Averting Catastrophe
Averting Catastrophe

Author: Cass R. Sunstein

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1479808482

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible? Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the “maximin rule,” which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of “Knightian uncertainty,” found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.

Averting Climate Catastrophe Together
Averting Climate Catastrophe Together

Author: Martin Zapf

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 3110777584

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Humanity has so far failed to respect some essential compatibility limits to ensure sustainable development. Is it possible to change the course? This book revolves around this question, focusing on climate change. Averting Climate Catastrophe Together addresses the necessity of meeting the Paris Agreement temperature target and explores what framework could enable climate action in an effective, efficient and equitable manner that is consistent with that goal. It also looks at the contribution of technological change within the economic system, including the feasibility of a global energy transition. Whether humanity can avoid catastrophic climate change appears to depend not on the availability of technological solutions, but rather on international cooperation and coordination. Given the various sustainability issues, this book also discusses whether it is possible to derive a general approach to them. It argues that dealing with compatibility limits in complex systems requires a holistic change in the system structure. Therefore, systems science is discussed together with economics, technological change, and sustainable development. This book targets scientists and experts from different disciplines due to the interdisciplinary topic, but especially from environmental economics and energy technology; policy makers, as policy recommendations are provided to address climate change; as well as the general public due to the pressing common challenge of addressing climate change and comprehensive efforts for sustainable development. Provides evidence based on climate science research on the necessity of meeting the Paris Agreement temperature target Highlights the feasibility of the global energy transition as one major option to mitigate climate change, also going into detail about the process of technological change Brings together systems science with economics, technological change, and sustainable development Derives a framework to meet the Paris Agreement temperature target, enabling coordinated climate action in an effective and efficient manner while pursuing distributive justice

Averting Disaster
Averting Disaster

Author: Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 54

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Wild and the Wicked
The Wild and the Wicked

Author: Benjamin Hale

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-12-10

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0262035405

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A brief foray into a moral thicket, exploring why we should protect nature despite tsunamis, malaria, bird flu, cancer, killer asteroids, and tofu. Most of us think that in order to be environmentalists, we have to love nature. Essentially, we should be tree huggers—embracing majestic redwoods, mighty oaks, graceful birches, etc. We ought to eat granola, drive hybrids, cook tofu, and write our appointments in Sierra Club calendars. Nature's splendor, in other words, justifies our protection of it. But, asks Benjamin Hale in this provocative book, what about tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, bird flu, killer asteroids? They are nature, too. For years, environmentalists have insisted that nature is fundamentally good. In The Wild and the Wicked, Benjamin Hale adopts the opposite position—that much of the time nature can be bad—in order to show that even if nature is cruel, we still need to be environmentally conscientious. Hale argues that environmentalists needn't feel compelled to defend the value of nature, or even to adopt the attitudes of tree-hugging nature lovers. We can acknowledge nature's indifference and periodic hostility. Deftly weaving anecdote and philosophy, he shows that we don't need to love nature to be green. What really ought to be driving our environmentalism is our humanity, not nature's value. Hale argues that our unique burden as human beings is that we can act for reasons, good or bad. He claims that we should be environmentalists because environmentalism is right, because we humans have the capacity to be better than nature. As humans, we fail to live up to our moral potential if we act as brutally as nature. Hale argues that despite nature's indifference to the plight of humanity, humanity cannot be indifferent to the plight of nature.

Hack the Planet
Hack the Planet

Author: Eli Kintisch

Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

Published: 2010-03-25

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 047061871X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An inside tour of the incredible—and probably dangerous—plans to counteract the effects of climate change through experiments that range from the plausible to the fantastic David Battisti had arrived in Cambridge expecting a bloodbath. So had many of the other scientists who had joined him for an invitation-only workshop on climate science in 2007, with geoengineering at the top of the agenda. We can't take deliberately altering the atmosphere seriously, he thought, because there’s no way we'll ever know enough to control it. But by the second day, with bad climate news piling on bad climate news, he was having second thoughts. When the scientists voted in a straw poll on whether to support geoengineering research, Battisti, filled with fear about the future, voted in favor. While the pernicious effects of global warming are clear, efforts to reduce the carbon emissions that cause it have fallen far short of what’s needed. Some scientists have started exploring more direct and radical ways to cool the planet, such as: Pouring reflective pollution into the upper atmosphere Making clouds brighter Growing enormous blooms of algae in the ocean Schemes that were science fiction just a few years ago have become earnest plans being studied by alarmed scientists, determined to avoid a climate catastrophe. In Hack the Planet, Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch looks more closely at this array of ideas and characters, asking if these risky schemes will work, and just how geoengineering is changing the world. Scientists are developing geoengineering techniques for worst-case scenarios. But what would those desperate times look like? Kintisch outlines four circumstances: collapsing ice sheets, megadroughts, a catastrophic methane release, and slowing of the global ocean conveyor belt. As incredible and outlandish as many of these plans may seem, could they soon become our only hope for avoiding calamity? Or will the plans of brilliant and well-intentioned scientists cause unforeseeable disasters as they play out in the real world? And does the advent of geoengineering mean that humanity has failed in its role as steward of the planet—or taken on a new responsibility? Kintisch lays out the possibilities and dangers of geoengineering in a time of planetary tipping points. His investigation is required reading as the debate over global warming shifts to whether humanity should Hack the Planet.

Helicopter Flight Dynamics
Helicopter Flight Dynamics

Author: Gareth D. Padfield

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 1624

ISBN-13: 1119401070

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Book The behaviour of helicopters and tiltrotor aircraft is so complex that understanding the physical mechanisms at work in trim, stability and response, and thus the prediction of Flying Qualities, requires a framework of analytical and numerical modelling and simulation. Good Flying Qualities are vital for ensuring that mission performance is achievable with safety and, in the first and second editions of Helicopter Flight Dynamics, a comprehensive treatment of design criteria was presented, relating to both normal and degraded Flying Qualities. Fully embracing the consequences of Degraded Flying Qualities during the design phase will contribute positively to safety. In this third edition, two new Chapters are included. Chapter 9 takes the reader on a journey from the origins of the story of Flying Qualities, tracing key contributions to the developing maturity and to the current position. Chapter 10 provides a comprehensive treatment of the Flight Dynamics of tiltrotor aircraft; informed by research activities and the limited data on operational aircraft. Many of the unique behavioural characteristics of tiltrotors are revealed for the first time in this book. The accurate prediction and assessment of Flying Qualities draws on the modelling and simulation discipline on the one hand and testing practice on the other. Checking predictions in flight requires clearly defined mission tasks, derived from realistic performance requirements. High fidelity simulations also form the basis for the design of stability and control augmentation systems, essential for conferring Level 1 Flying Qualities. The integrated description of flight dynamic modelling, simulation and flying qualities of rotorcraft forms the subject of this book, which will be of interest to engineers practising and honing their skills in research laboratories, academia and manufacturing industries, test pilots and flight test engineers, and as a reference for graduate and postgraduate students in aerospace engineering.

Wandering Games
Wandering Games

Author: Melissa Kagen

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-10-11

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0262370972

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.

Re-reading Derrida
Re-reading Derrida

Author: Tony Thwaites

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-03-08

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0739177265

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Re-reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and its Hospitalities, edited by Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer, is a unique collaborative exploration of the legacies of the late philosopher, Jacques Derrida, across a wide variety of fields. Anchoring the book are two major essays on mourning by two of the best-known Derridean thinkers today, who were close friends of Derrida: J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge. Each of the other essays has been written to respond to these, and—in a novel move—to at least two of the other contributions. As a result, the very form of the book is a way of exploring the thematics of hospitality, and the ways in which disciplines open themselves to one another, extending lines of flight across the archipelagos of knowledge—the politics of the memorial, poetry, trauma, film, neoliberalism, the novel, and psychoanalysis. Throughout the book themes and concerns recur, each time refracted, developed, and questioned under the pressures of new conjunctures. As the editors’ Introduction argues, what the book seeks to show is not that a certain general body of theoretical work can be applied in all sorts of areas, but something more interesting: that from the outset, theoretical work itself takes on its meaning only in its grappling with the specific, the singular, even the unique. Miller’s and Attridge’s essays have at their heart, after all, the loss of a friend.

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism

Author: Greg Garrard

Publisher: Oxford Handbooks

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0199742928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism explores a range of critical perspectives used to analyze literature, film, and the visual arts in relation to the natural environment. Since the publication of field-defining works by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate, and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in the 1990s, ecocriticism has become a conventional paradigm for critical analysis alongside queer theory, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. The field includes numerous approaches, genres, movements, and media, as the essays collected here demonstrate. The contributors come from around the globe and, similarly, the literature and media covered originate from several countries and continents. Taken together, the essays consider how literary and other cultural productions have engaged with the natural environment to investigate climate change, environmental justice, sustainability, the nature of "humanity," and more. Featuring thirty-four original chapters, the volume is organized into three major areas. The first, History, addresses topics such as the Renaissance pastoral, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and postmodern transgenic art. The second, Theory, considers how traditional critical theories have expanded to include environmental perspectives. Included in this section are essays on queer theory, science studies, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. Genre, the final major section, explores the specific artforms that have animated the field over the past decade, including nature writing, children's literature, animated films, and digital media. A short section entitled Views from Here concludes the handbook by zeroing in on the various transnational perspectives informing the continued dissemination and globalization of the field.