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The modeling study is far more a thought experiment than a prediction, given that, even in China, there is every indication that the world’s coal, particularly, will not all be exploited.

the loss of the entire Antarctic ice sheet would take millenniums, but up to 100 feet of sea level rise could result within 1,000 years, with the rate of the rise beginning to increase a century or two from now. That finding meshes with the 2014 paper on the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today. “What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”

“To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the economics prize, the last of this year’s Nobels. “More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding.”

“Simple ways of looking at the world are often the basis of policy, and if the statements are wrong, then the policy may be wrong also,” said the economist Janet M. Currie, a Princeton colleague. “He’s always had a concern for trying to capture the complexity of the real world.”

Economics before the 1980s relied on the assumption that the people represented by a large economic aggregate behaved in roughly the same way, not because that made sense but because accounting for diversity was too hard.

Though investment had declined under the previous government, all the major parties said some warm words on the topic. Going beyond that vague-but-positive consensus would have required pinning politicians down to specific pledges

There are also important discussions to be had about how funding is managed and distributed, and how such decisions are made. In arguments about levels of funding, expect most researchers to agree that more is better – no surprise there, and the quality of the arguments deserves scrutiny.

Those hoardings are coming down now, which makes the whole thing seem more approachable - as does the fact that a couple of physicists from my department have won access to the labs there. It will be a huge concentration of resource - intellectual and financial

No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

After the passage of 47 years, Dr. Ehrlich offers little in the way of a mea culpa. Quite the contrary. Timetables for disaster like those he once offered have no significance, he told Retro Report, because to someone in his field they mean something “very, very different” from what they do to the average person. The end is still nigh, he asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse “various forms of coercion” like eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children.”

Stewart Brand, founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. On this topic, Mr. Brand may be deemed a Keynesian, in the sense of an observation often attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind, sir. What do you do?” Mr. Brand’s formulation for Retro Report was to ask, “How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach a conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?”

a general suspicion that language— figurative language in particular—can move us and manipulate us in harmful ways. Which makes James Geary's "I Is an Other" especially timely. Mr. Geary proposes to show that metaphors are a key to how we think and may often determine our thinking without our knowing it.

Metaphor works, most obviously, when we recognize a similarity between two different things. It is a matter of "pattern recognition," which may be more important in the working of the brain than logic.

Many have argued that language should be, at its core, literal and straightforward, that figurative language distorts our thinking. Mr. Geary quotes philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the need to abjure metaphor. For Hobbes, we "deceive others" by using words "in other sense than that they are ordained for." Locke denounced "the artificial and figurative application of words" as the bane of "order and clearness." Metaphors "mislead the judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheats."

meaning” has become the stand-in concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks. It is one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance to describe a fundamentally spiritual need.

what do we mean when we use the word meaning?

as commonly used today, the word is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.

Jawbone’s Discovery Fills Barren Evolutionary Perio

This was a time when the human genus, Homo, was getting underway. The 2.8-million-year-old jawbone of a Homo habilis predates by at least 400,000 years any previously known Homo fossils.

The reconstruction, suggesting a plausible evolutionary link between A. afarensis and H. habilis, yielded a remarkably primitive picture of a deep-rooted diversity of a species that emerged much earlier than the 2.3 million years ago suggested by some specimens. The teeth and jaws appeared to be more similar to A. afarensis than to subsequent Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, modern humans that emerged about 200,000 years ago.

Common sense tells us that social and emotional skills -- such as perseverance, self-control or agreeableness -- help individuals have more fulfilling lives

Those who work hard are more likely to follow healthier lifestyles and remain fit. Individuals who are capable of coping with their emotions and adapting to change are more likely to cope with job loss, family disintegration or crime.

social and emotional skills matter because they help develop and enforce cognitive skills.

the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened.

The problem, in other words, isn’t ignorance; it’s wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and/or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.

In fact, hardly any of the people who predicted runaway inflation have acknowledged that they were wrong, and that the error suggests something amiss with their approach. Some have offered lame excuses; some, following in the footsteps of climate-change deniers, have gone down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole, claiming that we really do have soaring inflation, but the government is lying about the numbers

a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.

With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”

On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.

Older siblings play an important role in the lives of their younger siblings. Like parents, older brothers and sisters act as role models and teachers, helping their younger siblings learn about the world. This positive influence is thought to extend to younger siblings' capacity to feel care and sympathy for those in need: Children whose older siblings are kind, warm, and supportive are more empathic than children whose siblings lack these characteristics. A new longitudinal study looked at whether younger siblings also contribute to their older sisters' and brothers' empathy in early childhood, when empathic tendencies begin to develop. The research found that beyond the influence of parents, both older and younger siblings positively influence each other's empathic concern over time.

Researchers studied an ethnically diverse group of 452 Canadian sibling pairs and their mothers who were part of the Kids, Families, and Places project and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. They wanted to determine whether levels of empathy in 18- and 48-month-old siblings at the start of the study predicted changes in the other siblings' empathy 18 months later. The researchers videotaped interactions in the families' homes and mothers completed questionnaires. Children's empathy was measured by observing each sibling's behavioral and facial responses to an adult researcher who pretended to be distressed (e.g., after breaking a cherished object) and hurt (e.g., after hitting her knee and catching her finger in a briefcase).

"Our findings emphasize the importance of considering how all members of the family, not just parents and older siblings, contribute to children's development," suggests Sheri Madigan, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, who coauthored the study. "The influence of younger siblings has been found during adolescence, but our study indicates that this process may begin much earlier than previously thought."

If you go back to the intellectuals of the 1950s, you get the impression that they thought individuals could very much determine their own beliefs.

Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink.

We don’t think this way anymore, and in fact thinking this way can get you into trouble. I guess the first step was the rise of perspectivism

The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.

You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.

Sartre wrote like a novelist — not surprisingly, since he was one. In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free. Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.

n recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real

Ironically enough, it seems that one of the most reliable findings in psychology is that only half of psychological studies can be successfully repeated

That failure rate is especially galling, says Simine Vazire from the University of California at Davis, because the Many Labs 2 teams tried to replicate studies that had made a big splash and been highly cited

This was an awkward observation for a party that, then as now, wanted to slash taxes for the rich and dismantle the social safety net. How would conservatives respond?

The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn’t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn’t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth.

You might think that the right would have to choose one of those positions, or at least that once you’d managed to refute one layer of the argument, say by showing that inequality was indeed rising, you could put that argument behind you and move on to the next one. But no: Old arguments, like the wights in “Game of Thrones,” would just keep rising up after you thought you had killed them.

Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be?

I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that animated the project from the start:

that the public does not appreciate the scale of climate risk

Five years ago, at my therapist’s urging, I kept track of every panic attack that washed over me: my record for a single day was 132. Soon I was diagnosed with agoraphobia and panic disorder, which is essentially a preoccupation with recurring panic attacks

it was a grey, mass-market paperback called “Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” with a front-cover blurb from Ann Landers, that became my talisman

Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass. That’s the recipe that Dr. Claire Weekes, the Australian clinician and relatively underrecognized pioneer of modern anxiety treatment, established in a series of books

So the unfolding of the universe – biotic, and perhaps abiotic too – appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen

then reason, the Enlightenment’s highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.

Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of “God”. From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share. And from it we can, if we are wise, find means to avert wars of civilisations, the ravages of global warming, and the potential disaster of peak oil.