Abstract: In 2015 nations agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals, including ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all. To accomplish them, we need to find synergies across the seventeen goals. Fortunately, some co-benefits are clear.  Cutting greenhouse gas emissions does much more than fight climate change.  It saves water and improves water quality. It saves lives, too, as witnessed by the ~20,000 or more people who die from coal pollution each year in the United States, with a million more people worldwide. The low-carbon economy will help stabilize national security, create net jobs, and more.

About the Speaker: Rob Jackson is Douglas Provostial Professor and Chair of the Earth System Science Department at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow in Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy (jacksonlab.stanford.edu).  As an environmental scientist, he chairs the Global Carbon Project (globalcarbonproject.org), an international organization that tracks natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.  His photographs have appeared in many media outlets, including the NY Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, and he has published several books of poetry. Jackson is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Ecological Society of America and was honored at the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.

Abstract: Effective climate risk management requires robust quantification of the probability of different kinds of hazards, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe storms. As a result, there has been increasing interest in the extent to which historical global warming has influenced the occurrence and severity of individual extreme climate events. However, although trends in the extremes of the seasonal- and daily-scale distributions of climate records have been analyzed for many years, quantifying the contribution of observed global warming to individual events that are unprecedented in the observed record presents a particular scientific challenge. I will describe a framework for leveraging observations and large climate model ensembles to quantify the influence of observed global warming on the probability of unprecedented extreme events. This approach is grounded on three tenets: (1) Focus on understanding the physical causes of the individual event; (2) Use formal uncertainty quantification to test the probability of those physical conditions occurring in the current climate; and (3) Use formal hypothesis testing to compare the probability of those physical conditions occurring in the current climate and a climate without human influence. My group has applied our analysis to a number of different climate variables from a number of individual events, including temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and atmospheric circulation patterns. Together, this work has shown that global warming can influence the risk of extreme events that are unprecedented in historical experience, particularly by altering the probability of the physical conditions that are responsible for the event. In addition, given the widespread public interest in “real time” attribution, the prospects for operational attribution analysis will also be discussed.

About the Speaker: Noah Diffenbaugh is a Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University. He studies the climate system, including impacts on agriculture, water resources, and human health. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Geophysical Research Letters. He has served as an IPCC Lead Author, and has provided scientific expertise to the White House, the Governor of California, and U.S. Congressional offices. Recognitions include the Holton Award from the American Geophysical Union and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. 

Abstract: A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that changes in climate are associated with increases in human violence.  I review new and recent evidence on this topic, using data ranging from baseball games in the US to civil war in Africa.  Across disparate settings, warmer-than-average temperatures are shown to cause increases in violence, with effect sizes that are both consistent and large.  Economic theories of conflict appear to explain some of the linkage between climate and conflict, but are not consistent with the data in all settings. Constructive engagement with the political science and security communities will be very helpful in understanding and interpreting these findings.

About the Speaker: Marshall Burke is assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science, and Center Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on the economics of rural development in Africa. His work has appeared in both economics and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford.

Abstract: The term "natural disasters" diminishes the key role that the human context plays in turning a natural event into a disaster. In this talk, I present scientific insights into the physical processes governing the onset and evolution of extreme events and discuss how this improved understanding the challenges and opportunities that these present for decision-makers and communities at risk. More specifically, I will focus on three disasters of special current relevance, ice-sheet disintegration, coastal risk and injection-induced seismicity. The common denominator of what at first glance might seem like disparate systems is multiphase flow. The dynamic interactions between multiple solid and fluid phases, such as ice and melt-water; vegetation and waves; rocks and wastewater; give rise to drastic nonlinearities that govern abrupt changes in system behavior reflected in extreme events.

Abstract: Nuclear war and climate change present the two most serious threats to global security since World War II. This talk shows that nuclear weapons research and climate science were historically connected in deep, sometimes intimate ways. Each developed its own knowledge infrastructure, including people, technical systems, and organizations, with surprising parallels and frequent exchanges across the classified/civilian divide. From the 1940s on, nuclear weapons research and climate science both relied heavily on computer models, used related physics and numerical methods, and shared human as well as technical resources. Radiocarbon from nuclear weapons tests contributed to understanding of the global carbon cycle, while fallout monitoring networks produced critical knowledge about the stratosphere. In the 1980s, the potential for “nuclear winter” — a war-induced climatic catastrophe — became a major political issue, but the groundwork for this concern had been laid long before.

This interplay not only continued, but became even more significant after the Cold War’s end, when the weapons labs’ expertise, equipment, and observing systems were partially repurposed. Several US national laboratories now play essential roles in climate and Earth system science. Among these roles are the Program on Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, based at Livermore and responsible for the important Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a major unifying force in climate modeling for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. The cyberinfrastructure underlying CMIP and similar projects must address mounting challenges related to data access controls, software support, and the security of huge data collections, while their institutional and human bases depend on ongoing national support. Crafting effective climate policy, I argue, will require understanding and rethinking the dynamics of these knowledge infrastructures for the present, rapidly evolving context.

About the Speaker: Paul Edwards is a Professor in the School of Information (SI) and the Dept. of History at the University of Michigan. SI is an interdisciplinary professional school focused on bringing people, information, and technology together in more valuable ways.

His research explores the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science. His current research focuses on knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene.

Dr. Edwards is co-editor (with Geoffrey C. Bowker) of the Infrastructures book series (MIT Press), and he serves on the editorial boards of Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries and Information & Culture: A Journal of History. His most recent book is A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).

Abstract: The Federal response to dual use pathogens is being actively debated. We are at a critical juncture between free science exploration and government policy. Should science be regulated? We impede discovery and innovation at our peril. Yet, this issue must be viewed through the lens of the looming  infectious disease threat, globalization and its consequences, and environmental challenges such as climate change.

About the Speaker: Lucy Shapiro is a Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine where she holds the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research and is the Director of Stanford’s Beckman Center for Molecular & Genetic Medicine. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and is a member of the Board of Directors of Pacific Biosciences, Inc. She founded the anti-infectives discovery company, Anacor Pharmaceuticals, that was recently sold to Pfizer. She has co-founded a second company, Boragen LLC, providing novel antifungals for agriculture and the environment. Her studies of the control of the bacterial cell cycle and the establishment of cell fate has yielded fundamental insights into the living cell and garnered her multiple awards including the International Canadian Gairdner Award, the Abbott Lifetime Achievement Award, the Selman Waksman Award and the Horwitz Prize. In 2013 President Obama awarded her the US National Medal of Science. She is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.