1-5-09

Media Release

Climate Experts Featured in Seminar Series

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Some of the nation’s leading experts on the causes, effects and ways to deal with climate change will be featured in a winter seminar series at Oregon State University.

The series, “ Global Climate Change: Detection, Attribution, Impacts, Adaptation, Mitigation and Litigation ,” is free and open to the public. The presentations are designed for a general, non-scientific audience, but some of the speakers will also hold professional talks for students and faculty while they are in Oregon.

“The speakers are all very prominent in their fields, which range from science to policy formation, adaptation and even legal issues,” said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU.

“Two are MacArthur Fellows, and we’ll have lead authors from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Clark said. “One will discuss how climate change has affected societies, and the series also includes a legal expert who led some of the litigation that stopped construction of coal-fired power plants in Texas.”

Most of the talks will be on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. in Cordley Hall Room 1109, except for the last three presentations which are on different days of the week and have a location yet to be announced. Updated information can be found on the web at http://www.geo.oregonstate.edu/events/SeminarSeries/Seminar_Current.htm

The speakers and their topics include:

• Jan. 13: Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “How Do We Know that Human Activities Have Influenced Global Climate?”
• Jan. 20: David Battisti, University of Washington, “Global Warming and Global Food Production”
• Jan. 27: Dan Schrag, Harvard University, “Confronting the Climate-Energy Challenge”
• Feb. 3: Heather Holsinger, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, “U.S. Climate Policy: A Brave New World?”
• Feb. 10: Bette Otto-Bleisner, National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Polar Warmth, Ice Sheet Stability and Sea-Level Rise: Past Perspectives”
• Feb. 17: Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado, “Uncomfortable Knowledge about Climate Policy”
• Feb. 27: Eric Rignot, NASA and University of California/Irvine, “Satellite Studies of the Contribution to Sea Level Rise from Greenland and Antarctica Ice Dynamics”
• March 2: Steve Susman, Susman Godfrey LLP, “Climate Change Litigation: The Courthouse Effect”
• March 11: Brian Fagan, University of California/Santa Barbara, “The Great Warming, or the Story of the Silent Elephant in the Room”

The series is sponsored by the Department of Geosciences at OSU.