HUCE welcomes Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, School of Experimental Psychology and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, who will discuss "Constraints on the Social Discount Rate Derived from Ethical Ambiguities and Uncertainty about Future Climate Change.”

Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. His most recent research interests examine the potential conflict between human cognition and the physics of the global climate, which has led him into research in climate science and climate modeling. His talk will briefly review the ethical issues surrounding the social discount rate and then report a simulation experiment that constrains the value of the discount rate by considering 4 sources of uncertainty and ambiguity: scientific uncertainty about the extent of future warming, social uncertainty about future population and future economic development, political uncertainty about future mitigation trajectories, and ethical ambiguity about how much the welfare of future generations should be valued today.