Historical Perspectives on Climate Change
Videos, Wed, Feb 15th, 2012
Most major theories about why Earth’s global climate warmed and cooled over the last million years were formed by the early 1900s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that scientists began to put all the pieces together in a new, holistic approach to studying the climate system. Historian James Roger Fleming presents 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: James Rodger Fleming STS Program, Colby College Download: Presentation | Video James Rodger Fleming is a science historian and professor of science, technology and society at Colby College. He is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society. He is currently the Gordon Cain Conference Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, where he is organizing an international conference on the history of atmospheric chemistry. Fleming is also the founder and first president of the International Commission on History of Meteorology and series editor of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. He has a BS in astronomy from The Pennsylvania State University, an MS in atmospheric science from Colorado State University and a PhD in history from Princeton University. His books include Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford, 1998), Intimate Universality (Science History, 2006), The Callendar Effect (AMS, 2007), and Fixing the Sky (Columbia, 2010). For more information please click here.
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| The State of the Climate
Speaker: Deke Arndt 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. | What is the Difference Between Weather and Climate?
Speaker: Dr. Wayne Higgins Learn about the relationships and differences between weather and climate, as well as the differences between natural climate variability and human-induced climate change. | Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States Speaker: Anthony C. Janetos 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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| Is the Breathing of the World’s Ocean Choking Marine Life?
Speaker: Dr. Christopher L. Sabine Review ongoing impacts of acidification on marine ecology and projections of likely future impacts on marine life if this trend continues. | Limiting the Magnitude of & Adapting to Future Climate Change
Speakers: Robert W. Fri Claudia Mengelt 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. | Ethics and Issues Surrounding Geo-Engineering to Mitigate Climate Change
Speaker: Dr. Michael MacCracken This session explores of the pros and cons, as well as legal and ethical considerations, involved in options for “geo-engineering.” |
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| Climate Change Communication: Focusing on Public Engagement
Speaker: Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. A summary about social scientists’ research into Americans’ attitudes and opinions about global climate change. | ||
