Common Resources

Deep and Shallow Uncertainty in Messaging Climate Change

This post draws on a recent RFF discussion paper by RFF Senior Fellow Roger Cooke, where he explores these topics in greater detail. Cooke is the Chauncey Starr Chair in Risk Analysis at RFF and lead author for Risk and Uncertainty in the recently released IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Present State of the Uncertainty Narrative In […]

The Sandy Supplemental by the Numbers

The amount of federal spending on disaster aid has been growing over time. Hurricane Sandy resulted in an enormous level of supplemental appropriations. For perspective, we compared the Sandy supplemental appropriation, more than $50 billion, with the 2012 federal outlays by agency, excluding entitlement programs, military spending, and debt payments, as shown in Figure 1. […]

Valuing Conservation in the Context of Climate Change

In the twentieth century, flooding caused more deaths and property damage in the United States than any other natural disaster. Most climate models predict that flooding will worsen in the future, a prospect that is leading a growing number of communities to explore the use of natural areas as protection against extreme events. These areas […]

Estimating The Social Cost Of Carbon: Robert Pindyck’s Critique

The US government’s new consensus estimate of the social cost of carbon (SCC)—around $43 per ton of CO2 from a 2020 baseline—has met with some approval in academic and other circles (as we discussed yesterday). But some of the harshest criticisms, at least insofar as the blogosphere would interpret them, have come from MIT economist […]

Quantifying Uncertainty on Thin Ice

The IPCC’s fourth assessment report projecting sea level rise in 2100 of 18 to 59 cm excluded the contribution from ice sheets because the ice sheet models were not up to snuff. They still aren’t, but researchers Bamber and Aspinall at the University Bristol have found a work-around: structured expert judgment (SEJ). Their first results […]

Why the Climate Problem Requires a New Generation of Uncertainty Analysis

Over the past decade, the importance of incorporating uncertainty analysis into climate modeling has become generally recognized. The question is whether our current tools are up to the task. I’ve been looking at this question and my paper on it, “Uncertainty analysis comes to integrated assessment models for climate change…and conversely,” has just been published […]

Scientists Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison for “Optimizing” Uncertainty of L’Aquila Earthquake

A truism in risk management is that every disaster was predicted by someone, sometime, somehow. The 6 April 2009 earthquake that devastated the Italian city of L’Aquila was “predicted” (actually retrodicted: evidence was adduced post hoc) by anomalous toad behavior 70 km away. An earthquake in the Abruzzo region was also predicted by heretic scientist […]