Related papers: Climate determinism reborn
We consider a sequential decision making process, such as renewable energy trading or electrical production scheduling, whose outcome depends on the future realization of a random factor, such as a meteorological variable. We assume that…
Planet Earth and the biodiversity it supports are in crisis. Human impact on terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems and the hundreds of thousands of organisms that inhabit them is global. To what extent can we push ecosystems before…
We assess empirical models in climate econometrics using modern statistical learning techniques. Existing approaches are prone to outliers, ignore sample dependencies, and lack principled model selection. To address these issues, we…
In this PhD thesis the ancient question of determinism ('Does every event have a cause ?') will be re-examined. In the philosophy of science and physics communities the orthodox position states that the physical world is indeterministic:…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…
Elementary physical reasoning seems to leave it inevitable that global warming would increase the variability of the weather. The first two terms in an approximation to the global entropy are used to show that global warming has increased…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
Uncertainties surrounding the energy transition often lead modelers to present large sets of scenarios that are challenging for policymakers to interpret and act upon. An alternative approach is to define a few qualitative storylines from…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
In public discussions of the quality of forecasts, attention typically focuses on the predictive performance in cases of extreme events. However, the restriction of conventional forecast evaluation methods to subsets of extreme observations…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
We developed a coupled social-climate network model to understand the interaction between climate change opinion spread and the climate system and determine the role of this interaction in shaping collective actions and global temperature…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
The response of precipitation extremes to climate change is considered using results from theory, modeling, and observations, with a focus on the physical factors that control the response. Observations and simulations with climate models…
We live in a world brimming with uncertainty, where we constantly have to make a lot of decisions under incomplete information. We are firm believers that our subjective belief cannot be computed by rigorous mathematical formula; instead…
With the increasing frequency of major natural disasters, understanding their political consequences is of paramount importance for democratic accountability. The existing literature is deeply divided, with some studies finding that voters…
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…