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10/28/2006
Climate Change Speaker Series
Climate Change Speaker Series
Elizabeth Kolbert "On Global Warming"
Tuesday, December 5; 7:30 p.m.
Benaroya Hall, Seattle
$15- $60; co-sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures
Tickets at www.lectures.org
Jon Riedel and Erin Pettit "In Our Own Backyard: Climate Change in the North Cascades"
Wednesday, December 6; 7 p.m.
Seattle REI Meeting Room
Co-sponsored by REI
FREE; no registration required
Richard Gammon "Are We the Weathermakers?"
Thursday, December 7; 7 p.m.
Village Books; Bellingham
Co-sponsored by Village Books
FREE; no registration required
Colorado mountains without wildflower meadows? Yellowstone without grizzly bears? Glacier National Park lacking any glaciers and North Cascades National Park absent any cascades?
This is the frightening future foreseen in "Crown Jewels At Risk," a new report from the Natural Resource Defense Council. In sobering detail, the study predicts radical changes being brought to bear on some of our most treasured American landscapes as a result of global warming.
In the face of such a bleak scenario, what is one to do?
North Cascades Institute decided to explore the issue more deeply with some of the country's leading minds that have been studying the issue of global warming. It is our hope that a series of public presentations around the Puget Sound will spark hundreds of smaller discussions on what we can do to confront this emerging challenge.
The highlight of our Climate Change Speaker Series is the appearance of New Yorker investigative reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the best-selling Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change, at Seattle's Benaroya Hall on December 5. Kolbert brings with her the broad experience of many months of research and travel in the far north, as well as a gift for clearly elucidating the science and politics of global warming.
"I think there is a surprisingly large"-- you might even say frighteningly large -- gap between the scientific community and the lay community's opinions on global warming," Kolbert told a recent interviewer. "I spoke to many sober-minded, coolly analytical scientists who, in essence, warned of the end of the world as we know it (but) people tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes."
Following Kolbert's presentation, she will join K.C. Golden, Policy Director of Climate Solutions, and Stephen Gardiner, UW Philosophy professor, for an onstage dialogue moderated by New York Times Pacific Northwest reporter Timothy Egan.
In the days following Kolbert's keynote address, the Institute will host two free programs to deepen our investigation. On December 6, Jon Riedel, who manages hydrologic and geologic resources in North Cascades National Park, and Erin Pettit, field glaciologist and lead instructor of the Institute's Girls on Ice program, will bring their first-hand knowledge and informed perspectives of climate change in the Pacific Northwest, along with a stunning slideshow, to Seattle REI's meeting room.
Richard Gammon, a teacher in the Oceanography and Atmospheric Science department at the University of Washington and a local authority on climate change, will give a talk entitled "Are We The Weathermakers?" at Bellingham's Village Books. Gammon is renowned for being able to translate complex science into public understanding and he will deftly survey the latest information (and misinformation) on global warming.
In the North Cascades, it is expected that rising temperatures will radically alter the forest and meadow ecosystems, displace entire populations of animals, melt the many glaciers and snowfields of the high country and, consequently, dry up the region's streams, which frequently get half of their late-summer flow from ancient snow trapped in the layers of glaciers. The NRDC study found that, since 1959, the total mass of the park's 318 glaciers has already shrunk by 80 percent. The Thunder Creek watershed, which is in the neighborhood of the Institute's Learning Center, has already lost 31 percent of its historical summer flow.
We see the impending signs and hear the warnings. Now is the time to act.
 Chattermarks Blog
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