Weather Jiu-Jitsu: Climate Adaptation for the 21st Century

Abstract: Extreme climate events, e.g., droughts, floods, heat waves, and freezes, are becoming more frequent and intense with severe global socio-economic impacts. Growing populations and economic activity leads to increased exposure to these events. Scaling existing physical, financial, and social infrastructure to provide resilience against these extreme events is daunting, especially as one ponders projected climate changes. Climate extremes pose a challenge even if decarbonization and geoengineering are able to regulate Earth's radiation balance. We argue that there is an urgent need to explore a novel adaptive strategy that we call "Weather Jiu-Jitsu," which leverages the intrinsic chaotic dynamics of weather systems to subtly redirect or dissipate their destructive trajectories through precisely timed, small-energy interventions. By leveraging insights from adaptive chaos control, combined with improved observations, prediction and low-energy weather system interventions, humanity could develop a novel nature assisted global infrastructure to limit the impact of climate extremes in the 21st century.