Another talk in NYU’s Statistics in Society series. It looks interesting:

MIT economist Michael Greenstone will be giving a talk entitled “Weather and Death in India: Mechanisms and Implications for Climate Change”. The talk will take place on Tuesday May 5th from 4:15-5:30 in the Kimmel Center, Room 914.

This lecture discusses research on the impact of inter-annual variation in weather on well being in India. The results indicate that high temperatures dramatically increase mortality rates; for example, 1 additional day with a mean temperature above 32° C, relative to aday in the 22° – 24° C range, increases the annual mortality rate by 0.9% in rural areas. This effect appears to be related to substantial reductions in the income of agricultural laborers due to these same hot days. Finally, the estimated temperature-mortality relationship and state of the art climate change projections reveal a substantial increase in mortality due to climate change, which greatly exceeds the expected impact in the US and other developed countries.

Michael Greenstone is a professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.