Klaus Hasselmann (founding Director, the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology)

Climate change and its coupling to the global socio-economic system is the paramount example within the Global Systems Dynamics project of an exceedingly complex system which urgently needs to be better understood in order to provide policymakers engaged in climate policy negotiations with quantitative assessment tools. A method is presented for constructing computer-efficient coupled climate-socio-economic models by first projecting high-resolution climate models designed for super-computers onto nonlinear response models that run on PCs, and then coupling these suitably calibrated climate models to a new family of similarly efficient dynamic multi-actor socio-economic models that capture the conflicting strategies of the various actors that govern the evolution of the global socio-economic system. A number of simulation examples are presented.