Climate Lecture by Derek Sjostrom
apr 2, 2024 at 6:30 PM
6:30-7:30pm
Earth's climate past and future: It is almost always carbon dioxide's fault!
In many ways the science behind Earth's climate is fairly straightforward. However, the policy, politics, and economics are not. We will explore the processes that broadly control Earth's climate, discuss how Earth's climate is studied, how it has changed with time, and project how it may behave in the future. We will discuss some extreme climate events in Earth's history, including "Snowball Earth" when it is proposed that Earth's surface was (almost?) entirely frozen, and the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum", which is thought to be the last time the Earth went through a time of relatively rapid warming. To conclude we will explore some possibilities for minimizing humans' impact on Earth's climate.
Derek Sjostrom has been a Professor of Geology for over 20 years, including the last 15 years at Rocky Mountain College. He teaches a wide variety of courses including Earth History, Weather and Climate, and Paleoclimate. He has conducted research related to Earth's climate over the past 250-ish million years and primarily has focused on the relationships between regional climate change and mountain building events. He has conducted field work for these studies throughout central Asia and North America, along with numerous other studies using traditional geology and geochemistry.
Suggested donation $5/person
