Trust but Verify: The Science of Climate Treaty Verification

Abstract

[evdate 2015-10-28] IAS distinguished lecture. Title from opening screen.

Abstract: The world's nations are gathering to pledge targets for future greenhouse gas emissions. How well can we determine whether a nation is meeting its emission targets? Gases are mixed rapid, albeit incompletely, in the atmosphere. This rapid mixing confounds the problem of climate treaty verification. In this lecture, the speaker will discuss the Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of climate treaty verification. The new satellite, the Orbital Carbon Observatory 2, successfully launched on July 2 2014, delivers unprecedented observations of CO₂ variations in the atmosphere. The speaker and her research group present a 'top-down' approach for estimating carbon dioxide emissions from the atmospheric CO₂ variations. Satellite and in situ CO₂ observations together with raw weather observations are assimilated into a global carbon- climate model, so that surface sources and sinks of CO₂ can be inferred as that required for mass conservation.

Prof Inez Fung received her S.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Sc.D. in Meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1998, she joined the University of California at Berkeley as the founding director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center and she was also the founding director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. She is currently Professor of Atmospheric Science at UC Berkeley.

Prof Fung's research focuses on understanding and predicting the causes and consequences of changes in the abundance of climatically-significant trace species in the atmosphere. Her group develops and applies large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, methane, dust and other trace substances around the globe; the transport and mixing of trace constituents by atmospheric circulation; and the interaction of these trace constituents with climate.

Prof Fung is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of Academia Sinica (Taiwan); a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. She was also appointed to the US National Science Board in 2012. She has received numerous awards including the NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union, and a Distinguished Achievement Award for climate system modeling from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. She contributed to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Duration: 75 min.