Uncertainty Analysis of Climate Change and Policy Response

By M. Webster, C. Forest, J. Reilly, M. Babiker, D. Kicklighter, Monika. Mayer, R. Prinn, M. Sarofim, A. Sokolov, Peter H. Stone and 1 more. 2003

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To aid climate policy decisions, accurate quantitative descriptions of the uncertainty in climate outcomes under various possible policies are needed. Here, we apply an earth systems model to describe the uncertainty in climate projections under two different policy scenarios. This study illustrates an internally consistent uncertainty analysis of one climate assessment modeling framework, propagating uncertainties in both economic and climate components, and constraining climate parameter uncertainties based on observation. We find that in the absence of greenhouse gas emissions restrictions, there is a one in forty chance that global mean surface temperature change will exceed 4.9 °C by the year 2100. A policy case with aggressive emissions reductions over time lowers the temperature change to a one in forty chance of exceeding 3.2 °C, thus reducing but not eliminating the chance of substantial warming.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d68a6978cfdf345acf76892662331a0f9279fd52

Citations in the corpus

• Does climate policy need probabilities (2003, unknown): “Webster et al. (2003) have recently combined probabilistic GHG emissions (Webster et al., 2002) with constrains on climate parameters from observations (Forest et al., 2002).”
• Less Than 2 °C Warming by 2100 Unlikely (2017, unknown): “Other probabilistic forecasting methods for emissions and temperature increase have been proposed, using combinations of statistical modeling, expert elicitation and scenarios 25–28 ; in contrast, our approach is fully statistical.”
• Global economic effects of changes in crops, pasture, and forests due to changing climate, carbon dioxide, and ozone (2007, unknown): “There is considerable uncertainty in future temperature projections and so an increase of 4 to 5°C cannot be ruled out if GHGs are uncontrolled (Webster et al., 2003).”
• Issues related to mitigation in the long-term context (2007, unknown): “Examples include probabilistic projections for population (Lutz and Sanderson, 2001) and CO 2 emissions (Webster et al., 2002, 2003; O'Neill, 2004).”