Membership in the ICCL is limited to fewer than 20 current scientists; Professor Kravitz will be the sole American member of the international commission of experts.

“The organization that I've been invited to join is one of the international commissions that is part of the IUGG, which is comprised of 59 regular member countries and 15 associate member countries,” said Professor Kravitz. “The IUGG is dedicated to the international promotion and coordination of scientific studies of Earth, and within the atmosphere section, called the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS), they have a focus area on climate, and that's the commission that I've been invited to join.”

The IUGG encourages the application of scientific knowledge to societal needs, and Kravitz’s main area of research is climate engineering, which involves major interventions to counter climate change.

“We're not doing enough quickly enough to prevent some of the awful effects of climate change that we're experiencing right now,” said Kravitz, such as droughts, deadly, catastrophic storms and declining biodiversity. “There are things we could do temporarily in the meantime, while we get our act together, and these fall under the umbrella of climate engineering.”

To illustrate how climate engineering works, he explained, “We know that after large volcanic eruptions the planet cools, and that's because volcanoes eject a lot of stuff into the atmosphere. Some of that stuff stays up in the atmosphere for a few years and it reflects a small portion of sunlight back to space, which cools the planet. So, people have thought, well, maybe we could do this on purpose,” to limit the devastating impacts of climate change.

If that seems scary to people, mused Kravitz, “Good, that means you have a pulse. It is scary. But the impacts of climate change are scary, too, so we really need to understand how climate engineering work to know whether it could and should be part of a portfolio of responses—we only have one planet, after all. Therefore, a lot of the work that I do involves plugging climate engineering into climate models to see what might happen.”

Within the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department in the College, Kravitz’s research group uses climate models to better understand how the Earth has changed in the past, and how it might change going forward, so their research may enable policy makers and the public to make better decisions about their futures in a warming world.

Kravitz’s lab specializes in combining global climate, regional climate, and process model simulations with mathematical and engineering to work on such questions as, how does the Earth system respond to climate engineering, and what are the risks and side effects, and how can scientists combine models across scales to efficiently quantify how climate change will affect people in their daily lives.

More information is available at https://climatemodeling.earth.indiana.edu/index.html.