Climate Change: From Hot Air to Environmental Justice
Overview
Abstract
The human influence on the Earth’s climate system is clear and unequivocal. With global average surface temperatures nearly 1.5oC warmer than before the industrial revolution, certain types of extreme weather have become demonstrably more severe. I will discuss how scientists detect changes in extreme weather statistics and attribute those changes to the consumption of fossil fuels. These changes have real impacts on all people but especially those who are disadvantaged in some way. I will then give some examples to quantify such environmental injustice and how it changes in a warming world.
Speaker Biography
Michael F. Wehner is a senior scientist in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Dr. Wehner’s current research concerns the behavior of extreme weather events in a changing climate, especially heat waves, intense precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones. Before joining the Berkeley Lab in 2002, Wehner was an analyst at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Program for Climate Modeling Diagnosis and Intercomparison. He is the author or co-author of over 275 scientific papers and reports. He was a lead author for the 2013 Fifth and 2021 Sixth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 2nd,3rd, 4th and 5thUS National Climate Assessments. Dr. Wehner earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Delaware. He received the 2022 LBNL Director's Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.