Abstract: Effective climate risk management requires robust quantification of the probability of different kinds of hazards, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe storms. As a result, there has been increasing interest in the extent to which historical global warming has influenced the occurrence and severity of individual extreme climate events. However, although trends in the extremes of the seasonal- and daily-scale distributions of climate records have been analyzed for many years, quantifying the contribution of observed global warming to individual events that are unprecedented in the observed record presents a particular scientific challenge. I will describe a framework for leveraging observations and large climate model ensembles to quantify the influence of observed global warming on the probability of unprecedented extreme events. This approach is grounded on three tenets: (1) Focus on understanding the physical causes of the individual event; (2) Use formal uncertainty quantification to test the probability of those physical conditions occurring in the current climate; and (3) Use formal hypothesis testing to compare the probability of those physical conditions occurring in the current climate and a climate without human influence. My group has applied our analysis to a number of different climate variables from a number of individual events, including temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and atmospheric circulation patterns. Together, this work has shown that global warming can influence the risk of extreme events that are unprecedented in historical experience, particularly by altering the probability of the physical conditions that are responsible for the event. In addition, given the widespread public interest in “real time” attribution, the prospects for operational attribution analysis will also be discussed.
About the Speaker: Noah Diffenbaugh is a Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University. He studies the climate system, including impacts on agriculture, water resources, and human health. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Geophysical Research Letters. He has served as an IPCC Lead Author, and has provided scientific expertise to the White House, the Governor of California, and U.S. Congressional offices. Recognitions include the Holton Award from the American Geophysical Union and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Noah S. Diffenbaugh
Professor, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences
Stanford University
In a shack that now sits below sea level, a mother in Bangladesh struggles to grow vegetables in soil inundated by salt water. In Malawi, a toddler joins thousands of other children perishing from drought-induced malnutrition. And in China, more than one million people died from air pollution in 2012 alone.
Around the world, climate change is already having an effect on human health.
In a recent paper, Katherine Burke and Michele Barry from the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, along with former Wellesley College President Diana Walsh, described climate change as “the ultimate global health crisis.” They offered recommendations to the new United States president to address the urgently arising health risks associated with climate change.
Bangladeshi children make their way through flood waters.
The authors, along with Stanford researchers Marshall Burke, Eran Bendavid and Amy Pickering who also study climate change, are concerned by how little has been done to mitigate its effects on health.
There is still time to ease — though not eliminate — the worst effects on health, but as the average global temperature continues to creep upward, time appears to be running short.
“I think we are at a critical point right now in terms of mitigating the effects of climate change on health,” said Amy Pickering, a research engineer at the Woods Institute for the Environment. “And I don’t think that’s a priority of the new administration at all.”
Health effects of climate change
Even in countries like the United States that are well-equipped to adapt to climate change, health impacts will be significant.
“Extremes of temperature have a very observable direct effect,” said Eran Bendavid, an assistant professor of medicine and Stanford Health Policy core faculty member.
“We see mortality rates increase when temperatures are very low, and especially when they are very high.”
Bendavid also has seen air pollutants cause respiratory problems in people from Beijing to Los Angeles to villages in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Hotter temperatures make it such that particulate matter and dust and pollutants stick around longer,” he said.
In addition to respiratory issues, air pollution can have long-term cognitive effects. A study in Chile found that children who are exposed to high amounts of air pollution in utero score lower on math tests by the fourth grade.
“I think we’re only starting to understand the true costs of dirty air,” said Marshall Burke. “Even short-term exposure to low levels can have life-long effects.”
Low-income countries like Bangladesh already suffer widespread, direct health effects from rising sea levels. Salt water flooding has crept through homes and crops, threatening food sources and drinking water for millions of people.
“I think that flooding is one of the most pressing issues in low-income and densely populated countries,” said Pickering. “There’s no infrastructure there to handle it.”
Standing water left over from flooding is also a breeding ground for diseases like cholera, diarrhea and mosquito-borne illnesses, all of which are likely to become more prevalent as the planet warms.
On the flip side, many regions of Sub-Saharan Africa — where clean water is already hard to access — are likely to experience severe droughts. The United Nations warned last year that more than 36 million people across southern and eastern Africa face hunger due to drought and record-high temperatures.
Residents may have to walk farther to find water, and local sources could become contaminated more easily. Pickering fears that losing access to nearby, clean water will make maintaining proper hygiene and growing nutritious foods a challenge.
Climate change will affect health in all sectors of society.
All of these effects and more can also damage mental health, said Katherine Burke and her colleagues in their paper. The aftermath of extreme weather events and the hardships of living in long-term drought or flood can cause anxiety, depression, grief and trauma.
Climate change will affect health in every sector of society, but as Katherine Burke and her colleagues said, “….climate disruption is inflicting the greatest suffering on those least responsible for causing it, least equipped to adapt, least able to resist the powerful forces of the status quo.
“If we fail to act now,” they said, “the survival of our species may hang in the balance.”
What can the new administration do to ease health effects?
If the Paris Agreement’s emissions standards are met, scientists predict that the world’s temperature will increase about 2.7 degrees Celsius – still significant but less hazardous than the 4-degree increase projected from current emissions.
The United States plays a critical role in the Paris Agreement. Apart from the significance of cutting its own emissions, failing to live up to its end of the bargain — as the Trump administration has suggested — could have a significant impact on the morale of the other countries involved.
“The reason that Paris is going to work is because we’re in this together,” said Marshall Burke. “If you don’t meet your target, you’re going to be publicly shamed.”
The Trump administration has also discussed repealing the Clean Power Plan, Obama-era legislation to decrease the use of coal, which has been shown to contribute to respiratory disease.
“Withdrawing from either of those will likely have negative short- and long-run health impacts, both in the U.S. and abroad,” said Marshall Burke.
Scott Pruitt, who was confirmed today as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is expected to carry out Trump’s promise to dismantle environment regulations.
Despite the Trump administration’s apparent doubts about climate change, a few prominent Republicans do support addressing its effects.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobile, supports a carbon tax, which would create a financial incentive to turn to renewable energy sources. He also has expressed support for the Paris Agreement. It is possible that as secretary of state, Tillerson could help maintain U.S. obligations from the Paris Agreement, though it is far from certain whether he would choose to do so or how Trump would react.
More promising is a recent proposal from the Climate Leadership Council. Authored by eight leading Republicans — including two former secretaries of state, two former secretaries of the treasury and Rob Walton, Walmart’s former chairman of the board — the plan seeks to reduce emissions considerably through a carbon dividends plan.
Already an issue, malnutrition will increase with droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Their proposal would gradually increase taxes on carbon emissions but would return the proceeds directly to the American people. Americans would receive a regular check with their portion of the proceeds, similar to receiving a social security check. According to the authors, 70 percent of Americans would come out ahead financially, keeping the tax from being a burden on low- and middle-income Americans while still incentivizing lower emissions.
“A tax on carbon is exactly what we need to provide the right incentives and induce the sort of technological and infrastructure change needed to reduce long-term emissions,” said Marshall Burke.
Pickering added, “This policy is a ray of hope for meaningful action on climate.”
It remains to be seen whether the new administration and congress would consider such a program.
What can academics do to help?
Meanwhile, academics can promote health by researching the effects of climate change and finding ways to adapt to them.
“I think it’s fascinating that there’s just so little data right now on how climate change is going to impact health,” said Pickering.
Studying the effects of warming on the world challenges traditional methods of research.
“You can’t create any sort of experiment,” said Bendavid. “There’s only one climate and one planet.”
The scholars agree that interdisciplinary study is a critical part of adapting to climate change and that more research is needed.
“If ever there was an issue worthy of a leader’s best effort, this is the moment, this is the issue,” said Katherine Burke and her colleagues. “Time is short, but it may not be too late to make all the difference.”
Abstract: A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that changes in climate are associated with increases in human violence. I review new and recent evidence on this topic, using data ranging from baseball games in the US to civil war in Africa. Across disparate settings, warmer-than-average temperatures are shown to cause increases in violence, with effect sizes that are both consistent and large. Economic theories of conflict appear to explain some of the linkage between climate and conflict, but are not consistent with the data in all settings. Constructive engagement with the political science and security communities will be very helpful in understanding and interpreting these findings.
About the Speaker: Marshall Burke is assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science, and Center Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on the economics of rural development in Africa. His work has appeared in both economics and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford.
Marshall Burke
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Earth System Science
Stanford University
Temperature data are commonly used to estimate the sensitivity of many societally relevant outcomes, including crop yields, mortality, and economic output, to ongoing climate changes. In many tropical regions, however, temperature measures are often very sparse and unreliable, limiting our ability to understand climate change impacts. Here we evaluate satellite measures of near-surface temperature (Ts) as an alternative to traditional air temperatures (Ta) from weather stations, and in particular their ability to replace Ta in econometric estimation of climate response functions. We show that for maize yields in Africa and the United States, and for economic output in the United States, regressions that use Ts produce very similar results to those using Ta, despite the fact that daily correlation between the two temperature measures is often low. Moreover, for regions such as Africa with poor station coverage, we find that models with Ts outperform models with Ta, as measured by both R2 values and out-of-sample prediction error. The results indicate that Ts can be used to study climate impacts in areas with limited station data, and should enable faster progress in assessing risks and adaptation needs in these regions.
The potential impacts of climate change on crop productivity are of widespread interest to those concerned with addressing climate change and improving global food security. Two common approaches to assess these impacts are process-based simulation models, which attempt to represent key dynamic processes affecting crop yields, and statistical models, which estimate functional relationships between historical observations of weather and yields. Examples of both approaches are increasingly found in the scientific literature, although often published in different disciplinary journals. Here we compare published sensitivities to changes in temperature, precipitation, carbon dioxide (CO2), and ozone from each approach for the subset of crops, locations, and climate scenarios for which both have been applied. Despite a common perception that statistical models are more pessimistic, we find no systematic differences between the predicted sensitivities to warming from process-based and statistical models up to +2 °C, with limited evidence at higher levels of warming. For precipitation, there are many reasons why estimates could be expected to differ, but few estimates exist to develop robust comparisons, and precipitation changes are rarely the dominant factor for predicting impacts given the prominent role of temperature, CO2, and ozone changes. A common difference between process-based and statistical studies is that the former tend to include the effects of CO2 increases that accompany warming, whereas statistical models typically do not. Major needs moving forward include incorporating CO2 effects into statistical studies, improving both approaches' treatment of ozone, and increasing the use of both methods within the same study. At the same time, those who fund or use crop model projections should understand that in the short-term, both approaches when done well are likely to provide similar estimates of warming impacts, with statistical models generally requiring fewer resources to produce robust estimates, especially when applied to crops beyond the major grains.
Mitigating climate change requires countries to provide a global public good. This means that the domestic cleavages underlying mass attitudes toward international climate policy are a central determinant of its provision. We argue that the industry-specific costs of emission abatement and internalized social norms help explain support for climate policy. To evaluate our predictions we develop novel measures of industry-specific interests by cross-referencing individuals' sectors of employment and objective industry-level pollution data and employ quasi-behavioral measures of social norms in combination with both correlational and conjoint-experimental data. We find that individuals working in pollutive industries are 7 percentage points less likely to support climate cooperation than individuals employed in cleaner sectors. Our results also suggest that reciprocal and altruistic individuals are about 10 percentage points more supportive of global climate policy. These findings indicate that both interests and norms function as complementary explanations that improve our understanding of individual policy preferences.
Joann de Zegher is one of nine selected as a SAWIT Challenge Finalist. She will be pitching her sustainable palm oil solution in Jakarta, Indonesia November 17-18, 2016.
FSE is excited to announce that graduate student, Joann de Zegher, is one of the nine innovators chosen in the SAWIT Challenge to pitch her solution to help independent smallholder farmers produce palm oil sustainably. She will present her idea to international businesses, government, and NGO leaders in Jakarta, Indonesia November 17-18, 2016.
The nine finalists submitted their ideas to solve the biggest challenges facing independent smallholder palm oil farmers in Indonesia: financing, farming inputs and best practices, mapping and land tenureship, market information, as well as product traceability and transparency. The innovations are designed to make sustainable, more profitable palm oil production.
The SAWIT Challenge is run by Smallholders Advancing with Technology and Innovation (SAWIT), a partnership between the Oil Palm Smallholders Union, and the Indonesia Business Council for Sustainable Development, with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
De Zegher’s solution offers a substantial price incentive to smallholder farmers who comply with buyer sustainability policies, but only passes on a very small portion of the cost to buyers. The innovation leverages the simple fact that small farmers and large buyers have substantially different cash flow needs. It also helps to shorten and strengthen the palm supply chain from smallholder farmers to mill.
The Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU) held its second annual Lee Shau Kee World Leaders Forum at the center on Oct 13. This year’s conference, titled “Climate Change and Clean Energy,” was keynoted by Dr. Steven Chu, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology in the Medical School at Stanford University; the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy; and co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for laser cooling and atom trapping. Two panel discussions with a diverse set of experts from academia, government, and industry were also part of the event.
After welcoming remarks by SCPKU Director Jean C. Oi and Xiamen University Dean of the School of Energy Research Ning Li, the conference kicked off with the first panel, “Paths to Clean Energy” which centered around two questions: Is renewable energy feasible and how does China move away from coal as a dominant energy source? The second panel, “Challenges and Opportunities to Clean Energy,” focused on barriers preventing China from being progressive on climate change. China’s National Energy Advisory Committee, British Petroleum-China, and the U.S. Commission on Natural Resources Protection were among the organizations represented by panelists.
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Panelists discuss climate change and clean energy at SCPKU's World Leaders Forum held October 13. Courtesy of Stanford University
Steven Chu’s keynote wrapped up the forum, which touched on new data reflecting the risks of climate change and the need to continue progress on the development of clean energy. Regarding the pressing issue of pollution, he cited data from a British study inferring that the risk of contracting lung cancer is 29x higher in Beijing than other cities and highlighted Stanford’s research on nano-fiber filtration as a possible solution. Chu also spoke on the topic of energy storage and how the full cost of renewable energy needs to account for backup generation capacity, transmission and distribution systems, as well as the storage itself. Two things, he said, will likely play large roles in the future: high voltage lines (HVDC), and machine learning, which will be needed for largely autonomous management of the electrical grid. Nuclear energy will also be important to mitigate blackouts when transitioning to clean energy. In closing, Chu shared a poignant phrase from ancient Native Americans: “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
The purpose of the forum is to raise public understanding of the complex issues China and other countries face in the course of development. Funded by a generous gift from the Lee Shau Kee Foundation, the forum seeks to increase support for Asia-Pacific cooperation and turn ideas into action.
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Steven Chu poses with SCPKU World Leaders Forum attendees after delivering keynote. Courtesy of Stanford University
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Reception following SCPKU's World Leaders Forum featuring the China National Symphony Orchestra Concert Quartet in the center's courtyard. Courtesy of Stanford University
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Steven Chu keynotes SCPKU's second World Leaders Forum.
India is one of the world's largest food producers, making the sustainability of its agricultural system of global significance. Groundwater irrigation underpins India's agriculture, currently boosting crop production by enough to feed 170 million people. Groundwater overexploitation has led to drastic declines in groundwater levels, threatening to push this vital resource out of reach for millions of small-scale farmers who are the backbone of India's food security. Historically, losing access to groundwater has decreased agricultural production and increased poverty. We take a multidisciplinary approach to assess climate change challenges facing India's agricultural system, and to assess the effectiveness of large-scale water infrastructure projects designed to meet these challenges. We find that even in areas that experience climate change induced precipitation increases, expansion of irrigated agriculture will require increasing amounts of unsustainable groundwater. The large proposed national river linking project has limited capacity to alleviate groundwater stress. Thus, without intervention, poverty and food insecurity in rural India is likely to worsen.
Abstract: The term "natural disasters" diminishes the key role that the human context plays in turning a natural event into a disaster. In this talk, I present scientific insights into the physical processes governing the onset and evolution of extreme events and discuss how this improved understanding the challenges and opportunities that these present for decision-makers and communities at risk. More specifically, I will focus on three disasters of special current relevance, ice-sheet disintegration, coastal risk and injection-induced seismicity. The common denominator of what at first glance might seem like disparate systems is multiphase flow. The dynamic interactions between multiple solid and fluid phases, such as ice and melt-water; vegetation and waves; rocks and wastewater; give rise to drastic nonlinearities that govern abrupt changes in system behavior reflected in extreme events.
About the Speaker: Before joining Stanford in January 2014, Suckale held a position as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and as a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard. She has a PhD in Geophysics from MIT and a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining graduate school, Suckale worked as a scientific consultant for different international organizations aiming to reduce the impact of natural and environmental disasters in vulnerable communities. This experience motivates her research aimed at reducing disaster risk by advancing our understanding of the physical processes that give rise to the dramatic nonlinearities expressed in extreme events. For many natural systems, these nonlinearities result from the dynamic interactions between solid, fluid and gas phases. Suckale improves our fundamental understanding and predictive capabilities of these complex multi-phase flows by developing original computational methods customized for the problem at hand. The phenomena she explores range from the microscopic to the planetary scale and space a wide variety of geophysics systems such as volcanoes, glaciers, tsunamis and magma oceans.
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Jenny Suckale
Assistant Professor, Geophysics
Speaker
Stanford University
Bangladeshi children make their way through flood waters.
Climate change will affect health in all sectors of society.
Already an issue, malnutrition will increase with droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa.
