Climate Change

Biography

Biography: Wenjie Dong

Abstract

Integrated assessment models and coupled earth system models both have their limitations in understanding the interactionsbetween human activity and the physical earth system. In this paper, a new human–earth system model, BNUHESM1.0,constructed by combining the economic and climate damage components of the Dynamic Integrated Model ofClimate Change and Economy to the BNU-ESM model, is introduced. The ability of BNU-HESM1.0 in simulating theglobal CO2 concentration and surface temperature is also evaluated. We find that, compared to observation, BNU-HESM1.0underestimates the global CO2 concentration and its rising trend during 1965–2005, due to the uncertainty in the economiccomponents. However, the surface temperature simulated by BNU-HESM1.0 is much closer to observation, resulting fromthe overestimates of surface temperature by the original BNU-ESM model. The uncertainty of BNU-ESM falls within therange of present earth system uncertainty, so it is the economic and climate damage component of BNU-HESM1.0 that needsto be improved through further study. However, the main purpose of this paper is to introduce a new approach to investigatethe complex relationship between human activity and the earth system. It is hoped that it will inspire further ideas that provevaluable in guiding human activities appropriate for a sustainable future climate