@article {1002291,
	title = {Unmask temporal trade-offs in climate policy debates},
	journal = {Science},
	volume = {356},
	year = {2017},
	pages = {492-493},
	abstract = {<p>
	Global warming potentials (GWPs) have become an essential element of climate policy and are built into legal structures that regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This is in spite of a well-known shortcoming: GWP hides trade-offs between short- and long-term policy objectives inside a single time scale of 100 or 20 years (1). The most common form, GWP<sub>100</sub>, focuses on the climate impact of a pulse emission over 100 years, diluting near-term effects and misleadingly implying that short-lived climate pollutants exert forcings in the long-term, long after they are removed from the atmosphere (2). Meanwhile, GWP<sub>20</sub> ignores climate effects after 20 years. We propose that these time scales be ubiquitously reported as an inseparable pair, much like systolic-diastolic blood pressure and city-highway vehicle fuel economy, to make the climate effect of using one or the other time scale explicit. Policy-makers often treat a GWP as a value-neutral measure, but the time-scale choice is central to achieving specific objectives (2{\textendash}4).
</p>
},
	url = {http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6337/492},
	author = {Ilissa B. Ocko and Steven P. Hamburg and Daniel J. Jacob and David W. Keith and Nathaniel O. Keohane and Michael Oppenheimer and Joseph D. Roy-Mayhew and Daniel P. Schrag and Stephen W. Pacala}
}
