Part the First: Financial Stability and Climate Instability. Or, could a climate-related shock trigger a recession? This is a question that could be asked only by an economist, or two, as in Advancing research on financial stability and climate-related financial risk, an editorial last week in Science:
Climate change–related natural disasters such as floods, fires, and storms devastate communities, and their massive costs continue to grow. But as climate risks increase, financial risk management infrastructure is not keeping pace. Analytical tools on which investors, regulators, central banks, and governments depend were largely built for a 20th-century climate and a fossil fuel–dominated economy. Policymakers need a sounder understanding of which climate-related risks pose a threat to the financial system and macroeconomy, as well as the potential channels through which those risks operate. Although the US government recently disbanded its main efforts to understand and address these risks, it is vital that such work continues. Climate change is not a distant environmental issue, but a present financial and macroeconomic concern that will affect all of us, whether we accept it or not.
In January 2025, the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles County led to about $100 billion in total property and capital losses. Less than 6 months prior, Hurricane Helene ripped through western North Carolina, resulting in untold human suffering and about $78 billion in total costs. Climate-driven disasters such as these erode asset values, destabilize insurance markets, and strain household finances. On top of this, the unstable transition to low-carbon energy creates additional risk for the macroeconomy. For example, clean technologies and related investments that relied on Biden-era permitting and federal subsidies are now grappling with the loss of many supportive policies. US climate policies have swung wildly over the past two decades and will likely change again, creating asset revaluation and economic disruption that can ripple through the economy.
These two paragraphs answer the question. Imagine a year with a half-dozen Category 5 cyclones (or 6.5 such as Melissa, which last month devastated Jamaica and approached the magnitude of the 1935 Labor Day storm that washed the water out of Lake Okeechobee in South Florida – which was mostly empty ninety years ago) and an equal number of firestorms such as the Palisades Fire, each hitting an area as “rich” as Pacific Palisades, South Florida, Houston, and New Orleans. Oh, and add a Hurricane Sandy, to the mix, as a Category 6.5 hurricane instead of a measly Category 3 storm. Given current ocean temperatures, that just might be possible. But the “stakeholders” and others are on the case, so no worries:
Resources for the Future and the Salata Institute on Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University recently announced the Climate-related Financial and Macroeconomic Risk Initiative (CFMRI). This network of scientists, economists, finance scholars, private-sector stakeholders, and policymakers has three mutually reinforcing goals: to deepen understanding of climate-related financial and economic risks; to promote better responses by financial and economic policymakers; and to grow the research community to ensure a strong pipeline of future research and analysis.
CFMRI will complement leading work done by international organizations, such as the Network for Greening the Financial System and the Financial Stability Board, on how climate change can affect financial and economic outcomes. These international, public-sector efforts could benefit from broader engagement and complementary focus. By convening a broad set of private-sector participants, academics, and scientists with US expertise, CFMRI will bring together the right people with the right focus.
We, as consumers who are the handmaidens of capital, have known this was coming for fifty years. At least. It’s never too late for hope, but that requires action other than “drill, baby, drill. Maybe the thirtieth Conference of the Parties in Belem will finally figure it out (it is beyond me why COP doesn’t just meet immediately after the WEF every year, in Davos and save on the private jet carbon budget. In the meantime, don’t buy a house where I grew up on the Georgia coast unless the money used in the purchase is completely disposable. Our fellow citizens in Western North Carolina thought they were safe, until the last days of September 2024. I drove across the path of Helene last week…still a lot of blue tarps on roofs in MAGA Central. Who’s next?
Part the Second: What’s Next for the Deadliest Catch? Stormy Seas (Science again) notes that Warmer waters in the Bering Sea caused snow crabs to crash. Now, “scientists are racing to predict the future of the lucrative fishery.” To which one might respond, “What about the crabs themselves and countless other living organisms in the huge and astonishingly productive web of life at the bottom of the Bering Sea?”
I have spent considerable time at marine laboratories on both coasts of North America, so this rings true. Keeping the animals alive is always difficult when they are out of their native habitat:
After 3 weeks crisscrossing the frigid Bering Sea, much of it spent wrangling crabs scooped from the sea floor, Erin Fedewa faced a final challenge: getting nearly 200 live animals to a lab 3000 kilometers away in less than 24 hours.
“This is always a little bit risky,” said Fedewa, a fisheries biologist from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as she stood on the deck of the Northwest Explorer, a 49-meter trawler converted for a summer research trip, while the ship was moored at Nome’s port.
She lifted the lid on a waist-high blue plastic box and peered inside. There, immersed in 900 liters of seawater, lay her charges—dozens of what appeared to be enormous spiders, their leg spans the size of hub caps. Chunks of sea ice bobbed beside these snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio), stirred by a pump to keep the animals bathed in the coldest water possible.
For Fedewa, success would mean the difference between months of productive research and de facto crab stew. She learned this the hard way in 2022, when the ship on which she was working docked in Nome and scientists filled the crab tanks with water siphoned directly from Norton Sound, a shallow, warmer part of the Bering Sea. “They just died,” she said.
That small fiasco is a microcosm of the recent fate of snow crabs in much of the Bering Sea. An unprecedented underwater heat wave there in 2018 and ’19 set off a chain reaction that led to the disappearance of an estimated 47 billion crabs, one of the largest marine die-offs ever documented. Suddenly, a $150 million fishery mythologized in the Deadliest Catch reality TV show found itself with no catch at all.
The reason is not all that difficult to parse. When the ice melts and doesn’t come back, the water will warm up. And poikilotherms, especially invertebrates, will then get sick. And die. And this is no surprise to any biologist who remembers that biology was originally called “natural history.” There are a lot of us, still, even if the establishment has no use for that which cannot be valued on Wall Street:
Researchers have come to suspect that most of the crabs died of starvation (during the collapse of the crab “fishery”). To many the notion is surprising, because it is incredibly hard to starve a snow crab to death. At her Oregon lab, NOAA marine ecologist Louise Copeman has kept crabs alive in tanks without food for months on end to understand how starvation changes their physiology. Three-quarters of them lived more than 200 days, and nearly half survived more than 8 months.
But the warm summers of 2018 and ’19 evidently pushed the crabs past a physiological threshold. The metabolism of these cold-blooded creatures increases with temperature, and scientists later calculated that as water temperatures rose in 2018, they were burning through energy four times faster than 1 year earlier.
Yes, burning fuel at four time the normal basal rate will kill you, or a crab, sooner rather than later. I do wonder what Jordan Peterson would say about a lobster, though. The Bering Sea is cold again, but will this last? What odds would DraftKings or FanDuel lay on that? My helpers tell me the full article is available without a subscription or institutional access – good reporting worth a longer look.
Part the Third: Update on the Prop Bet Heaven Formerly Known as Major League Baseball. Last week we discussed legalized gambling and the inevitable, in my view, decline of big-time sports. Immediately after came this story that gets stranger by the day:
Emmanuel Clase had made over $12 million as a relief pitcher and was set to pocket an additional $6.4 million next season from the Cleveland Guardians. At just 27 years old with the ability to throw a 95-mph cutter, there were likely many more millions to come.
You’d think that would be enough to avoid possibly throwing it all away in a sports betting scandal.
Yet federal prosecutors allege that Clase, over the past few years, routinely conspired with a couple of as-yet-unnamed gamblers to throw certain pitches in certain ways so they could successfully bet on the outcome — below a specific speed, for example. (Yes, over/under 97.95 mph is a bet that is offered.)
Prosecutors said the gamblers involved won at least $400,000 in bets involving Clase. A portion, sometimes as little as $2,000 (fractional when compared with his salary), was allegedly kicked back to Clase
We must remember that Clase is innocent until proven guilty. More details are at the public ESPN link, but acquittal for him or his much less rich teammate Luis Ortiz is not the way to bet. Meanwhile Shohei Ohtani of the Mega-Pilfering Translator is once again the National League MVP. Sorry, Shoeless Joe. Rob Manfred is no Kennesaw Mountain Landis (not that anybody really needed him).
Part the Fourth: “Lucky Jim” Shuffles Off this Mortal Coil. And he will not be missed, much. This piece from STAT appeared in Links earlier, but the obituary of one James Dewey Watson – prewritten by our best science journalist, Sharon Begley, before she died of cancer a few years ago – will be the standard take on his life. I have read a new biography of Watson is in the works, but it will be unnecessary, except to the starry-eyed. Jim Watson caught lightning in a bottle once. That is all it takes to win a Nobel Prize sometimes.
Which is not to denigrate his intuition and sense of the important and the doable. These traits are essential for the artist, writer, scientist, craftsman, or politician who wants to make an original contribution of any kind. But he was the callow male chauvinist pig and Ugly American who in later life outed himself as the heir to the eugenicists who came before him in the early twentieth century. But of all the scientists of his renown I have known (a few) or known of (the many), he was unusual in his various distempers. My only encounter with him was a talk he gave at my university, in the 1980s if I remember correctly. As you might imagine, this was a big event in the provinces, even if we were not the rubes he believed. Lucky Jim talked about his social life in Cambridge when he was chasing the double helix with Francis Crick by day and chasing skirts by night. I still wonder if the young biology students thought he was typical of his type.
“Lucky Jim” comes from the title of Peter Medawar’s review of Watson’s account of the discovery of the DNA double helix in his book of the same title. The review and the book made big splashes. Both are good reading. But for anyone who wants to understand the history and science of the discipline that became molecular biology, The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson is the only source, still, after all these years, with Gunther Stent’s Molecular Genetics: An Introductory Narrative (Second Edition) a distant second. The graduate students of my former life as a student and faculty member who read The Eighth Day of Creation learned the theoretical and experimental foundations of their disciplines and became good scientists. Some of those who didn’t became good scientists anyway.
Part the Fifth: Oh, SNAP! What kind of government knows that 42 million (12%) of the people it its care (sic) need help to deal with their “food insecurity” but doesn’t give a flyin’ fig when the benefits are interrupted by its utter fecklessness? This is covered here by Dr. Grace Bagwell Adams in one of my favorite magazines, The Bitter Southerner:
On Saturday, November 1, 42 million Americans will be cut off from the lifeline that keeps their families from starving: SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal program formerly known as Food Stamps). The South, where so many folks already live on the margin, will be one of the hardest-hit areas. More than 40 percent of all SNAP-receiving households in the United States live in our region — a higher percentage than in any other part of the country. In just a few days, this new hardship will hit the bank accounts and dinner tables of SNAP recipients in a tsunami that will have ripple effects in our grocery stores and throughout the economy. The whole country is being held hostage by federal politicians, but the ransom is higher for the South. We have more to lose here.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the SNAP program and how it mitigates hunger for low-income families. I spent my first seven years as an academic researcher looking at every aspect of this food assistance program — how it functions, who it serves, how it might be improved, what barriers are present to participation, and how families perceive and experience the process of applying.
I’ve come to a few meaningful conclusions. First and foremost, SNAP is essential to poor families. The average $300 a month received by a family provides about $75 a week to buy food. This support keeps the worst effects of starvation at bay, but it rarely, if ever, stops recipients from completely going hungry. Second, SNAP is typically used by families who are the “working poor,” those piecing together multiple jobs to survive. And these households, more often than not, include children, older adults, and/or people with disabilities. Third, and somewhat surprising to most, is that SNAP is an economic stimulus. Families who get these benefits do not keep them in their bank accounts, as they aren’t able to spend the benefit on other goods. These dollars are spent in grocery stores and are often the engine of our food economy, especially in rural and low-income neighborhoods. Every dollar given to a family on SNAP supports the local food economy.
SNAP and WIC were never designed to solve the problem of poverty or to eliminate all food insecurity. They were, however, designed to ameliorate the very worst effects of privation. Quite literally, they exist to prevent people from starving to death. In the richest nation in the world, a substantial portion of our citizens, even with these programs fully funded and functioning, are hungry on a daily basis. Now, with SNAP and WIC unavailable, millions will be pushed beyond the brink.
This has been brought to you by Lambert’s First Law of Neoliberalism: Because markets, go die! And to my friendly acquaintances who have gone MAGA all the way, please remember most people using SNAP benefits are working people, and their families. Many of them work at Sam Walton’s place, the one that destroyed our formerly robust downtown. That is on the rest of us. Not them. And whether you want to admit it or not, Lambert’s Law is coming for your grandchildren, too. Unless you look at the ticking clock and take heed.
Part the Sixth: Tylenol Still Does Not Cause Autism. From BMJ this week. Yes, I know that this rapid review will convince not a single MAGAt or MAHAt out there, but here it is anyway should anyone need it to pass along, Paracetamol (Tylenol): No clear link between use in pregnancy and autism or ADHD in children, rapid review finds:
There is no clear link between taking paracetamol in pregnancy and the chances of a child having autism or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later in life, an in-depth evidence review has found.
The researchers concluded that the quality of existing studies supporting such a link was “low to critically low,” adding that any apparent effect can probably be explained by family genetics and other factors.
Yes, we live in interesting times.
See you next week!
