Climate Change: State of Science and Implications for Policy

Ronald G. Prinn, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Introduction
Global climate change is the subject of policy debate within most nations, and of negotiations within the Conference of Parties (COP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). But, what do we mean by the words climate and climate change? Climate is usefully defined as the average of the weather we experience over a ten-or twenty-year time period. Long-term temperature and rainfall changes are typical measures of climate change, and these changes can be expressed at the local, regional, country, or global scale. When the global average temperature changes we call that global warming or cooling. What produces global warming or cooling? Fundamentally, it can be driven by any imbalance between the energy the Earth receives, largely as visible light, from the sun, and the energy it radiates back to space as invisible infrared light. The greenhouse effect is a warming influence caused by the presence in the air of gases and clouds which are very efficient absorbers and radiators of this infrared light. The greenhouse effect is opposed by substances at the surface (such as snow and desert sand) and in the atmosphere (such as clouds and aerosols) which efficiently reflect sunlight back into space and are thus a cooling influence. Easily the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, which typically remains for a week or so in the atmosphere. Water vapor and clouds are handled internally in climate models, although with considerable uncertainty. Concerns about global warming, however, revolve around less important but much longer-lived greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. The concentrations of carbon dioxide and some other long-lived gases (methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons) have increased substantially over the past two centuries due at least in part to human activity. When the concentration of a greenhouse gas increases (with no other changes occurring), it temporarily lowers the flow of infrared energy to space and increases the flow of infrared energy down toward the surface. The Earth is then temporarily receiving more energy, for example 1 percent more, than it radiates to space. This small imbalance, which is often called "radiative forcing", tends to raise temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. The rate of surface temperature rise is slowed significantly by uptake of heat by the world's oceans. The greenhouse effect as quantified by this radiative forcing is real and the physics relatively well understood. What is much more uncertain, and the cause of much of the scientific debate, is the response of the complex system that determines our climate to this radiative forcing. Feedbacks in this system can either amplify or dampen the response in ways which are only partially understood at present. To inform policy development and implementation, there is need for integration of the diverse human and natural components of the problem. Climate research needs to focus on predictions of key variables such as rainfall, ecosystem productivity, and sea level that can be linked to estimates of economic, social, and environmental effects of possible climate change. Projections of emissions of greenhouse gases and atmospheric aerosol precursors need to be related to the economic, technological, and political forces, and to the expected results of international agreements. Also, these

assessments of possible societal and ecosystem impacts, and analyses of mitigation strategies, need to be based on realistic representations of the uncertainties of climate science. We have developed at MIT an Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) to help inform the policy process. It consists of a set of coupled sub-models of economic development and associated emissions, natural biogeochemical cycles, climate, and natural ecosystems (1Prinn et al., 1999). The IGSM is designed specifically to illuminate key issues linking science to policy. It attempts to include each of the major areas in the natural and social sciences that are amenable to quantitative analysis and are relevant to the issue of climate change. For example, how do the uncertainties in key component models, like those for ocean circulation and atmospheric convection, affect predictions important in policy analysis? Are feedbacks between component models, such as climate-induced changes in oceanic and terrestrial uptake of carbon dioxide, atmospheric chemistry, and terrestrial emissions of methane, important for making policy decisions? To answer such questions, and allow examination of a wide variety of proposed policies, the global system model must address the major human and natural processes involved in climate change, (2Schneider, 1992; 3Prinn & Hartley, 1992; 4a,4b,4c IPCC, 2001a,b,c) and also be computationally feasible for use in multiple 100-year predictions. However, priorities must be set as to what is important and what is not important in the model to ensure computational feasibility. We could simply couple together the most comprehensive existing versions of the component models. However, the resulting apparatus would be computationally so demanding that the many runs needed to understand inter-model feedbacks, address a wide range of policy measures, and study uncertainty would not be feasible with any current computer. Thus a major challenge in development of our global system model was to determine what processes really need to be included in detail, and which can be omitted or simplified. The structure of the IGSM is shown in Figure 1. Human activity leads to emissions of chemically and radiatively important trace gases. The anthropogenic emissions model incorporates the relevant demographic, economic, and technical forces involved in this process. Natural emissions of trace gases must also be predicted, and for this purpose the natural emissions model takes account of changes in both climate and ecosystem states. The coupled atmospheric chemistry and climate model is driven by a combination of anthropogenic and natural emissions. The essential components of this model are chemistry, atmospheric circulation, and ocean circulation, and each of these components by itself can require very large computer resources. The atmospheric chemistry is modeled in sufficient detail to capture its sensitivity to climate and different mixes of emissions, and to address the relationship among policies proposed for control of emissions related to air pollution, aerosols, and greenhouse gases (5Wang et al., 1998). For the atmosphere and ocean, the computer needed to adequately resolve the important small-scale eddies on a global scale for multiple century-long integrations, does not presently exist. Thus simplified treatments of these circulations are included in our current model (6Sokolov & Stone, 1998). Linking these complex models together leads to many challenges, illustrated well by the failure of all current coupled ocean-atmosphere models (including ours) to accurately simulate current climate without arbitrary adjustments. The coupled chemistry/climate model outputs then drive a terrestrial ecosystems model (7Xiao et al., 1998). This model then predicts vegetation changes, land carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes, and soil composition which feed back to the climate model, chemistry model, and natural emissions model. Not included in the present model, but planned for future versions, are the effects of changes in land cover

and surface albedo on climate, and the effects of changes in climate and ecosystems on agriculture and anthropogenic emissions.

Figure 1 - The schematic illustrates the framework and processes of the MIT Integrated Global System Model. Feedbacks between the component models that are currently included, or proposed for inclusion in the next generation, are shown as solid and dashed lines, respectively (Prinn et al., 1999). Our IGSM has several capabilities which are either not present or are simplified in other integrated models of the global climate system. The prediction of global anthropogenic emissions is based on a regionally disaggregated model of global economic growth. This allows treatment of a shifting geographical distribution of emissions over time and changing mixes of emissions, both of which affect atmospheric chemistry. Also, our model of natural emissions is coupled to the models for climate and land ecosystems which provide the needed explicit predictions of temperature, rainfall, and soil organic carbon concentrations. To attain the necessary computational efficiency while resolving key climate processes, we use a longitudinally averaged statistical-dynamical climate model which is two-dimensional (2D) but which also resolves the land and ocean (LO) at each latitude (and so is referred to as the 2D-LO model). It includes a simplified ocean model which is coupled to the atmosphere and includes representations of horizontal heat transport in the uppermost (mixed) layer and heat exchange between the mixed layer and deep ocean (Sokolov and Stone, 1998). It is capable of reproducing many characteristics of the current zonally-averaged climate, and its behavior and predictions are similar to those of coupled atmosphere-ocean three-dimensional general circulation models (GCMs), particularly the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) GCM from which it is derived. The 2D-LO model is about 20 times faster than the GISS GCM with similar latitudinal and vertical resolution. By choosing this

climate model, we are able to incorporate detailed atmospheric and oceanic chemistry interactively with climate with sufficient detail to allow study of key scientific and policy issues. In the latest version of the IGSM, a low-resolution three-dimensional (3D) ocean model replaces the 2D model to allow simulations of changes in the rate of the deep (thermohaline) oceanic circulation (8Kamenkovich et al., 2000). Fundamental ecosystem biogeochemical processes in 18 globally distributed terrestrial ecosystems are included in the ecosystem model. This model has sufficient biogeochemical and spatial detail to study both impacts of changes in climate and atmospheric composition on ecosystems, and relationships between ecosystems and chemistry, climate, natural emissions (Xiao et al., 1998), and (in future versions) agriculture. In summary, the above judicious choices and compromises have enabled detailed process-resolving models for all the relevant processes to be coupled in a computationally efficient form. With this computational efficiency comes the capability to identify and understand important feedbacks between model components and to compute sensitivities of policy-relevant variables (e.g., rainfall, temperature, ecosystem state) to assumptions in the various components and sub-components in the coupled models. Sensitivity analysis in turn enables assessment of what needs to be included or improved in future versions of the global system model, and what does not. I review the application of the IGSM to a number of policy-relevant issues in the following sections. Alternative approaches to all these issues exist as reviewed in IPCC (2001a,b,c). But the IGSM is arguably unique in its combination of scientific and economic detail and computational efficiency.

Uncertainty analysis
To help decision-makers to evaluate how policies might reduce the risk of climate impacts, quantitative assessment of uncertainty in climate projections are very useful. 9Webster et al. (2001) use hundreds of runs of the IGSM together with quantitative uncertainty techniques to achieve this assessment. Absent mitigation policies, the median projection in this study shows a global mean surface temperature rise from 1990 to 2100 of 2.3oC, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.9 oC to 5.3 oC (Webster et al., 2001). For comparison, the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports a range for the global mean surface temperature rise by 2100 of 1.4 to 5.8oC (1PCC, 2001a) but does not provide likelihood estimates for this key finding although it does for others. The IGSM physical climate model is flexible which enables it to accurately reproduce the global behavior of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) (Sokolov & Stone, 1998). This flexibility allows analysis of the effect of structural uncertainties present in existing 10 AOGCMs ( Forest et al., 2001). The Webster et al. (2001) study includes uncertainties in natural and anthropogenic emissions of all climatically important gases and aerosols (Prinn et al., 1999; 11Reilly et al., 1999, 12Reilly et al., 2000), in the critical atmospheric and oceanic interactions, and in the carboncycle feedbacks in land ecosystems and the ocean. Their estimates of key climate model uncertainties are constrained by observations of the climate system for the period 1906-1995 (13Forest et al., 2000), and uncertainty in emissions reflect errors in measurement of current emissions and expert judgment about variables that influence key economic projections.

The probability distribution function for the mean global surface temperature increase between 1990 and 2100 is shown in Figure 2. The results of the Webster et al. (2001) study suggest that there is about a 1 in 100 chance of a global mean surface temperature increase by 2100 as large as 5.8 oC. A caveat is that unknown and unmodeled processes (surprises) cannot be easily included in such analyses. In contrast to our analysis the IPCC does not indicate whether there is a 1 in 5 or 1 in 10,000 chance of exceeding its upper estimate of 5.8 oC (14Reilly et al., 2001; 15Allen et al., 2001).

Figure 2 - Probability density function for the change in global-mean surface temperature from 1990 to 2100, estimated as a best-fit of a beta distribution to 250 simulations using Latin Hypercube sampling from input distributions. The IPCC upper estimate is beyond our 95% confidence limit. Based on this distribution, there is a 12% chance that the temperature change in 2100 would be less than the IPCC lower estimate. Low probability-high impact events are important for policy considerations but it is critical to give some impression of their likelihood. Emissions reductions will lower the chance of exceeding an extreme climate outcome but not eliminate the risk entirely, and analysis of the reduction in probability is an important policy consideration. Future climate assessments would better serve the policy process by including formal analysis of uncertainty for key projections, with an explicit description of the methods used (Reilly et al., 2001).

Assessment of the Kyoto Protocol

Under the FCCC, the Kyoto Protocol allows reductions in emissions of several radiative gases to be credited against a carbon-equivalent emissions cap. A study using the IGSM (Reilly et al., 1999) showed that economic analyses that leave out non-CO2 gases err in several important ways: reference emissions are understated, allowable emissions in the commitment period are too low, and opportunities to reduce emissions of other gases are not considered in abatement options. Although the effects are partially offsetting, the inclusion of other relevant gases and carbon sinks reduces the costs of achieving CO2 emissions reductions specified by the Kyoto agreement. And achieving nearly the same reduction in warming by control of fossil CO2 only, ignoring other gases and sinks, could cost over 60% more. Extending the Kyoto Protocol using a more stringent emissions policy shows that the use of global warming potentials (GWPs) as defined in the Protocol leads to considerably more mitigation of climate change for multi-gas strategies than for the supposedly equivalent CO2-only control (i.e. in Figure 3, cases 2 and 3, and especially cases 2' and 3' differ significantly). This illustrates the limits of GWPs as a tool for political decision and the need to develop improved methods especially for use in the longer term.

Figure 3 - Predicted global and polar temperature changes from 1990 levels for four different policy cases. With the Kyoto Protocol extended to 2100 (cases 2 and 3) there is a 17% reduction in warming from the reference. With more aggressive policies after 2010 (cases 2' and 3') warming is reduced by about 55 and 85% respectively from the reference. Cases 2 and 2' convert non-CO2 emissions into CO2 emissions using GWPs. Cases 3 and 3' correctly consider all gases separately.

What is the economic impact of the Kyoto Protocol? While only the worlds wealthier countries will assume binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto agreement, countries that may not have agreed to share the burdens of control could also be affected. A study using the economics model of the IGSM (16Babiker et al., 2000) has shown how the effects of greenhouse-gas control measures taken by one set of nations will ripple through the international trade system due to worldwide economic links. As shown in Figure 4, adverse effects fall heavily on energy-exporting countries, and for some energy exporters, the impact is greater than on countries that are assuming commitments. Removing existing fuel taxes and subsidies, and using international permit trading, would reduce these adverse impacts, and also reduce the economic impacts on the countries taking on commitments (Babiker et al., 2000).

Figure 4. Costs of the Kyoto Protocol: The welfare implications in 2010 of alternative emissions trading schemes expressed as Equivalent Variation (EV) for each region.

Local air pollution and global climate

Urban air pollution has an impact on global chemistry, and thus climate. Air pollution is a problem in a steadily growing number of giant cities worldwide (Figure 5). The interconnection of pollution and climate hinders effective policy and decision making. To help unravel the interactions, an urban-scale air chemistry module was added to the IGSM to simulate the chemical reactions occurring in large cities, which are ignored in all other integrated assessment models. In a study of these phenomena (17Mayer et al., 2000), the inclusion of urban air chemistry processes led to lower global tropospheric NOx, ozone, and OH concentrations, and hence to more methane than in forecasts that neglect urban processing. The resulting changes, interestingly, have relatively little impact on the global mean surface temperature because ozone decreases partially offset the methane increases. However, this advance in the IGSM framework enables the simultaneous consideration of control policies applied to local air pollution and global climate. It also provides the capability to predict levels of irritants important to human health, such as ozone, in the growing number of megacities around the world.

Figure 5 - Projected increases in number of urban areas experiencing air pollution in each latitudinal band of the IGSM (Mayer et al., 2000).

Conclusions
With the above examples, I have attempted to demonstrate that integrated assessments using fully coupled models like the IGSM are invaluable tools for addressing a variety of important issues. These include discovery and elucidation of previously undetected feedbacks between natural and humanrelated components of the climate system, objective and quantitative assessments of uncertainty in forecasts of key climate and economic variables, and critical analysis of specific policy proposals. However, current knowledge of the stability of the great ice sheets, stability of the thermohaline circulation, ecosystem dynamics, connections between climate change and severe storms, future technological innovation, human population dynamics, and political change are all sufficiently inadequate to allow surprises not currently evident from model studies to occur. Therefore, as with all investigations and simulations of complex and only partially understood systems, the results must be treated with appropriate caution.

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