Welcome to OpenClimate
This is a website on climate change and, especially, climate change problem solving.
I am a professor at the University of Michigan, where I came after more than 20 years at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). I am in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering (CLaSP). I also have an appointment in the School of the Environment and Sustainability.
Every where I have worked I have worked across disciplines and boundaries. I became a manager at NASA early in my career. Since I cross disciplines, I studied management. Given the propensity of scientists to dismiss management as damaging to “science,” management acumen is something that distinguishes me from most other scientists.
To be effective as a manager at NASA, one has to cross disciplines. We think about complex systems. In fact our performance plans said that we “work on complex problems with no known solutions.” Seemed silly when I was 30, but teaching at Michigan I realized two things. First, I had learned many skills about complex problem solving. Second, climate change is a complex problem with no known solution.
Strictly speaking, we know the science-based and technology-based solutions. But, think about the “system,” science and technology are the easy parts of the solution. Over the years, I have come to react strongly and negatively to my scientist colleagues that claim solving the climate change problem is “just a matter of political will.” That statement indicates an ignorance of how we, actually, solve problems in our world. It also diminishes the role that our colleagues in, for example, political science and public policy bring to addressing climate change.
What is this site? It comes from my experience in teaching, research, and practice in addressing climate change problems. It is from the perspective of the “generalist,” which I was first introduced as in 2007. I liked the term better than dilettante. The site also comes from more than a decade of presence in the public forum through blogs, articles, and interviews. I will pull together and curate resources from many places and many fields.
The site will, also, serve as resource on “problem solving;” that is, bringing together all of the pieces to get something done. My goal is to accelerate the use of climate knowledge in planning and design.
Enough for now. This site is just getting started, and well, I have a couple of day jobs.
Richard B. (Ricky) Rood