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.
climate change
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.
Publication: Effect of Temperature on Math performance and learning /
Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Neidell and Sol Hsiang published a new article "Temperature and human capital in the short and long run". Analyzing over 24,000 student exams and following individual students over time, they demonstrate that cognitive performance in mathematics declines at high temperatures, but not in reading or verbal exams.
Read the article here.
Paper: Pricing climate /
Tatyana Deryugina and Solomon Hsiang have a new NBER working paper out titled "The Marginal Product of Climate". The analysis develops a formal theory for how overall economic productivity due to the climate should be valued, accounting for the fact that populations adapt to changes in their climate. They apply their approach to data on the United States and estimate that "business as usual" warming is worth roughly $6.7 trillion in foregone production within the US market economy.
Read the paper here.
Publication: Climate Damage in the United States /
James Rising, Solomon Hsiang, and former lab member Amir Jina, along with other teammates from the Climate Impact Lab, have a new paper out in Science calculating economic damages from climate change in the United States.
The analysis is the first to construct a "damage function" using micro-level econometric results for a large number of sectors, linked to the full suite of climate models used in CMIP5. Because the analysis has high spatial resolution, it is able to resolve how impacts of unmitigated climate damages across the country will vary, demonstrating that it will substantially increase economic inequality.
See the paper and an interactive visualization of results.
Update: The team at the Associated Press did a really nice interactive visualization of the results:
Climate Impact Lab Interactive Maps Launch + NYT Feature /
Two big things happened today. First, our team at the Climate Impact Lab launched an interactive data visualization page where many of our results will be featured as we produce them. You can zoom to the future and see probabilistic outcomes at unprecedented resolution (>24,000 individual regions!).
Second, the New York Times featured the the Impact Lab's work and built their own visualization to illustrate the changing frequency of extremely hot days expected in the future.
Obama cites GPL climate economics research /
In his recent Science article The Irreversible Momentum of Clean Energy, President Obama jumped into the "growth vs. levels" debate among empirical economists studying the effects of climate change, writing
[E]vidence is mounting that any economic strategy that ignores carbon pollution will impose tremendous costs to the global economy and will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth over the long term. Estimates of the economic damages from warming of 4°C over preindustrial levels range from 1% to 5% of global GDP each year by 2100 ... In addition, these estimates factor in economic damages but do not address the critical question of whether the underlying rate of economic growth (rather than just the level of GDP) is affected by climate change, so these studies could substantially understate the potential damage of climate change on the global macroeconomy (8, 9).
and citing the recent GPL paper on the global effects of temperature on growth.
Talk about a president who gets into the nuts and bolts...
Paper: Understanding farmer crop choice in response to climate change /
James Rising has a new working paper Weather-driven adaptation in perennial crop systems:An integrated study of Brazilian coffee yields, demonstrating how farmers in Brazil cope with changing environmental conditions by altering the portfolio of coffee crops they maintain. The analysis develops a novel structural Bayesian modeling approach that embeds reduced form modeling estimates, allowing James to solve (for the first time) the well-known "problem with perennials", i.e. the fact that analysts and policy-makes cannot generally observe the number of long-live plants (perennials) that farmers maintain on a farm. The analysis is important because it demonstrates how farmers cope with a changing climate by changing their investment decisions, sometimes amplifying the economic impact of changes in climate.
Publication: Social and economic impacts of climate /
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.
Berkeley Opportunity Lab web launch /
We launched the Opportunity Lab website. The Opportunity Lab is a new group of economists on campus that leverage data to uncover solutions to poverty and inequality issues. The Lab focuses on six core research areas: Climate and Environment, Crime and Criminal Justice, Education and Child Development, Health, Social Safety Nets and Employment, Taxation and Inequality. Sol and collaborator Reed Walker are co-directing the Climate and Environment program of the Lab. Stay tuned!
Publication: Potentially extreme migration and population concentration in the tropics /
Adam Sobel and Sol Hsiang have a new paper Potentially Extreme Population Displacement and Concentration in the Tropics Under Non-Extreme Warming in Scientific Reports.
Sol describes the paper on the G-FEED blog here.
CBO cites two GPL publications in national hurricane report /
The Congressional Budget Office used calculations in Hsiang & Jina (2014) and The American Climate Prospectus to inform their recent report on Potential Increases in Hurricane Damage in the United States: Implications for the Federal Budget. See a summary of the report by Politico here.
Hurricane Katrina