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6 year old me feels like he just won everything, ever

David Attenborough. With dinosaurs. Prehistoric Earth.

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 (perhapsContinue reading “Some weekend thoughts on causation and climate”

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 ideasContinue reading “villager is up on CRAN”

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 occupiedContinue reading “Pushing back the origins of New World human occupation”

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 costContinue reading “Press from CROs Nature paper”

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 negativeContinue reading “Operationalizing the net negative carbon economy”

Hot topic

The UEFA Euro 2020 tournament is being played out during a heat wave in Europe, including some of the warmest temperatures in recorded history (which is pretty long there). A friend of mine in Vienna was texting his complaints about it to me today. Well, California says, “hold my kombucha”: Update: The hottest temperatures everContinue reading “Hot topic”

Remembering the first SNO result

It’s already 20 years since the Sudbury Neutrino Collaboration (SNO) announced the first results from the heavy water detector experiment in northern Ontario: that neutrinos have a small but finite mass, and therefore their flavours oscillate. That is, that some fraction of electron-type neutrinos produced from the beta-decay of 8B in the thermonuclear chain reactionContinue reading “Remembering the first SNO result”

Good for CNN

This is a nice discussion of climate impacts on migration on a US cable news network.

The Case for a deep time Anthropocene

In a recent publication in the journal Science, Motti et al. (2021) use nearly 1200 pollen records, with some sequences dated to 18 thousand years ago, collected by researchers from all over the planet, to show that the highest rates of plant species turnover are associated with human occupation; specifically, with phases of agricultural expansionContinue reading “The Case for a deep time Anthropocene”