (30 minute) response offered by Dr. Jonathan Proctor (UBC).
About the Speakers
Ross McKitrick
Ross McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph where he specializes in environmental economics and climate change. He has published widely on environmental economics, climate econometrics and energy policy.
His academic research has appeared in top economics and climate science journals and his book Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010.
His background in applied statistics has also led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including climate change attribution, paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation.
Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate.
Jonathan Proctor
Dr. Proctor currently works as assistant professor in Food and Resource Economics at the University of British Columbia. Before starting at UBC, after receiving his PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley in 2019, He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard with the Data Science Initiative and the Center for the Environment.
Dr. Proctor’s research group develops and applies new methods to empirically estimate anthropogenic impacts on climate and, in turn, on global socio-environmental systems. He focusses in particular on how light, water, and temperature jointly determine crop growth and how high resolution imagery can be used to measure socio-environmental conditions.
His research uses tools from economics, agronomy, climate science, remote sensing, and machine learning to help answer policy-relevant questions. For more information, see https://www.jonathanproctor.org/