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How Overconfident are Current Projections of Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

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Author Info
Klaus Keller (Penn State University Park)
Louise I. Miltich (Penn State University Park)
Alexander Robinson (Penn State University Park)
Richard S.J. Tol (Economic and Social Research Institute)

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Abstract

Analyzing the risks of anthropogenic climate change requires sound probabilistic projections of CO2 emissions. Previous projections have broken important new ground, but many rely on out-of-range projections, are limited to the 21st century, or provide only implicit probabilistic information. Here we take a step towards resolving these problems by assimilating globally aggregated observations of population size, economic output, and CO2 emissions over the last three centuries into a simple economic model. We use this model to derive probabilistic projections of business-as-usual CO2 emissions to the year 2150. We demonstrate how the common practice to limit the calibration timescale to decades can result in biased and overconfident projections. The range of several CO2 emission scenarios (e.g., from the Special Report on Emission Scenarios) misses potentially important tails of our projected probability density function. Studies that have interpreted the range of CO2 emission scenarios as an approximation for the full forcing uncertainty may well be biased towards overconfident climate change projections.

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Paper provided by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in its series Working Papers with number 2007.39.

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Date of creation: Apr 2007
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Handle: RePEc:fem:femwpa:2007.39

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Related research
Keywords: Carbon Dioxide; Emissions; Scenarios; Data Assimilation; Markov Chain Monte Carlo;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters

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