Marcus C Sarofim

Robust assessment of Solar Radiation Modification risks and uncertainties must include shocks and societal feedbacks Abstract. Conventional climate scenarios omit fast-timescale human-system dynamics like policy rollback or economic shocks. The climate system's slow response to GHG emissions allows these `fast' ter...

SRM is a hot topic these days. I have incomplete thoughts about how SRM, air capture, bioCCS, adaptation, and SLCF mitigation may or may not complement a primary focus on net-zero CO2 emissions. This discussion paper is an interesting take on SRM: egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Not in the top 10 list of worst things this administration has done, but this article resonates with me: www.science.org/content/arti...

Anxious greens await death of endangerment finding Environmental groups are planning protests to oppose EPA’s upcoming move to repeal the scientific finding.

I was interviewed for this article in E&E News about EPA's forthcoming and expected repeal of the 2009 GHG endangerment finding. Remain very proud of the work we did for the original GHG finding and the work to uphold it in subsequent years. www.eenews.net/articles/anx...

Hi Danny, thank you for the kind words! Especially your call out to my 2018 article - that may be my favorite out of all my papers. Thank you for your great work on LCFS and offsets!

Did EPA Get the Climate Science Right in 2009? Spoiler Alert: Yes, we did.

I just posted the second in my Endangerment substack series: thesaraphreport.substack.com/p/did-epa-ge...

FYI: I recognize that truly horrible things are being done by my government in Minneapolis. Which is a sequel to the horrible things caused by the withdrawal of USAID, vaccine disinformation, January 6th, the dismantling of science, etc. But my bluesky will be mainly focused on climate for now.

Do any of my climate friends know where I can find the CH4 and N2O concentration data for the SRES scenarios in www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/...? I found CO2 and Temp data at www.ipcc-data.org/ancilliary/t... and www.ipcc-data.org/data/ar4_mul... respectively. Thank you.

Marcus C Sarofim | Substack Climate science and policy analysis from Marcus Sarofim: 17 years EPA, MIT PhD, JHU adjunct, key contributor to 2009 GHG Endangerment Finding. Saraph (my name's root) means "fire"—fitting for climate ...

After 17 years, I left the EPA yesterday. I'm sad to leave my "unicorn job", but this admin won't let me work on climate change.

I'll be posting at thesaraphreport.substack.com

First up: the Endangerment Finding. I helped write it. I defended it. Now I'm watching them tear it down.

Productivity During and Since the Pandemic - San Francisco Fed U.S. labor productivity initially surged in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the massive economic upheaval. As the economy recovered, the level of productivity retreated to its slow pre-pand...

E.g. the COVID shock. See www.frbsf.org/research-and...

I think productivity often goes up during big unemployment shocks because it is per-worker…

Trump Pulls Out of Global Climate Treaty

Well, this is depressing: Trump Pulls Out of Global Climate Treaty www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/c...

Projections of future mortality risk in older adults from high-tide flooding in coastal areas of the USA: an economic modelling study The cost of premature mortality in older adults is greater in magnitude than other modelled effects of climate-induced high-tide flooding (eg, value of lost time due to traffic delays). Results sugges...

Our paper on projections of elder mortality in the US due to sunny day flooding was published: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Contra dancing! Lots of other climate activists there too. (Also, reading sf & fantasy, petting cats and dogs, and once every couple of years, snorkeling)

It’s the gold standard of US climate research. Contrarians could write the next one. Researchers who have downplayed the threat of global warming have been asked to author the next National Climate Assessment.

This is depressing - by all reasonable evaluation, the CWG report was an embarrassing disaster. But, sadly unsurprisingly, the authors will apparently play central roles in a new NCA process: www.eenews.net/articles/its...

GiveDirectly: Send money to people living in poverty GiveDirectly allows donors to send money directly to people in poverty with no strings attached. Our approach is guided by rigorous evidence of impact and our values of efficiency, transparency, and r...

I think this is related to the theory behind Give Directly: www.givedirectly.org

Proportional ranked choice voting: protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/u...

I could imagine that attempting to replicate stratospheric conditions on the ground could introduce additional uncertainties. Though I wonder if doing it in the plane will block sunlight exposure…

From the fednews community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the fednews community

Which entrance did you try? EPA hasn’t started furloughs yet: www.reddit.com/r/fednews/co...

My preference is for highly stylized keystone GCM scenarios rather than complex IAM generated futures. Use the results to tune reduced complexity models (FaIR) and pattern scaling approaches (STITCHES) to do impact analysis on more realistic scenarios (or probabilistic like the RFF-SPs)

This also reminds me of all the people who show up after mass shootings to claim it is a mental health issue, not a gun control issue… and are then conspicuously silent when funding for mental health is threatened.

GiveWell makes the same argument, but from the defensible side of raising money to save lives efficiently, rather than attacking people for saving lives “inefficiently”

Please look at the work by GiveWell and similar organizations as the real heart of effective altruism, not the crazy longtermists.