We hear about climate models all the time, but how many of us know how they actually work? In this episode, we peel back the curtain, discussing where these models came from, what they can do amazingly well and their current limitations.

The need for negative emissions technologies to address our climate crisis has become increasingly clear. At the rate that our planet is emitting carbon dioxide – adding about 50 gigatons every year – we will have to remove carbon dioxide at the gigaton scale by 2050 in order to achieve “net zero” emissions.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab are working on new approaches to achieve direct air capture of carbon dioxide. Andrew Haddad, a researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area with a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry, talks about how a Nobel Prize-winning chemistry concept from more than a century ago inspired his idea for efficiently capturing CO2.

Researchers at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) announced this week that they had placed some of the most stringent limits yet on the strange possibility that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. CUORE has spent the last three years patiently waiting to see evidence of a distinctive nuclear decay process, only possible if neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same particle. Their new data shows that this decay doesn’t happen for trillions of trillions of years, if it happens at all.

A new campaign, Efficient and Healthy Schools, led by Berkeley Lab will provide practical guidance on ventilation upgrades that can increase energy efficiency, lower costs, and improve the air at K-12 schools nationwide.

The third and final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report calls for aggressive and comprehensive actions if we are to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century. It finds we still need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically, beyond what governments have pledged, and that this emissions gap is exacerbated by implementation gaps despite the mitigation efforts underway.

Research at Berkeley Lab starts with basic science which leads to innovative breakthroughs that have changed the world. The Basics2Breakthroughs video series focuses on early career scientists discussing their research and what they hope for the future in that research.