The Earth’s climate is changing. Models show us how.
The world’s climate is complex — land, oceans, atmosphere, all in a constant state of change. Feedback loops, seasonal cycles, complicated energy exchange mechanisms … how do you make sense of it all to figure out what’s going on?
Alex is a climate scientist and a physical oceanographer working on the role of the ocean in the climate system, in particular how the ocean will change in the future and what effect this has on the critters that live there. His research includes understanding how the East Australian Current will accelerate in the future, simulating how we can use virtual tuna in ocean simulations to guide sustainable fisheries and explain how a rising air in the tropical Indian Ocean can generate a marine heatwave in the South Atlantic.
———————————————— Associate Prof. Alex Sen Gupta, climate researcher at the University of UNSW, speaking to students at the 40th Professor Harry Messel International Science School, ISS2019: Frontier Science — The University of Sydney, Australia, July 2019.
This lab is planning to test the world’s first solar geoengineering experiment in the field. Here’s why that’s so controversial.
Solar geoengineering, an idea that picked up steam over a decade ago when a Nobel Prize winning scientist called for more research on this climate engineering intervention, is back in the news. The idea made it into the 2019 UN Environment Assembly agenda and was used to kickstart a global conversation surrounding the contentious response to the climate crisis.
With growing urgency and scientific interest, a team at Harvard University took up the charge to investigate solar geoengineering in a fully fledged research program.
Solar geoengineering involves a plan that would disperse particles into the stratosphere and could ultimately reduce global temperatures by bouncing the Sun’s rays back into space.
However, this type of geoengineering intervention would not fix the root cause, which is the rising funnel of greenhouse gas emissions that are getting trapped in our atmosphere.
