risk

Entropy to the Max!

I’ve been learning from my ERG colleague John Harte about a statistical technique called MaxEnt.  For many environmental problems — most notably climate change — we are not only unable to provide a reliable estimate of harm, but we don’t even know the shape of the probability distribution.  MaxEnt is a way of constructing a …

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Climate news gets worse

On Science Insider (subscription required), Eli Kintisch reports on two new scientific studies that together spell bad news for our ability to address the greenhouse gas problem. The first is a computer simulation of the effect on global CO2 levels if developed nations adopt the most aggressive greenhouse gas emission reductions they have proposed or …

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U.S. state insurance regulators take step toward addressing climate risk

I’ve spent some time over the past two years studying the relationship between the insurance industry and climate change.  Yesterday there was an important development in this area: the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) , the group of state regulators that collectively regulate insurance in the U.S., adopted for the first time a requirement that large insurers …

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