The value of knowledge accumulation on climate sensitivity uncertainty: comparison between perfect information, single stage and act then learn decisions

Shunsuke Mori, Hideo Shiogama

In COP21 followed by the Paris Agreement, the world is now seriously planning actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions toward a "below 2 °C above preindustrial levels" future. Currently, we are still far from identifying the emission pathways to achieve this target because of the various uncertainties in both climate science and the human behavior. As a part of the ICA-RUS project, conducted by Dr. Seita Emori of the National Institute for Environmental Studies we have studied how these uncertainties are eliminated by the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the decision-making processes. We consider the following three questions: first, when and how will the uncertainty range on the global temperature rise be eliminated, second which global emission pathway should be chosen before we get the perfect information, and third how much expenditure is justified in reducing the climate uncertainties. The first question has been investigated by one of the authors. Shiogama et al. (Sci Rep 6:18903, 2016) developed the Allen-Stott-Kettleborough (ASK) method further to estimate how quickly and in what way the uncertainties in future global mean temperature changes can decline when the current observation network of surface air temperature is maintained. Fourteen global climate model results in CMIP5 (CMIP http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/, 2017) are used as virtual observations of surface air temperature. The purpose of this study is to answer the remaining two questions. Based on the ASK research outcomes, we apply the multi stage decision-making known as Act Then Learn (ATL) process to an integrated assessment model MARIA which includes energy technologies, economic activities, land use changes and a simple climate model block. We reveal how accumulating observations helps to mitigate economic losses by expanding the existing ATL method to deal with the uncertainty eliminating process by ASK. The primary findings are as follows. First, the value of information largely increases as the climate target policy is more stringent. Second, even if the uncertainties in the equilibrium climate sensitivity are not fully resolved, scientific knowledge is still valuable. In other words, the expenditure for scientific researches is rationalized when we really concern the global climate changes.