Deja Vu All Over Again: What's New and What's Not
in Integrated Assessment Modelling of Climate Change
Although the importance of social and economic factors to climate
change policy has long been recognized, the focus of the written output
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) historically
has been the physics and biology of the problem. This slant changed in
1996 with the release of the report of Working Group III of the IPCC on
the socio-economic dimensions of the problem (Bruce et al, 1996). An
important tool that has been used to understand the pros and cons of
various climate policies is the integrated assessment model, a computer
representation of the economics, physics and other aspects of the
problem that are deemed important to formulating policy. One of the
chapters of the Working Group III review is concerned with integrated
assessment models of climate change, a number of which have emerged
over the past decade. This note is a critical review of that
chapter. As we shall see, one of the key issues concerns just what is
an integrated assessment model and for what purpose is one used?
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