MAE Seminar: 4:00 PM in B11 Kimball Hall Tuesday January 27th, 2015
Title: Geoengineering: The World’s Largest Control Challenge
Speaker: Doug MacMartin
Research Professor
California Institute of Technology
Host: Mark Campbell
Geoengineering: The World’s Largest Control Challenge
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Solar geoengineering aims to reflect some sunlight back to space, with the goal of reducing some of the risks associated with climate change. The best understood of these approaches is to add aerosols to the stratosphere. While we know this would cool the planet, we do not yet understand how to design strategies that would minimize important risks of geoengineering. There are many reasons for concern, ranging from “winners and losers” that might result from regional inequalities (i.e., who gets to set the thermostat?) to the irreducible uncertainty regarding the climate effects (how do we engineer a system that we don’t understand?) However, geoengineering is at least in part a control problem, and engineering tools can help – from optimization that minimizes regional differences, to feedback that helps manage outcomes despite uncertainty. The use of feedback makes this, quite literally, the world’s largest control challenge!
Time permitting, I will discuss several other applications from my research, applying tools and ideas from engineering feedback analysis to climate science, including system identification, and using feedback as a tool in climate model analysis.
