About: Our Mission

Global Environmental Science

At Caltech's Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science, we are striving to generate comprehensive analyses of the global environment—including the impact of human activities on it—and to develop solutions to the world's complex environmental problems.

We are addressing critical questions affecting the planet, including:

• How has Earth's climate varied in the past and how will it change in the future?
• What is the relationship between cloud formation and global warming?
• How does pollution affect air quality locally and far from its sources, and how does it affect climate change?
• What happens to carbon dioxide after it enters the atmosphere?

These are among the most difficult problems to solve, because the behavior of the dynamic natural system involves interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, solid earth, and living systems on temporal scales ranging from nanoseconds to millions of years and on spatial scales from molecules to continents.

At the Linde Center, scientists and engineers from a broad range of disciplines collaborate to solve these problems. The Linde Center is housed in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and is guided by a Director and a Steering Committee. Graduate students are affiliated with the Linde Center through Caltech's Environmental Science and Engineering Program and other graduate programs, and special partnerships exist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with its expertise in remote sensing.

"At Caltech, we want to find answers to the big questions in global environmental science, such as, what processes control Earth's climate, and what is its future. Instead of projects that make incremental advances, we focus on research with a longer reach and potentially much higher returns."
—Tapio Schneider, Director of the Linde Center and Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering