Projects

Each student is expected to research, present, and write-up a final project. The presentations will be about 15 minutes long and take place during the last three class sessions. The final project write-up should be about 15 pages long (other formats possible for non-standard projects—see instructor for permission). You may view examples of student projects from this course.

These projects may be done as individual projects, or by a team of two students. (Of course, a two-person project should involve about twice as much effort as two one-person projects).

The project deliverables are:

Identify team and 2–3 possible topics
Submit 1–2 page (or equivalent) project proposal
Meet with staff at least twice about your project
Present your project to the class
Final project writeup

We are very open to the style and topic for these projects; they may involve any aspect of climate change, including aspects not otherwise covered in the course. The basic requirements are: it should be about climate change and it should be interesting!

We imagine that a project could be:

A meaningful report, perhaps about a focused question relating to climate science, technological approaches to mitigation, policy options, psychology of responses to proposals, etc.
A report describing novel (but perhaps preliminary) results which may be later developed into a peer-reviewed publication
A computer program with writeup
A blog
Visual art or musical composition
Safe and responsible MIT hack
Video

You may also browse our list of project ideas. We encourage creative formats for the projects; however, the more creative or atypical the project, the more you should consult with the instructors.

The best projects might prompt action. You can imagine your audience as ordinary individuals (perhaps imagine your parents or the general public), scientists (your professors), institutions (MIT, other universities), corporations associated with carbon (car manufacturers, airlines, oil companies), or corporations associated with renewable energy (solar panels, wind turbines, …).

The following are a list of some potential projects (feel free to choose one of these or develop your own):

Public awareness (anything that helps people realize there is a real urgent problem and concrete solutions)
- Compose a song for the Chorallaries of MIT and get them to sing it.
- Create a sculpture of Earth that showcases regional impacts of climate change (e.g. for display on MIT’s campus)
Climate science
- Simulate the climate impacts of the entire Amazon Rainforest burning down over the next 20 years (probably publishable)
- Review Bayesian approaches to model projections of future climate change in the literature and evaluate their relative usefulness (possibly publishable)
- Develop a novel machine learning parameterization for a process that is missing from—or poorly represented in—climate models (possibly publishable)
- Apply machine learning approaches to the problem of seasonal prediction (the tricky middle-ground between weather and climate)
- Simulate the climate impacts of geoengineering (e.g. what if China decides to blot out the Sun only over China? How does that affect the rest of the planet?)
- Develop (or improve existing) an inverse model which takes CO2 concentrations (as a function of time and space) and winds as input and gives CO2 emissions as output
- Use dimension-reduction and clustering methods to identify different kinds of patterns in observational data (e.g. El Niño, types of hurricanes, atmospheric “rivers”)
- Run realistic simulations of forest fires and study their sensitivity to surrounding climate (air temperature, soil moisture, humidity)
- Replicate classic papers in climate modelling using modern, high-level software (Can you exactly replicate their results? How would their results change if you made different basic assumptions?)
Policy
- A report on the impact of a progressive carbon tax on energy systems, global emissions, and climate
- A review of the various geoengineering proposals and their benefits,
Technological
- Carry out life cycle analysis for the total emissions of conventional products (e.g. internal combustion engine cars, incandescent lightbulbs, …) as compared to sustainable versions of the product (e.g. electric cars, LED lightbulbs, …)
Data science / Visualization
- Develop a web-hosted queryable database of successful emission mitigation programs
- Create virtual reality / augmented reality visualizations of climate change
Software
- Develop an app which plots the historical and future climate at a given GPS location
- Develop a climate change game (many of these exist, the hard part is making it fun!)
- Write an Alexa app that can convert between behaviors (e.g. flight from SFO to BOS) into carbon emissions (e.g. in tons of CO2 emitted or added concentration of CO2 in ppm)
- Develop a high-level Julia wrapper for a climate model (or other climate-related software)
Machine Learning
- See this Twitter thread summarizing a recent workshop on Machine Learning in Climate
Political action
- Develop and carry out an action plan for a local grassroots climate / environmental organization
- Develop a campaign plan focused on addressing climate change for a politician (or run for public office yourself!)

For inspiration, we recommend students browse our list of resources. If you are unsure whether a potential topic would be appropriate, feel free to contact the TA.

These are the student projects from 6.S898 that were shared publicly on the course site.