Uncertainty , Extreme Outcomes , and Climate Change

نویسنده

  • Robert S. Pindyck
چکیده

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 temperature change and economic impact from studies assembled by the IPCC and from “integrated assessment models” (IAMs), I fit displaced gamma distributions for these variables. Unlike existing IAMs, I model economic impact as a relationship between temperature change and the growth rate of GDP as opposed to the level of GDP. This allows warming to have a permanent impact on future GDP. I find that the fitted distributions for temperature change and economic impact yield values of w(τ ) above 2 or 3% for small values of τ only for extreme parameter values and/or substantial shifts in the temperature distribution — which does not support the immediate adoption of a stringent abatement policy. JEL Classification Numbers: Q5; Q54, D81

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Climate Change Impact on Precipitation Extreme Events in Uncertainty Situation; Passing from Global Scale to Regional Scale

Global warming and then climate change are important topics studied by researchers throughout the world in the recent decades. In these studies, climatic parameters changes are investigated. Considering large-scaled output of AOGCMs and low precision in computational cells, uncertainty analysis is one of the principles in doing hydrological studies. For this reason, it is tried that investigati...

متن کامل

Impacts of climate change on extreme precipitation events in arid (Bandar Abbas) and semi-arid (Shahrekord) stations in Iran

The aim of this paper is to project extreme precipitation events in an arid and a semiarid station. In order to project climate change based on general circulation models (GCMs), we have applied LARS-WG[1] downscaling tool. This stochastic weather generator down-scaled the climate of two synoptic stations using HADCM3 model and A2 emission scenario for 2040. We extracted extreme precipitation e...

متن کامل

The survey of linkage between climate changes and desertification using extreme climate index software

Climate is the most important factor which control desertification .In order to detect climate changes in desert zones, time trend analysis is applied to extreme indices in Kashan station using extreme climate index software (ECIS). Results show significant trends in extreme indices during the past decade 1995-2004 and the pronounced warming is associated with a negative trend in cold extremes....

متن کامل

Analysis of Extreme Temperature Change Trend under Future Scenarios in order to Assess Climate Fluctuations (Case Study: Sanandaj and Saghez Synoptic Stations)

Climate change is a phenomenon that has affected natural ecosystems and all aspects of human life in recent years. Therefore, identifying and predicting climate change can greatly help manage it and reduce its harmful effects. The purpose of the present study is to identify whether or not occurrence of climate change by extreme indices including TXx and TNn during 1961-2015. In addition, CanESM...

متن کامل

GHG Targets as Insurance Against Catastrophic Climate Damages

A critical issue in climate-change economics is the speci…cation of the so-called “damages function”and its interaction with the unknown uncertainty of catastrophic outcomes. This paper asks how much we might be misled by our economic assessment of climate change when we employ a conventional quadratic damages function and/or a thin-tailed probability distribution for extreme temperatures. The ...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2009