Although global action is essential to meet climate targets, unilateral steps both encourage broader action and benefit the United States. Climate change is a global problem, and it will require strong international leadership to secure cooperation among both developed and developing countries to solve it. America must help forge a truly global solution to this global challenge by galvanizing international action to significantly reduce emissions. By taking credible steps toward mitigation, the United States will also reap the benefits of early action, such as investing in low-carbon infrastructure now that will reduce the costs of reaching climate targets in the future.
Climate Policy as Climate Insurance
Individuals and businesses routinely purchase insurance to guard against various forms of risk such as fire, theft, or other loss. This logic of self-protection also applies to climate change. Much is known about the basic science of climate change: there is a scientific consensus that, because of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and other GHGs, global temperatures are increasing, sea levels are rising, and the world’s oceans are becoming more acidic. These and other climate changes are expected to be harmful, on balance, to the world’s natural and economic systems. Nevertheless, uncertainty remains about the magnitude and timing of these and other aspects of climate change, even if we assume that future climate policies are known in advance. For example, the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC WG I AR5 2013) provides a likely range of 1.5° to 4.5° Celsius for the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is the long-run increase in global mean surface temperature that is caused by a sustained doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The upper end of that range would imply severe climate impacts under current emissions trajectories, and current scientific knowledge indicates that values in excess of this range are also possible.[1]
An additional, related source of climate uncertainty is the possibility of irreversible, large-scale changes that have wide-ranging and severe consequences. These are sometimes called abrupt changes because they could occur extremely rapidly as measured in geologic time, and are also sometimes called climate catastrophes. We are already witnessing one of these events—the rapid trend towards disappearance of late-summer Arctic sea ice. A recent study from the National Research Council (NRC 2013) found that this strong trend toward decreasing sea-ice cover could have large effects on a variety of components of the Arctic ecosystem and could potentially alter large-scale atmospheric circulation and its variability. The NRC also found that another large-scale change has been occurring, which is the critical endangerment or loss of a significant percentage of marine and terrestrial species. Other events judged by the NRC to be likely in the more distant future (after 2100) include, for example, the possible rapid melting of the Western Antarctic ice and Greenland ice sheets and the potential thawing of Arctic permafrost and the consequent release of the potent GHG methane, which would accelerate global warming. These and other potential large-scale changes are irreversible on relevant time
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- ↑ It is important to note that, as a global average, the equilibrium climate sensitivity masks the expectation that temperature change will be higher over land than the oceans, and that there will be substantial regional variations in temperature increases. The equilibrium climate sensitivity describes a long-term effect and is only one component of determining near term warming due to the buildup of GHGs in the atmosphere.
