AD-DICE: An Implementation of Adaptation in the DICE Mode

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMS) have helped us over the past decade to understand the interactions between the environment and the economy in the context of climate change. Although it has also long been recognized that adaptation is a powerful and necessary tool to combat the adverse effects of climate change, most IAMs have not explicitly included the option of adaptation in combating climate change. This paper adds to the IAM and climate change literature by explicitly including adaptation in an IAM, thereby making the trade-offs between adaptation and mitigation visible. Specifically, a theoretical framework is created and used to implement adaptation as a decision variable into the DICE model. We use our new AD-DICE model to derive the adaptation cost functions implicit in the DICE model. In our set-up, adaptation and mitigation decisions are separable and AD-DICE can mimic DICE when adaptation is optimal. We find that our specification of the adaptation costs is robust with respect to the mitigation policy scenarios. Our numerical results show that adaptation is a powerful option to combat climate change, as it reduces most of the potential costs of climate change in earlier periods, while mitigation does so in later periods

SYNTAX, CONTENT, AND FUNCTIONALISM: WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE SYNTACTIC THEORY OF MIND

[This is a working draft of a chapter of a book manuscript long overdue, somewhat incomplete and unpolished: please read it accordingly.] Comments/criticisms/corrections are most welcome

Foundations of the Formal Sciences II: Applications of Mathematical Logic in Philosophy and Linguistics, pp163-174. Trends in Logic Series, vol 17, 2003

We explain the raison d’être and basic ideas of input/output logic, with pointers to other publications for detailed developments. The motivation comes from the logic of conditional norms, where we need an approach that does not presume that directives carry truth-values. To deal with the subtleties of contrary-to-duty situations, input/output operations may be subjected to consistency constraints, expressed via the notion of an outfamily. They also provide a convenient platform for distinguishing and analysing several different kinds of permission. 1