Related papers: Climate determinism reborn
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…
The mitigation of climate change requires a fundamental transition of the energy system. Affordability, reliability and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions constitute central but often conflicting targets for this energy transition.…
Climate adaptation could yield significant benefits. However, the uncertainty of which future climate scenarios will occur decreases the feasibility of proactively adapting. Climate adaptation projects could be underwritten by benefits paid…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
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…
Multi-model ensembles provide a pragmatic approach to the representation of model uncertainty in climate prediction. However, such representations are inherently ad hoc, and, as shown, probability distributions of climate variables based on…
The IPCC started at a time when climate policy was an aspiration for the future. The research assessed in the early IPCC reports was necessarily about potential climate policies, always stylized and often optimized. The IPCC has continued…
The climate response to anthropogenic forcing has long been one of the dominant uncertainties in predicting future climate change (Houghton et al, 2001). Many observationally-based estimates of climate sensitivity (S) have been presented in…
Using observational data and an elementary rigorous statistical fact it is easily shown that the distribution of Earth's climate is non-stationary. Examination of records of hundreds of local Industrial Era temperature histories in the…
Accuracy of economic theories and efficiency of economic policy strictly depend on the choice of the economic variables and processes mostly liable for description of economic reality. That states the general problem of assessment of any…
It is well-established that human activity is driving extreme weather patterns, and that these extreme events influence human behaviour. However, few models allow for human behaviours and the climate to dynamically interact. The models…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the "Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitable planet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophic processes in…
In this paper, we survey recent econometric contributions to measure the relationship between economic activity and climate change. Due to the critical relevance of these effects for the well-being of future generations, there is an…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
In the past several years, scientists have issued a series of warnings about the threats of climate change and other forms of environmental disruption. Here, we provide a scientists' warning on how technology affects these issues.…
We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the judgments of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3,367) about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of…
How does the climatic experience of previous generations affect today's attention to environmental questions? Using self-reported beliefs and environmental themes in folklore, we show empirically that the realized intensity of deviations…
Time can be defined as the duration between events. It is irreversible. When used as a variable in quantifying the changing properties of matter, this irreversibility of time is incompatible with Newton's deterministic mechanics and with…
Decision makers sometimes cannot observe the consequences of their actions ex-post. This paper axiomatically characterizes a decision model in which the decision maker cares about verifying that a good consequence has been achieved.…