Climate Journal Club: "Geoengineering, the world's largest control problem"

Date and Time

December 2, 2014
03:00PM - 04:00PM EST

Location

HUCE Seminar Room

GS Cristi Proistosescu leads this week's ClimaTea seminar on geoengineering. He summarizes the discussion as the following:

Solar Radiation Management/Sunlight Reflection Methods (SRM) is a proposed geoengineering technique that might reduce damage from anthropogenic climate change. However, there is no one optimal method of applying SRM - the degree of compensation will vary, with residual climate changes larger over some regions and time scales than others.

The papers we will be discussing this week treat SRM as a feedback and discuss geoengineering as a control problem. The authors discuss (a) how to properly design an SRM feedback in order to manage significant uncertainty in both radiative forcing and the climate system's response; (b) how to optimize the distribution of radiative effect to minimize regional disparities.

Summary paper :Geoengineering: the World’s largest control problemMore Detailed formalism:Management of trade-offs in geoengineering through optimal choice of non-uniform radiative forcingDynamics of the coupled human–climate system resulting from closed-loop control of solar geoengineeringOptional:Solar Geoengineering to limit the rate of temperature change