To hedge or not against an uncertain climate future?

Science

Volumn 306, Issue 5695, 2004, Pages 416-417

  Yohe, Gary ^a   Andronova, Natasha ^b   Schlesinger, Michael ^b  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CLIMATE CHANGE;

CLIMATE; CLIMATE CHANGE; GREENHOUSE EFFECT; GREENHOUSE GAS; POLICY; PRIORITY JOURNAL; REVIEW;

EID: 5644297035     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.1101170     Document Type: Review

References (13)

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2. A. S. Manne, "A summary of poll results: EMF 14 Subgroup on Uncertainty" (Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA, 1995).
3. G. Yohe, Glob. Environ. Change 6, 87 (1996).
4. W. D. Nordhaus, J. Boyer, Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001).
5. N. G. Andronova, M. E. Schlesinger, J. Geophys. Res. 106 (D19), 22605 (2001).
6. P. D. Jones, A. Moberg, J. Climate 16, 206 (2003).
7. Table S1 of the supporting material provides the precise calibration of the CDF for climate sensitivity.
8. J. Smith, S. Hitz, "Estimating the global impact of climate change" [ENV/EPOC/GSP(2003)12, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris, 2003].
9. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001), chapter 19.
10. S. Schneider, "Abrupt non-linear climate change, irreversibility and surprise" (ENV/EPOC/GSP(2003)13, OECD, Paris, 2003).
11. R. J. Lempert, M. E. Schlesinger, Clim. Change 45, 387 (2000).
12. These costs represent only the added expense of having been wrong in setting mitigation policy relative to the ultimate resolution of the temperature target and of uncertainty about climate sensitivity. The supporting online material records net benefits (using perfect knowledge in 2005 as a baseline) to show that the discounted costs of achieving specific temperature targets can be much larger than these adjustment costs.
13. G.Y. was supported by NSF through its funding of the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carnegie Mellon University under Cooperative Agreement SBR 95-21914. N.A. and M.S. were supported by NSF under Award No. ATM-008420. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.