Aug 2022
Professor Georgiy Stenchikov, Earth Science and Engineering Program, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
Dr. Stenchikov graduated with distinction from Moscow Physical-Technical Institute in 1973. He completed his Ph.D. in the Numerical and Analytical Study of Weak Plasma Turbulence at Moscow Physical-Technical Institute in 1977. Afterward, he headed a department at the USSR Academy of Sciences, which used computational analysis to carry out crucial early research into the impact of humans on Earth’s climate and the climatic consequences of nuclear war. From 1992 until 1998, Dr. Stenchikov worked at the University of Maryland in the USA, after which he held a position as a Research Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of Rutgers University for over a decade. Since 2009, he has been a Professor and a Chair (until 2021) of the Earth Sciences and Engineering Program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. His work has brought significant advances in climate modeling, atmospheric physics, fluid dynamics, radiation transfer, and environmental sciences. Dr. Stenchikov contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC-AR4 of 2007. For his work on climate impact modeling, Prof. Stenchikov was awarded a Prize from the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, a Gold Medal from the Russian National Exhibition, outstanding scientific paper awards from the American Geophysical Union Journal and the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, and Future of Life award for reducing the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter.
Aerosols are liquid or solid particles suspended in the atmosphere. They significantly affect the Earth's energy balance delaying global warming. Primary aerosols like dust are entrained from the surface, but secondary, like sulfate aerosols, are chemically produced in the atmosphere. Aerosols absorb and reflect solar radiation and can have greenhouse effects like CO2. But their cooling effect usually prevails. Aerosols are short-lived and can be removed from the atmosphere in a few weeks. Therefore, during the recent pandemic, when anthropogenic emissions decreased, there was a tendency to accelerate climate warming because aerosol pollution cleared up, but greenhouse gases remained.
This talk focuses on aerosol catastrophes - episodes of extreme aerosol pollution like dust storms, volcanic eruptions, or intense fires. The latter was the subject of intensive research in the 1980s when a group of scientists in the US and Soviet Union realized that urban fires in the course of a nuclear conflict between superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union at that time, would emit into the atmosphere tens of megaton of black soot aerosols that absorb solar radiation, freeze the Earth for years, disrupting food production, transportation, and cause billions of casualties all over the world even in the countries not involved in the conflict. This phenomenon was called Nuclear Winter. It again attracted public attention recently because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and stressed international relations.