Ethics of the scientist qua policy advisor: inductive risk, uncertainty, and catastrophe in climate economics

This paper discusses ethical issues surrounding Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of the economic effects of climate change, and how climate economists acting as policy advisors ought to represent the uncertain possibility of catastrophe. Some climate economists, especially Martin Weitzman, have argued for a precautionary approach where avoiding catastrophe should structure climate economists’ welfare analysis. This paper details ethical arguments that justify this approach, showing how Weitzman’s “fat tail” probabilities of climate catastrophe pose ethical problems for widely used IAMs. The main claim is that economists who ignore or downplay catastrophic risks in their representations of uncertainty likely fall afoul of ethical constraints on scientists acting as policy advisors. Such scientists have duties to honestly articulate uncertainties and manage (some) inductive risks, or the risks of being wrong in different ways

Harper Collins, 1998: A Review by David Frank

I received this book in a package labelled “extremely urgent”, and the provocative title inside certainly sounded a note of alarm. In several short, forceful chapters the retired York University historian Jack Granatstein argues for the restoration of Canadian history to its proper place at the centre of public discourse in this country

Projective structures and projective bundles over compact Riemann surfaces

A projective structure on a compact Riemann surface X of genus g is given by an atlas with transition functions in PGL(2,C). Equivalently, a projective structure is given by a projective sl(2,C)-bundle over X equipped with a section s and a foliation F which is both transversal to the fibers and the section s. From this latter geometric bundle picture, we survey on classical problems and results on projective structures. We will give a complete description of projective (actually affine) structures on the torus with an explicit versal family of foliated bundle picture

A semidefinite programming hierarchy for packing problems in discrete geometry

Packing problems in discrete geometry can be modeled as finding independent sets in infinite graphs where one is interested in independent sets which are as large as possible. For finite graphs one popular way to compute upper bounds for the maximal size of an independent set is to use Lasserre's semidefinite programming hierarchy. We generalize this approach to infinite graphs. For this we introduce topological packing graphs as an abstraction for infinite graphs coming from packing problems in discrete geometry. We show that our hierarchy converges to the independence number.Comment: (v2) 25 pages, revision based on suggestions by referee, accepted in Mathematical Programming Series B special issue on polynomial optimizatio