Marshall Burke

Valuing wildfire smoke–related mortality benefits from climate mitigation | PNAS Human-induced climate change has increased wildfire risks, associated air pollution, and health damages in North America. Despite its large potenti...

🚨🔥 NEW: Increasing mortality from wildfire smoke is directly traceable to greenhouse gas emissions. In our new paper in @pnas.org , we show that every megaton of CO2 emitted costs the US more than 10 million dollars in health costs from wildfire smoke. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Should we be climate adaptation optimists? — ECHO: Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab | Stanford University by: Marshall B , with helpful feedback & additions from Andrew W and Chris C Yes, argues a recent working paper by Matt Burgess, Patrick Brown, Matt Kahn, and Roger Pielke Jr.  The pa...

Should we be climate adaptation optimists? A nice new paper by Matt Burgess, Matt Kahn, and colleagues argues yes. I'm not so sure. Optimism is not a plan, and we need a plan. Some thoughts: www.stanfordecholab.com/blog/should-...

For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has factored public health impacts into pollution limits.
Now, the equation is changing.

Woods senior fellow Marshall Burke explains what that shift means — and why it matters.

Read more: bit.ly/3NridYV

GitHub - echolab-stanford/heat: R package heat: Harmonized Environmental Exposure Aggregation Tools R package heat: Harmonized Environmental Exposure Aggregation Tools - echolab-stanford/heat

Excited to share a new R package: 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘁 🌡️

`heat` makes it easier to work with climate or other gridded data in applied research, providing a comprehensive + optimized set of tools to compute environmental exposures for admin boundaries or points from gridded/point data.

github.com/echolab-stan...

If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.

Huge thanks to @jonas-wallstein.bsky.social and Brandon de la Cuesta for all the hard work on this, and for StanfordEchoLab colleagues for testing.

GitHub - echolab-stanford/heat: R package heat: Harmonized Environmental Exposure Aggregation Tools R package heat: Harmonized Environmental Exposure Aggregation Tools - echolab-stanford/heat

Excited to share a new R package: 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘁 🌡️

`heat` makes it easier to work with climate or other gridded data in applied research, providing a comprehensive + optimized set of tools to compute environmental exposures for admin boundaries or points from gridded/point data.

github.com/echolab-stan...

Opinion | Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Increasing risk of mass human heat mortality if historical weather patterns recur - Nature Climate Change The authors couple calculations of historical heatwave intensity at present and future global temperatures with exposure–response functions to quantify mortality from extreme heat events in Europe. Th...

Analysis from @marshallburke.bsky.social and colleagues indicates that while mitigating further global warming can reduce heat mortality, mass mortality events remain plausible at near-future temperatures despite current adaptations to heat.

📄 READ HERE: ow.ly/CPRy50XtOnv

Analysis from @marshallburke.bsky.social confirms that ambient temperature is among the largest external threats to human health, and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in both the U.S. and EU.

📄 READ THE PAPER: ow.ly/ufQH50X8C2y

I love it when papers have accompanying websites!

also, neat when i found out @stanfordimpactlabs.bsky.social had a small role in supporting this work!

📄 & 💻by @marshallburke.bsky.social & a impressive team!

adaptationatlas.org/...
www.nber.org/papers/...

Cool and timely paper

🚨 NCA5 is now LIVE! 🚨

They took it down, but we've brought it back at: nca5.climate.us

Bookmark. 👏 this. 👏 page. 👏

This is just our first step in restoring trusted science information that Americans need to understand what's happening with the climate.

U.S. faces rising death toll from wildfire smoke, study finds Wildfire smoke increasingly threatens lives across the country. A new study shows smoke exposure in the coming decades will cause tens of thousands of excess deaths and predicts where exposure will oc...

A new study led by @marshallburke.bsky.social estimates that wildfire smoke emissions caused 41,380 excess deaths per year from 2011 to 2020, and rising temperatures could increase U.S. deaths from wildfire smoke more than 70% by 2050. ow.ly/RAp050WYWia

This is startling. The number of deaths every year tied to wildfire smoke now outnumber traffic fatalities, according to @washingtonpost.com coverage of a new @nature.com study from @marshallburke.bsky.social and others.

SPACEWHALE is indeed pretty solid

Important new paper from
@marshallburke.bsky.social
on the devastating toll of wildfire smoke in
@nature.com

"climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the US"
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sadly our wildfire smoke data start in 2006 - we depend on a satellite-based measure of wildfire smoke plumes that only came online then.

Excellent coverage of our study out today on climate impacts on wildfire smoke and related health impacts.

An extraordinary new tool from @marshallburke.bsky.social, SIEPR senior fellow @stanforddoerr.bsky.social, and Andrew Wilson. If you've got the evidence they're looking for, they want to hear from you. 👇

Thanks to @stanforddoerr.bsky.social @stanfordimpactlabs.bsky.social for seed funding. We are hoping to scale this substantially, so if you are a funder interested in this work, please get in touch! /n

Please get in touch if you have new evidence on the efficacy of a relevant intervention that we should include. We are launching a related small grants program to support this adaptation evaluation work, with first tranche of funds going out shortly (in an upcoming tweet). 9/

You can see estimates for your county or your census tract, and for your county you can download a summary pdf of exposures and impacts. All the methodology is explained in linked papers and in a (currently somewhat cursory) methods doc, linked on the about page. 8/

Impacts estimates in the maps are based on years of work we + others have done to statistically isolate the impacts of these exposures on health outcomes. The goal over time is to add new geographies, exposures, and impacts, as well as up to date info on intervention efficacy. 7/

See interventions page for extreme heat and cold interventions: adaptationatlas.org/interventions

A key finding is that a lot of interventions being tried have very little evidence backing them, and some “interventions” not aimed specifically at climate impacts at all (e.g. better access to health services) might be some of our best tools for limiting impacts. 5/

Summarizing what’s know about intervention efficacy was itself a very big task that we worked on as a lab for over a year. We took a hard line on what counted as high-quality causal evidence. 4/

Our goal with the Adaptation Atlas is to provide some of this info, starting with extreme temps and wildfire smoke, two leading health threats in the US and many parts of the world. Focused on the US for now, we measure exposures, health impacts, and what we know about interventions. 3/

Some existing public-facing tools provide info on climate and other environmental exposures. Fewer exist that provide info on the impacts of these exposures on societal outcomes like health or wellbeing. Even less systematic info exists on interventions that can reduce these impacts. 2/

Environmental Hazard Adaptation Atlas | ECHO Lab | Stanford University Studying the impacts of environmental change on human health and well-being

We are excited to announce the release of the Environmental Hazard Adaptation Atlas, an effort to map ongoing and future environmental hazards and their impacts on society, and to provide up to date evidence on what policies and interventions work to reduce impacts: adaptationatlas.org. Quick thread