The Rhodium Climate Outlook (RCO) seeks to address some of the shortcomings of existing modeling with probabilistic energy, emissions, and temperature projections of use to a wide range of global stakeholders, including policy-takers. We’ve done this by incorporating the following innovations, which to our knowledge have never been combined in a single modeling platform:
- Probabilistic global emissions projections that capture uncertainty in economic and population growth, oil and gas prices, and clean energy technology costs.
- An econometrically-based policy projection module that uses evidence of the determinants of climate policy around the world over the past two decades to provide probabilistic projections for how policy is likely to evolve going forward.
- Projections for all GHG emissions, not just CO2.
- Probabilistic temperature projections derived directly from our emissions projections but including climate system uncertainty as well.
The document linked below provides a detailed overview of the modeling framework used in the 2023 Rhodium Climate Outlook.
Section 1 provides an overview of Rhodium’s Global Energy Model (RHG-GEM), an integrated modeling platform that captures uncertainty in economic and population growth, oil and natural gas prices, and clean energy technology costs under likely policy evolution to provide probabilistic energy, emissions, and temperature projections through the end of the century.
In Section 2, we outline the probabilistic approach to projecting energy and emissions outcomes under uncertainty, and Section 3 describes the novel approach to climate policy projections implemented in the RHG-GEM to answer the question: “what are we on track for?”.
Section 4 summarizes the approach used to translate GHG emission pathways from RHG-GEM into temperature outcomes, through simulations of the the Finite-amplitude Impulse Response (FaIR) model.
Section 5 presents the methodology of the Monte-Carlo Analysis applied to this integrated modeling framework to capture the key uncertainties in the evolution of the energy system, future global GHG emissions pathways, and associated temperature outcomes.
Finally, we describe how we project all six Kyoto gases as part of our comprehensive emissions framework.
