Fifteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Semi-empirical is a standard approach that is widely used by climate scientists to project the sea level rise, for example, work by Rahmstorf (2007, 2009), Grinsted et al. (2009), and Orlic& Pasaric (2013, 2015). The sea level projections from the these past studies tend to vary widely depending on the relationship assumed and the data used. In this paper, we propose a new approach, which is built on a well-known Econometric model, namely the Error Correction Model (Engle and Granger, 1987), to estimate the relationship between the sea level rise and the global warming. The main advantages of our approach are: 1. sound empirical framework as the ECM model is a well established approach in the Economics literature; 2. capable of estimating both the long-term relationship between the sea level and the temperature, and short-term dynamics of such relationship; 3. the framework is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of assumptions, therefore can be expanded in future research. Using data from 1882 to 2020, our model estimates that for every one degree Celsius increase in global temperature, the sea level will rise by 279 millimeters over the course of 46 years. The magnitude of our estimate is within the range of the past studies.The parameters from our estimates are statistically significant and the model back tests well in the out-of-sample testing. We then construct sea level rise projections corresponding to different IPCC climate paths. At conclusion, we also propose several future research options that can further refine our method.