Enlarge / Hurricane Florence the morning of Sept. 12 as it churned across the Atlantic in a west-northwesterly direction with winds of 130 miles an hour. (credit: NASA Johnson)

Climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons: every country acting in its own self-interest contributes to depleting a joint resource, making the world worse for everyone. If you’ve ever lived with bad roommates, the concept will be easy to grasp. The social cost of carbon (or SCC) is a way to put a price tag on the result of that tragedy, quantifying just how much climate change will cost the world over the coming generations.

But a paper in Nature Climate Change this week tries to bring the cost closer to home by estimating what the SCC could be for each different country. These new calculations point to a wide range of different cost possibilities but with a few consistent messages: the cost is likely to be higher than previous estimates; the US will be one of the worst-hit countries; and many of the countries contributing the least to the problem will be slammed regardless.

Transparency, uncertainty, and rigor

The concept of SCC has been around for a long time, with a huge range of different ways to calculate it. Because it’s impossible to know for sure what the future holds, those estimates end up with quite different outcomes depending on the assumptions they make. For instance, it’s impossible to know for sure what economic growth will be, and so different educated guesses about that will lead to different SCC estimates.

We live in a golden age of astrophotography, with a feast of jaw-dropping images from the farthest reaches of space crossing our news feeds on a daily basis. But sometimes it’s good to revisit the imagery of our pre-photographic past—in this case, the work of 19th-century illustrator Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. The Frenchman, once dubbed the “prince of observers,” produced some 7000 astronomical illustrations over his lifetime, and we’re featuring some of the best of them here.

Trouvelot was born in Aisne, France, but his political leanings put him at odds with Napoleon Bonaparte. After Napoleon’s 1852 coup d’état, Trouvelot fled the country with his family in 1855 and landed in the Medford suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Trained as an artist, nature illustrator, and printmaker, Trouvelot fell in love with astronomy after witnessing several auroras, and he began illustrating the amateur observations he spied through his small telescope.

Enlarge / Yes, those are crickets adorning this otherwise standard chips-and-guac. (credit: John Timmer)

Around this time last year, one of our intrepid staff members took on something that’s on the verge of being a culinary trend: eating bugs. In Beth’s case, this involved incorporating cricket-based flour into a traditional muffin recipe. The results were anything but positive.

Still, that was just one implementation of a single type of bug—we hadn’t really given eating them the traditional Ars “thoroughly reviewed” exploration. So, when an opportunity presented itself to try a much larger assortment of insects (and a couple arachnids) prepared in a variety of ways, I quickly signed up.

Why bugs, why now?

Part of the reason is that it isn’t actually “now.” Cultures all over the world have been incorporating insects into their cuisine for ages. Many of us have only become aware of bug-eating as a result of the development of travel-eating as a television genre, popularized by people like Andrew Zimmerman and the late Anthony Bourdain.