Dynamics and economic aspects of climate change

Abstract

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992) denes climate change as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” Using this denition of climate change, a joint statement of several science academies concurred that in spite of uncertainties about something as complex as the world’s climate, there is now strong evidence that signicant global warming is occurring (National Academies, 2005). The scientic consensus-backed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organization, and a variety of scientic organizations and national academies-is that the process of global warming is attributed to anthropogenic inuence, that is, to gases emitted into the atmosphere from industrial, agricultural, transport, and other types of human activity (National Academies, 2005). The so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs) increase the capture of solar radiation by allowing less infrared radiation from the sun to be deected back into outer space. Climate change is related to a number of GHGs, including.