| dc.description.abstract | Evidence suggests that several elements of the climate system could be tipped into a
different state by global warming, causing irreversible economic damages. To address
their policy implications, we incorporated five interacting climate tipping points into a
stochastic-dynamic integrated assessment model, calibrating their likelihoods and
interactions on results from an existing expert elicitation. Here we show that combining
realistic assumptions about policymaker’s preferences under uncertainty, with the
prospect of multiple future interacting climate tipping points, increases the present
social cost of carbon (SCC) in the model nearly 8-fold from $15/tCO2 to $116/tCO2.
Furthermore, passing some tipping points increases the likelihood of other tipping
points occurring to such an extent that it abruptly increases the social cost of carbon.
The corresponding optimal policy involves an immediate, massive effort to control CO2
emissions, which are stopped by mid-century, leading to climate stabilization at <1.5 °C
warming above pre-industrial levels. | en_GB |
