Collaborators: Brian
Toon, Julie Lundquist, Nicole Lovenduski, and
Yunping Xi (University of Colorado); Chuck Bardeen (NCAR); Jonas Jägermeyr (Columbia University); Lili Xia,
Gal Hochman, Joshua Coupe, and Hainan Zhang (Rutgers University)
In the 1980s much of my work addressed the problem of
nuclear winter, the climatic effects of nuclear war, demonstrating long-term
(several year) effects with a computer model, disproving the dirty snow effect,
and discovering observational evidence of surface cooling due to forest fire
smoke plumes in the atmosphere. I am now once again doing research in this area,
using modern climate models to look at the climatic effects of regional and
global nuclear
conflicts, funded by the
Open Philanthropy Project. Our latest work shows that even a "small" regional nuclear conflict could
have severe global climatic effects, that there are still enough nuclear weapons in
global arsenals to produce nuclear winter, and that the impacts would last for a
decade.
This is the most serious environmental threat faced by humans and demands
immediate policy attention. If you are a scientist, you can join me on the
Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction to work on policy changes.
Even Fidel Castro was
interested.
Funded by
NSF and
SilverLining, we
are evaluating the efficacy and consequences of proposed schemes to reduce incoming solar
radiation to counteract global warming by injecting aerosol particles into the
stratosphere or brightening marine clouds. Our
recent papers describe climate model simulations and the benefits,
risks, and costs of stratospheric geoengineering, and the agricultural impacts
of geoengineering. Visit our Rutgers Impact Studies of Climate Intervention (RISCI) lab
and http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/GeoMIP/ for the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP).
For my latest PowerPoint on climate intervention (102 Mb),
click here.
Collaborators: Joshua Coupe (Rutgers University), Brian
Zambri (MIT), Anja Schmidt (University of Cambridge), and Michael Mills
(NCAR)
We were funded by
NSF to study the effects of volcanic eruptions
on climate using computer models and data analysis. Our papers on volcanic
eruptions and climate
include studies of winter warming from large tropical eruptions,
climatic effects of high-latitude eruptions (including how they have produced
reduced precipitation and famine in Africa and Asia), radiative forcing from volcanic stratospheric aerosol clouds,
evaluation of the volcanic record in ice cores, effects of supervolcanoes,
impacts of large volcanic eruptions on El Niño and
how volcanic eruptionsproduced the Little Ice Age.
I have produced a PowerPoint presentation of the effects of volcanic
eruptions on climate that can be used for teaching undergraduate and graduate
classes. It is 222 MB, and you can get it by clicking here. You will also need the movie, pin.AVI.
Visit http://www.volmip.org/ for the Model Intercomparison Project on the climatic response to Volcanic forcing (VolMIP)
and http://sparc-ssirc.org/
for the Stratospheric Sulfur and its Role in Climate activity.
