Related papers: The structure of the climate debate

Despite major advances in climate science over the last 30 years, persistent uncertainties in projections of future climate change remain. Climate projections are produced with increasingly complex models which attempt to represent key…

Promoting and increasing energy efficiency is a promising method of reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding the potentially devastating effects of climate change. The question is: How do we induce a cultural or behavioural change whereby people…

Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…

Prevailing top-down systems in politics and economics struggle to keep pace with the pressing challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, social inequality and conflict. Bottom-up democratisation and participatory approaches in…

In this lengthy letter, we wanted to discuss the concept of climate based on definitions established for over a century and direct observations that we have been collecting for more than a century as well. To do this, we present and discuss…

The transition from a fossil-based energy economy to one based on renewable energy is driven by the double challenge of climate change and resource depletion. Building a renewable energy infrastructure requires an upfront energy investment…

The pursuit of particle physics requires a stable and prosperous society. Today, our society is increasingly threatened by global climate change. Human-influenced climate change has already impacted weather patterns, and global warming will…

Climate change is a major impending threat to the future of humanity. According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), our emissions are estimated to have caused 0.8 deg C-1.2 deg C of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) above…

Climate change impacts a broad spectrum of human resources and activities, necessitating the use of climate models to project long-term effects and inform mitigation and adaptation strategies. These models generate multiple datasets by…

A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…

Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…

Water-rich planets such as Earth are expected to become eventually uninhabitable, because liquid water does not remain stable at the surface as surface temperatures increase with the solar luminosity over time. Whether a large increase of…

Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment. Various interest groups, social movement organizations, and individuals engage in collective action on this issue on social media. In addition, issue…

The issue of climate change has become increasingly noteworthy in the past years, the transition towards a renewable energy system is a priority in the transition to a sustainable society. In this document, we explore the definition of…

We provide ex-post empirical analysis of the effects of climate policies on carbon dioxide emissions at the aggregate national level. Our results are based on a comprehensive database of 121 countries. As climate policies we examine carbon…

Training powerful AI systems to exhibit desired behaviors hinges on the ability to provide accurate human supervision on increasingly complex tasks. A promising approach to this problem is to amplify human judgement by leveraging the power…

The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…

We find that, in the 21st century, democracy has persistent negative impacts on growth in GDP and night-time light intensity. This finding emerges from five different instrumental variable strategies that account for potential invalidity in…

With a folk understanding that political polarization refers to socio-political divisions within a society, many have proclaimed that we are more divided than ever. In this account, polarization has been blamed for populism, the erosion of…