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This paper compares projections over the twenty-first century of SO, BC, and OC emissions from three technologically detailed, long-term integrated assessment models. The character of the projections and the response of emissions due to a comprehensive climate policy are discussed focusing on the sectoral level. In a continuation of historical experience, aerosol and precursor emissions are increasingly decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions over the twenty-first century due to a combination of emission controls and technology shifts over time. Implementation of a comprehensive climate policy further reduces emissions, although there is significant variation in this response by sector and by model: the response has many similarities between models for the energy transformation and transportation sectors, with more diversity in the response for the building and industrial sectors. Much of these differences can be traced to specific characteristics of reference case end-use and supply-side technology deployment and emissions control assumptions, which are detailed by sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries can use both mitigation and adaptation strategies to protect their citizens from catastrophic risk posed by climate change (e.g., shift in the jet stream). A nation can mitigate by reducing CO2 emissions, which reduces the probability of a catastrophic event; it can adapt by altering the infrastructure so that damages can be reduced in the event a catastrophe is realized. Herein we add to the current literature by extending the endogenous risk framework into a dynamic framework permitting analysis of both mitigation and adaptation while allowing for the dynamic process of global climate change. Our results suggest adaptation to catastrophe is a small fraction of the national climate protection budget relative to mitigation when nations cooperate fully, when damages are both continuous and catastrophic, and when nations have a short planning horizon. Adaptation becomes more important relative to mitigation when nations are unlikely to cooperate, when damages are mainly catastrophic, or when the nation's planning horizon increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the sensitivity of emissions corridors for the 21st century to various factors that are currently under debate in the climate change arena. Emissions corridors represent the range of admissible emissions futures that observe some predefined guardrails on the future development of the human-climate system. They are calculated on the conceptual and methodological basis of the tolerable windows approach. We assess the sensitivity of the corridors to the choice of time-resolved as well as intertemporally aggregated guardrails that exclude an intolerable amount of climate change on the one hand and unbearable mitigation burdens on the other. In addition, we investigate the influence of climate sensitivity on the corridors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]