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Decomposing the anthropogenic causes of climate change

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Abstract

Awareness of the risks imposed by the ongoing process of climate change has led to progressive efforts at coordination at the global level, highlighting the need for shared efforts to achieve common goals. This study provides a contribution to the discussion through an analysis of the human contribution to climate change, highlighting the complexity of policy measures and the long amount of time required to reduce, or at least contain, the ongoing process of climate change. Our results remark the key role played by demographic pressure and the limited contribution that technological progress can provide to contain climate change. Overall, the core socio-economic and political paradigms on which current lifestyle is predominantly based are put under the spotlight. The results of the analysis question the very basis of economic growth and modern lifestyle and raise the prospect of some difficult but necessary behavioural changes.

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Notes

  1. There is a vast literature on climate change and on the analysis of its causes. For the sake of simplicity, this review is limited to contributions which are most relevant to this study.

  2. He also estimated that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would produce a rise in temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius, a figure that is well within the range estimated today.

  3. For instance, this is the case of some pollutants, which offset some of the warming, as well as of the removal of dark forests, which are replaced with lighter patches which reflect more sunlight and have some cooling effect (Miller et al. 2014).

  4. In order to account for small sample sizes, Narayan (2005) has calculated new critical values of the F-test. These are commonly used in studies conducted on limited data.

  5. The natural factors included in the analysis are: orbital changes, solar temperature, and volcanic activity; the anthropogenic factors are: greenhouse gases, ozone pollution, aerosol pollution, land use, and deforestation.

  6. We find this approach preferable to the alternative option of making use of estimates based on total factor productivity. In fact, despite the methodological similarities between the two approaches, in the case of TFP the focus on CO2 emissions as a side-effect of technical progress and economic growth would be somehow lost, due to other factors included in the estimation of TFP.

  7. When CO2 emissions are compared directly with CO2 levels, there is a strong correlation in the long-term trends. It is reasonable to imagine that the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere might have a causality link with the amount of CO2 that remains in the atmosphere. This is independently confirmed by carbon isotopes which find that the falling ratio of C13/C12 correlates well with fossil fuel emissions (Ghosh and Brand 2003).

  8. It is worth recalling Dyson’s expression: “… a significant rise in global CO2 emissions … will happen due to population growth, but it will happen much more because of the fueling of economic growth” (Dyson 2005).

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Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges comments received on an earlier version of this article from two anonymous referees. Usual disclaimer applies.

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  1. School of International Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

    Alessandro De Matteis

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Appendix

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Source: Miller et al. (2014)

Instantaneous global radiative forcing.

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De Matteis, A. Decomposing the anthropogenic causes of climate change. Environ Dev Sustain 21, 165–179 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-017-0028-4

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