Making Sense of Complexity with Upmanu Lall

Climate extremes pose an ever increasing threat to human societies. Storms, Heat Waves, Droughts, Floods, Tornadoes, etc. constitute the dominant natural hazard on average. Exposure to these events, and their derivatives events such as fires is growing, in part due to climate change and in part due to increasing human populations and their occupancy of vulnerable areas. The costs of developing infrastructure, financial relief (insurance), and other coping programs appears prohibitive at the global scale, and many of these instruments lead increase the potential for other (e.g., environmental) adverse outcomes. While a warming planet due to anthropogenic forcing of the atmosphere is the focal point of much of the climate discourse, the events in question are to a great extent determined by the dominant modes of atmospheric circulation and heat transport. The underlying equations driving these phenomenon are expected to hold even in the future. They are typically nonlinear and chaotic, leading to varying and limited predictability. In this talk, we plan to explore whether this setting is ripe for thinking about strategic approaches to weather modification by small perturbations that could allow us to limit or dramatically reduce exposure to the extreme climate events by nudging - adaptive chaos control. The technical and social implications of such an approach vs the current and traditional discourse on this topic are open for discussion

About Upmanu Lall

Upmanu Lall is the director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. He is also a professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within the College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and served as Director of the Columbia Water Center. He developed and led a Global Water Sustainability Initiative, a Global Flood Initiative, and the America’s Water Initiative. In addition to contributing to hydrology, climate dynamics, statistics and machine learning, and risk/insurance analysis, he has worked with colleagues, development banks, governments and the private sector to implement financial, technical and policy solutions for water and climate challenges from village to country scale on all major continents. He was named an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2017 and their Walter Langbein Lecturer in 2022. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and has received the Arid Lands Hydrology and the Ven Te Chow Awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. He received the Henry Darcy Medal from the European Geophysical Union. In April 2021, he and two of his former students (Professors Balaji Rajagopalan, University of Colorado, Boulder; and Ashish Sharma, University of New South Wales, Australia) were named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters.