James Doss-Gollin
Hydroclimate risk analysis & management. Assistant prof @ Rice CEVE, husband, dad, romanista, albirrojo, and apizza supremacist.
https://dossgollin-lab.github.io
https://jdossgollin.github.io
- Reposted by James Doss-Gollinman the problem with trying to explain to people why address level flood scores are so fraught is that i feel like i get backed into a corner where i have to start with like well what is knowledge really
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinFeaturing a quote from @jdossgollin.bsky.social! As Adam notes, the core problem is these scores cannot be validated (in the strictest sense) for future use, because there are too many assumptions about future changes. We need to be transparent about these and look across a range of projections.
- Tools that help savvy companies who hire scientists like @kellyhereid.bsky.social use, in conjunction with lots of other information, to answer specific questions are not intrinsically useful for ordinary people making the biggest financial decision of their lives
- My best advice is to use tools like this not at address level, but to browse around the neighborhood you're considering. None are going to give the same answer all the time, which @jdossgollin.bsky.social very correctly points out in article. But familiarizing yourself w local hot spots helps.
- Apparently I am so tired I cannot write a coherent sentence. Thanks, daycare germs!
- I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of daycare germs until somebody can figure out what the hell is going on (while I still have some backup care days left for 2026)
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinClimate risk science's greatest project successes have come in part due to transparency and reusability. We show that at the paper-level, there is plenty of room for growth. We talk about why this matters, what researchers can do, and how the greatest progress requires institutional support
- 🚨 Publication alert! Very happy to see our paper "Unlocking the benefits of transparent and reusable science for climate risk management" out in PNAS today. With @crispapoll.bsky.social @jdossgollin.bsky.social @bobkopp.net and many others. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- This paper began as a manifesto but (largely thank to @crispapoll.bsky.social's hard work) evolved into an empirically grounded, thoughtful, and nuanced analysis of why transparency is *especially* critical for #climate #climaterisk research and how current standards fall short
- 🚨 Publication alert! Very happy to see our paper "Unlocking the benefits of transparent and reusable science for climate risk management" out in PNAS today. With @crispapoll.bsky.social @jdossgollin.bsky.social @bobkopp.net and many others. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Sorry editors -- I got about a billion invitations to review this week and had to decline most of them. Prioritizing (1) society journals, (2) open access journals, and (3) journals I have recently submitted to, down-weighted if I have more recently reviewed there.
- All emails should cost $0.01. An email to all 20,000 people on campus should cost 200 bucks -- enough that you have to accept accountability and justify your choice, not so much that important stuff is blocked
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinKelly's point is why I think the merits of Zillow removing climate risk scores (www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...) is fairly nuanced. To make it clear: Zillow clearly did not do this for the right reasons, and the realty and developer lobbies have long been opponents of better climate information.
- My favorite thing about Thanksgiving week is that all the companies who’s crap I need to unsubscribe from hopefully send me multiple reminders
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinOur free and open source software for estimating property level flood risk under uncertainty now has a peer reviewed software paper! We would love your thoughts for improvement and contributions! github.com/abpoll/unsafe @jdossgollin.bsky.social @vsrikrish.bsky.social
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinOn Wed, Dec 10 I am offering a comprehensive introduction to Bayesian regression modeling, with exercises in both RStan and PyStan, at a steep discount in an effort to raise funds for World Central Kitchen and United Farm Workers. For registration details see betanalpha.github.io/courses/.
- There seems to be very little coverage, but Hurricane Melissa is about to do terrible damage to millions of people. gdacs.org/report.aspx?...
- Climate risk models require DEEP expertise to use well. It is easier every day to download some black-box risk estimate for your house/community/portfolio. However, the common mindset of "some data is better than no data" can lead to trouble!
- Absolutely fantastic study comparing anonymized outputs of climate analytics models. Everyone loves to bag on flood (rightly so), but can we talk about how the spread here is "30mph breeze to Cat 5 hurricane" www.fca.org.uk/publication/... HT @ruarirhodes.bsky.social
- Thanks to everyone who is out (on behalf of all of us knocked out by daycare germs) to demand and defend accountability, transparency, democracy, and the very concept of morality.
- I literally only use this app to grumble
- I knew having kids would change my life, but I wasn’t ready for Spotify to pack my recommendations with 98% white noise and nature sounds
- Reposted by James Doss-Gollin📊New research published in #ERCL - in the 'Focus on #ClimateChange Informed Catastrophe Modeling to Support #ClimateRisk Management' 🌧️Bayesian spatiotemporal nonstationary model quantifies robust increases in daily extreme rainfall across the Western Gulf Coast: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
- Broke: I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing Woke: I want AI to fill out when2meet / doodle / calendly polls so that I can complain about bad papers on social media
- Controversial take: every statistical analysis you do doesn’t need to be an R package. Packages should be infrastructure and set a very high bar of software engineering for them. To disseminate your analysis, just make some well documented templates and tutorials
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinWhat a clear, concise summary of the state and potential of renewable energy technologies. I particularly like how @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social includes the fact that nearly two-thirds of primary energy gets wasted today. Burning fossil fuels is a very inefficient way to provide useful services.
- How exciting is research according to...
- Grumpy take: you cannot just write in your methods section "we used X software", you should cite and note the software but you still need to explain what the software is doing and why it's a good choice
- Talk about a profoundly shredded moral fabric
- If you're a legal immigrant with a court date, ICE is likely to pick you up after the hearing. If you don't go to the hearing, a judge can order ICE to pick you up. Here's @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social with some great reporting on the Catch-22 Trump has made of our legal immigration system:
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinThis country won't get serious about climate change until we're honest about flood and fire risk and insurance to match. Imagine if Camp Mystic had been required to carry liability insurance in the event that its campers were flood victims. Those cabins would have been moved years ago.
- I understand everyone wants to cover the tragedy, but I would MUCH PREFER to be part of a public discussion of flood warning systems and safety BEFORE the next horrific disaster happens than AFTER. As long we remain uncomfortable with proactive safety measures, people will keep dying.
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinEarly warning systems work. Early warning systems are crucial. This camp lost no one. See next skeet for quote. apnews.com/article/texa...
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinBut this does illustrate a few tragic and uncomfortable truths. The first is that even quite good weather forecasts do not automatically translate into life-saving predictions--there's a lot of other work that has to take place to contextualize the forecast and ensure it gets to right people.
- #Flood modelers: lots of chatter RE soil profiles in "flash flood alley". Do we really think floods would have been meaningfully different if you dropped that much rain on those hills, but they had more/deeper topsoils? Of course the effect is not zero, but not convinced it's big.
- (a) this is an answerable question, so we shouldn't _need_ to rely on my limited intuition (b) I can hear the geomorphologists saying "there's a reason why you have a thin soil layer there" which is fair, but this is a thought experiment
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinBased on some of the reactions and comments I am absorbing by average people and elected officials, I think there needs to be a serious explanation and lesson on what the limits of predictability are for floods like the one in Texas.
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinAnd don’t remove observational capacities and cut funding to weather forecasting agencies and then blame them for “faulty” forecasts!
- Horrific things are happening along the Guadalupe River right now. Absolutely devastating for the families of everyone missing. I'm skeptical that we're going to build our way out of experiencing major flooding with 15+" rain on hilly terrain. Instead, we need...
- ... (1) build less in areas known to be high risk, (2) stop over-relying on the "100 year flood", the disconnect between how it's communicated vs actually estimated is incredible, (3) dramatically improve early warning (starting with weather!), (4) create safe places to retreat to during floods
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinI feel like I'm losing my mind. Here is the transcript of what Zohran Mamdani actually said about the phrase "globalize the intifada." This is his "refusal to disavow it." This is what has people terrified. Just fucking read it. Source: podscripts.co/podcasts/the...
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinMy latest feature is out: As the world has warmed, the regional flaws of climate models have grown apparent. Meanwhile, methods to localize the results of models have proliferated. It all leads to lots of uncertainty -- within a very certain global trend. And cities need answers now.
- Reposted by James Doss-Gollin🔴⚠️⛈🇦🇺Unprecedented rains, almost 500mm in three days for some towns, have hit #NewSouthWales with floods that involved 50000 people. #Australia declared the natural disaster for the state.⬇️#Sentinel1 animation of the flooded area covering 160km2.
- Reposted by James Doss-Gollin[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinWe are living in one of the few times in human history where you can buy a loaf of bread and if it says it’s made with wheat flour and salt and yeast and water and nothing else, it’s probably made from just those ingredients, and some people want to END this.
- “Hey Meta, give me the shallow illusion of a personality” is my favorite ad campaign right now
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinNSF cancelled our flood justice network today. I’m of course devastated. But the work will continue. We were already creating a network and we won’t stop now! @socialpixel.bsky.social P.S. there’s nothing woke about creating solutions for communities that flood. And saves the govt money!!!!
- QEPD
- Lots of other things going on and geopolitics is way beyond my expertise but glad to see some mainstream folks pushing back on the disturbingly widespread desire for another Cold War overcast.fm/+ABLShO7PaNM
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinThe plan “…eliminates NOAA's Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Office and its 10 research laboratories and 16 affiliated Cooperative Institutes…one only needs to see what NOAA research has provided to the U.S. taxpayer and imagine where we would be without…” www.ametsoc.org/ams/about-am...
- Cancelling an excellent scientific program because their findings are displeasing is NOT a good sign
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinAn extraordinary separate dissent from Justice Jackson accuses the majority of trying to pass off its dirty work under the cover of the shadow docket and explicitly invokes Korematsu, the Japanese internment case. Wow. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...
- If I have no representation do I still have to file taxes?
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinNew JP Morgan Climate Risk report out and even they are calling the insurance/property crisis the "doom loop" now
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinThe story of this man's abduction and deportation to a brutal El Salvador prison, without any due process—and apparently by mistake!—is the stuff of nightmares, literally ripped from some dystopian fiction. Kafka or Orwell. Or Stalin's Russia. Hitler's Germany. Or apparently, Donald Trump's America.
- The frustration when you agree to review a paper because the abstract seems relevant and exciting, but then you download it and it's more 😬
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinYes, I am aware that AI is often incredibly inaccurate, and that these powerful assholes knowingly use it as an unaccountable and inscrutable force to validate whatever they wanted to do anyway, that is *literally the point I’m making*
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinIf you are visiting the United States, having a negative view of Trump is enough to get you denied entry. If this was coming out of Russia or China, we would deplore such an authoritarian attack on freedom of expression.
- So on March 9, a French scientist, on a visa to attend a conference in Houston, was denied entry to the US and subsequently expelled because his phone had messages decrying scientific policies put forward by the Trump administration: www.lemonde.fr/internationa...
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinScientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away. They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.
- Exclusive: NIH officials have advised scientists to remove reference to mRNA vaccines from their grant applications, in expectation the Trump administration intends to abandon most research in the field. By @arthurallen202.bsky.social kffhealthnews.org/news/article...
- Reposted by James Doss-Gollin[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinI'm a researcher primarily in adaptation. We are not even adapted to where the climate is today. If you think you can seawall your way through a 4°C planet, you are straight up dreaming. Mitigation AND adaptation, or you end up with way more of option 3 for dealing with climate change: suffering.
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinInstead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.
- No one writes uglier LaTeX than a team of brilliant computer science professors 😆😆😆
- If that’s a 11th minute red in a European knockout match it’s time to stop watching sports on TV and focus on our rec leagues
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinThis should terrify every person in this country. The use of machine learning systems to approximate an individuals views on war and then, if they are here lawfully on a visa, tag them for deportation is about as sci-fi dystopian as it gets. www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinI know this is extremely vulgar idealism, but I do think we should try to aggressively reassert the norm that lying is bad. Not in a "Four Pinnochios" fact-checking kind of way, but in a way that frames this kind of lying as moral degeneracy that is fundamentally corrosive to the human spirit.
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinOver half of US forestry imports (lumber, plywood, etc) currently come from Canada. Cutting off that supply leads to increased housing costs (more expensive to build), increased insurance costs (more expensive to repair) and felling protected forests in the US to try to make up for it, apparently.
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinUnchecked discretion in spending money appropriated by Congress transforms the Executive into a pipeline of patronage: Drastic cuts in services, then exceptions in exchange for loyalty. Which is precisely why the framers, with care and vision, guarded the power of the purse for Congress.
- Reposted by James Doss-GollinThis nails down well my unease with (what my academic friends tell me is) the ubiquity of AI cheating in schools. It's not just that lots of students don't have a problem cheating, but that they've apparently bought into a very sad, anemic idea of what education is for. thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te...
- Reposted by James Doss-Gollin“Hey, let’s lock other countries into an infrastructure that’s so inferior to modern alternatives that my own, rich country with huge political support for coal hasn’t built a new coal plant in over a decade”
