Annual Pings Lecture: Confronting the Climate-Energy Challenge

Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering & Material Science Annual Ping's LecturePresentsProfessor Daniel Schrag
Harvard University, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and
School of Engineering and Applied SciencesConfronting the Climate-Energy ChallengeAbstractThe increase in atmospheric CO2 due to burning coal, oil and gas represents an unprecedented experiment on the Planet Earth. We know from air bubbles trapped in ice cores that CO2 has never been higher than 300 parts per million in the last 650,000 years, and from indirect measurements, we think it was not significantly higher than this for tens of millions of years. Geologic records of climate change, as well as observations of neighboring planets, provide a variety of important lessons that can guide us in evaluating the risks of future climate change. In general, the uncertainties in our understanding of the climate system are biased towards lack of knowledge about catastrophic events. In this context, a variety of strategies will be discussed for meeting the world's energy needs with the smallest possible impact on our atmosphere, as well as considering what strategies we might require if climate change is more dramatic than we expect.Daniel Schrag is the Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Environmental Science and Engineering. Schrag studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth's history. He has examined changes in ocean circulation over the last several decades, with particular attention to El Niño and the tropical Pacific; he investigates Pleistocene ice-age cycles over the last million years; he studies the warm climates of the Eocene, 50 million years ago; and, with colleagues from Harvard, helped to develop the Snowball Earth hypothesis that explains extreme glacial events that occurred
over 600 million years ago. Currently he is working on the early
history of Mars and Earth, trying to understand the environmental conditions around the time of the origin of life. He is also working on new technological approaches to mitigating future climate change, including advanced energy technologies for low-carbon transportation fuel, and carbon sequestration. Schrag received a B.S. from Yale and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Princeton before moving to Harvard in 1997. Among various honors, he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir