Eight priorities for calculating the social cost of carbon

Carbon is the basis of all organic matter on Earth, and is recycled through the ecosystem in two primary processes: one in which carbon is exchanged among living organisms, and one in which carbon is cycled over long periods of time through fossilized organic remains, weathering of rocks, and volcanic activity. Human activities, including increased agricultural practices and the burning of fossil fuels, has greatly affected the balance of the natural carbon cycle.

Organisms must balance energy intake with the energy required for growth, maintenance and reproduction. These trade-offs result in a variety of survivorship and reproductive strategies, including semelparity and iteroparity. Semelparous species, like annual plants, have only one reproductive episode in their lifetimes and consequently have short lifespans. Iteroparous species, by contrast, have many reproductive events during their lifetimes but have relatively few offspring. These two...

Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.

Flood risk assessment involves careful planning and analysis to ensure the safety of communities near water retention structures. Capacity contours are a vital tool in this process, as they illustrate the potential spread of water at specific levels in a given area. In the context of building a bund across a small valley, these contours play a critical role in evaluating the safety of nearby residential areas.In this example, the bund is intended to store stormwater in the valley. The engineers...

The extended Debye-Hückel equation indicates that the activity coefficient of an ion in an aqueous solution at 25°C depends on three partially interdependent properties: the ionic strength of the solution, the charge of the ion, and the ion size. 
The activity coefficient value for an ion is close to one when the solution has almost zero ionic strength, i.e., when the solution shows close to ideal behavior. As the ionic strength of the solution increases from 0 to 0.1 mol/L, a...

As the human population continues to grow and use resources, we must be mindful of our planet’s natural limits. Sustainable development provides a pathway to maintain and improve human life now while also ensuring that future generations will have the resources that they need. The long-term success of sustainability efforts rests on understanding the interplay between human actions and ecological systems.