Christopher Callahan, Justin Mankin

Changes in temperature averages, variability, and extremes may all independently affect economic growth under climate change. Kotz et al. (2021) show that temperature variability reduces growth, but find no significant effect of temperature extremes. Recreating their results, here we show that temperature extremes do indeed affect growth independently from the effects of variability. Our results emphasize the need to consider multiple related moments of the temperature distribution when analyzing climate damages and to use metrics of temperature extremes that are relative to the local climate.