"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.
Stanford Earth research scientist Mostafa Mousavi found a way of teasing out evidence of tiny earthquakes that went unnoticed but still left a record in the data.
In an analysis published in March, Marshall Burke found that a coronavirus lockdown in China probably saved more lives from a reduction in air pollution – which is linked to climate change – than it lost to Covid-19.
“A lot of the news coverage focuses on immediate danger: people with homes in harm’s way,” said Marshall Burke. “The impacts are much, much larger than that … they extend all over the place to people hundreds of miles away from wildfire.”
"We're in a 'once in our history' experiment observing the succession of these forests. They're growing back in a new climate. It's yet to be seen how that unfolds," said climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.
Marshall Burke projects that over the next 80 years, per capita G.D.P. in the United States will drop by 36 percent compared to what it would be in a nonwarming world, even as per capita G.D.P. in Russia will quadruple.
