Climate

The Earth beneath our feet holds an almost comically simple solution to our energy problems. Drill down a few kilometers anywhere on the planet and you’ll find temperatures hot enough to boil water.

Run that water through a turbine, generate electricity, reinject the cooled water into the ground, repeat. No fuel needed. No emissions. Just heat from the planet’s molten core, which will remain hot for billions of years – long after anyone stops caring about quarterly earnings reports.

It’s natural to expect that humanity’s response to a warming planet will involve sacrifices as we cut down on consumption and give up unsustainable ways of living. Climate action, has another side: however, where there’s room for growth and innovation. Reflecting the mentality he encounters at Columbia Business School, where MBA students are constantly asking, “What can I do over the course of my career? How do I make myself useful?” Wagner emphasizes that decarbonization means investment—in economies, companies, and oneself.

Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time.

Full text via nature.com [PDF]

Projections of climate change and climate impacts requires bias-corrected, downscaled output from ensembles of earth system models (ESMs). Potential impacts are uncertain due to modeling differences between ESMs, internal variability stemming from the chaos of the earth system, and differences in the historical reference datasets used to bias-corrected and downscale ESM output. Here, we introduce the Bias-Corrected and Downscaled Massive Ensemble (BCD-ME), a set of over 1,400 projections of daily mean and maximum temperature.

Organizations emphasize specific production practices to deal with authenticity pressures, but the practices that signal authenticity to audiences must be continually adapted when production environments are unstable. Changes in the environment can make production practices suddenly infeasible, compelling organizations to perform in different ways the highly visible practices that audiences have come to associate with authenticity.

To appreciate how fundamental a role cement plays in human society, one must first understand the importance of the carbon cycle in the evolution of the planet. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere dissolves in seawater and gets metabolized by living corals and plankton that eventually die and decompose into ocean sediments. The sediments are compressed over millions of years until they become limestone – a natural storage vault for elemental carbon, like coal, oil and gas.

Delayed climate mitigation imposes substantial economic costs by shifting the burden of adjustment onto future generations. We quantify these welfare losses within a climate-economy model that allows us to calculate the deadweight loss (DWL) of underpricing carbon pollution. We simulate policy delay by constraining initial mitigation years and comparing resulting welfare outcomes to an unconstrained baseline.

Focusing on global annual averages of climatic variables can bias aggregate and distributional estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. We here empirically identify dose-response functions of GDP growth rates to daily mean temperature levels and combine them with regional intra-annual climate projections of daily mean temperatures. We then disentangle, for various shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs), how much of the missing impacts are due to heterogeneous warming patterns over space.