"The Changing Carbon Cycle: How Fast Will Atmospheric CO2 Increase?"

Inez Fung, professor of atmospheric sciences, codirector, Berkeley Institute of the Environment, University of California at Berkeley

How fast the climate warms depends on the rate of CO₂ increase in the atmosphere. Currently, only half of the CO₂ emitted by fossil fuel combustion has remained in the atmosphere; the land and oceans have absorbed the rest. With global warming, Inez Fung anticipates that the land and oceans will reduce their capacities to store carbon, thus accelerating the problem.

Fung has been studying climate change for twenty years. She is a principal architect of large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of CO₂ , dust, and other trace substances around the world. Fung's recent work in climate modeling predicts the coevolution of CO₂ and climate and concludes that the diminishing capacities of the land and oceans to store carbon act to accelerate global warming.

Fung received her SB in Applied Mathematics and her ScD in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1998, she joined the University of California at Berkeley as the first Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences and the founding director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center. She is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Since 2005, she has been a founding codirector of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.