Related papers: Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answe…
The complexity of emergent wicked problems, such as climate change, culminates in a reformulation of how we think about society and mobilize scientists from various disciplines to seek solutions and perspectives on the problem. From an…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
This essay, written by a statistician and a climate scientist, describes our view of the gap that exists between current practice in mainstream climate science, and the practical needs of policymakers charged with exploring possible…
It is the role of the scientific community to provide for the knowledge of scientific facts and technical capabilities as a background for political decision-making. The reasons are given why governments are sometimes not ready to accept…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
Scientific knowledge and advances are a cornerstone of modern society. They improve our understanding of the world we live in and help us navigate global challenges including emerging infectious diseases, climate change and the biodiversity…
First-best climate policy is a uniform carbon tax which gradually rises over time. Civil servants have complicated climate policy to expand bureaucracies, politicians to create rents. Environmentalists have exaggerated climate change to…
Environmental determinism in the past followed from the belief that the gods bestowed political power and the best possible weather on the sponsors of early scholars. Although later discredited in academia because of the associations with…
Obtaining reliable answers to the major scientific questions raised by climate change in time to take appropriate action gives added urgency to the open access program.
The present politically correct consensus is that increased exchange of scientific insight, knowledge, practitioners and skills at the global level brings significant benefits to all. The quantifiable scientometric changes during the last…
We briefly review some of the scientific challenges and epistemological issues related to climate science. We discuss the formulation and testing of theories and numerical models, which, given the presence of unavoidable uncertainties in…
Over the last few decades, the nature of scientific research has changed in response to external influences. Firstly, powerful networked computers have become a standard tool. Secondly, society presses ever harder for research to deliver…
There is a perception that climate science can only be approached with complex computer simulations. But working climate scientists often use simple models to understand their simulations and make order-of-magnitude estimates. This article…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
Global climate change is attracting widespread scientific, political, and public attention owing to the involvement of international initiatives such as the Paris Agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We present a…
Institutions and their aggregates are not the right units of analysis for developing a science policy with cognitive goals in view. Institutions, however, can be compared in terms of their performance with reference to their previous…
Climate change is an ongoing topic in nearly all areas of society since many years. A discussion of climate change without referring to scientific results is not imaginable. This is especially the case for policies since action on the macro…
Climate science is the multidisciplinary field that studies the Earth's climate and its evolution. At the very core of climate science are indispensable climate models that predict future climate scenarios, inform policy decisions, and…
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article…