Solomon Hsiang
Along with 26 other distinguished scholars and researchers, Sol Hsiang was awarded a two-year fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation,
This generous award will support research efforts on using machine learning to categorize historical airplane photos of Caribbean islands and assemble remote sensing data prior to Landsat technology.
Congratulations to Sol and the Aerial Photos team!
Jon Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, and coauthors published a study in Nature estimating the effect of solar radiation management (SRM) on global agricultural production. The paper exploits the historical eruption of massive volcanoes that inject sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to understand the effect of changing light conditions on crop yields. The paper finds that benefits from cooling, the intended effect of SRM, are fully offset by harm to yields via shading.
Read the study ungated here.
A resource page for the article is here.
Press release here.
Visualization of the stratospheric sulfate aerosols injected into the atmosphere after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo. Each frame is a month. Visualization by Jon Proctor & Solomon Hsiang.
Sol visited Climate One at the Commonwealth Club of California to talk with Katharine Mach and host Greg Dalton on about the economic winners and losers of climate change, both in the United States and globally.
Listen to the podcast or watch videos from the event in our video gallery.
Solomon Hsiang spoke about methods used value the climate at the Sackler Colloquia on Economics, Environment, and Sustainable Development, organized by Simon Levin, Stephen Carpenter, Gretchen Daily, Sir Partha Dasgupta, Paul Ehrlich, Geoffrey Heal, Catherine Kling, Jane Lubchenco, and Stephen Polasky.
Solomon Hsiang surveyed new approaches to valuing planetary scale assets, using climate as an example, to other Kavli Fellows at the annual symposium run at the National Academy of Sciences.
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang published an article in Science discussing and synthesizing the methods and results used to understand the impact of climate from the last decade. We demonstrate how findings across the literature and sectors are linked, identify commonalities across numerous studies, and compute how much (i) various aspects of the current climate contribute to to historical social outcomes, (ii) how much climate change to date has affected outcomes, and (iii) quantitative projections of the future. We identify that understanding "adaptation gaps" is the most important area for future research.
Solomon Hsiang will be speaking at MIT's EmTech 2016 conference October 19th, hosted but the Technology Review. More info and registration here.
Tamma and Sol, along with co-author Marshall Burke at Stanford, published a review of the climate and violence literature in a Special Topics issue of the European Physical Journal.
The review focuses on how to use empirical evidence from historical climate-conflict relationships to make projections about the future. We present new evidence suggesting that income mitigates the impact of temperature on crime and conflict, implying that future projections may be improved by incorporating income-based adaptation. Check out a more detailed blog post about the publication on the blog G-FEED here.
Sol has a new review article out on Climate Econometrics, the new collection of techniques used to measure the effects of climate on societies and economies. The paper is forthcoming in the Annual Reviews of Resource Economics.
Sol summarized the paper in a blog post at G-FEED.
Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang published a letter in the Wall Street Journal responding to Bjorn Lomborg's claims about cost-benefit analysis of climate change policies.
Read about the research behind the letter here.
Kyle Meng and Solomon Hsiang published an Op-Ed in the Guardian explaining how the coming El Nino is likely to affect the 3 trillion people living in the tropics and what we can do about it.
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang visited New Zealand to work with a Maori Land Trust in an effort to develop new frameworks and techniques for measuring sustainable development.
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang led the first Summer Workshop in Climate Economics, where fifteen doctoral students from around the country learned econometric methods and worked with faculty and postdoc mentors to complete new research projects studying the impacts of climate change around the world.
Amir Jina, James Rising, and Solomon Hsiang were coauthors on the book "Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus" published by Columbia University Press. The analysis in the book was the research behind the Risky Business initiative lead by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson and Tom Steyer. Commentary by Karen Fisher-Vanden, Michael Greenstone, Geoffrey Heal, Michael Oppenheimer, and Nicholas Stern and Bob Ward enrich the original analysis.
Solomon Hsiang delivered a Keynote address "The Emerging Age of Data-Driven Policy Design" at Strata + Hadoop 2015.
