Global cloud control Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love geo-engineering

Besel, Neefjes and Kubecka imagine a world in which during the 2030s artificial intelligence has become so advanced that we gave it full control over the weather in order to stay below 1.5°C. It came at a great cost, but humanity is still going, and we may have just ensured another few decades to our existence.

Besel, Neefjes and Kubecka are the winners of Science magazine’s ‘Dance Your Ph.D.’ contest in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdrh82RVl3M

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/watch-winners-year-s-dance-your-phd-contest

Besel, Neefjes and Kubecka present their work on day 2 of T2051MCC. On this day it is assumed that global heating has remained below 1.5°C.

Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research, University of Helsinki, Finland

Vitus completed his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich after which he moved to Helsinki to study the master’s track of Theoretical and Computational methods. Already simultaneously to his master’s degree he started working as a research assistant for the computational aerosol physics group in which he continued with his doctoral studies after graduating in 2020. While his master focused on the clustering of sulfuric acid and ammonia in the atmosphere, he moved to research the utilization of machine learning and big data to understand the role of compounds and their oxidation products emitted by vegetation.

Additionally to his research, Vitus has always had a passion for art, especially music. He has been playing the guitar and has been singing since he was a teenager, and in recent years also turned to music production. Most recently he won the Dance your PhD contest 2021 with the Molecular Clusters song together with Jakub Kubečka and Ivo Neefjes.

Find out more on computational aerosol physics homepage and on Twitter.