Unmask temporal trade-offs in climate policy debates

Autor: Stephen W. Pacala, Daniel P. Schrag, Daniel J. Jacob, Ilissa B. Ocko, Nathaniel O. Keohane, David W. Keith, Steven P. Hamburg, Joseph D. Roy-Mayhew, Michael Oppenheimer
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: Science. 356:492-493
ISSN: 1095-9203
0036-8075
Popis: Global warming potentials (GWPs) have become an essential element of climate policy and are built into legal structures that regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This is in spite of a well-known shortcoming: GWP hides trade-offs between short- and long-term policy objectives inside a single time scale of 100 or 20 years ( 1 ). The most common form, GWP100, focuses on the climate impact of a pulse emission over 100 years, diluting near-term effects and misleadingly implying that short-lived climate pollutants exert forcings in the long-term, long after they are removed from the atmosphere ( 2 ). Meanwhile, GWP20 ignores climate effects after 20 years. We propose that these time scales be ubiquitously reported as an inseparable pair, much like systolic-diastolic blood pressure and city-highway vehicle fuel economy, to make the climate effect of using one or the other time scale explicit. Policy-makers often treat a GWP as a value-neutral measure, but the time-scale choice is central to achieving specific objectives ( 2 – 4 ).
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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