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Climate Change

Volume 488: debated on Tuesday 3 March 2009

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what climate models his Department (a) has access to and (b) uses, with particular reference to the climate model used by Lord Stern in his Review on the Economics of Climate Change. (255977)

The Department has access to and utilises the findings from the suite of climate models that have been developed and continue to be refined by the Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC), through its Integrated Climate programme. The Department, together with the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, jointly funds this programme which aims to monitor, understand and predict climate change. As part of its climate modelling work, the MOHC collaborates with other research centres in the UK and internationally in the development of these models.

The outputs from the MOHC’s climate models are a key element of the scientific evidence base that underpins our policy development and international negotiations on climate change. My Department also uses the findings from the international set of climate models and associated modelling work that contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The simple model for climate policy assessment (SiMCaP) climate model was used to provide mitigation trajectories for the global carbon finance (GLOCAF) model, developed by the Office of Climate Change to look at the costs to different countries of moving to a low carbon global economy, and the kind of international financial flows this might generate.