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Posts Tagged ‘weather’

“Gayborhoods” and Heat Waves at This Year’s AEA Meetings

Jon Hilsenrath of The Wall Street Journal reports on the most offbeat papers of this year’s American Economic Association meetings.   One of our favorites — in light of our recent “Are Gay Men Really Rich?” podcast — is this one:

FIND A NEW “GAYBORHOOD” FOR BETTER HOUSING RETURNS

Janice Madden of the University of Pennsylvania and Matthew Ruther of the University of Colorado studied census tract data and the American Community Survey to examine the locations of gay male and lesbian partnerships in 38 large U.S. cities. They found that census tracts that start the decade with more gay men experienced significantly greater growth in household incomes and, in the Northeast and West, also greater population growth over the next decade than those census tracts with fewer gay men. Census tracts with more lesbians at the start of the decade saw no difference in population or income growth.

Another favorite examines the long-term outcomes of children conceived during heat waves.


More Predictions, From Bad to Worse

Our “Folly of Prediction” podcast made these basic points:

Fact: Human beings love to predict the future.

Fact: Human beings are not very good at predicting the future.

Fact: Because the incentives to predict are quite imperfect — bad predictions are rarely punished — this situation is unlikely to change.

A couple of recent cases in point:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a particularly bad Atlantic hurricane season this year but, thankfully, were wrong, as noted by Dan Amira in New York magazine. It is hard to imagine that many people are unhappy about that. 

Here, as noted by Ira Stoll in the New York Sun, are the picks by ESPN experts at the start of the 2013 baseball season. How bad were their picks?


It's the Weather, Stupid

We’ve written in the past about how weather can have a surprisingly strong effect on things like civil war and riots. (Short story: rioters don’t like getting rained on and droughts can start a war.)

The political scientist Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard has a new paper on the topic in Public Choice (abstract; PDF) called “It’s the Weather, Stupid! Individual Participation in Collective May Day Demonstrations.” The bolding is mine:

“We investigate the possible explanations for variations in aggregate levels of participation in large-scale political demonstrations. A simple public choice inspired model is applied to data derived from the annual May Day demonstrations of the Danish labor movement and socialist parties taking place in Copenhagen in the period 1980–2011. The most important explanatory variables are variations in the weather conditions and consumer confidence, while political and socio-economic conditions exhibit no robust effects. As such accidental or non-political factors may be much more important for collective political action than usually acknowledged and possibly make changes in aggregate levels of political support seem erratic and unpredictable.”


Who Suffers in Bad Weather?

The weather — its effects on the environment, behavior, sports, and society — has long been of interest to Freakonomics.  Now a new working paper from Warren Anderson, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama explores the effects of cold growing seasons on discrimination against Jewish communities between 1100 and 1800:

What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. We then use panel data consisting of 785 city-level expulsions of Jews from 933 European cities between 1100 and 1800 to test the implications of the model. We use the variation in city-level temperature to test whether expulsions were associated with colder growing seasons. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was associated with a one to two percentage point increase in the likelihood that a Jewish community would be expelled. Drawing on our model and on additional historical evidence we argue that the rise of state capacity was one reason why this relationship between negative income shocks and expulsions weakened after 1600.


How We Perceive the Weather

A new study looks at how ideological and political beliefs affect people’s perceptions of the weather. The authors surveyed 8,000 people across the U.S. between 2008 and 2011 and found that while floods and droughts were remembered correctly, temperature changes were a different story. From Ars Technica:

In fact, the actual trends in temperatures had nothing to do with how people perceived them. If you graphed the predictive power of people’s perceptions against the actual temperatures, the resulting line was flat—it showed no trend at all. In the statistical model, the actual weather had little impact on people’s perception of recent temperatures. Education continued to have a positive impact on whether they got it right, but its magnitude was dwarfed by the influences of political affiliation and cultural beliefs.

And those cultural affiliations had about the effect you’d expect. Individualists, who often object to environmental regulations as an infringement on their freedoms, tended to think the temperatures hadn’t gone up in their area, regardless of whether they had. Strong egalitarians, in contrast, tended to believe the temperatures had gone up.


Should You Ignore the Weather When Buying a New House or Car?

An NBER working paper (full PDF here) by Meghan R. Busse, Devin G. Pope, Jaren C. Pope, and Jorge Silva-Risso explores the role of projection bias when choosing a new car or house. It turns out that weather conditions are a huge factor when consumers are debating big purchases like houses or cars. The abstract:

Projection bias is the tendency to overpredict the degree to which one’s future tastes will resemble one’s current tastes. We test for evidence of projection bias in two of the largest and most important consumer markets – the car and housing markets. Using data for more than forty million vehicle transactions and four million housing purchases, we explore the impact of the weather on purchasing decisions. We find that the choice to purchase a convertible, a 4-wheel drive, or a vehicle that is black in color is highly dependent on the weather at the time of purchase in a way that is inconsistent with classical utility theory. Similarly, we find that the hedonic value that a swimming pool and that central air add to a house is higher when the house goes under contract in the summertime compared to the wintertime.


In Case of Rain

In the town where we stay on the New Jersey shore the local movie theater advertises: In case of rain, we will have an extra show at 1PM on weekdays. Pretty clever. If it’s rainy, the demand curve for going to the movies shifts rightward—who wants to go to the beach in the rain. Accordingly, the theater increases the amount of showings supplied to the market. But why don’t they raise the price of tickets on bad-weather days? Presumably because it would create bad will among customers who might feel exploited, but perhaps there are other reasons. (I can’t imagine that it is difficult to alter prices on a daily basis.)


The New Yorker Geoengineers Itself

Michael Specter has written a good and interesting New Yorker article about the history and current state of geoengineering, called “The Climate Fixers: Is There a Technological Solution to Global Warming?”

Let me rephrase:

Michael Specter has written a good and interesting New Yorker article about the history and current state of geoengineering, called “The Climate Fixers: Is There a Technological Solution to Global Warming?,” which is essentially a New Yorkerized version of Chapter 5 of SuperFreakonomics, all the way down to the Mount Pinatubo explosion and the reliance on scientists Ken Caldeira and Nathan Myhrvold.


Collateral Damage from the Japanese Tsunami Disaster?

A reader named Mark Weitzman calls our attention to a Yomiuri Shimbun article with a provocative claim:

Quake efforts blamed for rise in snow mishaps

This winter’s heavier snowfall has seen more than 500 people across seven prefectures die or become injured in snow-related accidents, including cases in which they had been trying to remove snow, it has been learned.

People are trying to remove snow themselves using shovels and other tools because of delays in municipal-led snow removal. The delays have been caused by a shortage of dump trucks–many of which are being used in areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake for reconstruction work–to transport snow.

According to data compiled by the Akita, Aomori, Ishikawa, Nagano, Niigata, Toyama and Yamagata prefectural governments, the death toll from such snow-related accidents had reached 31 as of Wednesday, while 479 people had sustained injuries.


Football Freakonomics: The Frozen Conundrum

Well, it’s January. And even though my team stumbled into inglorious, injury-plagued defeat, the most exciting football is yet to be played — some of it in very cold weather.

So we thought it was time to take a look at the various effects, and hidden side, of cold weather. That’s the focus of our latest installment of Football Freakonomics.

It is no secret that weather, cold or hot, has a significant effect on athletic performance. I don’t want to start an argument here about what constitutes a sport and what doesn’t, but I will say that the most frustrating six hours of my life was spent on a lake in upstate New York trying to coax some walleye through a hole in the ice. Brrr! 


An Algorithm that Can Predict Weather a Year in Advance

In our latest podcast, “The Folly of Prediction,” we poke fun at the whole notion of forecasting. The basic gist is: whether it’s Romanian witches or Wall Street quant wizards, though we love to predict things — we’re generally terrible at it. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or read the transcript here.)
But there is one emerging tool that’s greatly enhancing our ability to predict: algorithms. Toward the end of the podcast, Dubner talks to Tim Westergren, a co-founder of Pandora Radio, about how the company’s algorithm is able to predict what kind of music people want to hear, by breaking songs down to their basic components. We’ve written a lot about algorithms, and the potential they have to vastly change our life through customization, and perhaps satisfy our demand for predictions with some robust results.
One of the first things that comes to mind when people hear the word forecasting is the weather. Over the last few decades, we’ve gotten much better at predicting the weather. But what if through algorithms, we could extend our range of accuracy, and say, predict the weather up to a year in advance? That’d be pretty cool, right? And probably worth a bit of money too.
That’s essentially what the folks at a small company called Weather Trends International are doing. The private firm based in Bethlehem, PA, uses technology first developed in the early 1990s, to project temperature, precipitation and snowfall trends up to a year ahead, all around the world, with more than 80% accuracy.


Freakonomics Poll: When It Comes to Predictions, Whom Do You Trust?

Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Folly of Prediction,” is built around the premise that humans love to predict the future, but are generally terrible at it. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript here.)
There are a host of professions built around predicting some future outcome: from predicting the score of a sports match, to forecasting the weather for the weekend, to being able to tell what the stock market is going to do tomorrow. But is anyone actually good at it?


Study Shows Animals Starting to Move to Higher Latitudes, Elevations

A new study out of the University of York shows that animals are moving to higher latitudes and elevations as a result of global warming. The research, which is a meta-analysis of previous individual studies, finds that about 1,300 species are shifting habitat faster than had previously been assumed. But they’re not all moving toward cooler temperatures. The data are mostly skewed toward Europe and North America. Here’s the abstract:

The distributions of many terrestrial organisms are currently shifting in latitude or elevation in response to changing climate. Using a meta-analysis, we estimated that the distributions of species have recently shifted to higher elevations at a median rate of 11.0 meters per decade, and to higher latitudes at a median rate of 16.9 kilometers per decade. These rates are approximately two and three times faster than previously reported. The distances moved by species are greatest in studies showing the highest levels of warming, with average latitudinal shifts being generally sufficient to track temperature changes. However, individual species vary greatly in their rates of change, suggesting that the range shift of each species depends on multiple internal species traits and external drivers of change. Rapid average shifts derive from a wide diversity of responses by individual species.


Baseball's Rainy Season

Major League Baseball is off to one of its wettest starts ever. The league came into this week having already postponed 26 games, which is 6 more than were washed out all of last season. According to Dailybaseballdata.com:

From 2006-2009, each season had from 33-38 rainouts. But 26 through mid-May puts us on a pace to wash out 100 games this year!

Today’s weather forecast and schedule looks to spell more rainouts.


Against (Discretionary) Snow Days

I awoke last week to another foot of snow adding a third blanket of winter to our city of Elms. I am reminded of the joy I felt as a child waiting to learn if school was canceled. Something has been lost in our age of instant information — who can forget huddling around the radio, holding your breath while the radio announcer lists the seemingly endless roster of closings? Today, we received the decidedly less romantic robo-calls at 5:33 in the morning.


If You Can Bet on the Rain, Watch out for Rainmakers

A few days ago, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange began selling futures contracts on rain. As this Marketplace report points out, the Merc – best known for selling agricultural commodities and futures – “already sells futures for temperature, frost, snow – even hurricanes.”


Do Hurricanes Prefer Cities?

A new study argues that the moisture levels and landscapes of cities influence hurricane movements. Professor Johnny Chan’s research team claims that “cities impose greater friction on the swirling flow because of the tall buildings . . . tropical cyclones tend to be ‘attracted’ towards areas of higher friction.”


Mayor of Moscow Versus Mother Nature: A Winner is Declared

This fall, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov made a bold declaration. With the help of the Russian Air Force, he was going to use cloud seeding techniques to keep it from snowing in Moscow this winter. Did Luzhkov vanquish Mother Nature as he predicted he would?


If It's Raining, You Might Want to Reschedule That Interview

It is no secret that weather affects mood, and even behavior. The Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics, who ran an honor-system business, received lower payments during foul weather. Now along come Donald Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter from the University of Toronto with an interesting question: do applicants to medical school suffer if they happen to be interviewed on a rainy day?


When the Weather Puts Food on Your Table

A lot of industries are obviously weather-dependent — agriculture, tourism, etc. — but I hadn’t known that the traditional production of roofing slate in the U.K. was also at the mercy of the weather. Here is but one of many fascinating things you can learn from Simon Winchester’s excellent book The Map That Changed the World, about the proto-geologist William Smith:


Will There Be Snow in Moscow This Winter?

Not if the mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov has his way. According to Simon Shuster at TIME magazine,
For just a few million dollars, the mayor’s office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March.


Can't NASA Find a Better Launch Site?

After bad weather foiled several launch attempts, the Space Shuttle Endeavor finally took off last night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida’s Cape Canaveral. With stormy weather so typical there, why does NASA continue to use it as a launch site?


Vortex Voyeurism

| Next month, a small army of meteorologists armed with 40 sensor-loaded vehicles and a flying drone will stalk America’s southern plains, trying to get an unprecedentedly detailed look at tornadoes as they form. The project, the largest and most ambitious of its kind, aims to unravel some mysteries of how these giant storms are born. Once we understand that, . . .


How Valid Are T.V. Weather Forecasts?

Eggleston and his daughter two minutes before it began to hail. Says Eggleston, “Hail was not in the forecast.” A gentleman named J.D. Eggleston recently wrote to us with a rather interesting report, a nice piece of D.I.Y. Freakonomics concerning the accuracy of local T.V. weather forecasts. I thought it was interesting enough to post in its entirety here on . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Wildlife refuges bring in impressive revenues. Researchers analyze goalkeeper jumps in stopping penalty kicks. (Earlier) Have your genomic profile read for just $1,000. New ranking scale helps experts predict winter storms. (Earlier)


What Should We Really Be Doing About Global Warming? A Freakonomics Quorum

We have blogged occasionally about different pieces of the global-warming puzzle (see here, here, and here), and we touched on the subject briefly in a New York Times Magazine column. It is an extraordinarily interesting issue, to say nothing of its importance and complexity, in part because there are so many foundational economic principles at play: not just supply and . . .


And Today Is…

August 28 is the day in 2005 when Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a full evacuation of New Orleans in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina. Little did he know that his order would temporarily drop the city’s crime rate to zero.