I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and am also doing work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts whether helping to build one wind farm at a time was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
I have never worked with fire plume models nor looked at that presentation, but have done some of the most advanced work on understanding wind conditions on the 2km-100km scale. What I know from that, probably quite similar work, is that there are so many parameters in these type of models to tweak the output. And that often, unfortunately, practice is to keep re-running models while tweaking until the output looks like the experimental results. I am not saying this happened here, I am just encouraging anyone looking into this to really pay attention to this, especially if making important decisions. If they do not explicitly and clearly say that the model results are a first-try, “no tweak” run, I would assume they have done tweaking and would consider the results not of sufficient quality to support conclusions.
What we did in the wind speed work I was involved in was to look at performance on statistically significant numbers of never-seen-before cases, really sitting on our hands and avoiding the temptation to re-run the simulations with more “realistic” model settings.