Climate system properties determining the social cost of carbon

Abstract

The choice of an appropriate scientific target to guide global mitigation efforts is complicated by uncertainties in the temperature response to greenhouse gas emissions. Much climate policy discourse has been based on the equilibrium global mean temperature increase following a concentration stabilization scenario. This is determined by the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) which, in many studies, shows persistent, fat-tailed uncertainty. However, for many purposes, the equilibrium response is less relevant than the transient response. Here, we show that one prominent policy variable, the social cost of carbon (SCC), is generally better constrained by the transient climate response (TCR) than by the ECS. Simple analytic expressions show the SCC to be directly proportional to the TCR under idealized assumptions when the rate at which we discount future damage equals 2.8%. Using ensemble simulations of a simple climate model we find that knowing the true value of the TCR can reduce the relative uncertainty in the SCC substantially more, up to a factor of 3, than knowing the ECS under typical discounting assumptions. We conclude that the TCR, which is better constrained by observations, less subject to fat-tailed uncertainty and more directly related to the SCC, is generally preferable to the ECS as a single proxy for the climate response in SCC calculations. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.