Introducing TAG Climate

Several years ago, I read about the Salter Sink – a creative idea for reducing hurricane risk. The concept was developed by a University of Edinburgh professor working in a research incubator led by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold.

The approach is simple: Large funnel devices are deployed across a wide swath of deep water. When the warm water crashes over the surface of the funnel, it falls down to the bottom of the weighted device, thus dropping the surface temperature, which in turn reduces hurricane risk.

This clever approach has not caught on sufficiently, largely because its deployment relies on government planning and funding. This reveals the utter ineptitude of politicians to address the growing climate crisis – one that virtually everyone agrees must be addressed.

For this reason, I have come to believe that the solution to the climate crisis will not come from politicians. I also believe that it will not come from one balkanized group winning an argument over another. This is not how effective, lasting solutions emerge to any major problem.

I believe instead that modern innovators like Sink and Myhrvold will be the source of the optimal solutions. But their solutions require an additional element: The opportunity for business, enterprise, and start-ups to make money. Innovation plus profit equal solutions.

As such, we have been planning an extension of our industry research and advisory capability at TAG Cyber toward an expanded focus on climate science. I am therefore proud to announce our new advisory team – TAG Climate, which will complement our work in cyber.

The TAG Climate team will follow the same approach as TAG Cyber – namely, to offer research and content as a service to participants in the climate science ecosystem. To that end, we’ve developed a taxonomy, which we believe corresponds nicely to start-ups in this area.

Our goal will be to serve Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG teams with our research and advisory solutions, and to help start-ups in this area – covering the entire TAG Climate Taxonomy – to explain, market, and evangelize their services.

Our TAG Climate team include luminaries such as Professor Dork Sahagian from Lehigh University. In addition to working with us, Professor Sahagian directs the Environmental Institute at Lehigh, which supports research in various aspects of climate science.

So, watch here for announcements from our TAG Climate team. I’ll keep you up to date as we make progress with our new initiative. Hopefully, we can help drive solutions such as the Salter Sink toward commercial success – and in turn toward reduced climate risk for our planet.