Lowell Lecture
Extreme Events and Climate Change: What We Know and Some Ideas About What To Do About It
Date & Time
Sept. 14, 2017 at 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Location
New England Aquarium
1 Central Wharf Boston, MA 02110
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Ellen Marie Douglas, PE, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Hydrology, School for the Environment, University of Massachusetts Boston
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Maggie See (AquariumLectures@neaq.org, 6172262183)
There are three truths that climate science tells us about what we can expect from climate change. The first is this: small changes in an average value, such as average global temperatures, will have bigger effects on the extremes. And we have seen this truth playing out in the extreme weather events that have wrought havoc across the nation and New England over the last decade or more. Record breaking events will always occur, but the time between these events should increase. Under climate change, records are getting broken in…well, record time! The second truth that climate science tells us is that our history of CO2 emissions has embedded a certain amount of change into the climate system, which we will need to adapt to. And the third truth is that that if we don’t account for our changing climate in planning and designing, our plans and designs will be wrong. In this presentation, I will discuss observations of our changing climate, what changes may be in Boston’s future and some plans for how to adapt to these changes.