@article{Marten:280920,
      recid = {280920},
      author = {Marten, Alex L.},
      title = {The Role of Scenario Uncertainty in Estimating the  Benefits of Carbon Mitigation},
      address = {2014-03},
      number = {2168-2018-8154},
      series = {14-04},
      pages = {31},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {The benefits of carbon mitigation are subject to numerous  sources of uncertainty and accounting for this uncertainty  in policy analysis is crucial. One often overlooked source  uncertainty are the forecasts of future baseline conditions  (e.g., population, economic output, emissions) from which  carbon mitigation benefits are assessed. Through, in some  cases highly non-linear relationships, these baseline  conditions determine the forecast level and rate of climate  change, exposed populations, vulnerability, and way in  which inter-temporal tradeoffs are valued. We study the  impact of explicitly considering this uncertainty on a  widely used metric to asses the benefits of carbon dioxide  mitigation, the social cost of carbon (SCC). To explore  this question a detailed integrated assessment that couples  economic and climate systems to assess the damages of  climate change is driven by a library of consistent  probabilistic socioeconomic-emission scenarios developed  using a comprehensive global computable general equilibrium  model. We find that scenario uncertainty has a significant  effect on estimates of the SCC and that excluding this  source of uncertainty could lead to an underestimate of the  mitigation benefits. A detailed decomposition finds that  this effect is driven primarily through the role that  uncertainty regarding future consumption per capita growth  has on the value of inter-temporal tradeoffs through the  consumption discount rate.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/280920},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.280920},
}