CACOR Live | Dr David Knoke | Fighting Global Warming with Agent-Based Models |14 Jan 2026 at 13:30 EST

[Raymond Leury]

You are invited to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

 

Speaker:  David Knoke

 

Subject: Fighting Global Warming with Agent-Based Models

 

Time: 14 Jan 2026 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

 

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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88278512426?pwd=aX8rj1VctDJyhpF3B7tUZtMVSmqtUn.1

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Summary:

 

This presentation examines how efforts to halt and reduce global warming can be studied using computer simulations. It is based on a chapter in my book Network Collective Action: Agent-Based Models of Pandemics, Riots, Social Movements, Insurrections and Insurgencies (Springer Nature 2025). It describes “Recruiting Movement Supporters”, an ABM program written in NetLogo software. The model demonstrates how differing network relations may hinder or facilitate efforts to recruit people to join a social movement. ABMs relevant to global warming could be based on Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric theory of common-pool resources as an alternative to the tragedy of the commons. She argued that self-organizing efforts can generate local and regional communication, trust-building, policy experimentation, and learning. People and organizations will collaborate as trust and confidence increase through working together to create a CPR public good. They become more willing to undertake necessary collective actions that increase their short-term costs because they believe greater longer-term benefits will accrue to themselves and others, and they believe that most other participants are also cooperating even as planet Earth inexorably heats.

 

Biography:

 

David Knoke is professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses on social networks, organizations, healthcare systems, social science fiction, and statistics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1972) and was professor of sociology at Indiana University (1972 to 1985). Knoke was a Fulbright research scholar at Kiel University, Germany (1989), and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1992). He received the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts’ Arthur “Red” Motley Exemplary Teaching Award (2008). His books, some written with coauthors: The Organizational State, Organizing for Collective Action, Political Networks, Organizations in America, Comparing Policy Networks, Changing Organizations, Social Network Analysis, Economic Networks, Multimodal Political Networks, and Network Collective Action.

 

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