2021/09/01 by Jarmo Kikstra, Paul Waidelich, James Rising +3 · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Environmental Science · Energy · #Climate Change Policy and Economics #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Energy, Environment, and Transportation Policies #Climate change #Damages #Environmental science #Carbon dioxide #Climate model #Global warming #Climatology #Ecology #Oceanography #Geology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac1d0b
openalex publication_date 2021/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract A key statistic describing climate change impacts is the ‘social cost of carbon dioxide’ (SCCO 2 ), the projected cost to society of releasing an additional tonne of CO 2 . Cost-benefit integrated assessment models that estimate the SCCO 2 lack robust representations of climate feedbacks, economy feedbacks, and climate extremes. We compare the PAGE-ICE model with the decade older PAGE09 and find that PAGE-ICE yields SCCO 2 values about two times higher, because of its climate and economic updates. Climate feedbacks only account for a relatively minor increase compared to other updates. Extending PAGE-ICE with economy feedbacks demonstrates a manifold increase in the SCCO 2 resulting from an empirically derived estimate of partially persistent economic damages. Both the economy feedbacks and other increases since PAGE09 are almost entirely due to higher damages in the Global South. Including an estimate of interannual temperature variability increases the width of the SCCO 2 distribution, with particularly strong effects in the tails and a slight increase in the mean SCCO 2 . Our results highlight the large impacts of climate change if future adaptation does not exceed historical trends. Robust quantification of climate-economy feedbacks and climate extremes are demonstrated to be essential for estimating the SCCO 2 and its uncertainty.