Wednesday, 16 January 2002: 4:00 PM
Uncertainty Analysis of Global Climate Change Projections
We use quantitative uncertainty analysis techniques to estimate the
likelihoods of climate change in the 21st century. We use the Latin
Hypercube approach to perform a Monte-Carlo simulation based on
uncertainty in eight factors determining anthropogenic emissions
projections and three climate model properties. Although uncertainty
in the emission model's factors are assessed via expert judgment,
uncertainty in the climate system properties can now be constrained by
climate observations of the 20th century. By sampling from the
uncertain input distributions and running approximately 500
simulations with the MIT Integrated Global System Model, this method
produces probability distributions for temperature and sea level
change in the 21st century. We present results from two cases, with
and without mitigation policies, to demonstrate the effect on the
probability distribution of climate change. As an illustration of the
approach we find that, absent mitigation policies, our median
projection shows a global mean surface temperature rise from 1990 to
2100 of 2.3 degrees C, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.9 to
5.3 degrees C. With a strong policy applied (a so called Beyond Kyoto
case), the 95 percent confidence interval is reduced to 0.5 to 2.5
degrees C with a median of 1.4 degrees C. Probability distributions
for sea level and other climate model variables will also be presented.
Supplementary URL: