[E&E seminars] Probstein Lecture: Friday, May 13, 2009; 3:30 PM; Room 34-101

[Sean Buhrmester]

The Mechanical Engineering  Colloquium presents:

*The Ronald F. Probstein Lecture in Engineering Science*

*Professor Robert H. Socolow*
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Princeton University

*Friday, March 13, 2009
3:30 PM, Room 34-101*

*"Technology, Policy, and Values for Living in a Greenhouse"
*

/ The growing prosperity of our species and the smallness of our planet 
are in collision. Fresh thinking is required to understand our 
predicament and our options, to manage geoengineering, to rethink 
"fairness" across countries, and to understand how our time on Earth 
relates to future time.
 
Climate change provides good points of entry into this new domain. Every 
"solution" carries its own risks. Uncertainties are large and are 
themselves uncertain. Yet we must act.
 
The first step is to reason on a planetary scale and to understand the 
numbers. /


*Robert Socolow* is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 
at Princeton University and co-principal investigator (with ecologist, 
Stephen Pacala) of Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative 
www.princeton.edu/~cmi/ <http://www.princeton.edu/%7Ecmi/>. Pacala and 
Socolow are the authors of "Stabilization wedges: Solving the climate 
problem for the next 50 years with current technologies" (/Science/, 
August 13, 2004).

Socolow is on two current committees of the National Academies: 
"America's Energy Future" and "America's Climate Choices" and was a 
member of the Grand Challenges for Engineering Committee of the National 
Academy of Engineering. He was the editor of /Annual Review of Energy 
and the Environment/, 1992-2002.

*For more information, please contact Sean Buhrmester (sean at mit.edu, 
x3-7952)*
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