Housing First: A Solution to Urban Homelessness

Homelessness in the United States 630,000 homeless in the US in 2012, thousands in Philadelphia Over 3% of the US population has been homeless during the past 5 years Homeless = no stable residence Temporary shelters, unsheltered locations (the street, transit stations, parked cars), etc. High rates of legal issues, substance abuse/dependency, & lack of stable employment Severe mental illness = overrepresented & linked to severe health disparities Higher risk for all-cause mortality (primarily due to injuries, overdose, CV disease) Mortality rates 3-4x higher than the general population Chronic & acute mental & physical health conditions HIV, tuberculosis, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, Hepatitis C Life expectancy: 42-52 years for the chronically homeless Disproportionately low numbers / low quality of social supports The current “continuum of care” model: Outreach à treatment à transitional housing à permanent supportive housing Perceived by the homeless as a series of hurdles, often not possible to overcome No empiric support in favor of the practice of requiring individuals to participate in psychiatric treatment or to maintain sobriety before being housed Poor health is a risk factor for homelessness, and homelessness is a risk factor for increased health needs.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/cwicposters/1002/thumbnail.jp

Palaeoclimate constraints on the impact of 2 °C anthropogenic warming and beyond

Over the past 3.5 million years, there have been several intervals when climate conditions were warmer than during the pre-industrial Holocene. Although past intervals of warming were forced differently than future anthropogenic change, such periods can provide insights into potential future climate impacts and ecosystem feedbacks, especially over centennial-to-millennial timescales that are often not covered by climate model simulations. Our observation-based synthesis of the understanding of past intervals with temperatures within the range of projected future warming suggests that there is a low risk of runaway greenhouse gas feedbacks for global warming of no more than 2 °C. However, substantial regional environmental impacts can occur. A global average warming of 1-2 °C with strong polar amplification has, in the past, been accompanied by significant shifts in climate zones and the spatial distribution of land and ocean ecosystems. Sustained warming at this level has also led to substantial reductions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, with sea-level increases of at least several metres on millennial timescales. Comparison of palaeo observations with climate model results suggests that, due to the lack of certain feedback processes, model-based climate projections may underestimate long-term warming in response to future radiative forcing by as much as a factor of two, and thus may also underestimate centennial-to-millennial-scale sea-level rise.Financial support of the PAGES Warmer World Integrative Activity workshop by the Future Earth core project PAGES (Past Global Changes) and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, is gratefully acknowledged. Additional funding by PAGES was provided to the plioVAR, PALSEA 2, QUIGS, the 2k network, C-peat, Global Paleofire 2 and OC3 PAGES working groups contributing to the Integrated Activity (see http://www.pages.unibe.ch/science/intro for an overview of all former and active PAGES working groups)

Erratum to: Beyond (Nature Geoscience, (2018), 11, 7, (474-485), 10.1038/s41561-018-0146-0)

In the version of this Review Article originally published, ref. 10 was mistakenly cited instead of ref. 107 at the end of the sentence: “This complexity of residual ice cover makes it likely that HTM warming was regional, rather than global, and its peak warmth thus had different timing in different locations.” In addition, for ref. 108, Scientific Reports was incorrectly given as the publication name; it should have been Scientific Data. These errors have now been corrected in the online versions

Erratum to: Beyond (Nature Geoscience, (2018), 11, 7, (474-485), 10.1038/s41561-018-0146-0)

In the version of this Review Article originally published, ref. 10 was mistakenly cited instead of ref. 107 at the end of the sentence: “This complexity of residual ice cover makes it likely that HTM warming was regional, rather than global, and its peak warmth thus had different timing in different locations.” In addition, for ref. 108, Scientific Reports was incorrectly given as the publication name; it should have been Scientific Data. These errors have now been corrected in the online versions

PaCTS 1.0: a crowdsourced reporting standard for paleoclimate data

The progress of science is tied to the standardization of measurements, instruments, and data. This is especially true in the Big Data age, where analyzing large data volumes critically hinges on the data being standardized. Accordingly, the lack of community‐sanctioned data standards in paleoclimatology has largely precluded the benefits of Big Data advances in the field. Building upon recent efforts to standardize the format and terminology of paleoclimate data, this article describes the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS), a crowdsourced reporting standard for such data. PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of maximizing the reuse value of paleoclimate data sets, particularly for synthesis work and comparison to climate model simulations. Initiated by the LinkedEarth project, the process to elicit a reporting standard involved an international workshop in 2016, various forms of digital community engagement over the next few years, and grassroots working groups. Participants in this process identified important properties across paleoclimate archives, in addition to the reporting of uncertainties and chronologies; they also identified archive‐specific properties and distinguished reporting standards for new versus legacy data sets. This work shows that at least 135 respondents overwhelmingly support a drastic increase in the amount of metadata accompanying paleoclimate data sets. Since such goals are at odds with present practices, we discuss a transparent path toward implementing or revising these recommendations in the near future, using both bottom‐up and top‐down approaches

Palaeoclimate constraints on the impact of 2 °C anthropogenic warming and beyond

Over the past 3.5 million years, there have been several intervals when climate conditions were warmer than during the pre-industrial Holocene. Although past intervals of warming were forced differently than future anthropogenic change, such periods can provide insights into potential future climate impacts and ecosystem feedbacks, especially over centennial-to-millennial timescales that are often not covered by climate model simulations. Our observation-based synthesis of the understanding of past intervals with temperatures within the range of projected future warming suggests that there is a low risk of runaway greenhouse gas feedbacks for global warming of no more than 2 °C. However, substantial regional environmental impacts can occur. A global average warming of 1–2 °C with strong polar amplification has, in the past, been accompanied by significant shifts in climate zones and the spatial distribution of land and ocean ecosystems. Sustained warming at this level has also led to substantial reductions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, with sea-level increases of at least several metres on millennial timescales. Comparison of palaeo observations with climate model results suggests that, due to the lack of certain feedback processes, model-based climate projections may underestimate long-term warming in response to future radiative forcing by as much as a factor of two, and thus may also underestimate centennial-to-millennial-scale sea-level rise