Dealing with climate change: Interview with guest speaker Frank P. Incropera

Last week, American engineer and author Frank P. Incropera held a talk on climate change for the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial.

Professor Incropera’s lecture “Climate Change: Dealing with Complexity” looked at the current knowledge on climate change as well as possible means of dealing with the problem. The talk was first in a new series of Distinguished Lectures named in honour of Sir Hugh Ford, former Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering and Pro Rector of Imperial College London. Lady Ford and other members of Sir Hugh Ford’s family were present in the audience.

In this interview before the lecture, Professor Incropera talked about the connections between engineering and tackling climate change:

Why is it important for engineers to engage with the issue of climate change?

Engineers have historically been very involved with the production, conversion and utilisation of energy. Even today, the world derives more than 80% of its energy from the consumption of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are non renewable, and they’re incompatible with a long-term, sustainable energy future. So I was initially interested in this subject because of the non-renewable aspects of fossil fuels and the requirement that at some point in time they would be replaced with renewable forms of energy.

As I explored this issue, what began to loom heavy in my mind was the fact that we would have to stop using fossil fuels long before we depleted them. Climate change for me became a very critical issue, because it changed my perspective on energy use. As an engineer, I’ve worked on energy issues all my life, and so, recognising that climate change was becoming the principal driver of energy issues, it became natural for me to look more closely at climate change, not only at the underlying science and technologies, but also at economic and policy implications.

What is an engineer’s unique contribution to dealing with climate change?

There are three different ways to deal with the problem of climate change, and engineers really have a role to play in all three, but the primary approach to climate should be one of mitigation. (The other two are adaptation and geo-engineering.) Mitigation looks at what kinds of technologies we can develop to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. These gases come primarily, although not exclusively, from burning fossil fuels.

Engineers try to provide systems that satisfy the human need for energy and to do so in an affordable manner that minimises environmental consequences. So the contribution that an engineer can make is in addressing the technologies that mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases. Engineers have a major role to play; they understand existing technologies, their limitations and their economic requirements. They are also key to the advancement of alternative energy technologies. How can performance be improved and costs reduced? In mitigating global warming and climate change, are we creating other environmental problems? So these are things that engineers do, and now climate change has become the biggest challenge to securing our energy future.

Professor Incropera talking at Imperial College London

How do you think solutions for climate change can be implemented globally when there is such a disparity between the different needs/capacities of different countries?

That’s right, and there are different solutions in different countries. A critical element is the capital investment needed to implement renewable energy technologies at a scale that would make a difference. And what it takes to unshackle investment is to ensure that those technologies are economically competitive.

It’s estimated that keeping the average surface temperature of the earth from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (the middle of the eighteenth century) would require the deployment of 90 trillion dollars over the next 15 years. That’s a huge amount of money, just to do the things needed to keep the temperature from rising above what many people think is the absolute upper limit that we should allow, and even then we’d have to implement significant adaptation measures. Where will that money come from? Some of it from governments, some from non-governmental organisations, but the bulk of it from the private sector. So that’s one of the big challenges today. How do we put together solutions that make investments by the private sector attractive?

What do you think of the agreements reached at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference (COP21)? Was that a step in the right direction?

I think it was absolutely a step in the right direction. The Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to reducing emissions will not get us to that 2 degree scenario. Even if all the commitments were fully honoured, but nothing else was done beyond that point, we would still exceed 2 degrees Celsius. But COP21 was an important first step, and China and the US should be applauded for their efforts. By making their INDCs early in the process, many other nations were encouraged to follow suit. Of course, the EU has been a leader on this for years, but it really took substantive pledges by China and the US to pry loose INDCs from much of the rest of the world.

Now, will all of those commitments be implemented in the timeframes that the different countries indicated? There are significant political challenges in each and every one of these countries, taking different forms. COP21 in Paris was really a breakthrough, no doubt in my mind, but it’s just the beginning, and it’s not a beginning that is without pitfalls, so we’ll have to see.

It seems that there is a gap between scientific consensus and public opinion when it comes to the reality of man-made climate change. Do you see that as a major obstacle in solving the problem?

I actually see some positive signs, with public opinion shifting towards accepting the existence of climate change and a human cause. What is absent is public information on solutions, communication of what needs to be done in a manner that prompts the public to advocate on behalf of climate change with their political representatives.

We all as human beings have a wide range of concerns: putting food on the table, putting a roof over our heads, raising our children, ensuring that they have good access to education, having some discretionary income for a bit of pleasure in life. And so coming to grips with climate change is hard. People tend to be more influenced by the messages put out by special interest groups.

Are we dealing with a conflict between long-term thinking and immediate needs?

Absolutely. And it’s something that I feel very strongly about. We who live on this Earth today are its stewards. There is an intergenerational ethics issue here. We have a responsibility to ensuring that those who come after us have a decent shot at life and don’t have to deal with environmental degradation that compromises their access to resources. We have to make sure there’s something there for them to build on.

Frank P. Incropera is the Clifford and Evelyn Brosey Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, US), and author of the book “Climate Change: A Wicked Problem: Complexity and Uncertainty at the Intersection of Science, Economics, Politics, and Human Behavior”.