Got No Title

John Fleck, who has recently acquired an Australian farmer's love of lagomorphia, inquires

Ezra Klein’s nominally talking to economists, but you guys sitting in the back might get something out of this as well:

Listen to political scientists, sociologists, etc. They have perspectives, evidence and training worthy of consideration.

to which John Mashey has a reasonable response

I would say: economists, political scientists and sociologists are normally distributed like anyone else. Do the same thing you’d do if you were a hiring manager looking for employees:

look at a number of candidates, check out their track records, and select a few to watch carefully, and if convinced they are good, listen hard to *them*.

and Eli, being a careful sort with all those Fudds out there after him, cautiously went looking and came up with something interesting, the Earth System Governance Project

Humans now influence all biological and physical systems of the planet. Almost no species, no land area, no part of the oceans has remained unaffected by the expansion of the human species. The four main global change research programmes, affiliated in the Earth System Science Partnership, see evidence today that the entire earth system now operates 'well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years', and that 'human activity is generating change that extends well be-yond natural variability - in some cases, alarmingly so - and at rates that continue to accelerate'. Given this situation, the Earth System Science Partnership has declared an 'urgent need' to develop 'strategies for Earth System management'. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remain unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations, and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient - they are also poorly understood.

This is the rationale for the Earth System Governance Project, a new long-term research programme developed under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. This Science Plan elaborates upon the concept of earth system governance and on the central questions, methods and processes of a global research effort in this field.

The Earth System Science Partnership has four parts, each of which is interesting,

DIVERSITAS - Biodiversity
IHDP - Human environmental interactions
IGBP - How climate change drives biosphere - geosphere interactions.
WCRP - World climate research program

Much to read.