Friday January 28th, 2022 Hugh Wright: An Ice Core Climate Model: Where we Were, Are and Will Be and Actionable Strategies

Hugh Wright will speak on An Ice Core Climate Model: Where we Were, Are and Will Be and Actionable Strategies. He will present a geophysical model that relates transient earth temperatures to the varying CO2 forcing function. Vostok ice core data quantifies the CO2 concentration and mid latitude surface temperature over the past 400,000 years. With a subset of the data that corresponds to times when CO2 and temperature were stable, and data from the past 170 years, we calculate the response time of earth following a change in CO2 concentration. Having characterized the Earth's transient response to varying CO2 we have a simple means of estimating future temperatures provided we speculate regarding future CO2 concentrations. He will illustrate the technique with two future scenarios,1) net zero by 2050 then stable forever, and 2) a successive, massively aggressive negative emissions strategy after 2050.

The story isn't complete without considering effective, scalable, affordable sequestration techniques. A summary of a few approaches (direct air capture, mineral accretion, reforesting, etc.) will precede discussion of a promising new technique, pyrolytic biomass carbon stabilization and current efforts to scale this using industrial techniques. In a free market, this will not happen unless the process is profitable, so the business aspects and what some entrepreneurs are dong will be discussed.

Hugh graduated from RPI in 1956 with BS in Geology/Geophysics. His first job was at Lamont Labs [now Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory], a geophysical research arm of Columbia. These were exciting times; 1957 was International Geophysical Year. Earth plate techtonics were actively debated. The field researchers [Scripts, Woods Hole, Lamont] were turning up very convincing field data, the theorists an Morningside Heights and elsewhere said continental drift was a physical impossibility and a frivolous distraction. In his words, “As the junior guy at Lamont I got asked to install a seismometer on Cornwallis Island in northern Canada, essentially at the magnetic north pole. Three weeks of -40 temps later I got it done. Meanwhile a Russian team was setting up the Vostok research station at the south pole that produced the data I will discuss. My boss installed a seismometer in I believe it was Hawaii!”

During the Vietnam era, he joined the Navy and spent 5 years piloting long range anti-submarine patrol aircraft, flying missions from Spitsbergen to Panama. Following that he went to MIT for a masters in geophysics (1964), worked in industry (Avco) for 7 years, then research at BBN for 13 years, followed by 30 years or so with several instrumentation based entrepreneurial startups. He is currently President/General Partner of Technology Development Collaborative, an industrial sensor company.

“For the past 2 years, I have been obsessed with environmental issues, and have done a lot of independent analysis that is the basis of my talk and a book Environmental Strategies that is available as an ebook on Amazon.”

Slide deck is available here.