Peak gas in Victoria, Australia
for 5 uker siden
...om det som opptar ham akkurat nå, etter innfallsmetoden.
Ærlige forsøk på å finne mening i en forvirrende verden, men uten å bli for redd for å ta feil; for som Francis Bacon påpekte:
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
Stanford climate researcher Stephen H. Schneider, a long-time friend, colleague and Edge contributor, died last month at the age of 65 of a heart attack while on a flight to London.
It turned out that all those parameters that mattered to the climate model, and all those parameters that mattered to the economics model, while they still mattered a bit in the coupled model, were completely trumped by two parameters that controlled the behavior of the coupled system. Climate sensitivity was the big gorilla from the climate side, and the discount rate—how much we value the future—emerged as dominant from the economic side.(mine uthevinger)
Everyone is familiar with the 'discount rate' in the financial markets.
The original neoclassical assumption was that the discount rate curve was exponential, meaning that we discounted the same from period to period. Actual economic experiments however show that the shape of the discount curve is hyperbolic, or as Harvard economist David Laibson prefers quasi-hyperbolic. This means that the early periods have much steeper discount rates than later periods. Laibsons research indicates that peoples discount rates are 12% during days 0-5 but drop to 4% in days 20-25. We REALLY prefer the present.
Understanding that stress increases peoples discount rates suggests to me that the events surrounding peak oil (and perhaps climate change) will reach an inflection point. We need to hit the emotional triggers well ahead of peak oil. Once people are stressed and things become difficult, accessing peoples rational minds will be all the harder.