The most incredible thing about the Christian holiday of Easter is the guiding light the faith has been to billions of people. You may share different religious beliefs, you may be atheist, or agnostic, but I would remind all of us two things. First, we all have religious beliefs, some of us are just able […]
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I will refer you later to a much larger work I’ve put together on “everything you need to know about the economics of climate change” … and among the key uncertainties are: What is the equilibrium climate sensitivity (i.e. long-term feedback)? There is zero consensus on this. (“feedback”) What is an appropriate way to count […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Environment, Innovation on Dec 12th, 2020
The “experts” tell us we have only a few decades. Many of the climate models, for what it’s worth (such as RCP8.5) do not assume much adaptation. Here is a glimpse of the challenge: Seoul, South Korea 1960 vs. Seoul, South Korea today:
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It is obviously extremely hard to pin down a solid figure for how many people are going to be displaced due to the challenges posed by a warming planet. But virtually every publication I have read on the challenges of global warming rank the issue of “climate refugees” as both a serious political and economic […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Behavior, Environment on Dec 18th, 2017
Yes, I am now becoming an internet meme where basically anything and everything can be tied into climate change. I’d like to make a few short observations today. What happened to the climate change discussion? It really does seem to be low-level background noise. My advice to those people who are posting regularly about the […]
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Posted in Adaptation on Sep 15th, 2016
Another wonderful piece of news on malaria: it has been eradicated from Sri Lanka. Here is an older post on malaria, and the global warming threat. There are more. Here is the Third IPCC Assessment Report on malaria. Here is more.
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I’ve spent most of my “academic” time the past two summers studying and writing on the economics of climate change. It has become quite clear to me that were we to line up the honest economic and environmental experts and received their honest assessments about what the worst case scenarios look like, and where the […]
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One reason I think some folks are suspicious of geoengineering solutions to climate change or biotechnology solutions to feeding people and clothing people is that these are not solutions where we “pay for our sins.” If humans perceive “easy” technical fixes to problems, that will not only make us less nervous about what future damages […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Immigration on Feb 15th, 2016
There is a well known literature on how well (very) the children and grandchildren assimilate into the American economy and culture. What is less well-known are how other aspects of America end up rubbing off on the progeny of immigrants? In this study on the heritability of health characteristics, the authors find that even factors […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Environment on Jan 5th, 2016
One of my favorite movies of all time was Spaceballs. That’s probably because I was a young boy when I saw it, and have not watched it since. In any case, remember MegaMaid? You can imagine she can serve some very important climate functions. If we could construct carbon scrubbers for our atmosphere that would […]
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