Economics of the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Main Author: Nordhaus, William
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: National Academy of Sciences 2019
• Subjects: PNAS Plus; Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7056935/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31164425; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1814990116

Concerns about the impact on large-scale earth systems have taken center stage in the scientific and economic analysis of climate change. The present study analyzes the economic impact of a potential disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet (GIS). The study introduces an approach that combines long-run economic growth models, climate models, and reduced-form GIS models. The study demonstrates that social cost–benefit analysis and damage-limiting strategies can be usefully extended to illuminate issues with major long-term consequences, as well as concerns such as potential tipping points, irreversibility, and hysteresis. A key finding is that, under a wide range of assumptions, the risk of GIS disintegration makes a small contribution to the optimal stringency of current policy or to the overall social cost of climate change. It finds that the cost of GIS disintegration adds less than 5% to the social cost of carbon (SCC) under alternative discount rates and estimates of the GIS dynamics.