How overconfident are current projections of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions?

Klaus Keller, Louise Miltich, Alexander Robinson and Richard Tol

No FNU-124, Working Papers from Research unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University

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.

Keywords: economics of climate change; scenarios; data assimilation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2007-01, Revised 2007-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: How Overconfident are Current Projections of Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Emissions? (2007)
Working Paper: How Overconfident are Current Projections of Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Emissions? (2007)
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