Research on Human Behavior and Climate Change Models

Louis Gross, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The research noted here has been carried out by an interdisciplinary group of researchers who first started work on this as part of a Joint NIMBioS-SESYNC Working Group on Human Risk Perception and Climate Change in 2013. Our general objective has been to incorporate models of human behavior with physically-based climate models to analyze the impacts on global temperature trajectories of linking human behavior to climate models.



NIMBioS/SESYNC Working Group summary page from NIMBioS (website)

SESYNC Research Project summary page from SESYNC (website)

Audio Interview Page on SYSYNC project with Brian Became and Katie Lacasse (website)

Beckage, B., L. J. Gross, K. Lacasse, E. Carr, S. S. Metcalf, J. M. Winter, P. D. Howe, N. Fefferman, T. Franck, A. Zia, A. Kinzig and F. M. Hoffman. 2018. Linking models of human behavior and climate alters projected climate change. Nature Climate Change 8: 79–84. (publication)

Beckage, B., K. Lacasse, J. M. Winter, L. J. Gross, N. Fefferman, F. M. Hoffman, S. S. Metcalf, T. Franck, E. Carr, A. Zia and A. Kinzig. 2020. The Earth has humans, so why don’t our climate models? Climatic Change 163: 181–188 (publication)

Moore, F.C., K. Lacasse, K. J. Mach, Y. A. Shin, L. J. Gross and B. Beckage. 2022. Determinants of emissions pathways in the coupled climate–social system. Nature 603: 103–111 (publication)

Beckage, B., F. C. Moore and K. Lacasse. 2022. Incorporating human behaviour into Earth system modelling. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1493–1502 (publication)

• Video and slides of my Final Lecture at UTK on A Rational Basis for Hope: Human Behavior Modeling and Climate Change. Presentation to Howard Baker Center Energy and Environment Forum. April 7, 2022 Link to video and Article from the UT Daily Beacon about this lecture

Gross, L. 2024. A Rational Basis for Hope Regarding Climate Change. Summary article published in the TenneSierran, January-February 2024. Newspaper of the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club

Gilligan, J. M. 2018. Accounting for the human factor. Nature Climate Change 8: 14-15 (commentary)

Baer, D. and N. J. Gordon. 2022. Better climate models would build in political and personal decisions. Washington Post, August 25, 2022. (commentary)






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