Profs & Pints Philadelphia: Climate Change 101

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Climate Change 101,” a crash course on the science related to directional climate change and global warming, with Sean O’Donnell, professor in Drexel University’s Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science program.

We hear and read a lot about climate change and global warming, and it has become pretty hard to ignore the Philadelphia region’s wacky weather patterns with its recent freakily warm winters, vanishing snow, and late spring “heat domes.”

Many of us, however, don’t have much of a grasp of the science explaining such developments and can’t answer questions such as: How do we really know that the climate is changing? If so, why? Is Philadelphia’s strange local weather part of the bigger picture?

Gain an understanding of the basic science that helps us predict and understand climate change with the help of Sean O’Donnell, an environmental ecologist and expert in animal responses to temperature conditions.

He’ll talk about how the Earth compares to the moon and other planets in terms of its atmosphere’s composition and function, and he’ll discuss what drives dynamic climates that undergo changes in their normal range of variation.

You’ll learn about the scientific basis for how and why we expect the climate to change and how we know human activities are driving changes. You’ll get a clear understanding of the evidence for and against climate change and a sense of the validity of various claims made by climate-change skeptics.

Dr. O’Donnell’s research is heavily focused on how various animals deal with shifts in climate conditions and extremely high or low temperatures. You’ll walk away from his talk with a clearer understanding of what we can expect to deal with down the road. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3 pm. Talk starts at 4:30.)

Image: Texas’s Lake Ray Hubbard after a drought. Photo by Terry Shuck / Creative Commons