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Zachary (Zack) Jacobson
Experience
I hold a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from University of Waterloo, 1972; my thesis topic was an early exploration of what later were called neural networks. I now act as principal mathematician with Exocortex Technologies Inc. and Zachary Jacobson Associates, both of Ottawa.
Since retirement from the Canadian Public Service, I became intensely interested in the problems of feedback loops and chaotic impacts on climate change—ocean acidification especially. My PhD had involved nonlinearities and before that, my Master’s thesis involved retinal feedbacks in colour vision; I guess I have studied feedbacks and nonlinearity continually ever since.
Looking not at the current linear modeling but at paleoclimatic results, I expect that current levels of atmospheric CO2 will result in catastrophic climate heating, sea level rise and result in the sixth great extinction, now ongoing. The timings of these things is uncertain of course, but I expect there will be multiple and grievous global calamities well before 2100. Accordingly, I am pursuing planetary means to avert the worst of the calamities, ocean fertilization particularly.
It is hard not to notice that most forms of geoengineering, and especially ocean fertilization, are regarded as anathema by many or most environmental NGO’s and even some Governments, but the deeper I look into the results of the few experiments that have been done, the more it seems to me that this opposition is unjustified and even countered by the data. Well, nobody said this was going to be easy.