Past Events

The Polar Speaker Series was a subset of our 2012-2013 Climate & Society seminar series.  All speakers except for Galya Morrell were co-sponsored by a Technologies Without Borders grant from GAIA.

Nikolay Shiklomanov - Arctic Urban Development and Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future of Urban Infrastructure in Permafrost Regions

Lawson Brigham - The New Maritime Arctic: Responding to Change at the Top of the World

Galya Morrell - Expedition Avanaa: Vanishing Ice and Culture in Northern Greenland

Timothy Heleniak - Polar Peoples: Population and Migration in the Arctic

On February 4^th, the Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Society and co-sponsors hosted a day-long visit by Bill McKibben, one of the country’s foremost environmental writers and a globally prominent climate change activist (350.org).  Following on his hard-hitting piece in Rolling Stone and his 20-city tour recently covered in the New York Times, McKibben challenged the Rutgers campus and wider public to Do the Math - Why Climate Change Matters and What You Can Do About It.

The Island President screening

Rutgers Climate Symposium

Arne Jacobson - The Pico Power Revolution

Mike Tidwell - Extreme Weather and Extreme Energy

Earth Day Environmental Film Festival

MARY ROBINSON SPOKE ON CLIMATE JUSTICE

April 2, 2012 Voorhees Chapel, Douglass Campus

Mary Robinson is President of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice.  She served as President of Ireland from 1990-1997 and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002. She is a member of the Elders and the Club of Madrid and the recipient of numerous honours and awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the President of the United States Barack Obama.

EXTREME WEATHER AND CLIMATE CHANGE: HOW CAN WE ADDRESS UNCERTAINTY?

Wednesday, March 28 2012 Cook Campus Center

Co-sponsored by Climate and Environmental Change Initiative

Katrina. Irene. Droughts in Texas and the Horn of Africa. Floods in the Midwest, Thailand and Pakistan. What’s next?

Does the progression of climate change portend future bouts of ‘extreme weather’?  Predicting the timing of such events remains an uncertain business.  How, then, should scientists communicate such risks to a skeptical public? How are members of the public likely to assess these risks? And how can policymakers make plans for adaptation, mitigation and development in the face of this uncertainty?  Four distinguished panelists addressed these and related questions in a series of short presentations followed by a dynamic panel and public discussion.

Communication about climate change is nearly as complex as the science. Among the most difficult communication challenges is persuading people to act on a problem that is not immediately relevant nor easily solved. This symposium included presentations of state-of-the-art research on how people understand climate change: Tony Leiserowitz (Yale), Rachel Shwom (Rutgers), Paul Stern (National Academy of Sciences), Bud Ward (Yale). Following the presentations there was a roundtable dialogue between panelists and Rutgers’ climate change leaders about the implications of the research for practice.