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.”
USA Climate Damages listed as one of Altmetric's top 100 articles of 2017 /
Our research article on the economic impacts of climate change in the United States was listed by Altimetric as one of the Top 100 Articles of 2017 (#55).
This is the third time a GPL research paper has made it into the top 100!
Hsiang speaks at National Academy of Science /
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.
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.
Hsiang Keynote at World Congress of Science Journalists /
Solomon Hsiang gave a keynote at the World Congress of Science Journalists on the science of understanding the social effects of climate change and the role it may play on exacerbating future inequality. The keynote is followed by a 25 min Q+A with the audience of journalists.
Paper: The Distribution of Environmental Damages /
Solomon Hsiang has a new joint paper with Paulina Oliva, and Reed Walker reviewing and exploring what is known about the distributional consequences of environmental damages and the benefits of environmental policy. They provide a general framework for empiricists and explore what is known in the context of pollution, deforestation, and climate. The NBER working paper is available online here. The article is forthcoming in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy.
Op-Ed in the New York Times: Economic consequences of Hurricane Maria /
Solomon Hsiang and Trevor Houser published an Op-Ed in the New York Times explaining the extraordinary potential economic consequences of Hurricane Maria. By their calculation, Maria could lower Puerto Rican incomes by 21% over the next 15 years, undoing roughly 26 years of economic development. This could make Maria the most costly Atlantic storm (in percentage terms) in history.
Their calculations and more context are provided in the Climate Impact Lab Insights Blog.
Publication: Crop-damaging temperatures increase suicide rates in India /
Tamma Carleton has a new paper out in PNAS linking the climate to suicide rates in India.
The analysis is the first to provide large-scale empirical evidence that the climate influences suicide rates in a developing country. The study shows that temperature during India's main agricultural growing season has a substantial influence over annual suicide rates, such that heating up the country by just 1 degree C on one day causes approximately 65 annual suicides. This effect appears to materialize through an agricultural channel in which high temperatures cause crop losses and economic distress, leading some to commit suicide in response. Carleton estimates that warming trends experienced in India since 1980 are responsible for a total of over 59,000 suicides.
See the paper here.