Mental Maps: Without Spaghetti They are Baloney

Gould and White show how "mental maps" of countries can be constructed. These maps can represent many facets of individual attitudes (preference, ignorance, prejudice, etc.). Once an individual preference structure has been constructed, Gould and White describe a technique for aggregating the preferences of individuals into "national" or "regional" preferences. Thus they illustrate the mental map of school leavers at Bristol, Aberystwyth, Liverpool, and Inverness over the preference for location in Great Britain (p.71 to 80), as well as maps for the United States for different regions. These maps are aggregations of individual maps, or preference structures. The technique used for constructing maps is to start with an ordinal preference map for individuals, then by the technique of factor analysis to combine or weight the individual preferences into an "aggregate preference structure.

World Modelling from the Bottom Up

Although opinions about world models vary from extreme enthusiasm to unbridled outrage, there can be no doubt about the success on one front: world models are the growth industry of the social sciences today. Three years ago the Club of Rome could have been the euphemism for the local wine-testing group. Today, it is hosting a pilgrimage of world scientists in Berlin to view the latest models in the haute couture of world thought. A preview of one of these models was given during October 1974, in a three day meeting in Baden, Austria, hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The work presented there was a project prepared by the Fundacion Bariloche, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars from Argentina. The most fascinating aspect of the Bariloche model is that it is a model about the world economy built from the bottom of the economic ladder looking up, rather than an elitist model built from the pinnacles of the Cambridges -- Massachusetts or England -- looking down (or into the future) at world problems. This perspective gives the model a ring of authenticity. Whereas "World Dynamics" and "The Limits to Growth" struck many as basically computer games, the Bariloche model has finally come to grips with the concrete problems of mankind. It is interesting that in so doing they have combined a radical political philosophy with a traditional set of techniques. In what follows I will try to layout the basic setting of the Bariloche model, with close attention to the problems of techniques and methodology. If I seem to harp on the shortcomings, it is only because I think that the project's strong points are vitiated by inattention to some important details. It is an incomplete model, one that cannot at present be taken terribly seriously as a normative or descriptive model of the world economy; but nevertheless it represents a significant improvement over the Limits to Growth models which have been-used heretofore

Proceedings of the Workshop on Energy Demand

The Workshop on Energy Demand was held by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) at Schloss Laxenburg, Austria, Flay 22-23, 1975, as part of the Energy Systems Project. The Energy Project was started in 1973 under the leadership of Professor Wolf Haefele. Professor William D. Nordhaus of IIASA and Yale University (USA) was the overall chairman of the Workshop. The Workshop was devoted to the understanding and modeling of energy demand, both from an engineering and from a behavioral point of view. Fifty-five people from fifteen countries East and West attended the Workshop. The participants are directly involved in energy demand modeling -- in government energy planning offices, in research divisions of the energy industry (mostly coal and electricity), in university or non-profit research institutes. In a number of instances the participants came from all three areas of activities within the same country. The twenty-nine papers submitted to the Workshop were discussed under five headings: I. Methodology; II. Individual Sectors; III. Individual Economies: 3.1 Eastern Europe and the USSR; 3.2 Western Europe; 3.3 North America and Others; IV. International Studies; and V. Linkages to the Rest of the Economy. The Workshop proceedings begin with welcoming addresses by Professors Haefele and Nordhaus, and they are followed by the papers presented at the Workshop and summaries of the discussions. The Workshop concludes with Professor Nordhaus' overview of the issues and problems discussed by the Workshop. This volume of the proceedings was prepared by Professor Nordhaus and Mrs. Claire P. Doblin

Can We Control Carbon Dioxide?

In recent years, the concern about the tradeoffs between economic growth and environmental quality have been paramount. To a large extent, the energy sector has been the locus of the major battles. For the most part, the concerns have been with local environmental problems such as disputes over air and water quality, nuclear accidents, and radioactive wastes. Although these problems have not been solved, it appears that as a result of considerable technical work that techniques exist (even if political will does not) to reduce most local environmental problems to a tolerable level. There remain on the agenda, however, a number of global environmental problems, and again these relate mainly to the energy sector. In particular, it appears that emissions of carbon dioxide particulate matter, and waste heat may, at some time in the future, lead to significant climatic modifications. Of these, it appears that carbon dioxide will probably be the first man-made emission to affect climate on a global scale, with a significant temperature increase by the end of the century

Integrative Assessment of Mitigation, Impacts, and Adaptation to Climate Change

This volume presents the proceedings of the second international workshop held at IIASA in October 1993 assessing the current state of integrated assessments. Numerous models and less formalized approaches analyze anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gas emissions, their concentrations in the atmosphere, the resulting climate forcing, impacts of the induced climate change on the economy and other human activities, as well as possible mitigation and adaptation strategies. Studies that include all or several of these salient aspects of the climate change problematique are known as integrative assessments. The number of such studies is increasing, highlighting the need for consistent analytic frameworks and comparative analyses. This volume reviews the current practice of integrative assessments, directions for improvement and further research, and implications for climate change policies. The workshop covered issues such as the role of science, integrated assessment, impacts and benefits, mitigation and adaptation, intergenerational assessments, and the role of technology. The volume includes the original papers presented at the workshop

Costs, Impacts, and Benefits of CO2 Mitigation

This volume presents the proceedings of the first international workshop on "Costs, Impacts, and Possible Benefits of CO2 Mitigation" held at IIASA in October 1992. The workshop was co-organized by the Japanese Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI), IIASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), Yale University, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The workshop was held to review current research and analysis of economic costs and possible benefits of measures for responding to global climate change, and to critically evaluate knowledge gaps and future research activities. Technological and economic measures for achieving environmentally compatible development have been and continue to be studied. There are a few studies on the comparative assessment of mitigation and adaptation costs, and the potential benefits of these measures. Since these are long-term issues ranging into the next century, their assessment also requires a degree of understanding of possible development paths the world may take in the absence of global warming. The workshop covered the economics of climate change, its impacts, mitigation costs, policy instruments, and modeling issues. This volume summarizes these proceedings and presents the papers from the workshop

Climate Change: Integrating Science, Economics, and Policy

This volume reports on the proceedings of the third international workshop on "Climate Change: Integrating Science, Economics, and Policy" held at IIASA in March 1996. Currently, it is widely recognized in both the analytical and policy communities that the complex issues surrounding the prospect of climate change and response measures and policies cannot be adequately assessed from the perspective of any single discipline in either the natural or social sciences, and that these issues cannot be resolved in the policy domain alone. This volume addresses these issues. The workshop focused on three related research areas in the economics of climate change: market and nonmarket impacts of climate change; costs and timing of greenhouse gas emissions abatement measures and strategies; and emissions reduction policies. This volume includes the revised versions of papers presented at the workshop

Coupling climate and economic models in a cost-benefit framework: a convex optimization approach

In this paper we present a general method, based on a convex optimisation technique, that facilitates the coupling of climate and economic models in a cost-benefit framework. As a demonstration of the method, we couple an economic growth model à la Ramsey adapted from DICE-99 with an efficient intermediate complexity climate model, C-GOLDSTEIN, which has highly simplified physics, but fully 3-D ocean dynamics. As in DICE-99 we assume that an economic cost is associated with global temperature change: this change is obtained from the climate model which is driven by the GHG concentrations computed from the economic growth path. The work extends a previous paper in which these models were coupled in cost-effectiveness mode. Here we consider the more intricate cost-benefit coupling in which the climate impact is not fixed a priori. We implement the coupled model using an oracle-based optimisation technique. Each model is contained in an oracle which supplies model output and information on its sensitivity to a master program. The algorithm Proximal-ACCPM guarantees the convergence of the procedure under sufficient convexity assumptions. Our results demonstrate the possibility of a consistent, cost-benefit, climate-damage optimisation analysis with a 3-D climate model

A population density grid for Spain

This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article published in "International Journal of Geographical Information Science"; Volume 27, Issue 12, 2013; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13658816.2013.799283This article describes a high-resolution land cover data set for Spain and its application to dasymetric population mapping (at census tract level). Eventually, this vector layer is transformed into a grid format. The work parallels the effort of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, in collaboration with Eurostat and the European Environment Agency (EEA), in building a population density grid for the whole of Europe, combining CORINE Land Cover with population data per commune. We solve many of the problems due to the low resolution of CORINE Land Cover, which are especially visible with Spanish data. An accuracy assessment is carried out from a simple aggregation of georeferenced point population data for the region of Madrid. The bottom-up grid constructed in this way is compared to our top-down grid. We show a great improvement over what has been reported from commune data and CORINE Land Cover, but the improvements seem to come entirely from the higher resolution data sets and not from the statistical modeling in the downscaling exercise. This highlights the importance of providing the research community with more detailed land cover data sets, as well as more detailed population data. The dasymetric grid is available free of charge from the authors upon request.The authors acknowledge financial support from the BBVA Foundation-Ivie research programme and the first author also acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, ECO2011-23248 project. Results mentioned, but not shown, are available from the authors upon request. The grid numbers are also available from the authors.Goerlich Sanchis, FJ.; Cantarino Martí, I. (2013). A population density grid for Spain. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 27(12):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2013.799283S117271