Abstract
Evidence suggests that several elements of the climate system could be tipped into a different state by global warming, causing irreversible economic damages. To address their policy implications, we incorporated five interacting climate tipping points into a stochastic-dynamic integrated assessment model, calibrating their likelihoods and interactions on results from an existing expert elicitation. Here we show that combining realistic assumptions about policymakers’ preferences under uncertainty, with the prospect of multiple future interacting climate tipping points, increases the present social cost of carbon in the model nearly eightfold from US$15 per tCO2 to US$116 per tCO2. Furthermore, passing some tipping points increases the likelihood of other tipping points occurring to such an extent that it abruptly increases the social cost of carbon. The corresponding optimal policy involves an immediate, massive effort to control CO2 emissions, which are stopped by mid-century, leading to climate stabilization at <1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$209.00 per year
only $17.42 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis—Under Executive Order 12866 (US Government, 2010).
Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis (US Government, 2013).
Dietz, S. High impact, low probability? An empirical analysis of risk in the economics of climate change. Climatic Change 108, 519–541 (2011).
Kopp, R. E., Golub, A., Keohane, N. O. & Onda, C. The influence of the specification of climate change damages on the social cost of carbon. Economics 6, 1–40 (2012).
Ackerman, F. & Stanton, E. A. Climate risks and carbon prices: revising the social cost of carbon. Economics 6, 1–25 (2012).
van den Bergh, J. C. J. M. & Botzen, W. J. W. A lower bound to the social cost of CO2 emissions. Nature Clim. Change 4, 253–258 (2014).
Lenton, T. M. et al. Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 1786–1793 (2008).
Kriegler, E., Hall, J. W., Held, H., Dawson, R. & Schellnhuber, H. J. Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 5041–5046 (2009).
Lenton, T. M. Early warning of climate tipping points. Nature Clim. Change 1, 201–209 (2011).
Lontzek, T. S., Cai, Y., Judd, K. L. & Lenton, T. M. Stochastic integrated assessment of climate tipping points indicates the need for strict climate policy. Nature Clim. Change 5, 441–444 (2015).
Lenton, T. M. & Ciscar, J.-C. Integrating tipping points into climate impact assessments. Climatic Change 117, 585–597 (2013).
Mastrandrea, M. D. & Schneider, S. H. Probabilistic integrated assessment of ‘dangerous’ climate change. Science 304, 571–575 (2004).
Kosugi, T. Integrated assessment for setting greenhouse gas emission targets under the condition of great uncertainty about the probability and impact of abrupt climate change. J. Environ. Inform. 14, 89–99 (2009).
Ackerman, F., Stanton, E. A. & Bueno, R. Fat tails, exponents, extreme uncertainty: simulating catastrophe in DICE. Ecol. Econ. 69, 1657–1665 (2010).
Weitzman, M. L. GHG targets as insurance against catastrophic climate damages. J. Public Econ. Theor. 14, 221–244 (2012).
Cai, Y., Judd, K. L., Lenton, T. M., Lontzek, T. S. & Narita, D. Environmental tipping points significantly affect the cost–benefit assessment of climate policies. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 4606–4611 (2015).
Lemoine, D. & Traeger, C. Watch your step: optimal policy in a tipping climate. Am. Econ. J. 6, 137–166 (2014).
Lemoine, D. & Traeger, C. P. Economics of tipping the climate dominoes. Nature Clim. Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2902 (2016).
Cai, Y., Judd, K. L. & Lontzek, T. S. The social cost of carbon with economic and climate risks. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06909 (2015).
Nordhaus, W. Estimates of the social cost of carbon: concepts and results from the DICE-2013R model and alternative approaches. J. Assoc. Environ. Res. Econ. 1, 273–312 (2014).
Meinshausen, M. et al. The RCP greenhouse gas concentrations and their extensions from 1765 to 2300. Climatic Change 109, 213–241 (2011).
Epstein, L. G. & Zin, S. E. Substitution, risk aversion, and the temporal behavior of consumption and asset returns: a theoretical framework. Econometrica 57, 937–969 (1989).
Pindyck, R. S. & Wang, N. The economic and policy consequences of catastrophes. Am. Econ. J. 5, 306–339 (2013).
Vissing-Jørgensen, A. & Attanasio, O. P. Stock-market participation, intertemporal substitution, and risk-aversion. Am. Econ. Rev. 93, 383–391 (2003).
Bansal, R. & Yaron, A. Risks for the long run: a potential resolution of asset pricing puzzles. J. Finance 59, 1481–1509 (2004).
Barro, R. J. Rare disasters, asset prices, and welfare costs. Am. Econ. Rev. 99, 243–264 (2009).
Nordhaus, W. D. Expert opinion on climatic change. Am. Sci. 82, 45–51 (1994).
Nordhaus, W. D. & Boyer, J. Warming the World. Models of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2000).
Baumol, W. J. On taxation and the control of externalities. Am. Econ. Rev. 62, 307–322 (1972).
Kopp, R. E. & Mignone, B. K. The U.S. government’s social cost of carbon estimates after their first two years: pathways for improvement. Economics 6, 1–41 (2012).
Khan, S. A. et al. Sustained mass loss of the northeast Greenland ice sheet triggered by regional warming. Nature Clim. Change 4, 292–299 (2014).
Harig, C. & Simons, F. J. Accelerated West Antarctic ice mass loss continues to outpace East Antarctic gains. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 415, 134–141 (2015).
Csatho, B. M. et al. Laser altimetry reveals complex pattern of Greenland Ice Sheet dynamics. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 18478–18483 (2014).
Bamber, J., van den Broeke, M., Ettema, J., Lenaerts, J. & Rignot, E. Recent large increases in freshwater fluxes from Greenland into the North Atlantic. Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, L19501 (2012).
Peterson, B. J. et al. Increasing river discharge to the Arctic Ocean. Science 298, 2171–2173 (2002).
Joughin, I., Smith, B. E. & Medley, B. Marine ice sheet collapse potentially under way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica. Science 344, 735–738 (2014).
Rignot, E., Mouginot, J., Morlighem, M., Seroussi, H. & Scheuchl, B. Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 3502–3509 (2014).
Wouters, B. et al. Dynamic thinning of glaciers on the Southern Antarctic Peninsula. Science 348, 899–903 (2015).
Glotter, M. J., Pierrehumbert, R. T., Elliott, J. W., Matteson, N. J. & Moyer, E. J. A simple carbon cycle representation for economic and policy analyses. Climatic Change 126, 319–335 (2014).
Bindoff, N. L. et al. in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) Ch. 10 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
Rogelj, J. et al. Energy system transformations for limiting end-of-century warming to below 1.5 °C. Nature Clim. Change 5, 519–527 (2015).
Rogelj, J. et al. Zero emission targets as long-term global goals for climate protection. Environ. Res. Lett. 10, 105007 (2015).
Nordhaus, W. The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (Yale Univ. Press, 2013).
Anda, J., Golub, A. & Strukova, E. Economics of climate change under uncertainty: benefits of flexibility. Energy Policy 37, 1345–1355 (2009).
Martin, I. W. R. & Pindyck, R. S. Averting catastrophes: the strange economics of scylla and charybdis. Am. Econ. Rev. 105, 2947–2985 (2015).
Cai, Y., Judd, K. L., Thain, G. & Wright, S. J. Solving dynamic programming problems on a computational grid. Comput. Econ. 45, 261–284 (2015).
Nævdal, E. & Oppenheimer, M. The economics of the thermohaline circulation—a problem with multiple thresholds of unknown location. Resour. Energy Econ. 29, 262–283 (2007).
Kostov, Y., Armour, K. C. & Marshall, J. Impact of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation on ocean heat storage and transient climate change. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 2108–2116 (2014).
Perez, F. F. et al. Atlantic Ocean CO2 uptake reduced by weakening of the meridional overturning circulation. Nature Geosci. 6, 146–152 (2013).
Zickfeld, K., Eby, M. & Weaver, A. J. Carbon-cycle feedbacks of changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation under future atmospheric CO2 . Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 22, GB3024 (2008).
Huybrechts, P. & De Wolde, J. The dynamic response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to multiple-century climatic warming. J. Clim. 12, 2169–2188 (1999).
Robinson, A., Calov, R. & Ganopolski, A. Multistability and critical thresholds of the Greenland ice sheet. Nature Clim. Change 2, 429–432 (2012).
Bamber, J. L., Riva, R. E. M., Vermeersen, B. L. A. & LeBrocq, A. M. Reassessment of the potential sea-level rise from a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Science 324, 901–903 (2009).
Tarnocai, C. et al. Soil organic carbon pools in the northern circumpolar permafrost region. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 23, GB2023 (2009).
Rohling, E. J. et al. High rates of sea-level rise during the last interglacial period. Nature Geosci. 1, 38–42 (2008).
Mitrovica, J. X., Tamislea, M. E., Davis, J. L. & Milne, G. A. Recent mass balance of polar ice sheets inferred from patterns of sea-level change. Nature 409, 1026–1029 (2001).
Huntingford, C. et al. Towards quantifying uncertainty in predictions of Amazon ‘dieback’. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363, 1857–1864 (2008).
Brando, P. M. et al. Abrupt increases in Amazonian tree mortality due to drought–fire interactions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 6347–6352 (2014).
Feldpausch, T. R. et al. Tree height integrated into pantropical forest biomass estimates. Biogeosciences 9, 3381–3403 (2012).
Cai, W. et al. ENSO and greenhouse warming. Nature Clim. Change 5, 849–859 (2015).
van der Werf, G. R. et al. Continental-scale partitioning of fire emissions during the 1997 to 2001 El Niño/La Niña period. Science 303, 73–76 (2004).
Acknowledgements
We thank K. L. Judd and participants of the 2015 Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economics for comments. Y.C. was supported by NSF (SES-0951576 and SES-146364). T.S.L. was supported by the Züricher Universitätsverein, the University of Zurich, and the Ecosciencia Foundation. T.M.L. was supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and the European Commission HELIX project (ENV.2013.6.1-3). Supercomputer support was provided by Blue Waters (NSF awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993, and the state of Illinois).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Y.C., T.M.L. and T.S.L. designed research, performed research and wrote the paper.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Information (PDF 2328 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cai, Y., Lenton, T. & Lontzek, T. Risk of multiple interacting tipping points should encourage rapid CO2 emission reduction. Nature Clim Change 6, 520–525 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2964
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2964
This article is cited by
-
Remotely sensing potential climate change tipping points across scales
Nature Communications (2024)
-
Social Costs of Methane and Carbon Dioxide in a Tipping Climate
Environmental and Resource Economics (2024)
-
Discounting the Future: On Climate Change, Ambiguity Aversion and Epstein–Zin Preferences
Environmental and Resource Economics (2024)
-
Global warming overshoots increase risks of climate tipping cascades in a network model
Nature Climate Change (2023)
-
More than unfamiliar environmental connection to super typhoon climatology
Scientific Reports (2023)