Pierce Donovan presented his research on carbon pricing and emissions planning. The increased likelihood of breaching several potential climate tipping points is directly attributable to anthropogenic activity. Beyond these temperature and carbon-based thresholds, we commit the Earth to drastically altered climate dynamics and truly immeasurable damages. In this paper,  Pierce develops an emissions scenario that limits the likelihood of crossing an ambiguous tipping point to a specified level at minimal cost. Instead of relegating threshold avoidance to a constraint on an integrated assessment model, Pierce shifts focus toward the maximization of a physical measure of [reversible] global warming potential. This change addresses common concerns about the specification of the economic modules in integrated assessment modeling. Pierce also uses a modern climate module consistent with the Earth’s climate dynamics and carbon cycle and showcase a new joint-chance constrained approximate dynamic programming algorithm that can handle a large and continuous state space.

Presentation slides: donovan_tipping_points.pdf

The manuscript is available on Pierce's personal website.