DATABASE INVENTORY SYSTEM

Database Inventory System

Database Inventory System

System Development Lifecycle Models

Climate change studies are often interdisciplinary by nature, incorporating many domains of science, economics, and political theory. Integrated assessment (IA) aims to bring diverse scientific, economics and social science expertise together to provide analysis and advice that comprehensively addresses all or at least many aspects of the climate change issue. IA methods have been applied to many areas of climate change providing insights into areas such as optimal timing of emission reductions, weighting of different greenhouse gases, or impacts of biofuel policies.

Additionally, IAs have identified key uncertainties that should be priorities of future research, such as the need to understand oceanic heat uptake in order to better constrain climate sensitivity and predict future timing of temperature change. These assessments have also served to establish ongoing communication within the community of researchers, and between researchers and policy makers. In complex scientific issues it is often difficult for policy makers and the public to sort out conflicting scientific views, and an authoritative assessment process can provide consensus views on the issue, accepting that in some cases the “consensus” may be that some aspects of the issue remain unresolved.

Integrated assessment modeling to climate change

The IAMs discussed in this review can all explicitly include complex interactions and feedbacks, enable simulations of policies and processes, provide consistent frameworks with which to evaluate scientific knowledge, and serve as tools for communication with decision-makers and disciplinary scientists.23 Broadly these models attempt to represent the earth system processes. The simplest have a model of the world economy with a single world region that produces CO2-equivalent GHGs, which then accumulate in the atmosphere with a box model describing how they are reallocated among atmosphere, ocean, and land reservoirs. The accumulated GHGs drive an increase in global mean surface temperature, lagged by the ocean's heat sink. Climate impacts are a reduced form expression of dollars of climate damage as a function of global mean surface temperature. Each of the basic processes are represented but in the simplest possible form. This simplest class of models can be useful for developing intuition about the interactions between the economy and the climate, but to answer many of the interest and policy-relevant questions requires models with increased scientific and/or economic complexity.

Applications Of IA

IAs have been applied to a wide range of different problems in the climate change field. Recent important insights have included the attribution statement from the IPCC 4th Assessment Report ('Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations') and the resolution of a major discrepancy between satellite and surface temperatures within Special Assessment Product 1.1 of the Climate Change Science Program.

In some cases IA serves to create consensus statements. In others, it identifies key parameters such as the discount rate, cost of backstop technology, or percent coral mortality from a bleaching event that may need to be refined by further research and describes the range of ...