Tipping points in the climate system and the economics of climate change | Simon Dietz & Thomas Stoerk

Simon and Thomas will be discussing the paper Tipping points in the climate system and the economics of climate change by Simon Dietz, James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, Gernot Wagner.

Abstract

Tipping points in the climate system are a key determinant of future impacts from climate change. Current consensus estimates for the economic impact of greenhouse gas emissions, however, do not yet incorporate tipping points.

The last decade has, at the same time, seen publication of over 50 individual research papers on how tipping points affect the economic impacts of climate change. These papers have typically incorporated an individual tipping point into an integrated climate-economy assessment model (IAM) such as DICE to study how the the tipping point affects economic impacts of climate change such as the social cost of carbon (SC-CO2). This literature, has, however, not yet been synthesized to study the joint effect of the large number of tipping points on the SC-CO2. SC-CO2 estimates currently used in climate policy are therefore too low, and they fail to reflect the latest research.

This paper brings together this large and active literature and proposes a way to jointly estimate the impact of tipping points. In doing so, we bridge an important gap between climate science and climate economics.