Not all carbon dioxide emission scenarios are equally likely: a subjective expert assessment

Emily Ho (), David V. Budescu, Valentina Bosetti, Detlef P. Vuuren and Klaus Keller
Additional contact information
Emily Ho: Fordham University
David V. Budescu: Fordham University
Detlef P. Vuuren: Utrecht University
Klaus Keller: Pennsylvania State University

Climatic Change, 2019, vol. 155, issue 4, No 6, 545-561

Abstract: Abstract Climate researchers use carbon dioxide emission scenarios to explore alternative climate futures and potential impacts, as well as implications of mitigation and adaptation policies. Often, these scenarios are published without formal probabilistic interpretations, given the deep uncertainty related to future development. However, users often seek such information, a likely range or relative probabilities. Without further specifications, users sometimes pick a small subset of emission scenarios and/or assume that all scenarios are equally likely. Here, we present probabilistic judgments of experts assessing the distribution of 2100 emissions under a business-as-usual and a policy scenario. We obtain the judgments through a method that relies only on pairwise comparisons of various ranges of emissions. There is wide variability between individual experts, but they clearly do not assign equal probabilities for the total range of future emissions. We contrast these judgments with the emission projection ranges derived from the shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) and a recent multi-model comparison producing probabilistic emission scenarios. Differences on long-term emission probabilities between expert estimates and model-based calculations may result from various factors including model restrictions, a coverage of a wider set of factors by experts, but also group think and inability to appreciate long-term processes.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-019-02500-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:155:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10584-019-02500-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-019-02500-y

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().