Dr Kendon Bell
Kenny Bell has been awarded a Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship! The fellowship is one of (or maybe the) most prestigious in New Zealand and Kenny is the first economist to ever receive it!
Data viz collaboration with NYT on extreme heat /
A collaboration between the New York Times data viz team and the Climate Impact Lab was released today, allowing visitors to explore how much their local climate has changed since the year they were born and how it is projected to change in the future.
Publication: measuring effects of geoengineering on agriculture using volcanoes /
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.
WSJ economics column on mortality costs of climate change /
Greg Ip discussed our research into the global economic costs of excess mortality risk caused by climate change in his recent Wall Street Journal column.
The research covered in the article is output from the Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration between the GPL at Berkeley, EPIC at U Chicago, The Rutgers Earth System Science & Policy Lab, and the Rhodium Group.
Credit: Wall Street Journal
Publication: Warming increases suicides in the USA and Mexico /
Felipe González, Patrick Baylis, Solomon Hsiang and colleagues published an article in Nature Climate Change demonstrating that higher temperatures increase suicide rates across the entire United States and Mexico.
Read the article here.
NPR Marketplace feature on Social Cost of carbon research /
NPR Marketplace's Jed Kim reported on the Social Cost of Carbon research program at the Climate Impact Lab.
Carleton to Chicago & UCSB /
Dr. Tamma Carleton has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management!
...but first she is going to enjoy a relaxing two year post doc in EPIC/Economics at the University of Chicago.
Englander Awarded Sea Grant /
Gabe Englander was awarded the NMFS Sea Grant Fellowship to fund two years of his research on marine economics and fisheries population dynamics!
First GPL mini conference /
Kadish founds data science start up /
Dr. Jonathan Kadish has graduated and founded the Elastic Data Lab! We are very proud of this future GPL benefactor:)
Hsiang speaks at Climate One /
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.
Mayer to Minnesota Phd program /
Despite our best efforts to keep him here, we said farewell and good luck to Terin Mayer as he sets off to do his PhD at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at University of Minnesota!
GPL turns 4! /
We celebrated our fourth year of research and office basketball with some Chinese food!
Publication: letter on Ivory trade policy in Science /
Alongside a large interdisciplinary team, Sol coauthored a letter today in Science today explaining that recommendations to limit trade in legal ivory are based on evidence-based research. This was a response to an earlier article by Biggs et al. arguing that recommendations to limit trade were based on arbitrary values. We also point out that transparency in international negotiations are an important element of the process, in contrast to the recommendation by Biggs et al. to speed up international decision-making by negotiating international trade in ivory behind closed doors.
Read the letter here.
Read research by the lab on the global black market for ivory and international trade policy experiments here.
Comment in Nature: Climate and conflict research can support policy decision-making /
Marshall Burke and Sol Hsiang wrote a short response to a recent editorial in Nature. The editorial was itself a response to an article in Nature Climate Change that argued that climate-conflict research contained systematic sampling bias. The published Correspondence is pretty succinct:
“Your Editorial on sampling bias in studies linking climate change with civil unrest (Nature 554, 275–276; 2018) is based on an analysis that in our view provides no evidence for biased results (C. Adams et al. Nature Clim. Change 8, 200–203; 2018).
We disagree with your contention that it is “undesirable” to study risk factors for populations with a high likelihood of conflict on the grounds that it could “stigmatize” these regions as politically unstable. The same logic would argue against studying risk factors for people who have a high chance of developing cancer for fear of stigmatizing patients. In our view, such recommendations could create bias in the literature by inhibiting research.
Studies of connections between climate and conflict should instead be motivated to identify causes of human suffering so that it can be alleviated (see, for example, M. Burke et al. Annu. Rev. Econ. 7, 577–617; 2015). We do not believe that shying away from investigations in this field is an effective path towards this goal.”