Related papers: Global Warming: the Sacrificial Temptation
I offer an analysis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its relevancy for the scientific endeavour. I submit that the world is not, and cannot be, rational - only some brained beings are. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a…
Earlier meta-analyses of the economic impact of climate change are updated with more data, with three new results: (1) The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative. (2) The confidence interval about the…
Online social media has become an important platform to organize around different socio-cultural and political topics. An extensive scholarship has discussed how people are divided into echo-chamber-like groups. However, there is a lack of…
The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation specifically…
The climate change attribution problem is addressed using empirical decomposition. Cycles in solar motion and activity of 60 and 20 years were used to develop an empirical model of Earth temperature variations. The model was fit to the…
Each cognitive science tries to understand a set of cognitive behaviors. The structuring of knowledge of this nature's aspect is far from what it can be expected about a science. Until now universal standard consistently describing the set…
The warming trend of the last decades is now so strong that it is discernible in local temperature observations. This opens the possibility to compare the trend to the warming predicted by comprehensive climate models (GCMs), which up to…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
The universe we observe is homogeneous on super-horizon scales, leading to the ``cosmic homogeneity problem''. Inflation alleviates this problem but cannot solve it within the realm of conservative extrapolations of classical physics. A…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
We critically examine the often-made observation that "quantum winter [or some other winter] is coming", and the related admonition to prepare for this or that winter, inevitably bound to arrive. What we find based on even the most…
The carbon footprint of astronomical research is an increasingly topical issue. From a comparison of existing literature, we infer an annual per capita carbon footprint of several tens of tonnes of CO$_2$ equivalents for an average person…
The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which…
The sixth assessment of the international panel on climate change (IPCC) states that "cumulative net CO2 emissions over the last decade (2010-2019) are about the same size as the 11 remaining carbon budget likely to limit warming to 1.5C…
Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…
The combined effects of collective beliefs and individual stubbornness in the dynamic of a public debate are investigated using the Galam sequential probabilistic model of opinion dynamics. The study is focused on pair interactions for…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
Climate change's impact on human health poses unprecedented and diverse challenges. Unless proactive measures based on solid evidence are implemented, these threats will likely escalate and continue to endanger human well-being. The…
Global temperature is a fundamental climate metric highly correlated with sea level, which implies that keeping shorelines near their present location requires keeping global temperature within or close to its preindustrial Holocene range.…
Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the `problem of time,' rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the `thermal time hypothesis,' which defines time in terms of…