I’m a postdoc researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), UC Santa Barbara. I am working on the Iterative Eden Project (IEP), a UCSB-based initiative to develop the scientific basis for a sustainable world of 10 billion people.

More here.

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Me on the Isle of Arran, Scotland. July 2019.

Some weekend thoughts on causation and climate

I’m reading The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, which explains Pearl’s career-long struggle to put causation back into the science that was once statistics and is now becoming something larger. By “was once statistics” I mean the school devoted to radical empiricism: there is nothing but the data, who are (perhaps…

villager is up on CRAN

Shout out to my colleagues on the SeibalSim Project, Gerardo Aldana (UCSB), Toni Gonzalez (UCSB), and especially Tommy Thelen (NCEAS) for getting this thing ready for primetime. The new R package, villager, is a great new tool to carry out agent-based modeling work. It is designed for archaeologists and non-expert modelers to test their ideas…

Pushing back the origins of New World human occupation

With new dating on charcoal from a context stratigraphically above human footprints set in the playa at Alkali Flat in the US, Bennett et al. writing in Science demonstrate the presence of humans in North America between 23-21 ka ago. This is a big deal. There has been a lot to suggest that humans occupied…

Press from CROs Nature paper

David Vetter writes in Forbes that CROs have great potential in carbon markets, after interviewing lead-author Johannes Bednar and co-authors Myles Allen and Michael Obersteiner. Also contains an audio rendition.Writing in Cosmos, Ellen Phiddian connects the possible application of CROs to a report from a Swiss reinsurance institute that explains the enormous potential cost of…

Operationalizing the net negative carbon economy

I am happy to announce that Johannes’ paper, on which I am a co-author, has just been published in Nature. Embargo ended at 8 AM California time today. See the IIASA press release here. Bednar, J., Obersteiner, M., Baklanov, A., Thomson, M., Wagner, F., Geden, O., Allen, M., Hall, J. (2021). Operationalizing the net negative…

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