Bumping against a Gas Ceiling

The adoption of physical thresholds as a ceiling for permitted climate change sidesteps contentious issues such as: policy cost, impact valuation, discounting and equity. In this paper I offer some reflections on the concept of tolerable climate change. I also use an integrated climate assessment model (ICAM-3) to demonstrate how uncertainties in our understanding of socioeconomic and earth systems reduce the probability of success in keeping climate change within a pre-defined tolerable range. Finally, I explore the implications of socioeconomic thresholds for welfare loss in pursuit of a climate policy (e.g., tax rebellions). Crossing such regional socioeconomic thresholds will lead to local failures to pursue climate change mitigation policies — increasing the probability of straying beyond the tolerable window of global climate change. Given various uncertainties and the dynamics of the socioeconomic and the earth systems, the odds of success in staying within a climate change window of T 2°C, and T/yr 0.015°C are estimated to be no higher than 25% over the next century. A risk-risk tradeoff approach appears to hold promise, but while adoption of a larger window of tolerance increases the probability of success, it also opens the window specification criteria to contention.