Jarvis' shed

At the bottom of the garden I've made a dry place where I am starting to store some otherwise homeless things I value. Rummaging is encouraged and forgive any mess.

How much warmer is it?

When they measure global temperature change they need a pre-industrial baseline to work off. The numbers you currently see being banded about use a very flakey baseline. Here, Piers and I propose a way to considerably firm up that foundation.

Pulling that efficiency lever

I can't understand why we are not all a little more cautious when reaching to pull that efficiency leaver. Surely the promise of both increasing prosperity and avoiding the climate crisis sound too good to be true? Carey King and I claim it is here, although it also appears that pulling the efficiency leaver as hard as possible offers a different kind of hope.

A Simple Assessment

I teach some third year undergraduates integrated assessment modelling (among other things). They don’t have any formal economics and, therefore, we approach the problem by pairing back the complexity more than I’ve seen others attempt in order to make the material accessible to math/modelling phobes. The result hopefully offends the economic/IAM orthodoxy while being illuminating for those wanting to see some of the entrails of the integrated assessment world. The current product is a spreadsheet model and associated handout. When I have time I intend to publish this more formally, although I do not imagine that will be easy. Check it out here.

It's [mostly] the [global] economy stupid

In the UK (and no doubt many other places) a perpetual political argument goes on over who owns the responsibility for the growth we experience, or not. Here, I see what the relationship between global and UK growth rates has to say about this.

Complex to perplex

One side effect of growth is increasing complexity. Perhaps there's a threshold when systems transition from complex to perplex, bewildering us onlookers.

Everything Flows

Having done some work looking at how long things last and how much of it there is, we wrote a short piece summarising our thinking. The take home is that everything flows, but I think it is still worth a read. You can find it here.

Leviathan Revisited

Thomas Hobbes saw a monster in the state. I see a monster in the economy and expand on why here.