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Addressing the Uncertain Prospect of Climate Change 1 (April 2003)

handle is hein.congrec/cbo8846 and id is 1 raw text is: A series of issue summari.es from the Congressional Budget Office APRIL 25, 2003 Addressing the Uncertain Prospect of Climate Change Over the next century, human activities will produce large quantities of green- house gases, and their accumulation in the atmosphere is expected to affect regional climates throughout the world. Those effects are very uncertain yet could prove serious and costly in at least some regions. However, restraints on emissions would also be costly and could be difficult to achieve in an efficient manner. The atmosphere is freely available to all, and greenhouse gases spread around the world no matter where they are emitted. Those characteristics make it very difficult to create property rights and markets for use of the atmosphere-and they make the climate issue international in scope. It may therefore fall to governments to develop alternative policies for addressing the risks posed by climate change. An effective policy response to those risks is likely to involve a series of actions based on incomplete but accumulating knowledge. Continued research could help guide policymakers by im- proving understanding of the risks and by developing options for reducing them. Modest restrictions on emissions -particularly restrictions that raised the price of emissions-could also yield net benefits, but extensive controls could crowd out other investments and reduce future generations' prosperity. The balancing of costs and benefits will be complicated by conflicts of interest-between energy-producing and energy-using regions, developed and developing countries, regions that may benefit from warming and others that stand to lose from it, and current and future generations. The challenge will be to develop policies that take advantage of low-cost opportunities to reduce emissions throughout the world, and to find an acceptable way to distribute costs and benefits among countries and regions with dramatically different circumstances and interests. A variety of human activities-mainly deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels-are adding greenhouse gases to the Earth's atmosphere and are probably contributing to a gradual warming of its climate. Unless measures are taken to constrain them, such emissions will continue to increase and the climate is likely to continue to warm. Extensive scientific and economic uncertainty makes pre- dicting and evaluating the effects ofsuch warming extremely difficult. The impacts would vary by region, with some effects positive and others negative. Moreover, some effects could be relatively minor, whereas others could be severe. Warming would raise sea levels. It could also expand the potential range of tropical diseases; disrupt agriculture, forestry, and natural ecosystems; and increase the variability and extremes of regional weather. Actual outcomes will probably be somewhere near the middle of the range of possibilities (see Figure 1). The climate could also shift in abrupt and unexpected ways, which could be much more costly to accommodate than gradual changes would be. The growth of emissions could be restrained in a variety ofways: by improving the efficiency of energy use, expand- ing the use of nuclear or renewable power, removing green- house gases from smokestacks, and sequestering gases in forests, soils, and oceans. But those alternatives are unlikely to be widely implemented unless measures are taken to lower their costs or to raise the price of greenhouse gas emissions.

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