Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change

Parson, Edward A.; Fisher‐Vanden, Karen

doi:10.1146/annurev.energy.22.1.589

Cited by 110 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 106 publications

(106 reference statements)

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“…Building on energy modeling approaches initially developed in the 1970s, IAMs saw a surge of activity in the 1990s coincident with the first serious policy attention to climate change. Major reviews of IAMs include Weyant et al, 5 Parson and FisherVanden, 6 Rotmans and Dowlatabadi, 7 and Kelly and Kolstad. 8 IAMs take various approaches to representing climate decision-making, but most presume optimal climate policy-making by a unitary agent.…”

Section: Treatment Of Uncertainty and Intertemporal Choice In Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential climate change policy

Parson

Karwat

2011

WIREs Climate Change

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Successfully managing global climate change will require a process of sequential, or iterative, decision-making, whereby policies and other decisions are revised repeatedly over multiple decades in response to changes in scientific knowledge, technological capabilities, or other conditions. Sequential decisions are required by the combined presence of long lags and uncertainty in climate and energy systems. Climate decision studies have most often examined simple cases of sequential decisions, with two decision points at fixed times and initial uncertainties that are resolved at the second decision point. Studies using this formulation initially suggested that increasing uncertainty favors stronger immediate action, while the prospect of future learning favors weaker immediate action, but subsequent work with more general formulations showed that the direction of either effect is indeterminate, depending on multiple elements of model structure and parameter values. Current issues in sequential climate decision-making include assessing responses to potential slow learning or negative learning, and examining the implications of various mechanisms by which current decision-makers may seek to influence future decisions by altering the choice sets, knowledge states, marginal costs and benefits, or default procedural requirements faced by future decisionmakers. 

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Section: Treatment Of Uncertainty and Intertemporal Choice In Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential climate change policy

Parson

Karwat

2011

WIREs Climate Change

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“…The primary ecological concern in this classical social theory was to understand how nature constrains society and, more particularly, how to separate and transcend society from the constraints of nature (Goldblatt 1996). Understanding of global environmental change is built upon interdisciplinary research (Chen et al 1983;Parson & Fisher-Vanden 1997;Liverman 1999;Edwards 2001). In the area of climate change, the authoritative IPCC reports demonstrate efforts made by governments to bring together key research findings in areas ranging from physical climate modelling to economic dimensions of the problem and possible solutions.…”

Section: Science Society and Climate Change Interactions: A Conceptumentioning

confidence: 99%

Global warming in the public sphere

Corfee-Morlot

Maslin

Burgess

2007

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

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Although the science of global warming has been in place for several decades if not more, only in the last decade and a half has the issue moved clearly into the public sphere as a public policy issue and a political priority. To understand how and why this has occurred, it is essential to consider the history of the scientific theory of the greenhouse effect, the evidence that supports it and the mechanisms through which science interacts with lay publics and other elite actors, such as politicians, policymakers and business decision makers. This article reviews why and how climate change has moved from the bottom to the top of the international political agenda. It traces the scientific discovery of global warming, political and institutional developments to manage it as well as other socially mediated pathways for understanding and promoting global warming as an issue in the public sphere. The article also places this historical overview of global warming as a public issue into a conceptual framework for understanding relationships between society and nature with emphasis on the co-construction of knowledge.

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“…Integrated assessment models (IAMs) couple human and physical Earth systems to explore the impacts of economic and environmental policies (Parson and Fisher-Vanden, 1997;Parson et al, 2007). IAMs are usually calibrated to a historical base year and simulate forward in time by incorporating changes in quantities such as population, GDP, technology, and policy to produce outputs that include land use, emissions, and commodity prices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of integrated assessment model hindcast experiments: a case study of the GCAM 3.0 land use module

2017

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Abstract. Hindcasting experiments (conducting a model forecast for a time period in which observational data are available) are being undertaken increasingly often by the integrated assessment model (IAM) community, across many scales of models. When they are undertaken, the results are often evaluated using global aggregates or otherwise highly aggregated skill scores that mask deficiencies. We select a set of deviation-based measures that can be applied on different spatial scales (regional versus global) to make evaluating the large number of variable-region combinations in IAMs more tractable. We also identify performance benchmarks for these measures, based on the statistics of the observational dataset, that allow a model to be evaluated in absolute terms rather than relative to the performance of other models at similar tasks. An ideal evaluation method for hindcast experiments in IAMs would feature both absolute measures for evaluation of a single experiment for a single model and relative measures to compare the results of multiple experiments for a single model or the same experiment repeated across multiple models, such as in community intercomparison studies. The performance benchmarks highlight the use of this scheme for model evaluation in absolute terms, providing information about the reasons a model may perform poorly on a given measure and therefore identifying opportunities for improvement. To demonstrate the use of and types of results possible with the evaluation method, the measures are applied to the results of a past hindcast experiment focusing on land allocation in the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) version 3.0. The question of how to more holistically evaluate models as complex as IAMs is an area for future research. We find quantitative evidence that global aggregates alone are not sufficient for evaluating IAMs that require global supply to equal global demand at each time period, such as GCAM. The results of this work indicate it is unlikely that a single evaluation measure for all variables in an IAM exists, and therefore sector-by-sector evaluation may be necessary.

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Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change

Cited by 110 publications

References 106 publications

Sequential climate change policy

Sequential climate change policy

Global warming in the public sphere

Evaluation of integrated assessment model hindcast experiments: a case study of the GCAM 3.0 land use module

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