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Pollution from wildfires is linked to lower test scores and possibly lower future earnings for kids growing up with more smoke days at school, a new study finds. Impacts of smoke exposure on earnings are disproportionately borne by economically disadvantaged communities of color.

Stanford researchers have developed an AI model for predicting dangerous particle pollution to help track the American West’s rapidly worsening wildfire smoke. The detailed results show millions of Americans are routinely exposed to pollution at levels rarely seen just a decade ago.

Fendorf, the Terry Huffington Professor in the Department of Earth System Science and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute, has been elected for his exceptional achievements.

Hurricanes and severe storms exacerbate inequalities. Ahead of a Sept. 21 webinar on the subject, Stanford experts discussed how to ensure equity in planning and response for such extreme weather events, economic benefits of nature-based storm defenses, and related issues. (Source: Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment)

“We're seeing all around the world that heat records are being broken, and we're seeing the impacts of those severe heat events, whether it's in agriculture, in our food system, water resources, electricity generation, ecosystems, both on land and in rivers and streams, as well as in the ocean from marine heatwaves,” says Stanford's Noah Diffenbaugh. 

When the right atmospheric factors come together to generate heavy precipitation, there is more water available to fall from the clouds than there had been before greenhouse-gas emissions began warming the planet, explains Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.

Unlike flooding or drought or heat, the menace of smoke in the American West is not compartmentalized along class lines; in fact, as Stanford’s Marshall Burke and his research partners have documented, U.S. smoke exposure is largely uncorrelated with income.

Stanford researchers collected water samples from boreholes at Sanford Underground Research Facility and found evidence of a long-term transformation of subsurface microbial communities.

"In order to be resilient to climate change now and in the future, its going to require updating all those sophisticated systems that we have put in place because the frequency of severe heat, how hot it gets is different now and it will be even more different in the future," says Stanford's Noah Diffenbaugh.

Our built world has historically been designed around a predictable climate, and that era is over. “The real question is, what will it take to design and build infrastructure to protect against flooding in a changing climate?” says Noah Diffenbaugh. “Our assumptions are obsolete.”

The legislation “is important symbolically and internationally,” says Rob Jackson. “Its biggest benefits are to provide longer-term certainty for renewables development and to promote sales of lower-cost electric vehicles. It’s critical the U.S. do something."

David Lobell has been awarded a 2022 Global Health Seed Grant from Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, along with several faculty members joining the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

The Stanford geographer and environmental scientist discusses the sand shortage crisis and what it means for the future of the environment. (Source: Stanford News)

In a Stanford study of hospitalizations near the 2018 Camp Fire, a week of heavy smoke exposure was linked to a five percent increased risk of preterm births.

“The political reality is that climate isn’t a top priority for Democrats,” says Earth system science professor Rob Jackson. “I think it means we will zoom past 1.5 C in a couple years and hurdle toward 2 C before we know it.”

New research reveals that, rather than being influenced only by environmental conditions, deep subsurface microbial communities can transform because of geological movements. The findings advance our understanding of subsurface microorganisms, which comprise up to half of all living material on the planet.