Climate change policy makers need good information upon which to base their decisions. Climate change is fundamentally an international and very long-run problem requiring information from a wide range of disciplines from physics to psychology. One response to the complexity with deep uncertainty that comes with this requirement has been the construction of so-called integrated assessment models which project the condition of the earth system out for a hundred years or more. This talk will focus on how complexity and uncertainty are dealt with in such models today and some possible directions for future research.
Slides:
There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.
About the speaker:
John P. Weyant is Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Director of the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) and Deputy Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Freeman-Spolgi Institute for International Studies at Stanford. Prof. Weyant earned a B.S./M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering and Astronautics, M.S. degrees in Engineering Management and in Operations Research and Statistics all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Ph.D. in Management Science with minors in Economics, Operations Research, and Organization Theory from University of California at Berkeley. He also was also a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His current research focuses on analysis of global climate change policy options, energy efficiency analysis, energy technology assessment, and models for strategic planning. He currently seves as co-editor of the journal Energy Economics.
Weyant has been a convening lead author or lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for chapters on integrated assessment, greenhouse gas mitigation, integrated climate impacts, and sustainable development, and most recently served as a review editor for the climate change mitigation working group of the IPCC's forth assessment report. He has been active in the U.S. debate on climate change policy through the Department of State, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In California, he is a member of the California Air Resources Board's Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee (ETAAC) which is charged with making recommendations for technology policies to help implement AB 32, The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.
Weyant was awarded the US Association for Energy Economics' 2008 Adelmann-Frankel award for unique and innovative contributions to the field of energy economics. Weyant was honored in 2007 as a major contributor to the Nobel Peace prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 2008 by Chairman Mary Nichols for contributions to the to the California Air Resources Board's Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee on AB 32.
Contact information:
John P Weyant
Room 260 Huang Engineering Center
475 Via Ortega Stanford University
Stanford, California
650-723-3506
650-725-5362
weyant@stanford.edu