Psychohistory revisited: fundamental issues in forecasting climate futures

Cullenward, Danny; Sudarshan, Anant; Howarth, Richard B.

doi:10.1007/s10584-010-9995-2

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Assumptions that define market behaviour (for example, perfect foresight versus incomplete foresight, or complete versus incomplete market clearing) are normative and should be fully explored by systematic variation. The presentation of scenario results should fully acknowledge the uncertain nature of all findings and its conditionality on partially speculative assumptions 58,59 .…”

Section: Provide Transparency On Uncertainty and Underlying Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconciling top-down and bottom-up modelling on future bioenergy deployment

et al. 2012

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NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | VOL 2 | MAY 2012 | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange T here is a divergence of views on future bioenergy deployment that is based in disparate epistemic communities. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) project rising deployment of biomass and biofuels in climate change-mitigation scenarios 1,2 . In contrast, life-cycle assessments (LCAs) and partial equilibrium models of land-use change emphasize high up-front greenhouse-gas emissions from direct land-use change (LUC) 3,4 and indirect land-use change (ILUC) 5 , and highlight epistemic uncertainties in modelling greenhouse-gas emissions as exemplified in fat-tail distributions and associated high risks 6 . Furthermore, bioenergy deployment is regarded as a threat to carbon-rich natural land, biodiversity, water resources and food security 7 . The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN) 8 exemplifies the seemingly disparate findings across these communities, highlighting the risk of land-use change and other trade-offs in its chapters on bioenergy 9 and sustainable development 10 , without integrating these results in its assessment chapter on mitigation potential and costs 11 . This lack of reconciliation constrains the assessment process and highlights the need for a coordinated research agenda.We briefly review LCA studies that indicate potentially high but uncertain life-cycle emissions, and highlight that assessments of biofuel emissions often use mixed and inadequate methodologies. We show that IAMs heavily rely on bioenergy to achieve future climate change-mitigation targets. Highly variable modelling assumptions of IAMs allow for widely diverging results. IAMs also focus on first-best world scenarios, that is, they specify assumptions of quasi-perfect worlds, and thus systematically underexplore risks related to ILUC and nitrous oxide emissions in imperfect real-world situations. We provide an outlook of how a modular modelling framework, integrating inductive bottomup and deductive top-down perspectives, can fill this gap. We argue that improved interdisciplinary communication is necessary to achieve this. We conclude by exploring the implications of a more complete representation of uncertainties at the science/ policy interface. (SRREN) assesses the role of bioenergy as a solution to meeting energy demand in a climate-constrained world. Based on integrated assessment models, the SRREN states that deployed bioenergy will contribute the greatest proportion of primary energy among renewable energies and result in greenhouse-gas emission reductions. The report also acknowledges insights from life-cycle assessments, which characterize biofuels as a potential source of significant greenhouse-gas emissions and environmental harm. The SRREN made considerable progress in bringing together contrasting views on indirect land-use change from inductive bottom-up studies, such as life-cycle analysis, and deductive top-down assessments. However, a reconc...

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Section: Provide Transparency On Uncertainty and Underlying Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconciling top-down and bottom-up modelling on future bioenergy deployment

et al. 2012

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“…The Second Law would also require that human consumption cannot simply disappear to the past, as is presumed in traditional models (and expressed in past criticisms of the approach here [Cullenward et al, 2011]. All past actions unavoidably have some connection to present actions.…”

Section: Expression Of Economic Quantities In Thermodynamic Termsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Long‐run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis

Garrett

2014

Earth's Future

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Climate change is a two-way street during the Anthropocene: civilization depends upon a favorable climate at the same time that it modifies it. Yet studies that forecast economic growth employ fundamentally different equations and assumptions than those used to model Earth's physical, chemical, and biological processes. In the interest of establishing a common theoretical framework, this article treats humanity like any other physical process; that is, as an open, nonequilibrium thermodynamic system that sustains existing circulations and furthers its material growth through the consumption and dissipation of energy. The link of physical to economic quantities comes from a prior result that establishes a fixed relationship between rates of global energy consumption and a historical accumulation of global economic wealth. What follows are nonequilibrium prognostic expressions for how wealth, energy consumption, and the Gross World Product (GWP) grow with time. This paper shows that the key components that determine whether civilization "innovates" itself toward faster economic growth include energy reserve discovery, improvements to human and infrastructure longevity, and reductions in the amount of energy required to extract raw materials. Growth slows due to a combination of prior growth, energy reserve depletion, and a "fraying" of civilization networks due to natural disasters. Theoretical and numerical arguments suggest that when growth rates approach zero, civilization becomes fragile to such externalities as natural disasters, and is at risk is for an accelerating collapse.Summary Linking physical to economic quantities comes from a fixed relationship between rates of global energy consumption and historical accumulation of global economic wealth. When growth rates approach zero, civilization becomes fragile to externalities, such as natural disasters, and is at risk for accelerating collapse.

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“…Humans are seen as being autonomous from the forces of biological evolution and therefore can cut the causal link between energy and growth. This argument is salient in many attempts at refuting thermodynamic approaches to the economy, as they relate to the general point that human individual and social behavior cannot be reduced to physical laws [9,29]. This argument does not deny that physical laws operate as constraints: After all, we cannot fly even if we wished.…”

Section: The Role Of Human Intentionality and Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Growth is an outcome of human actions, but does not directly manifest underlying physical principles in terms of causation. In other words, energy is a means of human economic activity, but the related physical theories cannot obtain the status of primary causal explanations [9].…”

Section: Introduction: Towards An "Economics Of the Anthropocene"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Constitutive Explanations as a Methodological Framework for Integrating Thermodynamics and Economics

Herrmann‐Pillath

2015

Entropy

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Abstract:The common approach to integrating thermodynamics and economics is subsuming thermodynamic aspects among the set of constraints under which economic activity takes place. The causal link between energy and growth is investigated via aggregate econometric analysis. This paper discusses methodological issues of aggregate analysis and proposes an alternative framework based on recent developments in philosophy of science, in particular of the life sciences. "Constitutive explanations" eschew the covering law approach to scientific explanation and concentrate on the identification of multi-level architectures of causal mechanisms that generate phenomena. This methodology has been productively employed to organize cross-disciplinary research, and I suggest that it can also provide a framework for integrating thermodynamics and economics, since this also requires the combination of several scientific disciplines. I present the example of the "rebound effect" as a kind of constitutive explanation and put it in the context of urbanization as a complex mechanism that is the defining feature of economic growth in physical terms.

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Psychohistory revisited: fundamental issues in forecasting climate futures

Cited by 13 publications

References 14 publications

Reconciling top-down and bottom-up modelling on future bioenergy deployment

Reconciling top-down and bottom-up modelling on future bioenergy deployment

Long‐run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis

Constitutive Explanations as a Methodological Framework for Integrating Thermodynamics and Economics

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