Publications
Collective intertemporal choice: time consistency vs. time invariance
We study collective choice when individuals have heterogeneous discounted utilitarian preferences. Two attractive properties of intertemporal preferences are indistinguishable for individuals, but have dramatically different implications for collective choice. Time … read more »
Estimating the economic impact of the permafrost carbon feedback
The permafrost carbon feedback is not currently taken into account in economic assessments of climate change, yet it could have important implications for the social cost of carbon and the … read more »
Comment on ‘Impact of Current Climate Proposals’ by Bjorn Lomborg
This paper claims there is a fundamental methodological flaw in a recent paper by Bjorn Lomborg which seeks to investigate the temperature reduction impact of major climate policy proposals. read more »
The impact of controversy on the production of scientific knowledge
Much of the existing literature employing the framework of controversy focuses on the science-policy interface. However a clear gap exists regarding the way(s) in which controversy may fundamentally shape the … read more »
Equipped to deal with uncertainty in climate and impacts predictions: lessons from internal peer review
The quantification of uncertainty is an increasingly popular topic, with clear importance for climate change policy. However, uncertainty assessments are open to a range of interpretations, each of which may … read more »
Limits to the quantification of local climate change
We demonstrate how the fundamental timescales of anthropogenic climate change limit the identification of societally relevant aspects of changes in precipitation. We show that it is nevertheless possible to extract, … read more »
Irreducible uncertainty in near-term climate projections
Model simulations of the next few decades are widely used in assessments of climate change impacts and as guidance for adaptation. Their non-linear nature reveals a level of irreducible uncertainty … read more »
Beliefs, politics, and environmental policy
This paper explores the relationship between beliefs and policy choices in relation to environmental regulation. read more »
Should climate policy account for ambiguity?
Climate change is fundamentally an `out-of-sample’ problem – our available information does not tightly constrain predictions of the consequences of rapid increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. Moreover, the fact that … read more »
An assessment of the foundational assumptions in high-resolution climate projections: the case of UKCP09
The United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme’s UKCP09 project makes high-resolution projections of the climate out to 2100 by post-processing the outputs of a large-scale global climate model. The aim of … read more »
