Maxwell School News and Commentary

“The authors show that the effect of warming on home runs is less for indoor stadiums and night games, making a somewhat controlled experiment,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment. “There may have been other changes to gameplay or equipment which could have also affected trends in home runs, but one might not expect those things to differ between indoor and outdoor stadiums or night versus day games.”

"There are three primary effects [of climate change on flying]: a reduction in payload capacity for some flights because of rising temperatures, an increase in clear air turbulence on some flight routes, and changes in fuel consumption on some routes due to changes in upper level wind speeds," says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

The fact that the costs of compliance are typically borne by workers and consumers is a fundamental flaw of carbon pricing programs, says Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment. It’s one that, he suggests, has led to the Biden administration’s relatively skeptical stance on cap-and-trade programs.

The professor of geography and the environment will spend part of the summer researching peatlands and helping develop a doctoral program in Chile. 

“The U.S. has always been promoting and setting up this entire thing,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment. “It’s not like the Americans are passive in this. We have absolutely helped sow the seeds for that Saudi agricultural industry that has come back to us now.”

“When you can’t adapt to climate change at all and face interconnected issues surrounding loss and damage, the unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality is worsened,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment. “This means destruction, devastation and loss are so profound that one can’t finance one’s way out of it.”

“In coming decades, winter—as most people understand it—will get shorter and warmer, with less snow and more rain,” says Robert Wilson, associate professor of geography and the environment. “This poses a serious threat to winter recreation: snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, and downhill skiing.”

Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment, argues that state lawmakers need to update the state’s 43 year old water law and create more active management areas to regulate water use across Arizona. “There needs to be some way of monitoring and regulating who is drawing what from the aquifers,” says Koch.

"Powering the next wave of green energy innovation," co-authored by David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in PLOS Climate.

“Pumping groundwater in Arizona remains largely unregulated,” writes Natalie Koch, professor of geography. “It’s this legal failing that, in part, allows the Saudi company to draw unlimited amounts of water to grow an alfalfa crop that feeds dairy cows 8,000 miles away.”