Related papers: Climate determinism reborn
A policy compass indicates the direction in which an institution is going in terms of three general qualities. The three qualities are: suppression, harmony and passion. Any formal institution can develop a policy compass to examine the…
The planned US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement as well as uncertainty about federal climate policy have raised questions about the country's future emissions trajectory. Our model-based analysis accounts for uncertainty in fuel prices…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Economists have predicted that damages from global warming will be as low as 2.1% of global economic production for a 3$^\circ$C rise in global average surface temperature, and 7.9% for a 6$^\circ$C rise. Such relatively trivial estimates…
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…
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 implications of technological innovation for sustainability are becoming increasingly complex with information technology moving machines from being mere tools for production or objects of consumption to playing a role in economic…
In recent months the figure of Greta Thunberg and the theme of climate changings quickly became the focus of the debate. This has lead to a polarization effect in opinion forming about the climate subject. Starting from the analysis of this…
The unfolding climate crisis is a physical manifestation of the damage that market economy, driven by the high intensity consumption of fossil fuels, has inflicted on the Earth System and on the stability conditions that were established by…
The production of goods we buy on a daily basis accounts for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Although consumers have the power to influence industries' behavior through their demand, making sustainable purchases is challenging.…
Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…
The demand for computing is continuing to grow exponentially. This growth will translate to exponential growth in computing's energy consumption unless improvements in its energy-efficiency can outpace increases in its demand. Yet, after…
Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…
Public policy shapes the economic landscape, influencing everything from corporate behavior to individual investment decisions. For Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investors, these policy shifts can create opportunities and…
Climate change poses substantial risks to the global economy. Kotz, Levermann and Wenz (Nature, 2024) statistically analyzed economic and climate data, finding significant projected damages until mid-century and a divergence in outcomes…
Many aspects of solar energy and policies to tackle the energy transition have been neglected. Even though the earth is plenty of sun energy, our planet is not plenty of resources to transform that energy into electricity. This is a case…
Assessing and managing risks in a changing climate requires projections that account for decision-relevant uncertainties. These deep uncertainties are often approximated by ensembles of Earth-system model runs that sample only a subset of…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
The Internet and Social Media change our way of decision-making. We are no longer the independent decision makers we used to be. Instead, we have become networked minds, social decision-makers, more than ever before. This has several…