Clouds play a key role in climate by removing pollutants from the atmosphere, shielding the Earth from sunlight, and by acting as pistons in the atmospheric heat engine. But clouds are also extraordinarily dynamic over a vast range of interacting scales in time and space, and this makes them difficult to understand.  Is the role of clouds in climate fundamentally simple (which would be nice) or impossibly complex (a cause for despair)? I work with the Aerosol-Cloud-Climate-Systems Group to try to seek ways to constrain this challenging problem.

Alongside clouds, a primary challenge in predicting climate change is providing economic forecasts for the trajectory of global civilization and its greenhouse gas emissions. Normally these trajectories are considered to be influenced by public policy, constrained by socio-economic forces. I have developed an alternative approach that makes accurate long-term hindcasts without reference to society or policy, and is rooted instead in some fairly simple non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The model rests on a finding that a very general measure of civilization’s wealth has been tied to its rate of energy consumption through a numerical constant.