Comparative risk projects can provide broad policy guidance but they rarely have adequate scientific foundations to support precise risk rankings. Many extant projects report rankings anyway, with limited attention to uncertainty. Stochastic uncertainty, structural uncertainty, and ignorance are types of incertitude that afflict risk comparisons. The recently completed New Jersey Comparative Risk Project was innovative in trying to acknowledge and accommodate some historically ignored uncertainties in a substantive manner. This article examines the methods used and lessons learned from the New Jersey project. Monte Carlo techniques were used to characterize stochastic uncertainty, and sensitivity analysis helped to manage structural uncertainty. A deliberative process and a sorting technique helped manage ignorance. Key findings are that stochastic rankings can be calculated but they reveal such an alarming degree of imprecision that the rankings are no longer useful, whereas sorting techniques are helpful in spite of uncertainty. A deliberative process is helpful to counter analytical overreaching.

At their core, societal decisions about climate policy-whether emissions reductions, adaptation to climate changes, or the implementation of geoengineering-hinge on collective judgments about the extent to which adverse effects to human welfare and ecosystem services will result from changes associated with anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases and the costs associated with the emissions reductions or adaptation activities. In this article, we discuss how risk is understood in the context of climate change, which presents particularly confounding, long-term, and pervasive threats to society and ecosystems. We review theoretical approaches to risk as applied to climate change and policy responses to climate change, focusing especially on the perspectives of individuals, governments, and firms with respect to traditional decision analysis frameworks. We also evaluate the peculiar role of uncertainty in climate debates and how it affects decision making; the origins and nature of the various uncertainties; and how uncertainty is represented, framed, and, at times, wielded by scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the media, politicians, and others. We conclude by assessing the limitations of and appropriate venues for risk analysis in climate decision making.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the USA communicate sustainability through their websites. Specifically, the authors compare how and to what extent sustainability is communicated through an institution-wide sustainability website versus operational and academic department websites. Design/methodology/approach -This paper describes the results of a content analysis of over 700 websites at IHEs in the USA which were selected in a stratified random sample. Each website was coded with responses entered into a data matrix. The data in the matrix were then evaluated and compared for important factors related to communicating about campus sustainability. Findings -Although there has been an increase in the number of commitments to sustainability by IHEs, at the time of this content analysis the commitment was not reflected on the websites of the IHEs sampled. Given the common use of websites at IHEs in the USA to communicate to large groups, colleges and universities should ensure that their websites reflect actual practice. Practical implications -The findings from this study may encourage IHEs in the USA to better communicate their practice related to sustainability. The implementation of the sustainability communication component in AASHE STARS may also play an important role in increased and better communication about campus sustainability. Originality/value -This study describes the first large-scale content analysis of university websites evaluating sustainability characteristics. This paper gives a starting point and recommendations for IHEs who wish to enhance communication about sustainability through their websites.

This article reviews five published "second-order" risk comparisons from the past four decades that implied precise understanding, and hence clear relationships or orderings, of the underlying risks. "Second order" here refers to efforts that extract information from original sources with the goal of relating diverse findings. All five of these publications have frequently been cited in the peer-reviewed literature and/or in risk regulatory debate in the United States. Each is associated with at least one contemporaneous critique that the findings were excessively precise. None of these critiques suggested that an alternative relationship or ordering of the risks evaluated was more appropriate. Instead, each critique concluded that alternative, contradictory relationships were at least as plausible given data and/or analytical limitations. In one case, the critique led to the withdrawal of the original publication. The original findings have been propagated or used uncritically in subsequent literature, including political support for cost-effectiveness analysis. In other cases, the critiques have been used to discredit quantitative risk analysis in general, especially in the cases of nuclear power and cost-benefit analysis. Both of these outcomes are undesirable. Future risk comparisons should avoid excessive precision, include explicit discussion of uncertainty, and differentiate between plausible estimates and expected values.

Effects of a person's sex and seating arrangement were tested with 310 participants (151 men and 159 women; M age=20.0, SD=3.3) from a large southwestern U.S. university who were asked to select a leader from among five persons depicted around a rectangular table. Participants chose a person shown seated at the head of the table as the leader of a group, regardless of that person's sex. This conflicts with prior research indicating gender bias against women as leaders.