Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/50174 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
ESRI Working Paper No. 392
Publisher: 
The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin
Abstract: 
Research into the social cost of carbon emissions - the marginal social damage from a tonne of emitted carbon - has tended to focus on best guess scenarios. Such scenarios generally ignore the potential for low-probability, high-damage events, which are critically important to determining optimal climate policy. This paper uses the FUND integrated assessment model to investigate the influence of three types of low-probability, high-impact climate responses on the social cost of carbon: the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation; large scale dissociation of oceanic methane hydrates; and climate sensitivities above best guess levels. We find that incorporating these events can increase the social cost of carbon by a factor of over 3.
Subjects: 
climate change
catastrophe
non-linearity
impacts
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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