Dr. Tami C. Bond, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, will present a seminar titled “Energy in the Anthropocene Era: a tale of fire, smoke, time and power,” at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9, in Room 103 Engineering Management. Bond will discuss a framework to illustrate how changes in individual sources affect climate in the near term and long term. Within this framework, she will show how mitigation efforts from sources such as diesel freight delivery, brick kilns, cooking stoves and kerosene lamps affect climate.

The seminar is hosted by the Environmental Research Center (ERC). Bond is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and an environmental engineer working at the interface of engineering and public policy to unravel the global effects of black carbon emissions on climate and human health and to comprehensively understand how energy interfaces with the atmosphere. Black carbon, or soot, is created essentially any time something is burned—from diesel engines and agricultural burning to home heating and cooking—and varies considerably by source; yet traditionally, large-scale global climate models have worked with rough estimations and little fidelity at the source level. The challenges to including black carbon as a factor in climate models are significant: the ubiquitous and diverse array of sources, complex atmospheric processes, and a lack of standardized global inventories made accurate assessments extremely difficult, and representation of the impact of black carbon was crude.