Last Friday, Andrew Light delivered the 2016 Rotman Lecture, titled, What Happened in Paris? How Differentiation Evolved to Create a Global Climate Agreement. Dr. Light is a professor at George Mason University, Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute, and a former Senior Climate Change Adviser [...]
By Justin Donhauser (Rotman Institute of Philosophy) At a conference of environmental ethicists some years ago, I somewhat nervously introduced myself to J. Baird Callicott—a central figure in environmental ethics and hero to many working in environmental philosophy and science. After some discussion about his work, and mine, and the future of environmental philosophy, Callicott [...]
Wendy Parker(Durham University, Department of Philosophy) Title: Looking forward in light of what we’ve learned
Mysterious Models and Enigmatic EnsemblesReto Knutti (ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science)Abstract: As our understanding improves, more observations become avail - able, and computational capacity increases, climate models continue to in - crease in complexity to synthesize all that knowledge. The hope is that as more and more processes are considered at greater [...]
Elisabeth Lloyd, Indiana University, BloomingtonMarch 05, 2015 Location: Western University, Stevenson Hall, Room 11453:30 pm Abstract: Both climate scientists and philosophers have been working hard to understand how the huge multidimensional global climate models can be tested and confirmed. The convergence of multiple climate models on a single outcome or result has provided a key [...]
Nathaniel Bergman* , Noam Greenbaum and Uri Schwartz( * University of Western Ontario)Title: Extreme Floods and Short-Term Hydroclimatological Fluctuations in the Hyper-Arid Dead Sea Region, IsraelThe autumn Active Red Sea Trough (ARST) rainstorm in the southern Dead Sea region on 29 October 2004 was documented using calibrated radar images, some rainfall measurements, slope-area, and HEC-RAS [...]
Jon Lawhead (University of Southern California) Title:MultiScale Modeling and Pluralism in Climate Systems The global climate is a paradigmatic complex system, and so exhibits interesting behavioral regularities at many different spatiotemporal scales. Moreover, these patterns are mutually constraining: the presence of a stable behavioral regularity at one scale can influence the structure of stable behavioral [...]
Forrest DeGroff (City College of San Francisco )Title: A Proposed Alternative Measure for Climate ChangePotential Carbon dioxide equivalents is the benchmark standard for expressing climate change potential, expressed as CO2e. “The international standard practice is to express greenhouse gases in carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalents. Emissions of gases other than CO2 are translated into CO2 equivalents [...]
Cross-posted from Je fais, donc je suisI’ve spent this weekend at the Rotman Institute’s big annual conference, this year on climate science. In this post, I want to follow up on an exchange Saturday morning, between Gavin Schmidt and Eric Winsberg.Some quick context: In a 2012 paper, Winsberg applied Heather Douglas’ inductive risk argument to [...]
By Wayne Myrvold I wish that I had suggested “Don’t be fooled” for the title of Gordon McBean’s blog post earlier this week, instead of “Don’t be misled,” so that I could call this one “Don’t be fooled again.” Several of the blog posts in the past week have pointed to difficulties in communicating climate [...]
