Abstract
Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have become critical tools for assessing the costs and benefits of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Three models currently inform the social cost of carbon dioxide (SCCO2, the net present value of damages from one additional ton of CO2) used by the US federal government, several states, and Canada. Here we present a new open-source implementation of one of these models (PAGE09) in the Julia programming language using a modular modeling framework (Mimi). Mimi-PAGE was coded using best coding practices (such as multiple code reviews by different individuals during development, automated testing of newly-committed code, and provision of documentation and usage notes) and is publicly available in a GitHub repository for community inspection and use under an open source license. In this paper we describe the Julia implementation of PAGE09, show that output from Mimi-PAGE matches that of the original model, and perform comparisons of the run time between the two implementations.
Highlights
Open-Source Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)IAMs model the global economy, climate system, and connections between them via greenhouse gas emissions and climate damages
Several key standards can enable sound, reproducible, and communicable science using IAMs: open-source code, a platform for model inter-operability, consistent programming conventions, reduced computational processing time, automated testing for new commits to the repository, and documented methodology[6]. Our endeavor meets these standards first by translating a model (PAGE09)[7], which formerly relied on proprietary software ( Microsoft Excel and the @RISK Excel plug-in), into an open-source and high-performance computing language, Julia, which follows much of the syntax of the widely-used
Model output was validated by comparison with output from PAGE09 run in its native Excel using the @RISK plug-in, both for a deterministic run with mean values for the inputs, and for the full probabilistic implementation
Summary
Open-Source IAMsIAMs model the global economy, climate system, and connections between them via greenhouse gas emissions and climate damages. Several key standards can enable sound, reproducible, and communicable science using IAMs: open-source code, a platform for model inter-operability, consistent programming conventions, reduced computational processing time, automated testing for new commits to the repository, and documented methodology[6]. Our endeavor meets these standards first by translating a model (PAGE09)[7], which formerly relied on proprietary software ( Microsoft Excel and the @RISK Excel plug-in), into an open-source and high-performance computing language, Julia, which follows much of the syntax of the widely-used
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