Catastrophe climatique irréversible et politique de l'effet de serre

This paper considers the issue of a catastrophic environmental collapse and the way one should deal with it. In the model used here, one faces the choice to cross or not a critical threshold of pollution, which consequences are a definitive destruction of some environmental characteristic. The introduced decision-rule compares the economic cost of the emission constraint, designed to avoid the catastrophe, to the damage of the catastrophic event. Depending on the order between this alternative costs, the good choice can be either to cross the threshold of pollution or to respect it.