The damage costs of climate change toward more comprehensive calculations：（气候变化的破坏成本向更全面的计算）.pdfVIP

The Damage Costs of Climate Change Toward More Comprehensive Calculations RICHARD S. J. TOL Institutefor Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1115, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract. It is argued that estimating the damage costs of a certain benchmark climate change is not sufficient. What is needed are cost functions and confidence intervals. Although these are contained in the integrated models and their technical manuals, this paper brings them into the open in order to stimulate discussion. After briefly reviewing the benchmark climate change damage costs, region-specific cost functions are presented which distinguish tangible from intangible losses and the losses due to a changing climate from those due to a changedclimate. Furthermore, cost functions are assumed to be quadratic, as an approximation of the unknown but presumably convex functions. Results from the damage module of the integrated climate economymodelFUND are presented, Next, uncertainties are incorporatedand expected damages are calculated. It is shown that because of convex loss functions and right-skewed uncertain- ties, the risk premium is substantial, calling for more action than analysis based on best-guess estimates. The final section explores some needs for further scientific research. Key words. Climate change damage costs; cost functions; uncertainty. 1. Introduction The greenhouse effect is a hot topic. The discussion on the climatological aspects of the changing composition of the atmosphere remains a lively one, but by now it is widely acknowledged that human-induced climate change is real, though uncertain in its details, and may have adverse impacts (Houghton et al., 1992). The impacts of climate change constitute another major field of research. Most attention is being paid to the direct im