It has often been stated that current studies aimed at understanding the magnitude of optimal climate policy fail to adequately capture the potential for “catastrophic” impacts of climate change. While economic modeling exercises to date do provide evidence that potential climate...

As atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations increase, the world’s oceans are absorbing CO2 at a faster rate than at any time in the past 800,000 years. While this reduces the amount of the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it also causes changes in seawater chemistry,...

The impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems are among the key reasons for concern about climate change. Integrated assessment models are the main tools used to estimate the global economic benefits of policies that would address climate change, but these models typically include only a partial...

The “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is the present value of the future stream of damages from one additional ton of carbon emissions in a particular year. This paper develops a simple model for calculating the SCC and compares estimates of the SCC under certainty and uncertainty. Our model...