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.
“I think it’s likely the biggest [drop in emissions] ever,” said Stanford's Rob Jackson. “That’s the equivalent of taking about 500 million cars off the world’s roads for a year.”
E-IPER PhD candidate Caroline Ferguson co-authored an op-ed about the challenges faced by residents of the Marshall Islands, a nation that stretches across more than a million square miles of Pacific Ocean.
Smoke pollution is beginning to reverse California's recent air quality gains, Stanford's Marshall Burke explains. His own personal experience shows how inequitable the impact of wildfire smoke pollution can be.
What happens with La Niña heavily determines what the water year will look like, said Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh. "It's not just bad luck. There are configurations that tend to tip the odds towards more dry conditions,” he said.
“I think the mid-upper mantle would be gorgeous, because it would be olivine green, like 60 percent, and it would also have garnets, these beautiful red cubic minerals,” says Stanford mineral physicist Wendy Mao.
Marshall Burke has found that, across California, as the number of smoke days has risen, it has begun to reverse gains the state had made in cleaning up its air from conventional sources of pollution.
“It’s not an obvious thing to wrap your head around. It’s a little counterintuitive to think about droughts over the ocean, because it’s wet,” Julio Herrera Estrada said about recent research co-authored with Noah Diffenbaugh.
