Essays on climate change: Economic impacts and public opinion analysis

The past few decades have witnessed an increasing concern among researchers, political groups, governmental agencies as well as citizens across the world regarding global warming which is an inherent aspect of long term climate change. In order to understand and analyze policy considerations incorporating climate change, this dissertation explored the issue of climate change from three individual perspectives. The first essay used a climate data based economic modeling approach to predict future impacts of climate change in the Texas High Plains. The results indicated that climate change will lead to reduction in groundwater availability and irrigated production, consequently affecting the farm revenue and crop mix in the study region. The second essay evaluated the impact of climatic and socio-economic variables on agricultural land prices under different land uses in the Northern and Southern High Plains of Texas, using a Ricardian approach. The results suggested that temperature changes significantly influenced the productivity of irrigated land thereby strongly impacting the land prices, when compared to dryland and ranchland, while ranchland prices were significantly influenced by precipitation. Finally the third essay analyzed the importance of various individual and macro variables in shaping the cross-national perceptions of citizens in high carbon emitting nations regarding the seriousness of global warming, and their willingness to pay for environmental concerns.