What We Do
Climate and climate impacts
How can we improve our thinking about the intersection of the climate system and human welfare? We study how the climate responds to human activities and why those changes might matter for people. We also study how the range of feasible energy systems is shaped by geophysical constraints.
Illustrative recent work
Climate and climate impacts
Understanding how human influences on the Earth system translate into outcomes that matter for people.
- A modeling study of the climate response to longwave and shortwave radiative forcing at the altitude of aviation-induced cirrus clouds (Thomas et al., 2025).
- Evidence that historical model biases in monthly high-temperature anomalies imply an under-estimation of future temperature extremes (Duan et al., 2025).
- A quantification of how interhemispheric differences in stratospheric sulfate aerosol optical depth would alter tropical monsoon precipitation (Roose et al., 2023).
- A contrast of the climate and carbon-cycle consequences of fossil-fuel use versus deforestation disturbance (Jayakrishnan et al., 2022).
- A study applying Nordhaus's approach to estimating climate effects on GDP to population density instead, as an indicator of incentive for future climate migration (Chen and Caldeira, 2020).
Geophysical constraints on energy systems
Asking how the wind, solar, and trade-dependent energy systems are shaped — and limited — by the geophysics of the climate system.
- Strategies for building climate-resilient global wind and solar power systems (Zheng et al., 2025).
- An assessment of trade risks to energy security in net-zero-emissions energy scenarios (Cheng et al., 2025).
- Identification of reliable locations for wind power generation through a global analysis of "wind droughts" (Antonini et al., 2024).
- An assessment of the geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power across the world's regions (Tong et al., 2021).