Kleinen, T.

Petschel-Held, G.

MPG.PuRe

Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 8, 06212, 2006SRef-ID: 1607-7962/gra/EGU06-A-06212© European Geosciences Union 2006The probabilistic tolerable windows approachT. Kleinen (1) and G. Petschel-Held (2)(1) Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia,Norwich NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom (t.kleinen@uea.ac.uk) (2) Potsdam Institute for ClimateImpact Research (PIK), PO Box 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, GermanyThe integrated assessment of climate change (IA) aims to consider the whole chainof cause-and-effect of climate change. Since uncertainty is ever-present in this chain,it needs to be taken into acount explicitly. The Tolerable Windows Approach (TWA),one approach in IA, is extended to a probabilistic approach in order to consider someof the uncertainty explicitly.The TWA excludes undesirable impacts of climate change by setting constraints thatlimit these impacts, so-called guardrails, and subsequently it determines the maneu-vering space humanity has if these undesirable impacts are to be avoided.Uncertainty about climate change that either arises through the natural variability ofclimatic variables or can be expressed as a probability distribution of uncertain param-eters leads to probability distributions of experiment outcomes. This also implies thatit is no longer possible to determine the consequences of a particular climate protec-tion strategy with certainty. Instead, uncertainty leads to a probability of violating theguardrails.The probabilistic TWA can take these uncertainties into account explicitly. It will bedemonstrated by applying it to the European Union’s target of limiting climate changeto a warming of less than 2◦C.

The probabilistic tolerable windows approach

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

MPG.PuRe