Gary W Yohe
Department of Economics, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, USA
Michael E Schlesinger
Climate Research Group, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA
Natasha G Andronova
Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, USA
Keywords:
thermo haline circulation, uncertainty analysis
Abstract
We are pleased that Fussel [2006] appreciates the reduced-form approach that we employed in our examination of the vulnerability of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (the THC) to greenhouse-gas-induced increases in global-mean temperature and its sensitivity to a wide range of policy interventions in Yohe, et al. [2006], and we commend his careful and informed reading of our work. We hereby confirm his assumption that the underlying structure of the economic forcing and the characterization of the link between increased greenhouse-gas concentrations and changes in temperature is the same as the structure we employed in Yohe, et al. [2004].
We are, however, a little perplexed that he quibbles so vehemently about the quantitative results. The numbers that emerge from climate models, be they simple reduced-form representations of specific process like the one we used or complicated general circulation models of the sort Fussel sites as evidence, are never really to be taken as true representations of reality.
