Dr David Keith

Professor Keith's policy work addresses the uncertainty in climate change predictions, geoengineering and carbon management. He has been a collaborator in research on climate related public policy at Carnegie Mellon since 1991, and an investigator in the Center for the Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change since its inception. His current focus is an analysis of the use of fossil fuels without atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide by means of carbon sequestration. This research aims to understand the economic and regulatory implications of this rapidly evolving technology. Questions range from near term technology-based cost estimation, to attempts to understand the path dependency of technical evolution; for example, how would entry of carbon management into the electric sector change prospects for hydrogen as a secondary energy carrier? In addition, he is working on a study of geoengineering that explores its historical roots and its ethical implications. As an atmospheric scientist, he works with James Anderson's group at Harvard, where he collaborates on observations of water-vapor, cirrus clouds, and stratosphere-troposphere exchange. He is the senior scientist for INTESA, a new Fourier-transform spectrometer that flies on the NASA U-2. He worked as project scientist on Arrhenius, a proposed satellite aimed at establishing an accurate benchmark of infrared radiance observations for the purpose of detecting climate change.