Tuesday Links

• Tim Duy discussing the trade-offs between financial instability, low inflation, and full employment (essentially the idea that we can now only achieve full employment during an asset price bubble).  I could be wrong, but my gut feel is that widening income-inequality has a good deal to do with this.
• Steve Randy Waldmann makes a related argument that technology/globalization has essentially turned societies like the US more like societies such as Nigeria - a generalized resource curse.
• Sudden stratospheric warmings.  I didn't know the first thing about this, but it's fascinating, and seemingly very relevant to the weather this spring.
• Wunderground has seven Earth Day essays on Climate Change.  Worth looking over.
• The Chinese are starting to get into SUVs according to the NYT.  This was inevitable, I imagine:

S.U.V. sales jumped 49 percent in March from a year ago as new models poured into the market. Overall auto sales in China climbed 13 percent in March and are on track for almost 21 million vehicles sold this year. By comparison, the latest forecasts in the United States this year are for a little more than 15 million vehicles. Both totals include sales of pickup trucks and other light commercial vehicles.

• However, it's getting very hard to breath in Beijing.  Sounds like China is close to reaching the kind of inflection point that came in the west with the Great Smog in London in 1952, which killed thousands of people and led to the 1956 Clean Air Act.  If China adopts similar measures, this may worsen global warming in the short term as China is currently a large source of reflective sulphate aerosols that offset warming.  Here's a picture of global spring-time anthropogenic aerosol depth from Fig 2 of Bellouin et al. 

Clearly China is a massive contributor.  Note that the distribution is different in different seasons, however - check the link for full details.