What is Sciatica

Many people with sciatic nerve pain are eventually able to lead happy, pain-free, healthy lives.Sciatica describes the symptoms of leg pain as well as weakness, tingling or numbness that willoriginate in the lower back and travel through the buttock and down the sciatic nerve behind the leg.

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How To Tell Sciatic Nerve Pain

Many people with sciatic nerve pain are eventually able to lead healthy, happy, pain-free lives.The term sciatica describes the symptoms of leg pain as well as numbness, weakness and tingling that typically willoriginate in the lower back and move through the buttock region and down the sciatic nerve behind the leg.

http://wolfram-alpha.tumblr.com/post/129874158419/how-to-effectively-deal-with-sciatic-nerve-pain

How To Tell Sciatica

A large percentage of people with sciatic nerve pain are eventually able to lead happy, healthy, pain-free lives.Sciatica describes the leg pain symptoms as well as numbness, weakness and tingling that usually willoriginate in the lower back and travel through the buttock region and down the sciatic nerve behind the leg.

https://treatmentsforsciaticanervepain.wordpress.com/2015/09/25/how-to-effectively-deal-with-back-pain/

How To Tell Sciatica

A large percentage of people with back pain are eventually able to lead happy, healthy, pain-free lives.Sciatica describes the leg pain symptoms and possibly tingling, numbness or weakness that typically willoriginate in the lower back and travels through the buttock region and down the large sciatic nerve in the back of the leg.

https://herniateddisknervepaintreatments.wordpress.com/2015/09/25/how-to-effectively-take-care-of-back-pain/

What is Sciatic Nerve Pain

Many people with sciatic nerve pain are eventually able to lead healthy, happy, pain-free lives.Sciatica describes the leg pain symptoms as well as weakness, tingling or numbness that willoriginate in the lower back and move through the buttock and down the large sciatic nerve in the back of the leg.

http://girlpushedtothebrink.tumblr.com/post/129874139836/how-to-properly-take-care-of-sciatica

How To Tell Sciatic Nerve Pain

Many people with lower back pain are eventually able to lead healthy, happy, pain-free lives.The term sciatica describes the leg pain symptoms as well as numbness, weakness and tingling that willoriginate in the lower back and travel through the buttock region and down the large sciatic nerve in the back of the leg.

https://physicaltherapytreatmentsforsciaticanervepain.wordpress.com/2015/09/25/how-to-effectively-take-care-of-back-pain/

What You Should Do If You Own A Volkswagen That Was Just Recalled

If you are an owner of one of the nearly half a million diesel-power vehicles the Obama administration ordered Volkswagen to recall on Friday, do not panic. 

You may have heard that wait times for replacements or repairs in several recent car recalls have taken as long as years.

But there is something you can do right away: Ask your car dealership for a loaner vehicle.

As HuffPost reported in May, many automakers offer loaner vehicles, but they are not always forthcoming about their availability. As a result, many car owners never bother trying to get them, and may be risking their health and safety.

Of course, the recalled Volkswagen vehicles are not being pulled from the road because of the danger they pose to drivers directly. The Environmental Protection Agency has recalled them for having software that turned on an emissions control system when the cars were being inspected, but otherwise allowed the cars to emit 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide, a chemical linked to respiratory illnesses. (The EPA is now collaborating with the Department of Justice and the state of California on an investigation of wrongdoing that could result in criminal charges.)

But that does not diminish the urgency of getting a loaner vehicle. Rather than risking the safety of their drivers alone, these cars harm the health of the entire public.

Here are the models and years of the recalled diesel-power vehicles:

• Volkswagen Jetta, 2009-15


• Volkswagen Beetle, 2009-15


• Volkswagen Golf, 2009-15


• Volkswagen Passat, 2014-15


• Audi A3, 2009-15

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5 Reasons People May Not Be Following Your Leadership

There are times throughout a leader's tenure that he/she must look behind them and see if anyone is following. Are the goals that have been set being accomplished? Is the organization moving in a positive direction? Are people working together to achieve the desired outcomes?

Losing your influence over the people that you lead often does not happen quickly...but, rather, happens over a period of time. People are forgiving at the beginning, but the longer you lead, the less they are willing to forgive your shortcomings. Those that you lead need to be led...want to be led.

We've probably all known "leaders" who were leaders in name only. The people who have been put in charge of a team, but they have no influence over those that they are leading. Or, maybe we've been involved in a group, a ministry, a task where we've been put in charge - but for some reason no one is following us.

There are lots of reason why people may not be following your leadership, but here are a few common reasons that I've discovered:

1. You're disorganized.
Organization leads to clarity. Clarity of mission, clarity of tasks to be completed, clarity of who does what, etc. When a leader is disorganized, he/she immediately loses credibility with the team. Being disorganized leads to confusion, missed deadlines, and a lack of care for the needs of the team. This is you if you find yourself late to appointments/meetings, misplacing documents, your unprepared for meetings, you forget who's supposed to do what, etc.

2. You're inconsistent.
Consistency helps people understand what is expected. When a leader is inconsistent, the team can be unsure of what is happening or what to do next. This is you if you change meeting times often and with very short notice, change your mind about how to accomplish the goals of the group, and/or you're moody and varied in your reaction to things, for example. Consistency gives people on the team a feeling of safety and security - which is vital to team success.

3. You don't follow up.
Answering emails, texts, and phone calls in a timely way. Following up on assignments that were assigned to you. When you don't follow up, people don't feel important and can interpret this behavior as a sign that they're not needed on the team. This is you if you don't have a system in place to follow up on communications/requests that you receive, you don't take minutes/notes at meetings that you lead, and/or you find yourself regularly saying that assigned items are not completed by the deadline.

4. You're a discourager, rather than an encourager.
As the leader, one of the primary responsibilities you have is to encourage those that you lead. This is a non-negotiable and extends to everyone under your leadership, regardless of position. It's enough for someone to stop following you if you simply do not encourage them, but when you also discourage those that you lead, it can be a deadly outcome. When you discourage those that you lead regularly, you are taking away the one thing that is most personal to them - the pride in their work. This is you if your first reaction to others' work is criticism, or you find it easier to tell others what they did wrong than what they did right, and/or you struggle to share the praise your team receives with the other people on the team.

5. You care more about your success than their's.
If you're on the team and leading the team because you want the accolades and to take the credit for the success, people will not follow you. One of the goals of leadership is to make those around you better. And, if they happen to surpass you in title, responsibility, and praise - so be it. That only looks good on you. But, if you are threatened by others who have better talent and ideas than you, you may want to reconsider your role as a leader. This is you if you regularly need to be praised for the progress of the team you lead, or you find yourself jealous when someone else's work is recognized or rewarded instead of your own, and/or you accept the praise when the team wins and quickly point fingers at everyone else when the team fails.

This article originally appeared on timparsons.me.

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How To Deal With These 3 Difficult Managers At Work

One of the biggest challenges for any employee is learning how to work well with a manager. A good working relationship with your manager can increase productivity and engagement, while a bad working relationship can help inspire you to find a new job.

After all, a recent Gallup survey of 7,272 U.S. adults found one in two have left a job to get away from a bad manager and improve their overall life. That means building a working relationship with your manager is more important than ever.

When dealing with a difficult boss, understanding personality is key to identifying the best course of action to take. Here are three difficult managerial types you may encounter and what you need to know about dealing with them, so you'll never have to quit to get away from a difficult manager again:

1. Goal-Focused Gary

Goal-Focused Gary cares about only one thing: the goal he sets for himself. The problem is, he usually doesn't share that goal with his team, and that makes him difficult to deal with.

Since Gary thinks he's the most valuable employee in the company, he tends to ignore ideas he didn't come up with and rarely -- if ever -- will give you the recognition you deserve for a job well done.

Managers like Goal-Focused Gary like to be involved in every decision made in their group, so they get the credit for the team's success. In other words, you're probably going to be running all of your decisions by Gary first, no matter how experienced you are.

How to deal with Goal-Focused Gary: The trick to getting along with managers like Gary is understanding what drives them. According to Isabel Briggs Myers' theories of personality type, Goal-Focused Gary is a Thinking type, who is more focused on the task at hand than any relationships he could be building (or destroying).

Use this to your advantage. Find out what Goal-Focused Gary is trying to achieve and make sure what you do at work helps him achieve that goal. By doing so, you're showing Gary you're also interested in his success. When you show Gary you're interested in his success, your responsibilities will increase and you may end up climbing the corporate ladder with him.

2. Pleasing Patricia

Pleasing Patricia is agreeable. For her, management is all about being liked. Sounds great, right?

It is -- until you realize she's doing it because she doesn't like confrontation. When a manager is highly agreeable, it's actually pretty difficult to get things done.

Agreeableness is the "Big Five" personality trait that measures an individual's tendency toward empathy, affection, kindness, and its namesake, agreeableness. The problem is, Pleasing Patricia has it in spades. She's not just empathetic and affectionate, she's also afraid to hurt an employee's feelings or say no.

Since she's worried about hurting her employees' feelings, Pleasing Patricia will rarely give honest, constructive feedback, and she'll always avoid making decisions between competing ideas in a group setting. This lack of managerial instinct slows down productivity for the group and hurts your professional development.

How to deal with Pleasing Patricia: Your approach with a Pleasing Patricia needs to be two-pronged.

First, you've got to make an effort to assure Pleasing Patricia that, at least with you, honesty is the best policy. Explain how your goal is to be the best employee you can and how constructive feedback plays into achieving that goal. Balance your need for feedback with Pleasing Patricia's agreeable nature by encouraging her to always include one or two things you could do better when she gives you positive feedback.

Second, since Pleasing Patricia is most concerned with her employees liking her, work hard to make sure she knows you're on her side. Stop by to chat occasionally, ask about life outside of work, and generally try to be as nice as possible to help provide Pleasing Patricia with the support she needs.

3. Micromanaging Mitchell

Possibly one of the most difficult manager types to deal with, Micromanaging Mitchell is a handful. Whether he's hovering over you to make sure you're doing things his way or leaving out key information so you can't finish a project without getting him involved, he always finds ways to stay in the loop.

What psychologist David Keirsey called a "Guardian" type, Micromanaging Mitchell likes things in order and doesn't mind letting his employees know about it. He cares about deadlines and wants to be a part of every aspect of a project, so he constantly asks for updates and rarely delegates full responsibility to his employees.

How to deal with Micromanaging Mitchell: You can try to fight it, but the first thing you have to accept when your manager is Micromanaging Mitchell is that things are going to take you longer to finish, and they're going to include multiple interactions with your manager.

Instead of waiting for Mitchell to request your latest status update, be proactive. Adjust your workflow to include regular status updates (how often depends on the manager) and longer project meetings where you get as much information from your manager as possible. This will help you build your manager's trust and keep you from walking out of a meeting without the information you need to finish the job.

While this strategy may slow down your productivity, proactively keeping Micromanaging Mitchell in the loop ensures status report distractions come on your terms, not on his.

Dealing with a difficult manager is something we'll all have to at some point in our careers, but it doesn't have to keep us from being happy at work. Consider how your manager's personality drives his or her managerial style and find ways to build a productive working relationship by appealing to that personality.

Have you ever had one of these managers? How did you deal with him or her?

Molly Owens is the CEO of Truity, developer of the TypeFinder® personality type assessment and other scientifically validated, user-friendly personality assessments that connect people with powerful insights about their strengths, talents, and traits. Find Molly and Truity on Twitter and Facebook.

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3 Proven Ways To Help You Achieve Your Goals

It's sad to think how many people go their whole lives dreaming of goals that they will never hit. While many of us have aspirations we want to reach, few of us actually get to the final destination.

The main reason behind this is consistency. We lack the ability to stick through the changes we need to make to turn our visions into reality. This in part can be blamed on the way media portrays the successful. It's a common belief that some giant act of heroism is what catalyzes success to begin. In reality, this path to reach success is rare. For all the people who got lucky and hit a homerun his or her first time at bat, there are a million others who struck out and gave up.

Thus the true way to hit our goals is by working on them every damn day. Below, I'll go through 3 proven methods that will get you to your goals. This isn't some get rich quick scheme, or the type of advice you get from infomercials selling you the latest "Ab maker 3000." These are time-consuming and tedious habits that will get you to your goals the old fashioned way: through consistent and determined effort over a long period of time.

1. Focus on one habit to change and be consistent

The number one reason why people fail to hit their goals is because they don't keep up the routine they originally start. For instance, say you want to lose weight. Instead of going cold turkey, what if you just cut the ice cream sandwich at night. Lets say it's only 300 calories. You don't change anything but you just change that one tiny thing. By the end of a year, you just saved over 100,000 calories off your body.

This is a simple example, but it highlights how core consistency is to reaching your goals. Don't try and do a complete magical transformation overnight. Instead, focus on one thing, and execute it everyday for about 2 months. The change will lead to more and more habit changes, and soon you'll be well on your way to hitting your goal.

2. Track everything

From now on, write down everything throughout the day that you're doing in regards to the goals you set for yourself. If you want to get healthy, write down everything your eating everyday. Lets say you're a business owner. Write down everything that you did to move your business forward.

By the end of the day, the results will surprise you. You'll be able to look at what you did for the business and realize that many of your activities were unnecessary. Tracking what we do has such a profound effect on us because it forces us to measure our progress through tangible metrics. We also are unable to forget the 2 hours of TV we watched or the 3-layer cheesecake we scarfed down. The key to getting to our goals is tracking what's holding us back, and removing those distractions.

3. Write your goals down

Write down the 3 main things you want to accomplish. These should be major goals that you want to achieve. Until these goals are written down, they are just fantasies. Putting your goals on paper brings them to life. There are so many distractions in today's world, and we ignore 99% of them. But when we physically have our goals in front us everyday, we naturally start thinking about them much more. Force all your effort and time thinking about what you want to achieve, and you'll graviate in the right direction.

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The Justice Department Pledge To Prosecute White-Collar Criminals Is About To Face A Major Test

The Obama administration accused Volkswagen on Friday of a stunning scheme to deceive the government about its cars’ emissions standards and ordered the German automaker to recall nearly 500,000 vehicles. 

But as the White House begins investigating Volkswagen's practices, will it prosecute top executives of the company that's accused of deceiving the government and endangering public health? 

The case provides an opportunity for the Department of Justice to deliver on a promise it made in a Sept. 9 memo to refocus its prosecution of white-collar crime on individual employees, rather than the institutions that employ them, and to pressure companies to cooperate in those efforts.

The DOJ memo, which The New York Times obtained, was an implicit response to criticism that the administration has avoided pursuing cases against individual white-collar criminals, preferring instead to strike deals with the companies that employ them. These deals typically result in substantial fines, but preclude jail time for individuals.  

Critics have been especially unforgiving of what they see as the administration’s milquetoast policing of Wall Street: Not a single top finance executive has gone to prison for their role in the 2008 financial crisis. (Last year, the Times profiled Kareem Serageldin, a mid-level Credit Suisse banker who went to jail for lying about the value of his bank's mortgage securities.)

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday issued Volkswagen a notice of violation for allegedly cheating emission-control standards. The company installed software in its diesel-powered vehicles that turned on their emissions control systems when the cars were inspected by state authorities, but otherwise left the cars free to emit 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide. The chemical adds to the buildup of smog and ozone, which are tied to asthma and other respiratory illnesses and contribute to shortened lifespans. Volkswagen may have been trying to improve its cars’ performance, since the emissions control systems apparently limit torque and acceleration. 

Volkswagen admitted to installing the software, the EPA said.

The EPA called Friday’s notice and recall an “opening salvo” in a larger investigation of wrongdoing on which it is collaborating with the DOJ and the state of California. Volkswagen said it was cooperating in the investigation.

If there is enough evidence that Volkswagen deliberately committed fraud, the case could be an ideal test for the DOJ’s professed rededication to the prosecution of individual corporate executives.

"This is a huge test of how serious the administration’s commitment is to prosecuting white collar crime," Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, told The Huffington Post. "If the facts end up showing that Volkswagen executives deliberately designed and implemented a program to evade emissions testing, that is a brazen act and there has to be some accountability. It cannot just be yet another instance of Volkswagen opens up its checkbook and writes a check of shareholders' money to pay a fine. There has to be prosecution of executives involved in such a scheme."

"This was not some mid-level thing," he added. "If it proves to be true, it was an illegal conspiracy to cheat emissions testing."

Lawyers specializing in automotive law told Bloomberg that if DOJ agrees with EPA claims about the device to cheat emissions inspections, it will have grounds to charge Volkswagen with criminal violations of the Clean Air Act.

But even if the DOJ pursues charges against individual Volkswagen executives, we may not be seeing company CEO Martin Winterkorn in handcuffs anytime soon. 

One of the reasons prosecutors are reluctant to charge employees in white-collar crime cases is that individual responsibility is hard to prove. And when they do choose to prosecute individuals, they have more success catching lower-level workers who take the fall for the executives calling the shots. 

Senior executives are adept at concealing any evidence that might implicate them in wrongdoing done at their behest, Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of Too Big To Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Big Corporations, told HuffPost Live earlier this month. 

“Like any mafia don you do not want to have a smoking gun: You do not want to e-mail illegal instructions to your underlings, you do not want to leave a paper trail,” Garrett said. “And that can make it possible for CEOs to hide their true role.” 

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The Results of Being the Dumb Down Party

We saw in the latest CNN Republican candidate debate the results of what seems to be a prolonged campaign to discount almost all scientific facts, as well as intelligent discussion of the most important issues of the day.

Especially scary was Donald Trump saying if we build up our military enough, we won't have to negotiate with anybody. Or Marco Rubio, the seemingly most moderate Republican, endorsing a 1,900 mile fence along our entire border with Mexico (or double fence, says Dr. Ben Carson) over mountains and rivers, or Carli Fiorina saying that Planned Parenthood was aborting live babies to harvest their organs.

Global warming is one of the most important issues today, since there is almost unanimous agreement among scientists that it is man-made and rising alarmingly. Hence the record heatwaves, cold spells and catastrophic storms the world has been experiencing recently. Yet thanks to the funding of multi-billionaires like the Koch Brothers, none of the Republican Presidential candidates said they believe global warming is man-made, or even real.

What is the reason Republicans have become the party of anti-intellectuals--some even want to abolish the Department of Education, and otherwise defund public education? Journalist Chris Hedges said in a PBS interview President Clinton in co opting moderate Republican positions, such as deregulation of the financial industry, putting 100,000 more cops on the street, and 'reforming' welfare, had driven the Republican Party to "insanity".

But the anti-intellectual, anti-science bias goes much further and deeper. It is in fact an almost totally American phenomenon that Republicans have taken advantage of, in an attempt to dumb down the electorate to levels that would even deny evolution. Why would anyone not want to support public education, when it educates more than 80 percent of our students? The result is that higher education is also falling behind.

According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design," said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

"After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place," said Psychology Today. "The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries"

Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can't be aborted.

Pundits give other reasons for such a dumbing down of a segment of the electorate--such as social media and television replacing literacy, or education that no longer teaches math and science or even history. Maybe that has enabled the Donald Trumps of the world to shout louder. The danger is that it may drown out any intelligent discourse about the most important issues of our day. It's driving at least one of our political parties into insanely ridiculous positions, at the moment.

Harlan Green © 2015

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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A present we can't unwrap

In only 150 years or so, we will have burned all fossil fuel on the planet, if carbon emissions keep rising like last year. Over time all ice on Earth will melt and cities like New York will be commited to the sea. Humankind has found other energy sources already, but coal, oil and gas are a gift to those who own them and as long as they can be sold for more than it costs to get them out the ground there is no economic brake for carbon emissions. We need to solve this problem. And for this, we might want to link the climate risk with its cause to incentivize company strategies that have a chance to survive.

Long before it was born, humanity got this incredibly valuable present: fossil fuels. Oil, coal and gas are captured sunlight once collected by tiny algae and huge forests. Over time this fossilized solar energy sunk into Earth's depth. Not everyone got the same piece of the cake; some regions got more, some less. It took us a while to discover how to use this wealth, but its energy density was unprecedented, so much greater than that of wood. So it fueled our industrial evolution - it was a present that meant prosperity as well as cultural development.

Yet in the meantime it has turned out to cause climate change and we are forced to think how to use solar power directly, without the carbon-detour. If emissions continue to rise linearly by 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon every year, we will have burned everything we found in the second half of the next century. That sounds far away, but it is also an incredible amount of carbon. Once turned into CO2 and blown into the sky, a large part of it stays there for hundreds of years and even millennia. Already now, it causes changes of the Earth system that will last for thousands of years.

Burn it all - melt it all

Last week we showed in a study in Science Advances that if we do that, burn all the fossil fuels, we melt all the ice of Antarctica. Since Antarctica is the coldest continent on Earth this means we would turn all the ice on the planet into liquid water and hence raise sea level worldwide higher than ever before in the history of humanity - let alone human civilization. That would reshape our coastlines and thereby change the face of our planet (see National Geographic maps for ice-free world). Cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Calcutta, Hamburg, Jakarta, Cairo would be committed to the sea.

Eliminating all ice on Antarctica would take thousands of years. That is even further away than the 150 years we need to burn all fossil fuels. And, understandably, possible changes in the far future are perceived as something we can ignore for now. But that is not true. As mind-blowing as it is: What we do now, within just a few decades, triggers changes that will be felt for thousands of years to come. We are setting the Earth system in motion and, on the way, destroy important parts of our cultural heritage.

But not just that. Even though melting all ice on Earth will take long, the sea-level rise will be quick enough to pose a real challenge for us to adapt to: Already in the first few centuries of the great melting, sea levels will rise up to two feet every ten years (see graph). This is a lot. New York City is currently preparing for a sea-level rise of about four feet for the end of the century. More than two inches every year is faster than most administrative processes can handle.

All this only happens if we do not stop emitting carbon. We carried out comprehensive computer simulations for this hypothetical scenario - gedankenexperiments, if you like. Now people might say: who knows what's in a thousand years? The answer is: physics does. While it's hard to predict the speed of near-term melting, because the climate system is complex, long-term projections are easier. If you put an ice-cube into your living room, in most families guesses on the rate with which the ice cube disappears will diverge. But none of us has a doubt that it will disappear. The reason is that we know the melting temperature of ice - and it is lower than what we normally like to endure in our living room.

A diamond that needs to stay coal

Sea-level rise is just one example of why we might not want to warm our planet by 20°F or more. If we want to avoid that we have to keep coal in the ground. That is a well-known fact. So fossil fuels are a present to those who own it, yet one that we cannot unwrap, if we do not want to change our entire planet.

Now here is a problem: Even if renewables can provide all the energy humanity needs, fossil fuels would still be worth something as long as you can sell them for more than you need to get them out of the ground and around the world to its consumers. What is needed is an economic mechanism to keep it in the ground. The simplest way is to put a price on carbon emissions.

Complement the trading by relocating future risk

Europe uses an emissions trading scheme to do exactly that. Emission rights are given to the emitting industries and they can trade them among each other. The total amount of certificates is, in principle, following the emission reduction path that is politically set. The carbon price is then determined by the demand - similar to the trading on a stock market.

So much for the trading. But if a company gives out stocks, it receives investment money in return. How does this work for the emission certificates? When the trading scheme was introduced in Europe all emission rights were given out for free and companies were able to profit by selling emission certificates they did not need. Later, part of the emission rights were auctioned which brought some money into public budgets, but the initial price of the certificates was and is not linked to the actual damage the emissions cause. It is an undetermined variable in the equation.

An alternative could be to couple this initial price of carbon to climate damages. This should not be confused with a "cost-benefit analysis" because a lot of climate impacts cannot be monetarized. There is no price tag one can put on a refugee that is fleeing a monsoon flooding or even "just" on a polar bear that is drowning? A lot of climate impacts cannot be monetarized in an ethical way. Thus the total amount of emission should continue to be determined by political will.

But just because there are not only monetary reasons to reduce carbon emissions does not mean we have to ignore the monetary ones that exist. It makes a lot of sense that the price of carbon should also reflect the price society pays to repair at least some of the damages caused by climate change. One way could be via the initial price of emission certificates. This way the risk of an increase in climate damages including those that are difficult to predict, like extreme weather events, would be transferred to the emitting industries.

The damages are likely to increase over time which creates an additional incentive to find future strategies of carbon reduction. Such a scheme would change the price of carbon but it would not replace a carbon trading scheme. It would complement the trading to incorporate the risk of future climate change and the societal need for adaptation into the price of carbon. Including future risks into your company's strategy is a very common challenge. At the moment the carbon risk for companies lies within the uncertainty of future European policies - not within the uncertainty of future climate. But it is the climate uncertainty against which we want to protect ourselves. It should be the one that determines our strategies.

The principle is simple: Once you use the carbon you pay for the damages it creates. This is not uncommon in situations concerning our global commons. For example, damages caused by the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon in 2010 had to be paid for by the company that caused it. The final claim filing deadline for the court-supervised Economic and Property Damages Settlement program for compensation of damages induced by the oil spill has just passed in June this year.

Since, in the case of climate change the attribution of specific events to the carbon emissions is scientifically challenging, one might withdraw to an attribution of the total damage increase over time adjusted for economic and demographic growth effects. Also the distribution of the money that is collected for the emission certificates needs some thought. But neither of these complications question the principle: incorporate the risk of future changes into the price of carbon to create the right incentive.

Make emission reduction a direct benefit

Obviously, all costs-of-carbon will come back to society. We will all pay the price for our emissions. The question is how these costs are distributed to create an incentive to best reduce the emissions and thereby the risk of future damages. At the moment, European companies try to assess the decision makers in Brussels because they represent the biggest uncertainty with respect to the future price of carbon. In reality however, the biggest risk for society lies within the uncertainties of future changes of climate itself. To incorporate this risk into the price of carbon is a step that is currently missing.

The Munich Re reinsurance company has calculated the meteorologically induced damages during the past three decades to be of the order of four trillion US$, one of which was insured. That means one trillion US$ of uninsured weather-induced damages per decade in the last thirty years. Integrated over a century, this is the same order of magnitude as the cost of transferring our global energy system onto a renewable path as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - and that sum does not even include possible future changes in the intensity of weather extremes as they are likely to develop in a warming climate.

We are currently spending a similar amount of money as we would need to completely transform our energy system just for repairing the damages caused by weather. If we learn how to link changes in this enourmous monetary flow to the emissions of carbon, we will be faster on our path towards a renewable energy system.

100 million years ago, we were given a diamond that has to stay coal, if we want to avoid dangerous climate change. We need to find a way to achieve that. A sensible way is to incorporate the risk of future climate change into the price of carbon so that reducing emissions will become a direct benefit.



Graph: Rate of sea-level rise for different cumulative emissions. The available fossil fuel carbon is estimated to be around 10000 billion metric tons of carbon (10000 GtC) as depicted by the red line (Winkelmann et al., 2015).



Further reading:

R. Winkelmann, A. Levermann, A. Ridgwell, K. Caldeira; Combustion of available fossil-fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet; Science Advances 1 (2015), e1500589; DOI:10.1126/sciadv.1500589.

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