Bellarmine University’s Center for Regional Environmental Studies will host a free public symposium on climate change Sept. 22 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The event will be held in the George G. Brown Center’s Frazier Hall, and advance registration is required and can be accomplished online at: https://buclimate.eventbrite.com/.
A news release from Bellarmine noted that public discussions about climate change often include differing opinions, and noted that “authenticated information is harder to come by.”
The symposium will attempt to answer the question: What have scientific researchers learned about the current state of our climate? And how do they collect data about the seas and atmosphere, and how do they test their conclusions.”
The symposium is funded by a grant from NASA Kentucky’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research and is “open to anyone whishing to hear directly from scientists involved in climate change research,” the release said.
The keynote speaker will be Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Schmidt co-authored Climate Change: Picturing the Science” in 2009, and received the American Geophysical Union’s inaugural climate communications prize in 2011 for his efforts to educate the public about scientific research related to climate change.
Dr. Keith Mountain, a climatologist at the University of Louisville, will discuss what his research on Arctic ice reveals about past climatic conditions.
In the afternoon, participants can attend one of three concurrent sessions:
- A workshop for teachers of grades kindergarten to 12, led by Bellarmine’s Dr. Kate Bulinski.
- An interactive teleconference with scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Climate Sciences.
- A panel discussion on the biological effects of climate change, led by Claude Stephens, education director for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.