Most Americans now accept the basic physics of climate change-that manmade greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global temperatures. Yet the public discussion of climate change is still remarkably broken in the United States. Leaders of one political party frame climate change as an existential emergency that threatens human life and prosperity. Leaders of the other dismiss it as a distraction from economic growth and energy security. Economists like me, trained to think about trade-offs,
In an eleventh-hour attempt to slow down global warming, some scientists have been proposing - or even testing, at a small scale - whether releasing aerosolized particles into the atmosphere to dim the Sun could lower global temperatures, effectively mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions. It's a controversial idea that has drawn plenty of criticism from the scientific community as well, with experts pointing out the substantial societal implications and effectiveness of turning down the Sun's rays.
I n the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running weather simulations on an early computer system when he realized that a small rounding difference led to extremely divergent weather predictions. He later called this idea the butterfly effect to communicate that small changes in initial conditions, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Nepal, could produce wildly different outcomes, like rain in New York.