Uncategorized

Democrats must embrace Traditional Values

Leave a comment

In the wake of the UK landslide defeat of the Labour Party, Democrats in the US are asking if the same will happen to them. I believe that we can defeat Trump, but only by radically reconnecting with our roots.

A major reason why Labour lost, and why Trump has been doing so well, is that progressives have forgotten how to relate to the working class (a term, by the way, which should be synonomous with the middle class). As Hugo Dixon said about the Brexit fight in the UK, “There is a crisis of liberalism because we have not found a way to connect to the lives of people in the small towns of the postindustrial wasteland whose traditional culture has been torn away.” [op. ed. piece] People feel betrayed by politicians, and just explaining to them that Democrats are the only party really fighting for working people is not going to help.

For the sake of the United States and for the sake of the planet, the Democratic Party needs to make one of the hardest shifts ever: we must become the party of Traditional Values, and we have to do it right now.

What does it mean to fight for Traditional Values?

First, I am not suggesting allowing any “rolling-back” of the rights of women, minorities, or LGBTQAI+, and we have a lot further to go. The mistreatment of women and black people, in particular, needs to be tackled now.

And importantly, discrimination and white-male dominance have nothing to do with Traditional Values. Those aren’t values; they’re harmful practices, and the recent raising of awareness of them doesn’t attack anyone’s values– it just provides new information to apply those values to.

What are the Traditional Values I’m talking about? I thought I posted about this last year, but I can’t find it, so I’ll say it here.

I have come to a conclusion that I think is shared by many conservatives: Our society has lost its moral core, and many of our problems of social and political problems stem from that lack of foundation. And I actually think that there is quite a large common ground in how progressives and conservatives understand that moral core.

Here are a few foundations that I think I share with hard-line conservatives:

The primacy of the working class

The working class, both poor and middle-class, are the core of American society. That means (1) that they should have the biggest say in government decisions, and (2) our society should be organized to work for them.

Importance of and duty to community

A sense of community is a foundation of wellbeing. Communities form through mutual commitment, and that means that we have responsibilities to our communities that we should act on.

The excellence of American individualism

America is a unique place of self-determination and freedom. You can pursue any life, and the America I want to see is where anyone can achieve their personal goals. In America, our communities only every work by people freely choosing to uphold them.

Earth was given to us to steward

America is a land of amazing beauty. We have a responsibility to maintain the earth for future generations– to conserve.

Importance of a moral core

In a land of individual, personal choices, it is even more important that people treat every situation with moral care, and ask “What can I do to make this right?”

Lack of a common moral core

We have lost our common moral core. No political party has a monopoly on morality, and we all have some deep introspection to do.

Consequences of that lack

Many of the current divides in society stem from our lack of common morality. Democrats moral failures when they have been in power are as much to blame for the rise of Trump as Republican failures.

The American Dream is not to be fabulously wealthy. It is an implicit deal that if you work hard, you can have a comfortable lifestyle. That means a stable job and knowing that you can send your children to school.

But being the party of Traditional Values requires more than just reconnecting with our existing values. It requires new kinds of actions. We have to be the party of ordinary people, of Small-Town, USA, or decaying rust belt communities. We have to bring our message into sports bars and into churches.

What happened to Traditional Values?

People feel betrayed– by politicians, by society, and particularly by urban elites. But they have also misdiagnosed the problem, with the help of Republican pundits. The forces that betrayed the American people are bigger than the parties. But they should be slowed or stopped, and managed, and we have a responsibility to do that.

First, work has changed. People are less secure in their careers and in their companies. The Work-Home divide has been broken, and people are under chronic stress like never before. This is partly because of unmanaged technology, partly the decay of unions, partly the endless stream of mergers. We value stable work, but we haven’t been providing it.

Culture has been changing too. Technology has infiltrated every aspect of our culture. Social media has left people feeling insecure. People no longer feel free to choose how they relate to their technology and the brands of immense corporations, and that smacks against the core of the American ideal.

So what happened to Traditional Values was unmanaged technological change and corporate consolidation. It is time to subjugate both of these to our values, and recognize that they are both tools to help us make the world we want.

Why should Democrats embrace Traditional Values?

We should become the party of Traditional Values first because we can. The Republicans have completely dropped this ball, in the era of Trump. I believe that people will respond if we speak about the importance of American traditions and values, because we will actually be authentic when we do so. With repeated, strong effort, the Republican hold on churches and communities will melt away.

I do not know if Democrats are the natural party of Traditional Values, but America needs it, and we have every right to the role. We have been fighting for the working class forever, ensuring that small-businesses can prosper, and protecting the environment.

Finally, we need to do this because we have to act right now. Another four years of Trump would be the end of the Paris Agreement, and these are incredibly important years to act on climate change. We are going through a sixth great extinction, and if we want to conserve biodiversity for the future, we can’t wait. And the rise of inequality and the technological giants is relentless, and we need to stop it before our culture is completely subsumed by it.

Uncategorized

The missing economic risks in assessments of climate change impacts

Leave a comment

Through an expert elicitation involving LSE, Columbia University, and PIK, we have developed a statement for policy-makers on missing risks of climate change. Often the discussion of the risks of climate change focuses on what we know: higher temperatures and sea-levels, biodiversity loss, deaths from heat waves. But scientists are reticent to discuss what we do not yet understand: die-off of the Amazon, loss of the ocean currents that warm Europe, mass migrations and their conflict consequences.

Our paper says that even though we cannot yet quantify these risks, we should be planning for them. Even if the worst scenarios are unlikely to happen, leaving them out of our discussions with policy-makers is the same as claiming that their risk is zero, which is not right either. Governments regularly plan for international security scenarios that only have a 1-in-10,000 chance of happening, and we should treat the worst risks of climate change the same way.

Our document on the missing risks of climate change will be presented at the U.N. General Assembly Climate Action Summit, and we hope it will heat things up!

Transience Divine

An animated life

Leave a comment

I recently discovered all four seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on Netflix, and now I’m fired up about making some surreal animations. I have a particular vision for a series on the life and times of James Rising, born 1618. It would be an inseparable mix of historical research and mythologizing, childhood and adult themes combined in Walt Disneyesque fashion, anarchy and anachronism, set in a surrealist pre-Steampunk world.

I’m envisioning this as an ever growing series of cel-animation episodes. The whole series would be divided into 5 chapters, of which I initially only aim to make a single episode for each chapter. [Really, I just want to make a single episode, but dividing it into 5 segments makes it seem more feasible.]

Here’s the story so far:

Chapter 1: In the shadow of Castle Rising

The Rising ancestors, not yet named Risings, live a peasant life in the Norfolk countryside. But everything is changing in Jacobean era for a young, rebellious youth who runs away to the big city, Norwich. There he falls in some counter-culture Catholic recusants, before realizing that no religion can ensure love. Turning his back on both his old home and his new one, he drives into the horizon.

Chapter 2: The childhood of a Cordwainer

James is born to Risings that have finally made it in the middle class of small-town Beccles. But the world is so much bigger now, and at 18, the other side of the world seems nearer to James than the small-minded village politics around him. A chance encounter with nobility ruins his internship and his reputation, and he finally packs his bags.

Chapter 3: By land and by sea

James hitchhikes to London, through many new lands and strange customs. Along the way, he befriends a world-weary ex-raver, an existentialist dog, and a recurring used-cart salesman. Each offers him the possibility of their way of life, and he barters each one away for passage on the Dorset, bound for Bermuda. After nearly starving on the boat, he’s saved by a rat named Sergeant Buzfuz, who becomes his life-long companion.

Chapter 4: Zeal for the zealots

Ten years of hard labor offer lots of pitfalls, and James’s favorites are drink, women, and religious experiments. He is struggling with depression when a friend’s cult decides to go off-the-grid and they convince James to come and help them. But the boat is wrecked on metaphor-heavy rocks, their cool-aid lost, and life without technology turns out to be pretty tough. The colony gives up, but James and Sergeant Buzfuz, now both bearded and world-weary, stow away on a boat to Boston.

Chapter 5: Englands Old and New

James uses his intrepid instinct for trouble to make a living in Boston. He falls madly in love with a lifestyle where anything is possible, and then he meets Elizabeth Hinsdale. Together they start a family, move to Connecticut, and try to avoid an irate used-cart salesmen. At the deathbed-side of Sergeant Buzfuz, James recounts the dreams of youth and his memories of the future.

Transience Divine

Hospital of Transplanted Hearts

Leave a comment

I came upon this bit of literary engineering by D. M. Thomas in Best SF: 1969 (ed. Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss). I love the project idea, but I don’t endorse all the content.

  A B   C D E F G H I J K L M N
1
       Body of:
2
       Priest Soldier Whore Gardener Sadist Virgin Psychologist Stakhanovite Scientist Composer Masochist Surgeon</td>
                               
3
 Heart of: Priest     Bending sadly over his enemy he gave him his cup of grace. Absolved by her, he lit a small candle. He told folwers they would rise again if they were holy Religiously he choked evil spirits out of her. She stopped at the laying on of hands. He strove to marry the schizophrenic, whose tongue could not find his name. From his crane-pulpit he made a new heaven, new earth. In a smear of communion-wine: DNA of God. He believed in the triad, three-in-one, one-in-three. Lunchtime eucharist. Her sad, broiler flesh stigmatised. In the waiting flesh he made a vertical and transverse cut.
4
 Soldier   He baptised the little ones with fire.   After the fray she withdrew completely exploding bridges. Unimaginatively he heard the insecticides silent rain. Her nails left stripes on arms, epaulettes on shoulders. She made them retreat from the capital’s gates through snow. Bravely he climbed down into sewers where the Resistance lurked. Sagging dugs fed her tenth son to a patriot’s death. On Mt. Palomar: Such multitudes! And more in reverse. Choric Ode Warsaw Ghetto for unaccompanied keening of mothers. She guided the gun barrel between her lips. The enemy on x-ray. We will attack at first light.
5
 Whore   He loved all men equally. He did not question their instructions.   Where he planted used condoms, a gard of limbo. Shagging her, he pulled away from the intimacy of a kiss. She hung hesitant at the entrance of unlit alleys. If he were not paid for his skill their souls would feel enslaved. He holidayed in santinarium. Regained health. Inadequate theories passed each other on the stairs. All day at the piano, the spume of notes breaking and idling back. He dreamt he was a jewes in the Auschwitz brothel. Cunningly his hands moved as though we were operating.
6
 Gardener   The butterfly evading his touch he mistook for Jesus. Where the shell struck, poppies bloomed from the astounded body. Two roses in the hot-house; one overblown one cankered.   While police raged he cultivated his garden quietly at night. She regretted pollinization by the wind. How could he restore the lost paradise beneath Suicide City? He drilled desert after desert, Planting a future forever receding. By morning, the culture had flowered unrecognizably. Instrumentation of a hot summer’s day, concerto for busy ephemera. The cooked and ate the insecticide-ridden plants. The steering column was grafted into the beautiful girl’s breast.
7
 Sadist   He pictured a femal Messiah’s bloodied, heaving breasts. Afterwards, no one found it was only the moon rising over Finland. She left their mutilated bodies in backstreet hotels. The face of the rose purpled, crumpled.   Take me! she said, as the bus left, in church, on the big dipper.</i> He restored naturals to sanity. His skill faltered by an inch in the third story of the skyscraper. Test tube in hand, he stood over the city’s reservoir. He ended all movements with imperfect cadences. She had herself whipped by a reluctant weeping masochist. Religious he refused to cut away.
8
 Virgin   He swooned at the snakeflesh of the communicant’s tongue. He did not know if he had died in that attack. She wept at her inviolate purity. Spring congress: nature’s pandering shocked him. She told her daughter You are ugly the world must not see you.   His fingers holding the pencil trembled. His cheeks blushed. He shuddered as the road drill clove soft earth. He shivered at the neutrino cleaving light years of lead. Convent bells over the fields stirred his heart to new modes. He kept himself untouched. Seventy years he fought to save the small tissues.
9
 Psychologist   He considered Christ’s over-compensatory Oedipus complex. Bayoneted, he watched his killer’s face. She asked them why they did this. Autumn divorce: psychosis of Kore lengthened. He studied the child’s face. Lying on her lonely couch, she made notes on her case.   He felt for the huge machine’s pent-up sexual energy. He observed the expression on the dog’s transplanted head. At the first performance he watched the faces of the audience. On her couch of nails, she took notes on herself. Skimming the memory cells his lancet found the trauma.
10
 Stakhanovite   In his confessional, a camp bed. He wanted to be the firing squad for the world. She frigged the hunover gray morning into cupfinal night. He dreamt himself sole survivor and named Adam. He emigrated to South Africa. She took the veil. He emigrated to the States.   If only nature had covered up its tracks more cunningly. His 999th Symphony was his last. Sketches of the 1000ths remain. He longed to believe in the consolation of Hell. He said We must take out the lot.
11
 Scientist   So many worlds! So many galaxies! So many saviors! The silent village forgave him, for not using germ warfare. As her sighs quickened, she graphed their heartbeats. Birds hooded, flowers shut: everwhere entropy accepted. He experimented with the velocity of falling bodies. She feared the Pill, she feared it. Uncertainty: observing quanta changed by his observing. Give me an ideology and I will move the whole earth.   Tone-poem Jodrell Bank. The cracklings of infinite space. Singlehanded she sailed for the atom-test island. He toiled to turn inert mass into energy again.
12
 Composer   Through all troubling modulations always the home-key. He wrote a victory march for the refugees to sing. Afire with impatience, she felt its percussive rhythm. Violets muted trumpets, then spring’s full sweet jazz. He looked at the inert score he played with too much brio. Night-music. The wind’s singers clicking sadly her bones. Slowly he collected all the strange lost tunes of the mad. He could listen to the song of a tractor forever. He played moon-light sonata of the cool star’s spectrum.   Dies Irae, Her favorite lovesong. He gasped at the cancer’s unexpected counterpoint.
13
 Masochist   As the rope tightened, he offered to die instead. He turned the napalm inwards. She made love for love. He fecundated the Venus flytrap. He lashed a masochist who cried with joy. All night her moist, lustrous eyes begged him not ot rape her. He drove the devils out and into his own Gaderene mind. He toiled to complete the robot which would destroy him. Love bites of laboratory rats. He destroyed his magnum opus. Only God was worthy of it.   He turned the scalpel inward.
14
 Surgeon   The one he had lost, not the ninety-nine he had saved. Heart transplant. He sent them to slave factories in the fatherland. She felt the hump on his back with skilled healing fingers. Plantation of transplantation. All members of one body. He said To whip you externally is not enough. Loving her, he allowed her to tenderly emasculate him. For freedom the patient must find her heart grasped by hands. Onto church-rubble he transplanted the factory. Man came: slowly, heart grafted into the universe. Thirty years he cut, sighed, stitched up the white silence. Lovebites in his old diseased heart.  
Uncategorized

Connected oceans

Leave a comment

Dividing an elephant in half does not make two small elephants. It makes one mess.

The same is true of our oceans. Modern management of the natural environment is all about dividing up elephants, assigning the halves to different owners, and blinding ourselves to the activities beyond our halves. But just as with elephants, pieces of an ocean depend on each other: fish and currents do not respect national boundaries.

That is the starting point of a new paper Nandini Ramesh, Kimberly Oremus, and I recently published in Science, entitled “The small world of global marine fisheries: The cross-boundary consequences of larval dispersal“. We wanted to understand how national fisheries depended upon each other.

To study this, we used the same model used to study how debris from the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash ended up halfway around the world:

Instead of looking at airplane debris, we looked at fish spawn. Most marine species spend a stage of their lives as plankton, either in the form of floating eggs or microscopic larvae. They can travel huge distances as they float with the currents, sometimes over the course of several months. We can use those journeys to identify the original spawning grounds of the adult fish that are eventually caught.

These connections are important, because they mean that your national fisheries depend upon neighboring countries. Spawning regions are highly sensitive, and if your national neighbors fail to protect them, the fish in your country can disappear. A country like the UK depends upon plenty of other countries for its many species.

Finally, this is not just an issue for the fishing sector. We also looked at food security and jobs. People around the world depend on the careful environmental management of their neighbors, and it is time we recognized this elephant as a whole.

Uncategorized

An unstoppable force

Leave a comment

Shortly after I joined LSE, Stéphane Hallegatte from the World Bank gave a presentation on their new report, “Unbreakable”. The report is about how to measure risk in the face of the potential to fall into poverty, and includes one of my favorite graphs of the last year:

Unbreakable figure
From “Unbreakable”: Estimated people driven into poverty annually by natural disasters.

I think it’s an amazing bit of modeling to be able to relate natural events to the excruciatingly chaotic process we call “falling into poverty”. But it’s the scale of the two sides of the graph that blows me away. On the left, earthquakes, storm surge, tsunamis, and windstorms all together account for about 1 million people falling into poverty every year. On the right, floods account for 10x as many, and droughts account for an additional 8x as many.

The reason is that floods and droughts are naturally huge events– covering large areas and affecting millions of people– every time they occur. The second is that they occur all the time.

This gets at the importance of water. Most of the researchers I know don’t spend much time thinking about water. They know it’s important, but in a way that’s so commonplace as to be invisible. We just said that 18 million people fall into poverty each year from floods and droughts; in 2015 there were 736 million people in poverty total. That means that if we magically got everyone out of poverty today, in 41 years, there would have already been 736 million new instances of poverty from floods and drought alone. Water is about enough to explain the stubbornness of extreme poverty all on its own.

Transience Divine

A gallery in real life

Leave a comment

“Elstir’s studio seemed like the laboratory out of which would come a kind of new creation of the world: from the chaos made of all things we see, he had abstracted, by painting them on various rectangles of canvas now standing about on all sides, glimpses of things, like a wave in the sea crashing its angry lilac shaded foam down on the sand, or a young man in white twill leaning on a ship’s rail. The young man’s jacket and the splash of the wave had taken on a new dignity, in virtue of the fact that they continued to exist, though now deprived of what they were believed to consist in, the wave being now unable to wet anyone, and the jacket unable to be worn.”

– In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust

I like to think I make art, sometimes, but all of my work exists only in this virtual Neverland. My works can be seen, but only through a glorified microfiche scanner, and if you choose to look to the right tiny speck. I wish I had a studio like Elstir’s where people could wander, with real hands tilting back real physical picture frames.

There’s a magic in printing things out, like a spell that reincarnates from the spirit-like 1s and 0s. Flame and I have over a dozen hand-picked photo albums from our various trips, ready should anyone care to open some memories. I want similar momentos for my projects. I thought for a while of building a converter that could represent the structures of code and data as intricate art. But no converter would see the beauty that I see in my own work.

So, I’m thinking of just printing and binding my papers (completed, whether published or not). I’m not above making them into mugs instead, or making blown-up figures etched in canvas. But the first step is to leave them leaning one on the other, and see if anyone takes a peak.

Transience Divine

Paper Fish

Leave a comment

I have fish! Two lovely creatures, my current obsession. I have not had an aquarium since I was 14 (when, at my height, I had tanks’ worth), but my new tank is at the center of our London flat.

Flame knows that I love animals, but her allergy to cats has killed any pet plans until recently. She finally consented to one fish per paper I publish. Since I’ve only published two papers since coming to London, I get two fish. Let me introduce them:

Paige is a Pearl Gourami. You can see her center stage, above. She’s a bit of an attention hog, but she’s beautiful and knows it. I got her for a paper on a model I helped build, named Mimi-PAGE, so it’s no surprise that she’s a model.

Robbie is a Red-tailed Black Shark (not an actual shark sadly). He’s quite shy, and you can just see his tail behind Paige. He inches along the gravel, propelled by his flaming tail, and I got him for a paper on transportation in Nairobi.

As I get more fish, I fully expected to be in a constant publication race against their perishing, but I didn’t do my research. Given the opportunity, Paige is going to grow 5 inches long and 5 years old, and Robbie is going to get 6 inches long after 9 years. And by the time Robbie comes of age, his instinct for territory is likely to be the terror of any other paper I try to publish.

Transience Divine

23andme, Part I

2 Comments

Flame got me a 23andme genetic testing kit (report? procedure?) for Christmas! I’m excited to get some cliffnotes to my user manual, but I was surprised at how daunted I would feel. Preparing my saliva sample felt fatalistic, like each spit was nailing closed the possible; though, I suppose it was just a knock on the door to the actual.

I’m afraid of what I’m going to see. I got the genetic health option, and one of the items on the list is Parkinson’s, with which I watched my grandfather slowly die. That alone tells me that I have a chance that I’m predisposed– do I want to know that it’s definitely waiting in my future? I want to want to know.

On a happier note, I get to find out my paternal haplogroup. From an uncle’s genetic test, I know that my mother’s side comes from the lost land of Doggerland. And I think that my Y-chromosome comes from the east coast of England, but the story is so murky against 300 years of being American that I’m really curious what I’ll find.

Part II when I learn more!

Uncategorized

Improving IAMs: From problems to priorities

Leave a comment

I wrote this up over the holidays, to feed into some discussions about the failings of integrated assessment models (IAMs). IAMs have long been the point at which climate science (in a simplistic form), economics (in a fanciful form), and policy (beyond what they deserve) meet. I’m a big believer in the potential of models to bring those three together, and the hard work of improving them will be a big part of my career (see also my EAERE newsletter piece). The point of this document is to highlight some progress that’s being made, and the next steps that are needed. Thanks to D. Anthoff and F. Moore for many of the citations.

Integrated assessment models fail to accurately represent the full risks of climate change. This document outlines the challenges (section 1), recent research and progress (section 2), and priorities to develop the next generation of IAMs.

1. Problems with the IAMs and existing challenges

The problems with IAMs have been extensively discussed elsewhere (Stern 2013, Pindyck 2017). The purpose here is to highlight those challenges that are responsive to changes in near-term research priorities. I think there are three categories: scientific deficiencies, tipping points and feedbacks, and disciplinary mismatches. The calibrations of the IAMs are often decades out of date (Rising 2018) and represent empirical methods which are no longer credible (e.g. Huber et al. 2017). The IAMs also miss the potential and consequences of catastrophic feedback in both the climate and social systems, and the corresponding long-tails of risk. Difficulties in communication between natural scientists, economists, and modelers have stalled the scientific process (see previous document, Juan-Carlos et al. WP).

2. Recent work to improve IAMs

Progress is being made on each of these three fronts. A new set of scientific standards represents the environmental economic consensus (Hsiang et al. 2017). The gap between empirical economics and IAMs has been bridged by, e.g., the works of the Climate Impact Lab, through empirically-estimated damage functions, with work on impacts on mortality, energy demand, agricultural production, labour productivity, and inter-group conflict (CIL 2018). Empirical estimates of the costs and potential of adaptation have also been developed (Carleton et al. 2018). Updated results have been integrated into IAMs for economic growth (Moore & Diaz 2015), agricultural productivity (Moore et al. 2017), and mortality (Vasquez WP), resulting in large SCC changes.

The natural science work on tipping points suggest some stylized results: multiple tipping points are already at risk of being triggered, and tipping points are interdependent, but known feedbacks are weak and may take centuries to unfold (O’Neill et al. 2017, Steffen et al. 2018, Kopp et al. 2016). Within IAMs, treatment of tipping points has been at the DICE-theory interface (Lemoine and Traeger 2016, Cai et al. 2016), and feedbacks through higher climate sensitivities (Ceronsky et al. 2005, Nordhaus 2018). Separately, there are feedbacks and tipping points in the economic systems, but only some of these have been studied: capital formation feedbacks (Houser et al. 2015), growth rate effects (Burke et al. 2015), and conflict feedbacks (Rising WP).

Interdisciplinary groups remain rare. The US National Academy of Sciences has produced suggestions on needed improvements, as part of the Social Cost of Carbon estimation process (NAS 2016). Resources For the Future is engaged in a multi-pronged project to implement these changes. This work is partly built upon the recent open-sourcing of RICE, PAGE, and FUND under a common modeling framework (Moore et al. 2018). The Climate Impact Lab is pioneering better connections between climate science and empirical economics. The ISIMIP process has improved standards for models, mainly in process models at the social-environment interface.

Since the development of the original IAMs, a wide variety of sector-specific impact, adaptation, and mitigation models have been developed (see ISIMIP), alternative IAMs (WITCH, REMIND, MERGE, GCAM, GIAM, ICAM), as well as integrated earth system models (MIT IGSM, IMAGE). The latter often include no mitigation, but mitigation is an area that I am not highlighting in this document, because of the longer research agenda needed. The IAM Consortium and Snowmass conferences are important points of contact across these models.

3. Priorities for new developments

Of the three challenges, I think that significant progress in improving the science within IAMs is occurring and the path forward is clear. The need to incorporate tipping points into IAMs is being undermined by (1) a lack of clear science, (2) difficulties in bridging the climate-economic-model cultures, and (3) methods of understanding long-term long-tail risks. Of these, (1) is being actively worked on the climate side, but clarity is not expected soon; economic tipping points need much more work. A process for (2) will require the repeated, collaboration-focused covening of researchers engaged in all aspects of the problem (see Bob Ward’s proposal). Concerning (3), the focus on cost-benefit analysis may poorly represent the relevant ethical choices, even under an accurate representation of tipping points, due to their long time horizon (under Ramsey discounting), and low probabilities. Alternatives are available (e.g., Watkiss & Downing 2008), but common norms are needed.

References:

Burke, M., Hsiang, S. M., & Miguel, E. (2015). Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production. Nature, 527(7577), 235.
Cai, Y., Lenton, T. M., & Lontzek, T. S. (2016). Risk of multiple interacting tipping points should encourage rapid CO 2 emission reduction. Nature Climate Change, 6(5), 520.
Ceronsky, M., Anthoff, D., Hepburn, C., & Tol, R. S. (2005). Checking the price tag on catastrophe: the social cost of carbon under non-linear climate response. Climatic Change.
CIL (2018). Climate Impact Lab website: Our approach. Accessible at http://bit.ly/2SKT8XB.
Houser, T., Hsiang, S., Kopp, R., & Larsen, K. (2015). Economic risks of climate change: an American prospectus. Columbia University Press.
Huber, V., Ibarreta, D., & Frieler, K. (2017). Cold-and heat-related mortality: a cautionary note on current damage functions with net benefits from climate change. Climatic change, 142(3-4), 407-418.
Kopp, R. E., Shwom, R. L., Wagner, G., & Yuan, J. (2016). Tipping elements and climate–economic shocks: Pathways toward integrated assessment. Earth’s Future, 4(8), 346-372.
Lemoine, D., & Traeger, C. P. (2016). Economics of tipping the climate dominoes. Nature Climate Change, 6(5), 514.
Moore, F. C., & Diaz, D. B. (2015). Temperature impacts on economic growth warrant stringent mitigation policy. Nature Climate Change, 5(2), 127.
Moore, F. C., Baldos, U., Hertel, T., & Diaz, D. (2017). New science of climate change impacts on agriculture implies higher social cost of carbon. Nature Communications, 8(1), 1607.
NAS (2016). Assessing Approaches to Updating the Social Cost of Carbon. Accessible at http://bit.ly/1nY5dZX
Nordhaus, W. D. (2018). Global Melting? The Economics of Disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet (No. w24640). National Bureau of Economic Research.
O’Neill, B. C., Oppenheimer, M., Warren, R., Hallegatte, S., Kopp, R. E., Pörtner, H. O., … & Mach, K. J. (2017). IPCC reasons for concern regarding climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 7(1), 28.
Pindyck, R. S. (2017). The use and misuse of models for climate policy. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 11(1), 100-114.
Rising, J. (2018). The Future Of The Cost Of Climate Change. EAERE Newsletter. Accessible at http://bit.ly/2SLnQ2F
Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T. M., Folke, C., Liverman, D., … & Donges, J. F. (2018). Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), 8252-8259.
Stern, N. (2013). The structure of economic modeling of the potential impacts of climate change: grafting gross underestimation of risk onto already narrow science models. Journal of Economic Literature, 51(3), 838-59.
Vasquez, V. (WP). Uncertainty in Climate Impact Modelling: An Empirical Exploration of the Mortality Damage Function and Value of Statistical Life in FUND. Masters Dissertation.
Watkiss, P., & Downing, T. (2008). The social cost of carbon: Valuation estimates and their use in UK policy. Integrated Assessment, 8(1).

Sustainability, Engineering, and Philosophy