Related papers: Climate determinism reborn
There is an increasingly urgent need to develop knowledge and practices to manage climate risks. For example, flood-risk information can inform household decisions such as purchasing a home or flood insurance. However, flood-risk estimates…
Natural climate variability, captured through multiple initial condition ensembles, may be comparable to the variability caused by knowledge gaps in future emissions trajectories and in the physical science basis, especially at…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
Multiple changes in Earth's climate system have been observed over the past decades. Determining how likely each of these changes are to have been caused by human influence, is important for decision making on mitigation and adaptation…
Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers--but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little…
Many real-world situations of ethical and economic relevance, such as collective (in)action with respect to the climate crisis, involve not only diverse agents whose decisions interact in complicated ways, but also various forms of…
The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposes different mitigation strategies to achieve the net emissions reductions that would be required to follow a pathway that limits global warming to 1.5{\deg}C with no or limited overshoot.…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
The consequences of anthropogenic climate change are extensively debated through scientific papers, newspaper articles, and blogs. Newspaper articles may lack accuracy, while the severity of findings in scientific papers may be too opaque…
Carbon abatement decisions are usually based on the implausible assumption of constant social preference. This paper focuses on a specific case of market and non-market goods, and investigates the optimal climate policy when social…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
Even if never elucidated, the question of determinism is a standing question along the history of human thinking. A physical system evolves in a deterministic way if its future is completely determined once we have fixed some present…
Ecological forecasts are model-based statements about currently unknown ecosystem states in time or space. For a model forecast to be useful to inform decision makers, model validation and verification determine adequateness. The measure of…
Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…
There is much disagreement concerning how best to control global carbon emissions. We explore quantitatively how different control schemes affect the collective emission dynamics of a population of emitting entities. We uncover a complex…
In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there appears to be an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. In cultural markets such as…
Predicting the future state of a system has always been a natural motivation for science and practical applications. Such a topic, beyond its obvious technical and societal relevance, is also interesting from a conceptual point of view.…