In this Faculty Forum Online broadcast, Professor Kerry Emanuel ’76, PhD ’78 discussed a new approach to climate science that emphasizes basic understanding over black box simulation.
Research aimed at predicting future climate activity has primarily focused on large and complex numerical models. While this approach has provided some quantitative estimates of climate change, those predictions can vary greatly from one model to the next and produce doubts in the projected outcome.
In this video, after presenting a brief overview of climate research, Emanuel took questions from the worldwide MIT community via video chat.
In 2006, Emanuel was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of What We Know about Climate Change, a book The New York Times called “the single best thing written about climate change for a general audience.”