Join the Cultural Arts Committee for a fun and educational lecture
Climate Change and Global Warming - Is It Time for Geoengineering?
May 21st 7– 8:30
Portola Valley Town Center – Community Hall
Light refreshment provided
Is it time for geoengineering?
The unrelenting increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and particularly the accelerating rate of increase over the last year, spell out very worrying trends for our future global climate and wellbeing. In spite of substantial progress in renewable energy costs, it does not look like we will even come close to meeting the Paris Accord targets. While little advertised, these targets also include the removal of carbon dioxide from the air on an enormous scale which is very difficult to do, and which for right now, does not have even a remote practical solution. All of these facts seem to predict that we might reach levels of green houses that are highly undesirable, if not catastrophic. For this reason, the field of geoengineering, the deliberate and (hopefully) judicious modification of our atmosphere and climate is rapidly being forced to the foreground. The most promising form of this is Solar Radiation Management (SRM) i.e. reflecting a few percent of sunlight back in space, thereby cooling the earth, a concept which has been around for many decades. The talk will describe several techniques that are presently under consideration. The extremely low cost of these techniques make them very appealing in some ways, but they also come with inherent limitations and dangers. It should be well understood that these are only stopgap measures, which cannot substitute in any way for the need of rapid decarbonization of our energy sources.
Armand Neukermans holds EE and ME engineering degrees from Louvain University, an MSEE form Arizona State and the Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University. Since 1964, he has held various research and management positions within the organizations of KLA-Tencor, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and General Electric. He founded Xros, an optical switch company where he served as Chairman and CTO, which was acquired by Nortel Networks in 2000. He is the author of 45 publications, and is the inventor of over 75 patents in very diverse fields. He was named Silicon Valley “Inventor of the year” in 2001 and won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Entrepreneurship from Belcham. In 2018 he was inducted as an officer in the Order of Leopold by the Belgian Crown. He serves on the board of both public and private companies. Since his retirement, he has been involved in various environmental projects (including the foundation of the Big Sur Environmental Institute) and in fostering the causes of various social entrepreneurs, such as Jaipur Foot, D-Rev, and Benetech’s Landmine project, and the Frugal Innovation Project at SCU. The Stanford-Jaipur Knee project, initiated by the Neukermans Trust at Stanford, has resulted in a widely recognized $20 knee prosthesis of which over 17000 are now in operation worldwide. He set up the Portola Valley Solar Community project, which became the landmark model for community buying of solar power and helped launch SolarCity. The last ten years, he has directed a group of volunteer scientists and engineers on an innovative climate mitigation effort. In conjunction with the University of Washington and Harvard University, the group is doing technology research for solar radiation management such as Marine Cloud Brightening with seawater nuclei and particulates to cool the earth.
