Pascal Polonik

NIH Ends Future Funding to Study the Health Effects of Climate Change It’s unclear whether the guidance will impact active grants, but it appears to halt opportunities for future studies. One climate health expert said the directive would have a “devastating” impact on ...

The National Institutes of Health will no longer be funding work on the health effects of climate change, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

www.propublica.org/article/nih-...

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups The Trump administration is targeting climate organizations that received a Biden-era grant.

The FBI is moving to criminalize community climate workgroups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, claiming they engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the United States by writing successful funding proposals.

bsky.app/profile/cbib...

Many of these topics have been discussed previously, but we contextualize with tangible examples and suggest possible ways forward. This project has been a long time coming and was a huge learning experience for me. Many thanks to my coauthors/advisors for their help and patience.

Lastly, we argue that the mean climate is poorly represented when using fixed effects. We test a few examples of how mean climate could be better incorporated, but assuming adaptation yields entirely different projections. More work is necessary since this can completely change the interpretation

Depending on setup, we argue this may sometimes cancel out the benefit of using precip "as a control" for temp impacts. It's not always a huge effect, but it's worth keeping in mind! The impact of measurement error can be backed out if you know the error - precip impacts double in our GDP example

We then set up an idealized multivariate model (with a known outcome) to demonstrate that uncertain variables can cause bias to estimated impacts of other (certain) variables. So, thanks to correlation, uncertain precip can cause bias in temp impact estimates even if temp is perfectly measured

Relatedly, we discuss the role of aggregation to political boundaries. We point out that running the same model on different levels of aggregation yields very different results. Perhaps surprisingly, more granular estimates don't always yield higher impacts - for GDP it's the opposite!

We start by pointing out the different spatial scales of different environmental variables. That means we actually don't have great global datasets of precipitation (relative to temperature). Furthermore, surface measurement are declining and sparse in many parts of the world, which results in bias

Estimating the impacts of climate change: reconciling disconnects between physical climate and statistical models - Climatic Change Climate impacts studies often rely on empirical statistical methods to isolate the effects of changing environmental factors on human outcomes of interest. However, this research may not always accoun...

We have a new paper out today about the statistical estimation of climate impacts and how that process intersects with the physical climate! We start from surface measurements and move all the way to the estimation of adaptation to new climates.
More detail below!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

thanks for sharing, but I think you skipped an important part of the story, which is that they’re assuming - especially in the very optimistic scenario - a large amount of carbon capture to offset the continued extraction of fossil fuels. The required technology does not currently exist at scale.

I’m pleased to see that this trend originated in the same place I went birding this morning (in Davis), but here’s a big bright authoritative sign with a little drab defiant bird

A news article screenshot about California's e-bike rebate program, featuring an image of someone riding an e-bike while pulling a blue and yellow bike trailer carrying a white dog. The headline reveals that demand vastly exceeded supply, with 100,000 people queuing for just 1,500 vouchers. Article is dated December 23, 2024, written by Diana Ionescu (@aworkoffiction).

100k people tried to snag just 1,500 electric bicycle incentive vouchers in California. They were gone in a minute.

People clearly want alternatives to cars. Let's give them more of these incentives everywhere.

Read in @planetizen.bsky.social | www.planetizen.com/news/2024/12...

Today I had the very excellent experience of providing testimony to the Illinois Pollution Control Board (IPCB). The Board is considering the adoption of 3 pollution mitigation policies, each of which focuses on EV adoption as a means of reducing air pollutants and their hazardous health effects. 🧵

Polar stereographic map showing 2-m air temperature anomalies in October 2024 for the Arctic Circle with red shading for warmer anomalies and blue shading for colder anomalies. Most areas are warmer than average and well exceeded the colorbar maximum of 5°C above average. The baseline is a 1981-2010 reference period using ECMWF ERA5 data.

Yes, I realize that my usual temperature anomaly scale is less than ideal for visualization purposes in this image here. But that's also because the #Arctic was absurdly warm compared to the 1981-2010 climatological average in October 2024.

Data from @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social ERA5 reanalysis.

Started this starter pack with energy justice & climate justice folks. Let me know who I should add to it. go.bsky.app/HXiuKJ5
(P.S. yes this is my way of finding my friends that migrated to bluer skies)

@costasamaras.com @menrywy.bsky.social @leahstokes.bsky.social @sidersadapts.bsky.social

Sources
www.aims.gov.au/sites/defaul...

www2.gbrmpa.gov.au/learn/threat...

amp.theguardian.com/environment/...

This is from February of this year. And from what I’ve read it’s gotten worse since then. We’re in the purple. Sources below.

Tough day teaching about election implications for climate action. But the glass-half-full interpretation is that a lot of mitigation actually happens at the local and state levels. In San Diego, city policy alone makes up over half of planned mitigation, not to mention state.

SpaceX launch as seen from Scripps 🚀

This has been my experience with other things like the IRA. The assumption is still that the US is doing nothing - the news has not reached younger people at all. I even surprise them by saying US emissions are going down - the assumption is we’re still soaring up

Open access in Nature today, work led by @bbastien.bsky.social quantifies the market and non-market welfare impacts of climate change effects on terrestrial vegetation www.nature.com/articles/s41...

At #AGU23 this week. Come check out my talk on aerosols in climate policy on Mon at 10:40am or my poster on the role of physical science in statistical climate impact models on Thurs afternoon. Also free to reach out if you want to chat!