Virtual Fireside Chat Open to the Public

Climate change discussions are often full of complexity and uncertainty.  Taking a different approach, Dr. Emanuel will focus his presentation on the opportunities that our adaptation to climate change creates.  Dr. Emanuel will begin his presentation with a broad overview of climate science, including the history of the science itself, and what we have learned about the natural variation in Earth’s climate system through analysis of paleoclimate data, the instrumental record and, most importantly, the fundamental physics, chemistry, and biology underlying it.

He will discuss projections of future climates, made using both simple and complex models, with an emphasis on sources of uncertainty together with an assessment of whether and to what extent the level of uncertainty can be reduced.

Toward the end of the talk, he will frame the problem of global warming as a problem of risk assessment and resiliency management, including the difficulties in dealing with low probability but very high impact events, and will describe various technical and policy options for dealing with climate change.  These include important and exciting opportunities in carbon-free energy sources and addressing issues of anti-resiliency that influence rapid and effective mitigation efforts.

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