Climate expert to lecture at W&J
Renowned climatologist Dr. Michael Mann will give a public lecture at Washington & Jefferson College at 6:30 p.m. today in Room 100 of Dieter-Porter Life Sciences Building.
Mann’s lecture, entitled “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change” is based on his recently updated book by the same name. The event is free and open to the public.
In his lecture, Mann will review evidence for a human influence on the climate of recent decades. He will address the likely future impacts of human-induced climate change, including possible influences on sea levels, severe weather and water supply. He also will discuss possible solutions to the climate change problem, the uncertainties existing in climate change modeling and predictions and implications of potential “surprises” and “tipping points” in the climate system.
Mann’s research and publications put him front and center in the climate change discourse. He currently serves as director of Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, where his research is focused on modeling and predicting the impacts of climate change.
His “hockey stick” graph of global temperature contributed to the 2007 Noble Prize awarded to Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In discussing his upcoming lecture, Mann said a fractured media environment in which reliable sources of information compete with blogs and social media creates a generally challenging environment for communicating science topics, especially that of climate change.
“In the case of climate change, scientific findings are often considered a threat to vested interests, and contentious public debate has thus ensued,” he said. “Yet, the stakes couldn’t be greater – they involve, quite literally, the future habitability of this planet. Given these stakes, it is absolutely critical that the policy debate over what to do about the problem be informed by a sober and objective assessment of the risks involved. Here, the scientific community plays a key role in informing the policy discourse.”