Climate

Understanding country differences in temporal discounting is critical for extending incentive-based environmental policies successfully from developed countries to developing countries. We examined differences between Chinese and Americans in discounting of future financial and environmental gains and losses. In general, environmental use value was discounted significantly more than the monetary values, but environmental existence value was discounted similarly to the monetary values. Confirming previous research, we found that participants discounted gains significantly more than losses.

Actions by individuals and households to reduce carbon-based energy consumption have the potential to change the picture of U.S. energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in the near term. To tap this potential, however, energy policies and programs need to replace outmoded assumptions about what drives human behavior; they must integrate insights from the behavioral and social sciences with those from engineering and economics. This integrated approach has thus far only occasionally been implemented.

In smart grids the formerly separated worlds of energy and telecommunication converge to an interactive and automated energy supply system. Driven by social, legal, and economic pressures, energy systems around the globe are updated with information and communication technology. These investments aim at enhancing energy efficiency, securing affordable energy supply, and mitigate climate change.

It is apparent that severe weather should hamper the productivity of work that occurs outside. But what is the effect of extreme rain, snow, heat and wind on work that occurs indoors, such as the production of automobiles? Using weekly production data from 64 automobile plants in the United States over a ten-year period, we find that adverse weather conditions lead to a significant reduction in production. For example, a week with six or more days of heat exceeding 90F reduces production in that week by 8% on average.

The disciplines of economics and political science, as well as applied climate science, have added a great deal to our understanding of the obstacles to the use of climate information. However, in order for climate information to be fully embraced and successfully implemented into risk management, the issue needs to be looked at in terms of risk communication in human decision makers — (as) individuals and (in) groups. What is special about human risk perception and decision making under risk and situations of uncertainty regarding climate?

We investigate whether progress towards an international treaty on greenhouse gas emissions could benefit from insights about tipping a non-cooperative game from an inefficient to an efficient equilibrium. Games with increasing differences have multiple equilibria and have a “tipping set,” a subset of agents who by changing from the inefficient to the efficient equilibrium can induce all others to do the same. We argue that international climate negotiations form such a game and so have a tipping set. This can provide a novel perspective on finding a way forward in climate negotiations.

Economic evaluation of climate policy traditionally treats uncertainty by appealing to expected utility theory. Yet our knowledge of the impacts of climate policy may not be of sufficient quality to justify probabilistic beliefs. In such circumstances, it has been argued that the axioms of expected utility theory may not be the correct standard of rationality. By contrast, several axiomatic frameworks have recently been proposed that account for ambiguous beliefs. In this paper, we apply static and dynamic versions of a smooth ambiguity model to climate mitigation policy.

Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.

This article considers scientific and public understandings of climate change and addresses the following question: Why is it that while scientific evidence has accumulated to document global climate change and scientific opinion has solidified about its existence and causes, U.S. public opinion has not and has instead become more polarized? Our review supports a constructivist account of human judgment.