Fusion of experts’ opinions with the Transferable Belief Model: application to climate sensitivity

This paper uses the recently proposed cautious combination rule of the Transferable Belief Model to aggregate experts’ opinion on the climate sensitivity parameter. The non-independence of experts issue is dealt with by organizing experts into schools of thought, requiring non-interactivity only across but not within groups. The issue of dissonance, that is wide qualitative differences in beliefs, is dealt with by using a disjunctive rather than conjunctive rule to combine the groups. We find the fusion do not support the idea that climate sensitivity must necessarily be within the IPCC [1.5, 4.5] degree C range at any level, that the plausibility of the [4.5, 12] range is about 0.62, and for [6.0, 12] it is 0.31.