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Climate Uncertainty, Emissions Reduction, and SRM

 

M. Granger Morgan

Head, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

Pierce Hall 209

29 Oxford St.

Cambridge, MA

 

Much of the research in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), a department in the Engineering School at Carnegie Mellon University, is focused on developing a better understanding of uncertainty about future climate change, finding cost effective strategies to reduce dramatically emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy system, and thinking about what to do if climate change ends up being much worse than expected.

In this talk Morgan will present a very brief overview of EPP that includes a quick summary of several of the energy and climate-related research projects now in progress.  Then in the bulk of the talk he will provide greater detail on: 1) The use of expert elicitation to characterize uncertainty about the likely response of the climate system between now and 2200; 2) The development of a regulatory framework to facilitate the deep geological sequestration of carbon dioxide; and 3) A technical and policy analysis of SRM (solar radiation management) – the idea of inducing cooling by increasing the planet's albedo in the event that we are unfortunate and end up in the "high tails" of the distribution of future climate outcomes.

 

M. Granger Morgan is Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where he is also University and Lord Chair Professor in Engineering. In addition, he holds academic appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the H. John Heinz III College. His research addresses problems in science, technology and public policy with a particular focus on energy, environmental systems, climate change and risk analysis. Much of his work has involved the development and demonstration of methods to characterize and treat uncertainty in quantitative policy analysis. At Carnegie Mellon, Morgan directs the NSF Climate Decision Making Centerand co-directs, with Lester Lave, the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. Morgan serves as Chair of the Scientific and Technical Council for the International Risk Governance Council. In the recent past, he served as Chair of the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and as Chair of the Advisory Council of the Electric Power Research Institute. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the AAAS, the IEEE, and the Society for Risk Analysis. He holds a BA from Harvard College (1963) where he concentrated in Physics, an MS in Astronomy and Space Science from Cornell (1965) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Physics and Information Sciences at the University of California at San Diego (1969).