David archer concludes the global carbon cycle by saying: "the conclusion we come to is that the natural carbon cycle is a wild card, as large an uncertainty as that of our own CO2 emissions." (the…

David archer concludes the global carbon cycle by saying: "the conclusion we come to is that the natural carbon cycle is a wild card, as large an uncertainty as that of our own CO2 emissions." (the global carbon cycle, princeton, 2010, P20). Uncertainties in emissions figure prominently in modeling the social cost of carbon (SCC), but the uncertainties from the carbon cycle have so far played no role in the models underpinning the SCC. Neglecting uncertainty quantification (UQ) for the carbon cycle poses a risk for decision making. IT also makes quantifying the social benefit of programs aimed at reducing that uncertainty impossible. Bontempi, cetinic and cooke began laying the foundations for a value of information study of the carbon cycle in 2018. An abstract the economic valuation of aquatic carbon observations from space was submitted to the oceanobvs 19 conference and the authors were invited to submit a community white paper to be published in a special issue of frontiers in marine science prior to the conference. The envisioned VOI study is similar in spirit to studies conducted by cooke ET AL with researchers at the langley center. However, those VOI studies could profit from a baseline uncertainty quantification of equilibrium climate sensitivity and an existing uncertainty decomposition of the climate observing system clarreo. These could be plugged into the integrated assessment model dice with relative ease to put a dollar value on enhanced observation capabilities. A comparable baseline uncertainty quantification of the carbon cycle is not available, in part because the carbon cycle itself can be presented at varying levels of complexity according to the purpose for which IT is used. Flaws in the carbon cycle in dice are widely recognized, but no alternative at a comparable level of complexity is at hand, and even this model is not equipped with UQ. For the frontiers paper, a simple carbon cycle with UQ of some pedigree can be extracted from ipcc AR(5) to provide a baseline UQ and illustrate the impact of these uncertainties on atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Coupling this with the damage and economic impacts modules of dice will allow US to compute the expected surfeit averted damages of any observation program whose uncertainty reduction can be quantified. The rest of this proposal describes initial steps already performed and sketches work yet to be performed for the frontiers white paper.