In the last few decades, huge amounts of climate data have been gathered and stored by several institutions. The analysis of these data has become an important task due to worldwide climate changes and the consequent social and economic effects. In this work, we propose an approach to analyzing multiple climate time series in order to identify intrinsic temporal patterns and trend changes. By d...

The effects of and responses to the health impacts of climate change will affect individuals, communities, and societies. Effectively preparing for and responding to current and projected climate change requires ongoing assessment and action, not a one-time assessment of risks and interventions. To promote resilience to climate change and other community stressors, a stepwise course of action i...

This paper deals with the often ignored issue of adaptation to human-induced climate change. Adaptation is not only inevitable but essential to fashioning the least-social-cost strategy to addressing climate change. The urgency for limiting climate change is inversely proportional to society's adaptability. Some limitation strategies are incompatible with adaptation goals (e.g., reducing CO2 ra...

Background: Space-Time Discounting Discounting is typically defined as the process of comparing the values of costs and benefits that occur at different times. This definition neglects where costs and benefits occur. For example, we might discount future costs and benefits because we care less about the welfare of people in the future, but we might also discount the welfare of people in differe...

Climate change and urbanization can alter the burden of human diseases. The tropics, a region that includes the poorest populations and highest disease burdens, are expected to get slightly hotter and substantially more urban. Studies have projected changing burdens under different climate or urbanization scenarios, but it remains unclear what will happen if both happen at once. Interactions co...

The economic costs of climate change can be large, or perhaps non-existent. We cannot tell before experiencing climate change, and thus the social cost of carbon is partly based on subjective beliefs. We take a dataset of estimates for the carbon price as a representation of beliefs, and develop a tractable stochastic climate-economy model that replicates the distribution of estimates. We use t...

Prioritarianism is the ethical view that gives greater weight to well-being changes affecting individuals at lower well-being levels. This view is influential both in moral philosophy, and in theoretical work on social choice—where it is captured by a social welfare function (“SWF”) summing a concave transformation of individual well-being numbers. However, prioritarianism has largely been igno...

Climate change brings into sharp relief the most difficult problems in addressing the interaction between science and policy. Instead of trying to solve an existing environmental problem one tries to prevent a problem that scientists expect to come. Results from model simulations have an unprecedented role in shaping the public debate. Forecasts of climate change and potential impacts are basic...

Current governance of regional scale water management systems in the United States has not placed them on a path toward sustainability, as conflict and gridlock characterize the social arena and ecosystem services continue to erode. Changing climate may continue this trajectory, but it also provides a catalyst for renewal of ecosystems and a window of opportunity for change in institutions. Res...

Research on youth civic engagement focuses on individual-level predictors. We examined individual- and school-level characteristics, including family affluence, democratic school social climate and perceived neighborhood social capital, in their relation to civic engagement of 15-year-old students. Data were taken from the 2006 World Health Organization Health Behaviour in School-aged Children ...