Mr. Phillips' Paper Goes to the Washington Post: How Clearer Air Could Make Global Warming Worse

On March 14, the Washington Post published a piece on how aerosol’s cooling effect impacts greenhouse warming referencing a research study co-authored by Professor Peter C. B. Phillips in this month’s Nature Geoscience.  Several statistical methods on nonstationary time series and panels co-developed by Phillips were used in the study including the Phillips-Perron, KPSS, and Phillips-Ouliaris tests.  The methods, commonly applied to economic time series, were used to decompose observed temperature trends into components attributable to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and surface radiation.  Results from the statistical analysis suggest greenhouse gas emissions during the last 50 years have had a greater effect on the climate than had been previously thought. The study’s lead author, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science Trude Storelvmo also works at Yale in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and a third author, Thomas Leirvik, was a former post-doctoral associate in the Department of Economics and Yale Climate and Energy Institute. Read the full article on the Washington Post’s site.