The two US universities leading the public Global Warming discussion are Yale (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication) and Stanford (The Solutions Project). Today we are going to look at how Yale sees its climate research going forward.
Yale and the climate
The university's initiatives to combat climate change.
“Human-accelerated environmental change presents one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century,” as identified in the 2018 University Science Strategy Committee report. “Planetary solutions” is one of the top five areas for scientific investment at Yale, and it is an area of focus across the university. Faculty and students in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES), on the West Campus, in the School of Management, and in the Peabody Museum of Natural History work with colleagues in law, health sciences, architecture, engineering, economics, and the natural sciences. Together, they are creating knowledge that informs cutting-edge policy and practice.
Peter Salovey
President
Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology
I have, of course, cited both programs frequently in this Diary series. Yale, on how we talk about it and what the public thinks about it, and Stanford, as it says, on proposed solutions, by city, state, and country.
Here are several statements made in the discussion at Yale about what to do on the research front.
First, from the report cited above:
Can we mitigate climate change?
Negative emissions, carbon capture and long-term storage.
The negative emissions goal inevitably requires carbon capture from the atmosphere. Carbon capture is reasonably well-developed for extraction of CO2 from power plant emissions. To offset current levels of atmospheric CO2, however, carbon will need to be captured directly from the ambient atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 capture remains a frontier of technology and a highly challenging problem.
Some examples include “wind-mills” doused in amines that react with CO2 in passing air, and membrane separation of atmospheric nitrogen to increase CO2 concentration. Developing a variety of ambient capture strategies, using integrative insights from chemistry, engineering and atmospheric science, remains a critical component to successful mitigation strategies.
Once captured, CO2 must also be stored. Carbon storage or sequestration technology can involve injecting captured carbon into subsurface reservoirs, such as saline aquifers and coal seams. However, the CO2 remains trapped as an aqueous solution or in a supercritical “liquid” state, which can potentially leak. Permanent storage by reaction of CO2 with "mafic" minerals (found in many volcanic geological settings) includes storing carbon as carbonate minerals such as limestone and dolomite. This approach remains an active area of research and is a scientific and technological holy grail. Other means of carbon capture and storage involve iron fertilization of iron-deficient parts of the ocean. Given the vastness of the ocean and its potential as a CO2 reservoir, such capture and storage approaches may be an important component in the mix of possible solutions. Another approach for combined carbon capture and storage is the targeted use of natural biogeochemical processes within aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. All of these mediations of carbon storage remain frontiers in science.
I have written about several ways to go carbon-negative, such as
I have a diary on mafic minerals planned.
- Inject CO2 into basalt formations, where they react to form stable carbonates. Iceland has run some successful experiments with this.
- Mine olivine and serentine minerals, grind them up, and let them react with the CO2 in the air to form stable carbonate minerals. Research on this is going on worldwide.
The question for these processes is cost vs. benefits. But we can have that argument after we go off fossil fuels and the Denialists have lost their funding along with the value of fossil fuel resources.
We will get into seeding the oceans, too, another time.
Climate Solutions at Yale
Given the importance of finding Climate Solutions, the USSC is enthusiastic about a Climate Solutions initiative at Yale. The feasibility of identifying solutions to carbon capture and sequestration challenges makes a Climate Solution initiative one of significant risk. We have excellent faculty working on public perception and communications about climate change, climate modeling, and social policy around climate change. The identification of carbon capture and carbon sequestration technologies will rely upon the recruitment of senior faculty leadership to move this idea forward, as well as significant investment in facilities for the types of science and engineering required. Furthermore, governmental reluctance to acknowledge the problem of human induced climate change means that the research will require significant funding from non-governmental sources. A broad approach to environmental and climate sciences, which also includes the Environment and Evolutionary Sciences recommendation above, could include exploration and expansion of our footprint in this field.
What distinguishes Yale?
University Priorities and Academic Investments
Yale is the research university most committed to teaching and learning. We are emphatically interdisciplinary and collaborative. And we are guided by our mission of improving the world through the education of leaders for all sectors of society. If our goal is to build a more excellent Yale—a university that is the best possible version of itself—these areas of special distinction form the roadmap for moving forward.
For an example of investing where Yale must be strong, I want to touch very briefly on rankings, although I share your nervousness about being overly reliant on what are far-from-perfect indicators. With our unabashed emphasis on undergraduate education, strong teaching in Yale College, and unsurpassed residential experience, Yale has long boasted one of the very highest-ranked colleges, perennially among the top three. In the ratings of world research universities, however, we tend to be somewhere between tenth and fifteenth. This discrepancy points to an opportunity, and that opportunity is science, as it is the sciences that most differentiate Yale from those above us on such lists.
Why science? First, because science can change—and improve—the world. The discoveries and new knowledge that emerge from our faculty members’ research will help solve some of the most pressing issues of our time. The physical sciences can help us learn to live sustainably. Advances in life science save lives. And technology allows us to pursue solutions we never would have dreamed possible even a decade ago.
Science at Yale is a university-wide endeavor, including the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health, Forestry & Environmental Studies, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and beyond. By the year 2020, we will have finished the first phase of an ambitious investment in STEM research and education at Yale: the complete transformation of Science Hill. This includes new, state-of-the-art teaching labs for chemistry, biology, and soon physics in the renovated Sterling Chemistry Laboratory; the Yale Science Building, slated to open in 2019, which will house two of our FAS biology departments and part of our physics department; and common spaces including a pavilion and large auditorium that will bring together faculty and students from across the scientific disciplines—and draw faculty and students from other fields and parts of campus.
Finally, a word about the social sciences—and by this I mean not only the departments in the FAS, but also the social scientific scholarship taking place in the Law School, the School of Management, parts of Forestry, Public Health, and elsewhere. Social science at Yale is quite strong, thanks to investments we have already made in people, programs, and facilities. But one area that spans schools and departments, and that could complement existing strengths, is the application of empirical social science to public policy problems and questions—the great issues of our day. Health and health care, elections and voting, aging and social security, growth and innovation.
As we know, all of that is affected by global warming, and reacts back on the debate about it. Check out the various Green New Deal plans.
Yale University, Science Hill Master Plan
As a part of their effort to double the amount of science facility space over the next 20 years, Yale University decided to improve Science Hill, a 36-acre site located to the north of Yale’s main campus, to ensure that the university remained at the forefront of science and technology. The Science Hill Landscape and Open Space Development Plan provides the University with the framework for landscape, open space, infrastructure, and stormwater management designs to support the planned development.
Other University Programs
These listings are about on-campus actions and about academic degree programs, not about public communication.
As part of the University Impact Rankings, Times Higher Education has produced a ranking focusing on how universities are contributing to climate action. Some of the measures considered as part of the ranking are low carbon energy use, the presence of a university-wide climate action plan, and working with local or national government to address climate change planning. You can read more about the methodology here.
How to Study Climate Change in College
Climate scientists aren't the only ones engaging global warming; career options abound in various industries.