Category: Weather And Climate - Wanyun Shao, Ph.D

My analysis article: A year after Hurricane Harvey

8/23/2018

A year after Hurricane Harvey, the decisions to rebuild can affect the future. I just published an analysis article on the Conversation. Here is the last paragraph:

"My recent research shows that even with their flaws, FEMA flood maps influence decisions to purchase flood insurance and overall support for flood mitigation. Policy makers need to seriously consider how to accurately communicate increasing flood risks to the public. Reverting to old flood maps and granting variances to promote development is a recipe for more disasters down the road."

Hat tip to Emily Powell at the National Wildlife Federation, who brought this situation to my attention.

Climate in everything: low rainfall and assassinations of Roman Emperors

7/21/2018

A new paper published on Economics Letters claims that low rainfall can predict assassinations of Roman Emperors from 27 BC to 476 AD. The logic line is: low rainfall -> low food supplies -> more troop mutinies -> assassination of Roman Emperors. Being creative enough, one can find no shortage of interesting topics to study.

Climate in everything: heat and cognitive skill development

6/29/2018

A new NBER working paper shows aggregate-level evidence that indicates cumulative exposure to heat can have detrimental impacts on learning. The authors suggest school air conditioning can help mitigate the adverse effects. Evidently, more studies need to be conducted in developing countries where air conditioning is not universally available.

A seminar talk at Princeton University

6/14/2018

I am honored to be invited to give a seminar talk, entitled "Understanding Human Judgement on Environmental Risks and Hazards in a Geographic Context," at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University on June 21.

The abstract of the talk is as follows:
"The coupling effects of changing climate and rising concentration of population and assets in the coastal regions have increased the threat of potential damages. There is an urgent need for coastal communities to prepare well for future hazards through mitigation and adaptation measures. A growing number of empirical studies have found that peoples’ motivation of voluntary risk mitigation and adaptation is low unless actual risk can be perceived. Risk perception is thus the precondition for adaptive behavior. It is of both intellectual and practical interests to study what affects individuals’/communities’ risk perceptions. In this talk, I will present four of my previous studies. The first three studies are focused on the individual level and the fourth on the aggregate level. I will start with understanding how local weather and climate affect American public risk perceptions of climate change. I will then discuss how the spatial context represented by past flooding events and estimated flooding risks influence costal residents’ voluntary flood insurance purchase decisions and their support for flood adaptation policies. As many policies are designed and implemented at an aggregate level (i.e., state, county, city), it is necessary to examine aggregate-level risk perceptions. In the fourth study, I will focus on how the contextual hurricane risks in conjunction with community resilience shape county-level perceptions of hurricane-related risks. I will end with a research agenda linking communities’ perception with contextual risks and community resilience. I contend that the cognitive dimension including both risk perceptions and perceived adaptive capacity is not represented in any of the existing community resilience indexes, and therefore needs to be measured, quantified, and incorporated into a more comprehensive index."

Harvey's heavy rainfalls and ocean heat content

5/10/2018

Hurricane Harvey dumped record-breaking rain in Houston in 2017. Now, a new study shows that this extreme amounts of rainfalls actually resulted from unprecedented ocean heat content. This study presents some evidence to support the link between global temperature rise with increasing hurricane intensity.

Not so quick to connect cold snap to climate change

1/17/2018

Extremely cold temperature can be utilized by politicians as counter evidence to climate change. Scientists, trained to be cautious, need to conduct rigorous studies to either confirm or fail to confirm any hypotheses. A new study shows that the deep freeze in the U.S. is not related to climate change.

Climate in everything:temperature and personality

12/23/2017

It has long been speculated that the regional climate plays a role in shaping personalities. Recently, a group of researchers mainly from China and the U.S. have used large-scale data, multilevel analyses and machine learning analyses to test this hypothesis. Nature Human Behavior just published their study linking regional temperature with human personality. The authors have made some interesting but intuitive findings. Personalities related to socialization and stability such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and personal growth and plasticity such as extraversion and openness to experience are often associated with more clement temperature along with which individuals grew up. They further suggested that climate change may bring concomitant changes in human personality.

Once again, this finding resonates with the notion that we are products of our surrounding environment.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program released a new Climate Science Special Report

11/5/2017

The U.S. Global Change Research Program just released a Climate Science Special Report. In this report, the increasing trend of global annually averaged air temperature over the past century has been reiterated. Like IPCC's most recent assessment report, this report also uses "extremely likely" when attributing the warming trend since the mid 20th century to human activities, "especially emissions of greenhouse gases." The continually rising global temperatures have brought about a wide range of impacts such as sea level rise, glacier melting, ocean acidification, more frequent extreme weather events - wild fires, hurricanes, heavy rainfall, heat waves, etc.

This report also states that "over the next few decades (2021 -2050), annual average temperatures are expected to rise by about 2.5°F for the U.S., relative to the recent past (average from 1976-2015), under all plausible future climate scenarios." To many people, 2.5°F does not seem to be an impressive number to cause substantial concern. But if we put this number in the context of a normal distribution, we have every reason to worry a great deal about the future of the global climate and its implications for human civilization. As Joseph Romm explains in this Podcast episode, if we move the "bell curve" (normal distribution of temperatures) as a whole towards the upper end, as the current trend suggests, not only do we see the mean temperature rise but also witness the increasing frequency of high temperatures currently deemed to be abnormal. In other words, a new norm will need to be defined with more "extremes" becoming more frequent and normal.

Thanks to a relatively steady climate, the humanity has managed to achieve a high level of civilization over the past 10000 years. Today, the need to feed an ever growing world population and the resulting intensifying industrialization are disrupting the global climate system on which our survivals are largely reliant upon. In the entire history of our existence, the human species has displayed magnificent adaptive capacity to the environment. But many would argue that there is a limitation to adaptation. It takes time for an individual, a community, or a society to learn and adopt appropriate measures to adapt to a new environment. When the extreme loses extremity by becoming the new "norm" every few years, one cannot help but wonder how fast we need to learn and make necessary changes to keep up with nature. We don't need to look far to find ample evidence in history that rapid climate change can bring an end to a sophisticated social and political system. A prime example would be the collapse of Roman Empire. When the climate changed abruptly, even the mighty Roman Empire could not evade the fate of collapse.

Geography in everything: increasing obesity rate in America

10/13/2017

       The obesity rate has been rising rapidly in America over the past two decades. Many factors have been identified as contributors to this ongoing public health crisis. The food industry plays a powerful role shaping public perceptions of food and eating behaviors, as this Vox article explains.

      As a geographer, I am always concerned with the influence of our surrounding environment on what we perceive and how we behave. In this paper, my coauthors and I have considered the impacts of built and natural environments on physical inactivity and correspondingly obesity rate. We have made a couple of findings. First, higher street connectivity and walk scores are related to lower physical inactivity and obesity rates. In a more pedestrian-friendly environment with more streets and connections, people tend to be more physically active and less likely to be obese. Second, higher ratio of fast-food restaurants in a community is positively related to physical inactivity and obesity. Surprise, surprise, fast-food makes people become more obese, well, because in the fast-paced modernity, fast-food is literally fast and therefore convenient for people to grab and eat on the go.

        Last but not least, the number of extreme weather events is also found to lead to physical inactivity and obesity. When extreme weather events occur, the environment outside the window all of a sudden becomes hostile. People are constrained inside, much less likely to get engaged in any exercises. So, these extreme weather events pose threats to not only public safety but also public health.

Weather in everything: "too hot to reject?"

9/23/2017

While coastal residents in Texas and Florida are still lamenting the loss from extreme weather events (Harvey and Irma), patent applicants may wish their applications would be evaluated on a hotter than usual day with higher cloud coverage, because this paper claims hot weather is associated with lower final rejection rates. Obviously, a lot of work needs to be done to validate this claim.

湖边的风

Wanyun Shao, Ph.D

I am a geographer who studies the relationship between human society and the environment at various geographic levels. I apply both quantitative (i.e., statistics and geospatial models) and qualitative (i.e., in-person interviews and policy analysis) methods in my research.

As a National Academies of Sciences Gulf Research Program Early-Career Research Fellow, my current research is focused on the U.S. Gulf Coast Region.

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