Climate: Past, Present & Future

Are the risks of zoonotic diseases rising in the Anthropocene due to climate change?

Ichiko Sugiyama, Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Chemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel March 16, 2020

The recent coronavirus outbreak (i.e., nCovID-19; Fig. 1) has caused global panic, along with widespread travel bans, home quarantines and country-wide lockdowns. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared nCoVID-19 as a pandemic as of March 11th, 2020 (WHO, 2020). To tackle this global health crisis, scientists are attempting to synthesize a vaccine, while countries are trying to mitigate the n ...[Read More]

Dead Sea – lively stories of the past

Dr. Andrea Miebach, postdoc at the Institute of Geosciences, University of Bonn, Germany February 25, 2020

Dead Sea (photo: Andrea Miebach).

The Dead Sea is dead. Nothing can live there except for specialized microbes. The water with a salinity multiple times higher than seawater prevents a colonization by higher life forms. However, it does not prevent the input of organic material that can tell us stories about the past. A unique sediment record The Dead Sea, located at the lowest elevation on Earth – currently about 430 m below sea ...[Read More]

Dear “climate sceptic”, do you have a fire insurance? – Climate policy under uncertainty

Claudia Elisabeth Wieners, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa December 12, 2019

Smoke clears after an experimental wildfire in Australian eucalyptus forest. Credit: Stefan Doerr (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

One often hears that ambitious climate policy might be premature while climate change is still “uncertain”. This sounds like a fair argument: The amount of global warming per doubling CO2 is not well constrained, and the amount of economic damage per degree of warming even less. But is this uncertainty a sound excuse to wait and see? Uncertainty, risk aversion, and insurance If you knew the ...[Read More]

God does not play DICE – but Bill Nordhaus does! What can models tell us about the economics of climate change?

Claudia Elisabeth Wieners, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research, Utrecht And Centre for Complex Systems Studies, Utrecht University December 3, 2018

Climate change has been described as “the biggest market failure in human history”[1]. Although fuel is costly, emitting the by-product CO2 is for free; yet it causes damages to society. In other words, those who benefit, by using the atmosphere as waste dump, do not pay the full costs, i.e. the adverse effects climate change has on societies on a global scale. Can this market failure be cured? Sh ...[Read More]