Climate Technology Primer

⊕Excellent documents and courses are available online on what we are doing to the climate — such as the IPCC reports or Prof. Michael Mann’s online course or this National Academies report.⊕
There are integrative assessments of solutions, such as Project Drawdown, and a huge proliferation of innovative technologies being proposed and developed in all sectors. There are also some superb review papers that treat the need for new technologies. Bret Victor has a beautiful overview emphasizing the role of general design, modeling and implementation capacity, and there is now a climate change for computer scientists course at MIT. And if you want more of a quantitative look at things I can't reccommend David MacKay's Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air enough.⊕
Within applications of machine learning to climate, I recommend this paper for a broader picture that spans a wider range of solution domains — such breadth serves as good food for thought for technologists interested in finding the truly most impactful areas in which they might be able to contribute
Welcome to my Climate Technology Primer. Here I try to break down in a bit more of a quantitative way what is currently happening to our climate and some interesting ways technology can help address these problems. These posts have a numerical bend to them and go back to the basics to try to help build up a quantitative picture of how technology can contribute to solving our climate problems. They’re done from the perspective of a scientifically literate (PhD in Biophysics) outsider who wants to have the foundations to do some back of the envelope looking at the challenges. Hopefully they provide this, as well as links that go into even more detail.

The emphasis of these posts is more on things I perceive to be less mainstream topics, like CDR or geo-engineering. That very much doesn’t mean that the more mainstream things, like decarbonizing steel and cement production, hydrogen, adaptation to climate effects, are any less important, they might in fact be more so. It just means that these are the things I think have had less coverage than they might warrant, and they’re some of the things I find particularly interesting.

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