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Michael MacCracken has been chief scientist for climate change programs with the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C., since October 2002. His current research interests include human-induced climate change and consequent impacts, the potential for climate engineering and the beneficial effects of limiting emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases. From 1968 to 1993, he led climate modeling studies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that were designed to evaluate the effects on climate of greenhouse gas emissions, volcanic aerosols and nuclear war. From 1993 to 2002 he served as senior global change scientist for the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, where he served as the first executive director and then as executive director of the coordination office for the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Change. During this time he also coordinated preparation of the official U.S. Government reviews of the periodic assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since 2002, he has served as an integration team member for the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences and co-lead author of the report Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable, prepared for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. He was most recently chair of the Scientific Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies: Minimizing the Potential Risk of Research to Counter-balance Climate Change and Its Impacts. MacCracken has an undergraduate degree in engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in applied science from the University of California, Davis. For more information please click here.

Editor’s note: these eight videos comprise a recent “Climate Science 101″ short course sponsored jointly by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), at George Mason University, and NOAA. The presenters in this series were selected for their subject matter expertise. Their views and opinions are their own and don’t necessarily represent those of OLLI and NOAA.

Speaker: James Rodger Fleming
STS Program, Colby College

Get a historical perspective on how our understanding of Earth’s climate system evolved through a succession of pioneering scientists in the 1800s and 1900s who asked, and answered, fundamental questions about the causes and effects of global climate change.

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Speaker: Deke Arndt
Chief, Climate Monitoring Branch
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

Drawing on the annual State of the Climate reports, published by the AMS Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, this session presents of the preponderance of scientific evidence that global climate change is occurring.

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Speaker: Dr. Wayne Higgins
Director, Climate Prediction Center/NCEP/NWS/NOAA

Learn about the relationships and differences between weather and climate, as well as the differences between natural climate variability and human-induced climate change.

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This evidence-based presentation makes it clear that climate change isn’t some future abstraction, nor is it a far-off phenomenon happening to people in other parts of the world.

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Speaker: Dr. Christopher L. Sabine
Oceanographer at NOAA’s
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory

Review ongoing impacts of acidification on marine ecology and projections of likely future impacts on marine life if this trend continues.

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Speakers: Robert W. Fri
Resources for the Future

Claudia Mengelt
National Research Council

Learn about the findings from a recent series of reports by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science highlighting options for adapting to and mitigating global climate change.

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Speaker: Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D.
School of Communication
American University
Washington DC

A summary about social scientists’ research into Americans’ attitudes and opinions about global climate change.

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