Integrated Assessment of Climate Change: Dealing With Massive Complexity and Uncertainty

Climate change policy makers need good information upon which to base their decisions. Climate change is fundamentally an international and very long-run problem requiring information from a wide range of disciplines from physics to psychology. One response to the complexity with deep uncertainty that comes with this requirement has been the construction of so-called integrated assessment models which project the condition of the earth system out for a hundred years or more. This talk will focus on how complexity and uncertainty are dealt with in such models today and some possible directions for future research.

Speaker: John P. Weyant, Stanford University

Skilling auditorium