For Immediate Release                                                         Oct. 3, 2007 Contact: Lynn Whalen, 217.786.2219   SPRINGFIELD –  Don Wuebbles, Ph.D., an international expert on global warming and director of the School of Earth, Society and Environment at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will speak on “Confronting Global Warming” Friday evening, Oct. 12 at Lincoln Land Community College. The public is invited to the free presentation, which begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Trutter Center.   In 2000, Dr. Wuebbles was elected a member of the International Ozone Commission. He received the Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2005. He developed the concept of Ozone Depletion Potentials used in most policymaking relative to protection of the ozone layer, including the U.S. Clean Air Act.   Dr. Wuebbles will discuss what is happening to our climate, the “expected” weather, and its variability.  “The American public is still too unaware of the potential impacts of these changes on their lives and on future generations. Nonetheless, the available evidence strongly indicates that human activities are playing a significant role in bringing about climate change, especially in the last few decades of the 20th Century and the first seven years of the 21st Century,” said Dr. Wuebbles.  He will outline significant changes in climate as a result of human activities that are projected for the rest of the 21st Century and beyond. “The scientific analyses also strongly indicate that the globally-averaged temperature increase is resulting from rising atmospheric levels of radiatively important (mostly heat-trapping) gases and particles, lending credence to concerns about much larger changes in climate being predicted for the coming decades.” Dr. Wuebbles’ talk will serve as the keynote address for the biannual meeting of the Illinois Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The two-day meeting is being coordinated by LLCC Professors of Physics Dave Sykes and Tom Snyder.   Dr. Wuebbles. who also serves as a professor in the UIUC Departments of Atmospheric Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the author of over 380 scientific articles, most of which relate to atmospheric chemistry and global climate change as affected by both human activities and natural phenomena. His research emphasizes the development and use of mathematical models of the atmosphere to study the chemical and physical processes that determine atmospheric structure, aimed primarily toward improving our understanding of the impacts that man-made and natural trace gases may be having on the Earth’s climate and on tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry.   He is a principal investigator in the Center for Integrating Statistics and Environmental Science that is headquartered at the University of Chicago. He is also a Faculty Fellow in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.   Dr. Wuebbles coauthored an assessment of the impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes region, and more recently, a similar assessment of the U.S. Northeast. He was recently asked to lead a new assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on the city of Chicago.   For more information, please contact Professor Dave Sykes at 786-2404.
Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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