The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently published climate change projections to 2100, giving likely ranges of global temperature increase for each of four possible scenarios for population, economic growth and carbon use. We develop a probabilistic forecast of carbon emissions to 2100, using a country-specific version of Kaya’s identity, which expresses carbon emissions as a product of population, GDP per capita and carbon intensity (carbon per unit of GDP). We use the UN’s probabilistic population projections for all countries, based on methods from our group, and develop a joint Bayesian hierarchical model for GDP per capita and carbon intensity in most countries. In contrast with opinion-based scenarios, our findings are statistically based using data for 1960–2010. We find that our likely range (90% interval) for cumulative carbon emissions to 2100 includes the IPCC’s two middle scenarios but not the lowest or highest ones. We combine our results with the ensemble of climate models used by the IPCC to obtain a predictive distribution of global temperature increase to 2100.

Adrian E. Raftery is Professor of Statistics and Sociology at the University of Washington. He develops new statistical methods for problems in the social, environmental and health sciences. Raftery has published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed statistical, sociological and other journals. An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, he was identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995-2005 by Thomson-ISI. He has supervised 29 Ph.D. graduates, of whom 21 hold or have held tenure-track university faculty positions.