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28 - What is the economic value of information about climate thresholds?

from Part IV - Policy design and decisionmaking under uncertainty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

By
Klaus Keller ,
Seung-Rae Kim ,
Johanna Baehr ,
David F. Bradford  and
Michael Oppenheimer
Edited by
Michael E. Schlesinger ,
Haroon S. Kheshgi ,
Joel Smith ,
Francisco C. de la Chesnaye ,
John M. Reilly ,
Tom Wilson  and
Charles Kolstad
Klaus Keller
Affiliation:
208 Deike Building Department of Geosciences The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802, USA
Seung-Rae Kim
Affiliation:
Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Economics Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Johanna Baehr
Affiliation:
208 Deike Building Department of Geosciences The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802, USA
David F. Bradford
Affiliation:
208 Deike Building Department of Geosciences The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802, USA
Michael Oppenheimer
Affiliation:
Department of Geosciences Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Michael E. Schlesinger
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Haroon S. Kheshgi
Affiliation:
ExxonMobil Research and Engineering
Joel Smith
Affiliation:
Stratus Consulting Ltd, Boulder
Francisco C. de la Chesnaye
Affiliation:
US Environmental Protection Agency
John M. Reilly
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tom Wilson
Affiliation:
Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto
Charles Kolstad
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Summary

Introduction

The field of integrated assessment of climate change is undergoing a paradigm shift towards the analysis of potentially abrupt and irreversible climate changes (Alley et al., 2003; Keller et al., 2007). Early integrated studies broke important new ground in exploring the relationship between the costs and benefits of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (e.g., Nordhaus, 1991; Manne and Richels, 1991; or Tol, 1997). These studies project the climate response to anthropogenic CO2 emissions to be relatively smooth and typically conclude that the projected benefits of reducing CO2 emissions would justify only small reductions in CO2 emissions in a cost–benefit framework. The validity of the often- assumed smooth climate response is, however, questionable, given how the climate system has responded to forcing in the geological past. Before the Anthropocene, the geological time period where humans have started to influence the global biogeochemical cycles considerably (Crutzen, 2002), the predominant responses of the climate system were forced by small changes in solar insolation occurring on timescales of thousands of years (Berger and Loutre, 1991). Yet this slow and smooth forcing apparently triggered abrupt climate changes – a threshold response where the climate system moved between different basins of attraction (Berger, 1990; Clement et al., 2001). Anthropogenic forcing may trigger climate threshold responses in the future (Alley et al., 2003; Keller et al., 2007).

Type
Chapter
Information
Human-Induced Climate Change
An Interdisciplinary Assessment
 , pp. 343 - 354
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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