ESD Search Seminar

Considering Risk and Uncertainty in Designing Climate Change Policy

By Mort David Webster

Abstract:
In this talk, Mort will frame the question of climate policy choice as one of risk management and sequential decision under uncertainty. Mort will overview previous work that found that the choice of near-term emissions reductions depends critically on assumptions of how much and by when will uncertainty be reduced. To explore the potential timing of reduced uncertainty in climate projections, Mort applies Bayes rule to update prior probability distributions for climate sensitivity based on observations generated from a 2D (zonally-averaged) climate model. Mort will demonstrate the importance of considering additional sources of uncertainty, and that as a best estimate, observations alone will not reduce uncertainty soon enough to justify a weak near-term target (i.e., stronger precautionary policies appear warranted).