Research led by Salvatore Pascale shows human-caused climate change made Cape Town's worst drought on record five to six times more likely. The city's water crisis holds lessons on how we can solve environmental problems by encouraging virtuous habits.

"This is the symptom of a larger issue, which is deregulation," said Stanford professor Sally Benson in an interview about Texas' power crisis. "In a world where the climate is changing quickly – and how, when and where people use energy is changing quickly – it's not clear that the market can keep up."

Texas' power woes should be yet another reminder that California needs to invest more in preparing for disaster risk, said Chris Field, director of Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“In 2020, we saw roughly 60 days with wildfire smoke that was in the air that we breathed, up from 10 to 15 days just a decade ago,” said Stanford environmental economist Marshall Burke. 

Working with NASA, National Geographic and Google, Liza Goldberg '24  is helping  to launch Cloud to Classroom – a better way to visualize and therefore better teach climate change, like showing the spread of droughts and wildfires.

A group of researchers including Jamie Jones examined how reparation payments made before the pandemic would have affected Louisiana, a state that remains segregated in parts, and found that the payments could have reduced coronavirus transmission in the state by 31% to 68%.

"Social and environmental factors like mobility, segregation, and the nature of the built environment help determine rates of infection," said James Jones, associate professor of Earth system science. 

“We can form all sorts of gemstones potentially in space, as long as you have the right chemistry in the right temperature and conditions,” said Stanford Earth professor Wendy Mao.

"Most people do not see sea-level rise. Most people do not ever see hurricanes. Many, many people will see wildfire smoke from climate change," said Stanford environmental economist Marshall Burke. 

“We know smoke is bad for health. But we really didn’t have a comprehensive national picture for how much wildfires are contributing to poor air quality,” said Marshall Burke.

Wildfire smoke has resulted in as much as half of the soot pollution in parts of the western U.S., according to a study led by Stanford environmental economist Marshall Burke.

“This shows that there is real economic value in avoiding higher levels of global warming,” said Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh. “That’s not a political statement. That’s a factual statement about costs."

Research by Frances Davenport, Noah Diffenbaugh  and Marshall Burke shows that over the past three decades, the U.S. has had nearly $75 billion in damage from floods fueled by the climate crisis. 

“The more global warming we get, the more we can expect these damages to increase – and reductions (in emissions) will have value in terms of avoided costs,” said climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.

“Unless global emissions are curbed, the trajectory we’re on as a civilization will likely lead to greater than 3 degrees [Celsius],” said Stanford's Noah Diffenbaugh. Work to mitigate the looming effects of climate change is unifying Stockton, California.

“We have clear evidence that not only California has warmed, but that California is now in a new climate that is both warmer overall and is much more likely to experience unprecedented hot conditions,” said climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.