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To analyse climate change mitigation strategies, economists rely on simplified climate models—so-called climate emulators—that provide a realistic quantitative link between emissions and global warming at low computational costs. In this paper, we propose a generic and transparent calibration and evaluation strategy for these climate emulators that are based on freely and easily accessible state-of-the-art benchmark data from climate sciences. We demonstrate that the appropriate choice of the free model parameters can be of key relevance for the predicted social cost of carbon. The key idea we put forward is to calibrate the simplified climate models to benchmark data from comprehensive global climate models that took part in the coupled model intercomparison project, phase 5 (CMIP5). In particular, we propose to use four different test cases that are considered pivotal in the climate science …