scientific and economic literature that the IWG is actively following and that could provide guidance on, or methodologies for, addressing some of the limitations with the interim SC-GHG estimates.
5Scientific and Economic Advances
The research community has made considerable progress in developing new data and methods that will provide a path forward for bringing the USG SC-GHG estimates closer to the current frontier of climate science and economics and could address many of the National Academies’ (2017) recommendations. This research since 2010/2013 has advanced knowledge regarding each key component in the process of estimating the SC-GHG. This TSD does not intend to provide a detailed review of all these advancements, but this section does highlight some of the key research and new information that the IWG will be reviewing as it works to improve the SC-GHG estimates. As part of the process for updating the SC-GHG estimates by January 2022, the IWG will survey the scientific literature, including the economic literature, to identify advances to address the National Academies (2017) recommendations.
Climate system representation. There have been advancements in climate science since the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Synthesis report (IPCC 2007), which was the basis for the IWG decision on what equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) input to use in the IAM model runs. The conclusions of recent scientific assessments, e.g., from the IPCC (2014, 2018, 2019a, 2019b), the USGCRP (2016, 2018), and the National Academies (2016b, 2019), confirm and strengthen the science, updating projections of future climate change and documenting and attributing ongoing changes. In addition, there are reduced complexity climate models that could offer meaningful improvement over current representation of climate dynamics in existing IAMs (Nicholls et al. 2020). For example, the National Academies (2017) stated that the FAIR model (Smith et al., 2018) satisfies all of the criteria set by National Academies (2017) recommendations related to the representation of climate system dynamics, generates projections of future warming consistent with more complex, state of the art models, can be used to accurately characterize current best understanding of uncertainty, and can be easily implemented and transparently documented. Reduced complexity sea level rise models are also being developed that can provide projections for damage functions that require sea level estimates, including the contributions of thermal expansion and glacial and ice sheet melting based on recent scientific research (e.g., Wong et al. 2017).
Damage functions. At the core of IAMs are “damage functions” that map global mean temperature changes and other physical impacts of climate change into economic (both market[1] and nonmarket[2]) damages. Relative to how much progress has been made in modeling and improving our understanding of climate system dynamics and the physical impacts resulting from temperature change, efforts involved in, and the public resources targeted at, understanding how these physical changes translate into economic impacts have been significantly smaller (Auffhammer 2018). Even so, as illustrated in Figure 5, in the time since the versions of the IAMs used in this TSD were published, there has been an explosion of research on climate impacts and damages.
- ↑ Examples of market damages include changes in net agricultural productivity, energy use, and property damage from increased flood risk.
- ↑ Examples of nonmarket damages include services that natural ecosystems provide to society.
