"Global Climate Change: Hoax or Catastrophe"

Dr. Philip Mote
University of Washington

Sunday, October 14, 2007 6:00 -7:00 pm
Room 602/603, Washington State Convention Center

Dr. Philip Mote

Global climate change has sometimes been described in apocalyptic terms and has been dismissed by some as a hoax. The scientific enterprise, however, has been toiling for many decades to describe and understand the changes wrought by humans in the global experiment we are playing with our planet's energy balance.

Measurements of change from the depths of the sea to the highest mountains can now be placed in context by clever reconstructions from tree rings, corals, and other "proxies", and satellite observations provide unprecedented measurements of year-to-year changes in the thickness of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the global mean sea level, and solar output, in order to better understand whether and how humans are changing the planet.

Dr. Philip Mote is a research scientist at the University of Washington, in the Climate Impacts Group, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. His research interests include the Northwest climate and its effects on snowpack, streamflow, and forest fires.  A frequent public speaker, he has also written numerous scientific articles and edited a book on climate modeling, published in 2000. In 2003 he became the Washington State Climatologist and is the lead author of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in 2007.

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