Mark Zachary Jacobson (born 1965) is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program. He is also a co-founder of the non-profit, Solutions Project.
Jacobson pursued "better understanding air pollution and global warming problems and developing large-scale clean, renewable energy solutions to them". He has developed computer models to study the effects of fossil fuels, biofuels, and biomass burning on air pollution, weather, and climate. With these models, Jacobson examined the impacts of anthropogenic particles (black carbon and brown carbon) on health and climate. He presented such particles as the second-leading cause of global warming after carbon dioxide. Due to their strong health impacts and their short time in the air, he has also hypothesized that reducing their emissions may improve people's health and rapidly slow down global warming.
In a 2009 Scientific American paper, Jacobson and Mark Delucchi proposed that the world should move to 100% clean, renewable energy, namely wind, water, and solar power, across all energy sectors. He discussed and promoted the conversion of worldwide energy infrastructure to "100% wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) for all purposes" in many interviews Jacobson's 2015 study on transitioning the 50 states to WWS was cited as the scientific basis in House Resolution 540 (2015) and in the 2015 New York Senate Bill S5527 on renewable energy The Green New Deal appears compatible with Jacobson's scholarship.
Jacobson's clean energy solutions exclude nuclear power, carbon capture, and bioenergy, prompting a pushback by proponents of these technologies in the form of peer-reviewed letters and journal papers He has published peer-reviewed responses to these critics. A controversy developed in September 2017 when Jacobson sued the journal and one author of a critique for $10M, for defamation. He retracted his lawsuit five months later.
Jacobson has built his own net-zero home to run on renewable energy. He was also an expert witness in Held v. Montana, the first climate trial in U.S. history.
Research
Jacobson has published research on the role of black carbon and other aerosol chemical components on global and regional climates.
Jacobson advocates a speedy transition to 100% renewable energy in order to limit climate change, air pollution damage, and energy security issues. Jacobson co-founded the non-profit Solutions Project in 2011 along with Marco Krapels, Mark Ruffalo, and Josh Fox. The Solutions Project was started to combine science, business, and culture in an effort to educate the public and policymakers about the ability U.S. states and communities to switch to a "100% renewable world".
Soot and aerosol
Jacobson, as a PhD student at UCLA under Richard P. Turco, began computer model development in 1990 with the development of algorithms for what is now called GATOR-GCMOM (Gas, Aerosol, Transport, Radiation, General Circulation, Mesoscale, and Ocean Model). This model simulates air pollution, weather, and climate from the local to global scale. Zhang (2008, pp. 2901, 2902) calls Jacobson's model "the first fully-coupled online model in the history that accounts for all major feedbacks among major atmospheric processes based on first principles."
Several of the individual computer code solvers Jacobson developed for GATOR-GCMOM include the gas and aqueous chemistry ordinary differential equations solvers SMVGEAR and SMVGEAR II, alongside a slew of other related and different modules, The GATOR-GCMOM model has incorporated these processes and has evolved over several decades.
One of the most important fields of research that Jacobson has added to, with the aid of GATOR-GCMOM, is re-defining the range of values on exactly how much diffuse tropospheric black carbon from fossil fuel, biofuel, and biomass burning affects the climate. Unlike greenhouse gases, black carbon absorbs solar radiation. It then converts the solar energy to heat, which is re-emitted to the atmosphere. Without such absorption, much of the sunlight would potentially reflect back out to space since it would have struck a more reflective surface. Therefore, as a whole, soot affects the planets albedo, a unit of reflectance. On the other hand, greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere by trapping thermal-infrared heat radiation that is emitted by the surface of the Earth.