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Notes
The time horizon considered can range considerably from a century (Kandlikar 1996) to multiple millennia as in the FUND model. The recent United States government SCC exercise used a fixed terminal period of 2300.
The full names of the models are: Dynamic Integrated Climate and Economy (DICE), Policy Analysis of the Greenhouse Effect (PAGE), and Climate Framework for Uncertainty, Negotiations, and Distribution (FUND). These IAMs are highly aggregated, and can be distinguished from more disaggregated, process-based IAMs that traditionally have been used for mitigation policy analysis but have not generally attempted to represent comprehensively climate feedbacks upon human systems.
Many damages have only been studied at low to moderate levels of climate change (e.g. changes of 2.5° to 3°C global average temperature). However, even at these levels of warming the level of agreement among IAMs about specific sectoral impacts is low (e.g., Kopp and Mignone 2012). Multiple methods to extrapolate damages from temperature changes beyond this level have been proposed (e.g., Kopp et al. 2012a).
Parallel to but independent of this special issue, a special issue of Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Deliberation E-Journal contains additional related papers on the SCC (Kopp et al. 2012b)
Although not included in this special issue, Nordhaus (2011) has examined SCC estimates from his latest multi-regional model, RICE 2011, a regionalized and updated version of the DICE model used in the U.S. government analysis.
Though they are treated as accurate to the nearest dollar for U.S. regulatory analyses, unresolvable uncertainties will always prevent confidence in the SCC estimates to this degree of precision. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2009) concluded “only rough order-of-magnitude estimates of marginal climate damages are possible at this time.”
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The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or the United States Government.
This article is part of a Special Issue on “Improving the Assessment and Valuation of Climate Change Impacts for Policy and Regulatory Analysis” edited by Alex L. Marten, Kate C. Shouse, and Robert E. Kopp.
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Marten, A.L., Kopp, R.E., Shouse, K.C. et al. Improving the assessment and valuation of climate change impacts for policy and regulatory analysis. Climatic Change 117, 433–438 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0608-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0608-0