Scientific uncertainty and climate change: Part I. Uncertainty and unabated emissions

Uncertainty and Climate Change Policy

Uncertainty is a pervasive feature of climate change analysis. This paper explores the consequences for policymakers. Importantly, uncertainty means that every policy has a range of possible outcomes rather than a single estimate. At a minimum, this requires policymakers to decide how to compare these different outcomes and to determine the likelihood that each outcome occurs. While objective a...

Uncertainty and Climate Change Policy

layer over the South Pole in the late 1970s went undetected for years. The satellite instrumentation did not fail; rather, the computer programs written to analyze the vast volumes of satellite data were instructed to reject measurements that diverged sharply from expected normal conditions. Amazingly, the rejected values were called to no one’s attention. Noticing outliers in ground-based reco...

Uncertainty of Climate Change and Synoptic Parameters and modeling the trends

Bounded uncertainty and climate change economics.

It has been argued recently that the combination of risk aversion and an uncertainty distribution of future temperature change with a heavy upper tail invalidates mainstream economic analyses of climate change policy. A simple model is used to explore the effect of imposing an upper bound on future temperature change. The analysis shows that imposing even a high bound reverses the earlier argum...

Uncertainty , Extreme Outcomes , and Climate Change

Focusing on tail effects — low probability but very adverse outcomes — I incorporate distributions for temperature change and its economic impact in an analysis of climate change policy. I estimate the fraction of consumption w(τ ) that society would be willing to sacrifice to ensure that any increase in temperature at a future point is limited to τ . Using information on the distributions for ...