News and Outreach: Susan Solomon

MIT researchers demonstrate new approach to designing location-specific emissions-control measures

A large group of climate scientists has made a bracing statement in the journal Nature Climate Change, arguing that we are mistaken if we think global warming is only a matter of the next 100 years or so.

MIT News Office

MIT is launching a multifaceted five-year plan aimed at fighting climate change, representing a new phase in the Institute’s commitment to an issue that, the plan says, “demands society’s urgent attention.”

Citing “overwhelming” scientific evidence, “A Plan for Action on Climate Change” underscores the “risk of catastrophic outcomes” due to climate change and emphasizes that “the world needs an aggressive but pragmatic transition plan to achieve a zero-carbon global energy system.”

To that end, MIT has developed a five-year plan to enhance its efforts in five areas of climate action, whose elements have consensus support within the MIT community:

• research to further understand climate change and advance solutions to mitigate and adapt to it;
• the acceleration of low-carbon energy technology via eight new research centers;
• the development of enhanced educational programs on climate change;
• new tools to share climate information globally; and
• measures to reduce carbon use on the MIT campus.

The plan calls for MIT to convene academia, industry, and government in pursuit of three overlapping stages of progress.

“The first step,” according to the plan, “is to imagine the future as informed by research: e.g., What is the optimal mix of energy sources in 15, 25 and 35 years, in order to meet emissions targets and eventually reach a zero-carbon global energy system? And how can societies across the globe best adapt to damaging climate impacts in the meantime?”

“Next,” the plan continues, “it will be vital to establish the policy and economic incentives to achieve that future. Finally, clear technological goals and aligned incentives will focus and accelerate the research and development required to achieve success. All three phases need to be continuously refreshed: Research and development should continuously inform timelines and targets. The success of this strategy depends on the best efforts of all three sectors.”

The plan specifically asserts the need for a price on carbon in order to align the incentives of industry with the imperatives of climate science.

The plan also announces that MIT will not divest from the fossil fuel industry. This decision and the overall plan emerged from more than a year of broad consultation with the MIT community, including extensive public discussion led by the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation, and engagement with the student-led group Fossil Free MIT. This group originally petitioned MIT to divest from 200 companies and more recently has asked for “reinvestment in campus sustainability, and a reinvention of the approach that MIT takes toward climate change.”

In his announcement letter today to the MIT community, President L. Rafael Reif said the plan would not have taken the shape it did without Fossil Free MIT’s “willingness to work with us toward the shared goal of meaningful climate action.” He encouraged the group’s members to join in the work ahead.

A call to service, on campus and beyond

In his letter, Reif called upon all members of the MIT community to take action. “There is room and reason for each of us to be part of the solution,” he wrote. “I urge everyone to join us in rising to this historic challenge.”

Alumni are being called upon to imagine how they can help MIT execute the plan. A competition announced in the plan has been created in order to elicit the most effective ways for the MIT alumni community to take personal and combined action.

“MIT’s 130,000 alumni represent an exceptional untapped resource for driving substantive progress on climate change,” the plan says, “and we are certain that our graduates will know better than we do how to make the most of their strength, from their technical expertise to their professional and community networks.”

The competition will be hosted by the MIT Climate CoLab, a digital community that engages nearly 50,000 people from over 170 countries to crowdsource climate priorities and novel solutions. The plan calls for the Climate CoLab to expand its overall capacity, so that MIT can serve as a vital hub of crowdsourced solutions to climate change.

A year and more in the making

The plan is the result of an MIT-wide initiative on climate launched in May 2014, and led by Provost Martin Schmidt; Vice President for Research Maria Zuber; MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Director Robert Armstrong; and Susan Solomon, founding director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative.

In September 2014, the initiative appointed the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation, chaired by Roman Stocker, then associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, to lead public discussion of MIT’s options for addressing climate change.

The plan credits members of the committee, as well as members of Fossil Free MIT, for having “brought climate change to the top of MIT’s institutional agenda by urging that MIT assume a role of public leadership.”

“Today’s plan is truly MIT’s plan,” Zuber says. “There is a hunger across the Institute to apply MIT’s strengths to the problem. With a firm theory of the case for how to bring cohesion to our work in science, engineering, and policy, we are now poised to set forth on five years of critical work. Today is an important beginning.”

In his letter to the MIT community, Reif wrote that MIT will rely on Zuber to lead MIT’s research, outreach, and convening efforts.

“President Reif and Vice President for Research Zuber have led us to a very important day in the Institute’s history,” says Diana Chapman Walsh, a member of the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation (MIT’s board of trustees) and former president of Wellesley College. “The world is calling for leadership at a time of urgency and uncertainty. Today, MIT is deepening its commitment to meaningful action.”

Intensifying MIT’s impact

The plan outlines five areas for “direct action”:

1. An improved understanding of climate change, and practical solutions to mitigate and adapt to it. As part of its Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), now led by Professor John E. Fernandez, who was named as ESI’s second director earlier this week, MIT is providing $5 million to back further research on a series of cross-disciplinary projects and will seek outside support for promising new work.

2. Accelerating progress on low-carbon technologies. Building on decades of faculty research, the MIT Energy Initiative is planning to launch eight new low-carbon energy centers, in cooperation with corporate partners, each focused on the advancement of a specific type of technology. Each center will seek about $8 million in annual funding, or more than $300 million in total over the five-year period — which the plan says represents “far and away the greatest opportunity for MIT to make a difference on climate change.” The eight centers will be in the areas of solar energy; energy storage; materials; carbon capture, use, and sequestration; nuclear energy; nuclear fusion; energy bioscience; and the electrical grid.

1. In addition, MIT plans additional research intended to help transform at least four major types of energy-related systems. These projects will concern the future of the utility industry, ground transportation, air transportation, and cities. And MIT is commissioning a multidisciplinary report to envision the pathway to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon future.

3. Education. MIT plans to create an Environment and Sustainability degree option; develop an online Climate Change and Sustainability credential; and, in a joint effort between MIT’s School of Engineering and School of Architecture and Planning, find ways to insert principles of “benign and sustainable design” throughout MIT’s engineering and design instruction.

4. Additional knowledge-sharing tools. MIT will expand its range of short courses and seminars for executives (including through online tools); create a new web portal on climate change; expand its Climate CoLab crowdsourcing tool (as noted above); and continue to focus on climate issues through Solve.

5. Reducing emissions on the MIT campus, and using the campus as a “test bed” for climate action. MIT plans to reduce campus emission by at least 32 percent by 2030 (the amount set as a goal by the federal government); eliminate the use of fuel oil on campus by 2019; enact “carbon shadow pricing,” to explore the effects of assigning a self-imposed cost to campus carbon emissions; pursue more carbon-efficient technologies as it renews its stock of campus buildings and systems; and build an open data platform on campus energy use.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who earned a PhD from MIT in 1949 and served on the economics faculty in the 1950s, has urged the MIT community to take action on climate change and endorses today’s plan, calling it “a terrific document. It is inspirational that MIT is working on the subject with such energy and impact.” Shultz chairs the External Advisory Board of the MIT Energy Initiative.

Robert Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative, says, “The plan recognizes the central role that climate change will have in driving transformation of the global energy system. The eight low-carbon energy centers leverage MIT’s strengths in working across disciplines and in deeply engaging with industry to tackle society’s greatest challenges.”

Investment questions

The plan announces that in the interest of fighting climate change, MIT will not divest from companies in the fossil fuel sector.

“We believe that divestment — a dramatic public disengagement — is incompatible with the strategy of engagement with industry to solve problems that is at the heart of today’s plan. Combatting climate change will require intense collaboration across the research community, industry and government,” the plan states.

Divestment has been a principal aim of Fossil Free MIT, which had gathered 3,400 signatures from members of the MIT community, asking for divestment from 200 companies in the fossil-fuel industry. MIT hosted a public debate on the issue in April, in which MIT faculty, professors from other institutions, and investment executives addressed the potential merits and drawbacks of divestment.

The plan states that MIT is “not naïve about the pernicious role of some segments of the fossil fuel industry in creating the current policy deadlock. We deplore the practice of ‘disinformation,’ through which some industry players and related groups have actively obstructed clear public understanding of the problem of climate change.”

MIT’s position, the plan states, is that “well-crafted policies can harness the creative forces of industry to serve the common good.” Further, it argues “that growing awareness of climate change may be generating a tipping point in that policy dynamic now. Witness the fact that in Paris last Friday, October 16, the CEOs of ten of the world’s largest oil and gas companies declared that their ‘shared ambition is for a 2°C future,’ and called for ‘an effective climate change agreement’ at next month’s 21st session of the United Nations Conference of Parties to the UN Framework on Climate Change (COP21).”

“Six of those companies — BP, Eni, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Statoil, and Total — are members of MITEI,” the plan continues. “We believe we have greater power to build on such momentum not by distancing ourselves from fossil fuel companies, but by bringing them closer to us.”

Ultimately, the plan states, massive changes are needed in the production, distribution, and consumption of energy to avert a potential climate catastrophe: “To solve this global problem, humanity must reorder the global energy status quo.”

Robert Millard, chairman of the MIT Corporation, calls the plan “bold, respectful, complete, honest, and well-reasoned. It therefore reflects,” he says, “the highest aspirations of MIT."

Photo: Christopher Harting/AboveSummit

by David L. Chandler | MIT News

John E. Fernandez, a professor of building technology in the Department of Architecture, has been named as the new director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), a campuswide initiative launched in 2014. Fernandez succeeds Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, who has served as the Initiative’s founding director.

“I’m honored to be taking over from such an eminent scientist,” says Fernandez, who has served on the MIT faculty for 16 years. “It’s really humbling to hear her talk about her work and be given the opportunity to extend the reach of the ESI.”

Fernandez’s appointment was announced today in a letter to the MIT community from Provost Martin Schmidt and Vice President for Research Maria Zuber.

“Professor Fernandez approaches this role as a world expert on high-performance, sustainable building materials, as a leading scholar on the resources and infrastructure of cities — home to more than half the human population — and as a practicing architect who has led the design for more than 2.5 million square feet of new construction in cities from Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles to Jakarta, Tokyo, and Shanghai,” Schmidt and Zuber wrote. “A member of our faculty since 1999, he founded and directs the Urban Metabolism Group, a highly multidisciplinary research group that studies how intelligent design and technology can reduce the resource intensity of cities.”

Since its founding in May of last year, ESI has awarded nine seed grants for research projects, on efforts that include promoting sustainable consumption in cities, improving methods for safe mining on land and at sea, and improving air quality and plans to mitigate global climate change. Such highly multidisciplinary projects can be difficult to fund through traditional channels.

“I’m delighted to be passing the reins to such a well-qualified and distinguished scholar,” Solomon says. “John Fernandez has a deep understanding of MIT’s strengths across a very diverse suite of environmental challenges, and he brings a clear commitment to excellence and breadth. I’ll be looking forward to seeing him take ESI to the next level.”

Fernandez says ESI’s broad scope is illustrated by the very different backgrounds of its first two directors. “I’m very optimistic about the vision for ESI,” he says: If this initiative can embrace leaders from fields as different as atmospheric science, architecture, and building technology, “It speaks to the breadth of MIT, and the commitment to the ESI.”

Fernandez’s research looks at the environmental consequences of societal activities — which tend to be concentrated in the world’s cities. “Decisions that architects and planners make can have huge ramifications, because the built environment accounts for the consumption of enormous quantities of energy and materials,” he says. Such environmental consequences, he says, “should be integral to a designer’s thinking process.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown the built environment to be one of the major contributors to global emissions,” Fernandez says. “What is less well known is that a majority of raw materials extracted and processed are used in the construction and operation of buildings, roads and other large-scale infrastructure. For that reason, much of my work has been focused on understanding the environmental benefits of resource-efficient buildings and cities.”

Since more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, Fernandez says, he has focused on systems involved in the functioning of modern cities, from buildings and transportation to the delivery of food, water, sanitation services, and goods — and the resource intensities associated with these services. The research outcomes from his group contribute to a field known as “urban metabolism,” because it treats the city as an interconnected whole, rather than focusing on individual components or economic sectors. This is best done through a multidisciplinary approach.

In the work of the ESI, Fernandez says, “many solutions will require multiple perspectives” — which underscores the importance of communication and collaboration among disciplines, and an understanding of different modes for tackling problems through science, engineering, design, and policy.

Fernandez sums up his vision for the Initiative by considering the three components of its name: environmental, solutions, and initiative.

On the environment, he says, “the priority is to progress beyond the discussion of the uncertainties about climate change, to delve deeper into research that tells us more about the consequences of climate change, and to do research in targeted ways that will tell us about the kinds of risks we are facing.” Researchers tackling those issues should be provided with resources to do their work, but also to help them in communicating “a very simple but unequivocal message that the science of the climate is well-established and the most conclusive it can be, and is telling us very dire things that we should really pay attention to.”

The second priority, Fernandez says, lies in solutions. It’s essential, he says, “to propose pathways toward mitigation and adaptation in every aspect of society, with regard to every important human activity, enlisting engineers, scientists, architects, economists, political scientists, and others, and with regard to all regions of the world.” For example, hundreds of millions of people live in coastal cities, which face significant threats from sea-level rise. Designers need to converge on integrated solutions with other disciplines to enlist multiple systems for adapting these cities, he says “so that we’re not approaching this in a siloed way.”

The initiative part of the ESI’s name, Fernandez says, “is the part that I hope will bear important short-term and local results for MIT. I believe this initiative has the critical responsibility to initiate action across diverse communities at MIT.”

The ESI, Fernandez adds, should involve all sectors of our community — undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, researchers, and staff. “We will be working to initiate a great many actions for the environment, both local and global,” Fernandez says. “Some will be very targeted and modest, and others extraordinarily ambitious, broad and sweeping.”

One example of a way in which Fernandez hopes to implement this agenda, he says, is in funding student projects, including some that might relate directly to residential life: “Support for even very modest but very immediate grassroots projects, where it’s right there in front of you, is something I’m very keen to launch as soon as possible,” he says.

by Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Over two weeks in December, delegates from virtually every country in the world will gather in Paris for the 21st annual United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their ambitious goal: to hammer out a binding international agreement on climate action.

In advance of the conference, organizers have requested that countries submit Intended Nationally Determined Contributions — pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by an amount that should be “fair and ambitious,” in order to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Now a new study by researchers at MIT and the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, has found that pledges by the three largest emitters — the United States, the European Union, and China — leave very little room for the rest of the world to emit.

Based on the pledges submitted, the U.S. plans to reduce emissions by 28 percent by 2025, and 83 percent by 2050, while the EU will work toward reductions of 40 percent by 2030, and 80 percent by 2050. China has not pledged a reduction, but has indicated that its emissions will peak by 2030; China also aims to improve its energy efficiency by 60 to 65 percent.

Despite these substantial commitments, the researchers found that the rest of the world’s nations would be forced to adopt per capita emissions 7 to 14 times lower than the EU, U.S., or China, by 2030, in order to keep global temperatures from rising higher than 2 C.

“The challenge of this problem is, we have about 7 billion people on the planet, and about 1 billion of us live pretty well,” says Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT. “The other 6 billion are struggling to develop, and if they develop using carbon as we did, the planet is going to get quite hot. And hot is, of course, just the beginning of the story in terms of what climate change actually means.”

Solomon and her colleagues have published their results in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

What’s fair?

While countries were asked to demonstrate that their pledges were fair and ambitious, conference organizers provided no framework with which to make such an assessment.

In the new study, the MIT and Norwegian scientists gauged the fairness and ambition of the top three emitters’ pledges using a “cumulative emissions” approach developed by the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The cumulative emissions approach finds that a best estimate of 3.7 trillion tons of carbon dioxide can be emitted globally before temperatures rise 2 C above pre-industrial levels. Given the amount of carbon dioxide emitted thus far, and accounting for other greenhouse gases, land-use change, and other factors, the remaining amount is about 1 trillion tons — about 30 years’ worth of current emissions.

How to fairly allocate the remaining allowable emissions among the world’s nations is a complex and contentious issue. Solomon and her colleagues examined two scenarios for fairly reducing emissions by the EU, U.S., and China: an equity approach, which divides the global quota of emissions among all nations based on population; and an inertia approach, which divides the quota based on the current shares of global emissions.

Based on their calculations, they found all three emitters’ pledges fall short of fair: The U.S. and EU pledges may be considered in line with keeping global warming at 2 C only under the inertia scenario, in which the high emitters continue to emit based on their current shares. If, however, both were to adopt an equity scenario, they would have to pledge significantly more emissions reductions, to account for their relatively small share of the world’s population.

China’s pledge deviates significantly from both scenarios, as both would require the country to immediately begin drastic reductions. Instead, China has pledged to begin reducing its emissions in 2030, so as to improve the quality of living for its millions of citizens now living under the poverty line.

“The environment we ask for”

In sum, Solomon and her colleagues conclude that even if the three largest emitters fulfill their pledges, they would “lock the world into a higher long-term temperature increase” of around 3 C.

“People don’t realize that 2 degrees Celsius is a big change,” Solomon says. For instance, she points to the summer of 2003, in which an unprecedented hot summer killed more than 10,000 people throughout Europe.

“That summer was about 2 degrees Celsius hotter than an average European summer,” Solomon says. “By 2050, every summer in Europe will probably be 2 degrees hotter than average, if we keep going the way we’re going right now. Three degrees, in my opinion, is a really frightening change.”

To stave off additional warming, Solomon says countries will need to significantly ramp up efforts to decarbonize. In the short term, she says, international climate talks must integrate discussions on research and development, to spur technological innovation.

“We have to decarbonize the energy system via research and development, changes in technologies and policies, and we need to encourage those to happen,” Solomon says.  “We’ll get the environment we ask for. History has proven time and again that public engagement is essential in making anything change on this planet.”

by David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

New research shows that relatively small volcanic eruptions can increase aerosol particles in the atmosphere, temporarily mitigating the global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The impact of such smaller eruptions has been underestimated in climate models, the researchers say, and helps to account for a discrepancy between those models and the actual temperatures observed over the last 15 years.

The findings are reported in a paper in the journal Geophysical Review Letters, co-authored by MIT Professor Susan Solomon, postdoc David Ridley, and 15 others. They help to explain the apparent slowdown in the pace of global warming recorded over the last 10 to 15 years — possibly explaining as much as half of that slowdown, the researchers say.

“We’ve learned a lot of new things about how the Earth’s climate changes, not just from year to year but from decade to decade, as a result of recent research,” says Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT. “Several independent sets of observations show that relatively modest volcanic eruptions are important.”

For the last several years, “It’s been quite clear that the observed trends are not following what the models say,” Ridley adds: While the overall warming trend continues, its rate is slower than projected. Previous research has suggested that some of that discrepancy can be accounted for by an increase in the amount of warm water being carried down to the deep ocean, but other processes can also contribute.

The cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, was already widely recognized; the new work shows that smaller eruptions can have a significant cooling effect as well, and provides a better estimate of how much of the recent reduction in warming could be explained by such eruptions: about 30 to 50 percent of the discrepancy, the team found.

The team found that small eruptions produce a significant amount of aerosol particles, which reflect sunlight, in a region of the upper atmosphere that is relatively poorly monitored: Satellites can provide good data about the atmosphere down to around 15 kilometers above ground level, below which clouds interfere. The team filled in the missing region using multiple balloon, laser radar (lidar), and ground-based measurements.

Aerosols in that intermediate zone, from about a dozen modest eruptions around the world during the last 15 years, may double previous estimates of the cooling effect of eruptions, Ridley says.

“It’s always exciting in science when you can find multiple measurements that lead to a common conclusion,” Solomon adds. “Several independent sets of observations now show that relatively modest volcanic eruptions are more important for global climate than previously thought.”

Overall, these smaller eruptions have lowered the increase of global temperature since 2000 by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius, counteracting some of the warming that would otherwise have occurred. Now, using this new information, groups that carry out climate modeling can update their models to more accurately project global climate change over the coming decades, Ridley says.

Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, says, “This work helps to better quantify the impacts of the most important natural cause of climate change, volcanic eruptions. We have an imperfect observational system for volcanic aerosols, and this work exploits some previously unused sources of information to better quantify the effects of small eruptions for the past decade.”

Robock, who was not involved in this research, adds that in light of these findings, “We need a more robust observing system for volcanic aerosols, to do a better job of measuring future small eruptions.”

Ridley and Solomon were the lead authors of this paper, joining authors from Wyoming, Russia, Germany, Japan, California, New York, Virginia, Colorado, and the U.K. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of the Russian Federation, and the Russian Science Foundation.

By Jennifer Chu

For the past two summers, Australians have sweated through record heat waves, with thermometers climbing as high as 118 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the country. In January, officials were forced to halt tennis matches during the Australian Open due to extreme heat — a decision made following several days of sizzling temperatures.

Now MIT researchers have found that the intensity of summer temperatures in Australia and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere may be better predicted as early as the previous spring by an unlikely indicator: ozone.

From their study, published in the Journal of Climate, the scientists found that as the springtime ozone hole’s severity varies from year to year, the temperatures in Australia and southern regions of Africa and South America reveal correlations: Years with higher springtime ozone experience hotter summers, and vice versa.

The results suggest that ozone levels may help meteorologists predict the severity of summertime temperatures months in advance.

“No one has actually looked at the variation of ozone as a way to forecast or predict the climate or the next summer’s temperature,” says lead author Justin Bandoro, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “This could be especially important for farmers, and for areas like southeastern Australia, where most of that nation’s population resides.”

Bandoro’s MIT co-authors include Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science, and postdoc Aaron Donohoe, as well as David Thompson of Colorado State University and Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A spring forecast for summer temperatures

In 1987, countries around the world signed the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that established a global phase-out of chemicals that cause ozone depletion. Because of the long lifetime of the chemicals, the ozone hole will continue to occur for many years, but it is expected to slowly begin to become less severe in the next several decades.

Bandoro and his colleagues analyzed annual ozone measurements, from 1979 through the most recent heat wave in 2013.

The team combined data from various sources, including a station in Antarctica that has measured total ozone levels in the same atmospheric column since the 1950s. The team performed a correlation analysis to identify links between ozone levels and variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind patterns.

Although the ozone hole won’t close for many years, its intensity does vary somewhat from one year to another, and the depth of the hole affects an atmospheric phenomenon known as the Southern Annular Mode, which describes the wind patterns that circle Antarctica and influence the strength and position of fronts and storm systems in the Southern Hemisphere.

In years with high springtime ozone, the researchers found that winds shifted, bringing hotter summer temperatures to much of Australia and parts of southern Africa and South America. Lower ozone levels reversed this behavior, with winds leading to cooler summertime temperatures to these same regions.

Expect more extreme temperatures as ozone hole recovers

The link between springtime ozone and summertime temperatures is particularly strong for the present period, while ozone is still in a recovery phase. When the researchers examined this link from a period before the ozone hole had begun to form, they observed a much weaker correlation.

The implication, Bandoro says, is that as ozone levels likely rise in the coming decades, these parts of the Southern Hemisphere will probably experience systematically hotter summers.

“We can expect that these types of summers are going to be more frequent as the ozone hole recovers in coming decades,” Bandoro says. “When the ozone hole is deep, it essentially holds back climate change from showing its face, and Australia is just starting to feel this effect in the summertime in years with shallower ozone holes.”

David Karoly, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, says the MIT group has shown, for the first time, a strong relationship between the severity of summer temperatures in Australia and the strength of the ozone hole the previous spring. The results, he says, point to a long-term warming trend in the Southern Hemisphere.

“As the ozone hole recovers this century, the masking effects of ozone depletion causing reduced summer warming over the Southern Hemisphere will disappear,” says Karoly, who did not participate in the study. “Then there will be an acceleration of the summer warming trends over Australia and South Africa, as the ozone hole recovers and the masking influence disappears.”

David Chandler
MIT News Office

MIT has announced a major new campuswide initiative to promote transformative, cross-disciplinary research relating to the environment.

The initiative will be formally launched in the fall, and its founding director will be Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science. Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, stewarded the establishment of the new initiative, and expressed gratitude to Solomon for having agreed to serve as its first leader.

“Professor Solomon is one of the finest climate scientists in the world,” Zuber says. “Her service in the coming year will be of immense value to MIT, and to the world.” A search will be mounted for a permanent director to run the initiative after its first year.

A major component of the initiative will be the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS), whose creation was announced this week; J-WAFS was established through a major gift from MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel. Headed by John Lienhard, the Jameel Professor of Water and Food, the lab is intended to help humankind adapt to a rapidly rising population, a changing climate, and increasing urbanization and development. The lab will work toward environmentally benign, scalable solutions for water and food supply across a range of regional, social, and economic contexts. 

Regarding the environment initiative, Solomon says, “Our faculty, students, and staff have a deeply shared vision of being responsible stewards of the environment. This initiative will focus and amplify the aspirations of our community to understand, inform, and seek solutions to pressing problems of the natural world and built environment.”

This new initiative, she says, will promote research that engages wide participation by members of the MIT community to address the most significant interdisciplinary problems in our environment, spanning the physical and social sciences; engineering; and urban planning and policy.

“The goal of the initiative will be very specific: for faculty members to self-organize into teams of people who are interested in defining genuinely new research directions; to come up with ideas across schools; and to propose research that might not easily be funded by current federal agencies, which tend to be defined by disciplinary areas,” Solomon says. Such interdisciplinary research is recognized as a key way to bring about significant advances in technology and understanding.

Like the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), the new program is also expected to produce detailed, comprehensive studies in particular areas of concern — in this case, large-scale environmental issues. “Such studies by MIT would be welcomed on Capitol Hill,” Solomon says.“One of the most important challenges of our time is the question of how to build a sustainable human society,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to the MIT community this morning. “The intense interest in this subject from our students and faculty reflects a shared sense of urgency and obligation. With Professor Solomon’s leadership, the environment initiative will help focus MIT’s distinctive strengths on advancing science, engineering, management, design and policy solutions to help drive the kind of progress required in time to make a difference.”

The initiative, which does not yet have a formal name, will start with funding for five years of operation, partly provided by MIT; after that it is expected to be self-sustaining, Solomon says. It will tie together research undertaken by many departments and centers at MIT, including, in addition to J-WAFS, the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; the Center for Global Change Science; and the Earth System Initiative, among others. Some themes of the new initiative will link closely with ongoing efforts in MITEI, particularly on climate change and water.

The search for the director was announced in February by Provost Martin Schmidt. The search committee, chaired by Professor Markus Buehler, included Professors Rob van der Hilst, Eran Ben-Joseph, JoAnne Yates, and Melissa Nobles. Professors Robert Armstrong and Vladimir Bulović also served on the committee; they were asked to help think through coordination with existing MIT initiatives. The committee worked with students to get their input.

The initiative will put out a call for initial interdisciplinary proposals this fall, Zuber says, adding: “We want new ideas. MIT can bring its special talents to bear to address global concerns, in the process drawing in people from across the campus.”

Additionally, a group consisting of Solomon, Zuber, Schmidt, and Armstrong (who serves as director of MITEI) will lead a series of conversations around campus on how MIT should engage to address the issue of climate change. This activity will include a series of lectures by prominent speakers representing a diverse set of perspectives.

The initiative will place a high priority on engaging the many students whose interests center on the environment and sustainability issues, Solomon says.

“There are a lot of opportunities for synergies,” she continues. “The initiative will take advantage of the traditionally open atmosphere at MIT, which fosters interactions among people working in very different fields of study. That spirit of collaboration, and the possibilities it unleashes, are very powerful.”

Alli Gold Roberts
MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

By the late 1990s, scientists had observed more than two decades of rapid global warming, and expected the warming trend to continue. Instead, despite continuing increases in greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth’s surface temperatures have remained nearly flat for the last 15 years. The International Panel on Climate Change verified this recent warming “hiatus” in its latest report.

Researchers around the globe have been working to understand this puzzle—looking at heat going into the oceans, changes in wind patterns, and other factors to explain why temperatures have stayed nearly stable, while greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to rise. In a study published today in Nature Geoscience, a team of scientists from MIT and elsewhere around the U.S. report that volcanic eruptions have contributed to this recent cooling, and that most climate models have not accurately accounted for the effects of volcanic activity.

“This is the most comprehensive observational evaluation of the role of volcanic activity on climate in the early part of the 21st century,” says co-author Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT. “We assess the contributions of volcanoes on temperatures in the troposphere—the lowest layer of the atmosphere—and find they’ve certainly played some role in keeping the Earth cooler.”

There are many components of the Earth’s climate system that can increase or decrease the temperature of the globe. For example, while greenhouse gases cause warming, some types of small particles, known as aerosols, cause cooling. When volcanoes erupt explosively enough, they enhance these aerosols—a phenomenon referred to as “volcanic forcing.”

“The recent slowdown in observed surface and tropospheric warming is a fascinating detective story,” says Ben Santer, the lead author of the study and a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “There is not a single culprit, as some scientists have claimed. Multiple factors are implicated. The real scientific challenge is to obtain hard quantitative estimates of the contributions of each of these factors to the so-called slowdown.”

The researchers verified the cooling phenomenon by performing two different statistical tests to determine whether recent volcanic eruptions have cooling effects that can be distinguished from the intrinsic variability of the climate. The team found evidence for significant correlations between volcanic aerosol observations and satellite-based estimates of both tropospheric temperature and sunlight reflected by the particles off the top of the atmosphere.

“What’s exciting in this work was that we could detect the influence of the volcanic aerosols in new ways. Using satellite observations confirmed the fact that the volcanic particles reflected a significant amount of the sun’s energy out to space, and of course losing energy means cooling—and the tropospheric temperatures show that too,” explains Solomon, who is also a researcher with MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “There are still uncertainties in exactly how big the effects are, so there is more work to do.”

Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University and a leading expert on the impacts of volcanic eruptions on climate, says these findings are an important part of the larger climate picture. “This paper reminds us that there are multiple causes of climate change, both natural and anthropogenic, and that we need to consider all of them when interpreting past climate and predicting future climate.”

“Since none of the standard scenarios for evaluating future global warming include volcanic eruptions,” Robock adds, “this paper will help us quantify the impacts of future large and small eruptions when they happen, and thus better interpret the role of humans in causing climate change.”

This research was led by a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and builds upon work Solomon conducted in 2011, finding that aerosols in an upper layer of the atmosphere—the stratosphere—are persistently variable and must be included in climate models to accurately depict climate changes.

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

By Michael Craig, Amanda Giang, Colin Thackrayʉ۬

What’s the difference between climate change, the Northern spotted owl, and acid rain?

That question is not the beginning of a bad joke. Rather, it was the type of question that lay at the heart of the class ‘Science, Politics, and Environmental Policy’ offered this past fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the first time, the class was co-taught by Professors Susan Solomon of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Judy Layzer of Urban Studies and Planning – an interdisciplinary team that drew students from diverse backgrounds across MIT’s schools and departments. Through weekly case studies, the class aimed to better understand how the United States has dealt with environmental problems and the multifaceted role of science in that process.

Each week, students focused on a different environmental issue, ranging from historical examples like the use of lead in gasoline, to currently unfolding debates, like the environmental impacts of unconventional shale gas production. Through reading, writing, and discussion, students explored how and why these issues entered the policy agenda (or didn’t), evolving policy responses, and how science fit into the picture. While fast and hard conclusions were elusive, as the class drew to a close students reflected on several themes that emerged over the course of the semester: the complexity of the policy-making process, the convoluted path that science takes from its origin to its use in policy, and the importance of storytelling for communicating science effectively.

Opening the black box of policy-making

Many of us initially saw the policy process as a black box – we could see the inputs (mainly science) and outputs (environmental policy), but did not fully grasp how one led to the other. Over the course of the semester, we came to a far better understanding of what levers exist to influence the policy-making process.

Some of those levers are litigation, direct involvement in the political process, and communication to the public. Each can influence the conversion of inputs to outputs, but vary in effectiveness under different circumstances. In part, such circumstances emerge from existing economic and political institutions, which can constrain policymaking and create path dependency. Recognizing these realities through case studies demonstrated the importance of looking at policy issues from different angles and thinking carefully about the best strategy for effecting change.

The path from science to policy

As we peeled the lid off the black box of policymaking, we also began to recognize how convoluted the path science travels from generation to use in policymaking can be. Science does not pass directly from academics to policymakers, but rather is filtered and translated by many individuals. These individuals – and even scientists themselves – have differing values, biases, and goals that can lead them to different interpretations of, and conclusions from, science. What role, if any, should scientists play along science’s path from lab to policy? Do scientists who act as advocates harm the credibility of science as a whole, and if so, does this harm outweigh the potential benefits? For scientists who act as the ‘experts’ that communicate the scientific basis of environmental issues to non-scientists, how do their biases and values shape their actions and their interpretation of science? If science is being filtered and reinterpreted, how can we ensure the veracity of information we receive that is purportedly "based on science”?

Stories matter

Over the course of the semester, the importance of storytelling also emerged as a major theme. In many of the cases we studied, public engagement was a key driver for policy action, so effectively communicating with and reaching the public is crucial. Doing so requires the ability to tell a clear story – to communicate information (scientific or otherwise) clearly, concisely, and in a way that is relevant to the audience. Focusing on what you know can help in putting forth a clear narrative, and while uncertainties are important to convey, they do not need to be the focus of communication.

There is no easy formula for developing strong environmental policies, nor are there simple rules for how science should be involved. That said, 'Science, Politics, and Environmental Policy' helped us develop a more nuanced understanding of the complex policy-making process, and gave us tools to engage in it strategically, and with self-awareness. Rarely is there an opportunity to discuss the many-layered environmental policy system with students with such diverse expertise. The confluence of ideas and points of view from the varied backgrounds of both the students and professors resulted in a unique learning experience for this collection of young environmental scholars.

Colin Thackray is a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences working with Noelle Selin. Amanda Giang and Michael Craig are graduate students in MIT's Engineering Systems Division.