Stephen Salter wants to build a fleet of ships that will churn up seawater to create whiter, fluffier clouds that will reflect more sunlight away from the sea surface. The cost for the first 300 ships that should turn the clock back: $600 million. Other ideas include spraying sulfur dioxide 65,000 feet up...

First, let me say how honored I am to be contributing to this blog and to the complex systems web community in general. A New York Times Magazine article raises an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. If you are, as I am, a scientist concerned about global climate change, you may find yourself...

As I’ve made clear before, I remain skeptical that carbon emissions pose a significant marginal threat of climate change. The likely climate sensitivity to CO2 is substantially less than the natural variability over human timescales.  Seeing as how temperature trends over geologic time scales are...

Rafe posted this TED talk by Willie Smits without much commentary. I would like to add some.  When I first started watching, I thought, “Wow, you can make a lot of hay out of simply applying Econ 101.”  This was in response to the fact that they bought the former rainforest land in question,...

Oh, and re-grow the rainforrest, strengthen the social, political and economic climate, save endangered species and increase biodiversity and resilliance all at the same time without any...

Via a post at the always terrific Watts Up with That, a pre publication version of this paper examines the non-linear coupling dynamics of the climate. Its hypothesis is based on the mathematics of synchronized chaos (sorry, no good introductory link available). ...

Kevin has a few threads regarding the effect that micro behaviors have when aggregated to macro behaviors: Society According to Kevin I May Have Been Wrong About Macroeconomics But I Was Probably Right About Climate Models It occurred to me as I was reading this Huffington Post article that there is a...

I try not to practice false modesty (those of you who know me well probably just did a spit take at that understatement).  So while I try to stand up and admit when I’m wrong, I also like to stand up and point out where I’m right. It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you that I came to the...

bed Code) He makes so much sense! ...

This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post. Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own?  Obviously, there are many multicellular...

Okay, Kev, here’s your chance on affecting climate policy, go...

I apologize for the posting lull. I actually spotted an issue than I wanted to address a few weeks ago, but I’ve been pondering how to approach it.  It’s pretty complicated and subtle.  I even ran a couple of drafts by Rafe to refine my thinking.  So please bear with me. As I’ve...

Jay makes a thoughtful comment to my last post on the Ascetic Meme.  While I’m pleased that I was able to affect Jay enough to write such a comment, I’m dismayed that the effect was not the one I intended.  I don’t mean to be either insulting or hostile to the vast majority of regular...

I’d like to thank everyone that stuck with me for Part I and Part II. Now we get to the punch line, which is very simple: because of the Ascetic Meme, we cannot trust our instincts when it comes to environmental policy. ...

As I discussed in Environmental Ideology and the Ascetic Meme, the Ascetic Meme is a severe form of the Frugality Meme. In this post, I’ll explore how I think it arises and the social interactions that emerge when the Ascetic Meme takes hold. ...

I’ve always been ambivalent about environmentalism. On the one hand, my gut instinct is usually to conserve and preserve as a default policy. On the other hand, a lot of environmentalists seem to adopt an absolutist posture. Any harm to the environment is bad. No tradeoffs. No cost-benefit analysis....

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I hope you’ll pay particular attention to interventions where Rafe and I agree something should be done. Whenever such agreement emerges, we plan on letting you know. Hopefully, we’ll inspire you to support them as well. As it happens, we have just...

An eye-opening graphic from Wired’s cover this month on “Peak Water“: ...