Global Warming, Irreversibility and Learning.

A number of economists have argued that the literature on the irreversibility effect implies that current abatement of greenhouse gas emissions should be greater when there is the possibility of obtaining better information in the future about the potential damages from global warming than when there is no possibility of obtaining better information. In this paper the authors show that even the simplest model of global warming does not satisfy either of Epstein's (1980) sufficient conditions, so it is not possible to use Epstein's analysis to tell whether the irreversibility effect applies to models of global warming. They derive an alternative sufficient condition for the irreversibility effect to hold. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.