ABSTRACT
The Environmental Protection Agency report illustrated that if serious efforts were undertaken to limit climate change as induced by human activity, the efforts could not be limited to CO2 alone. Scientists working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Scientific Assessment of Climate Change offered significant refinements to the index by improving the representation of physical processes. This chapter examines the relevant index should be an index of economic effect of climate-environmental change, which requires adjustments to simple measures of radiative forcing because the gases are removed from the atmosphere at different rates and marginal damages are likely to vary over time. Climate-related resources are determined by the aggregate concentration of trace gases. In particular, effort is required to characterize the economic damage associated with climate and the direct effects of trace-gas accumulation. A popular notion is that the best response to climate change is to pursue policies that would make sense to pursue even without climate change.
