Kirk Johnson, a world-renowned paleontologist who focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs, will visit Virginia Tech on Friday, February 16.
He will give a 4 p.m. distinguished lecture, “Natural History in the Age of Humans,” at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Blacksburg. The lecture is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing in the theatre’s main lobby.
Dr. Kirk Johnson
Dr. Kirk Johnson is the Sant Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He oversees more than 440 employees and a collection of more than 145 million objects—the largest natural history collection in the world. The Museum hosts more than 7 million visitors annually and, in 2017, its scientists published over 760 scientific research papers and described more than 300 new species.
Johnson is a paleontologist who has led expeditions that have resulted in the discovery of more than 1,400 fossil sites. His research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs. He is known for his scientific articles, popular books, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and collaborations with artists. In 2010-11, he led the excavation of an ice age site near Snowmass Village, Colorado, that recovered more than 5,400 bones of mammoths, mastodons and other ice age animals. This dig was featured in the NOVA documentary, Ice Age Death Trap, and in Johnson’s book, Digging Snowmastodon, Discovering an Ice Age World in the Colorado Rockies. His recent documentaries include the three-part NOVA series Making North America, which aired on PBS networks in November 2015, and The Great Yellowstone Thaw which premiered on PBS in June 2017.
This event is part of the annual Distinguished Lecture Series hosted by the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, with funding from the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and the Virginia Tech Graduate School.
For more information about the event, please contact the Global Change Center at 231-5400 or by email at schoeng@vt.edu.
The Lyric Theatre is located at 135 College Ave. in Blacksburg. Doors will open at 3 p.m. Metered parking is available on the street as well as in the Kent Square garage. Anyone parking on the Virginia Tech campus before 5:00 pm will need a permit.
Jeremy Hoffman, a climate and earth scientist from the Science Museum of Virginia, gave a free public lecture at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 25 at the Fralin Life Science Institute auditorium at Virginia Tech.
His talk, titled “Birds, Bees, Flowers, Trees: The Phenological Impact of Climate Change,” focused on the local effects of climate change on our health, recreation, and daily lives.
Hoffman regularly engages with audiences of all ages and background to explore climate change and how it works on multiple timescales from human (decades) to geologic (millions of years). He graduated with distinction in earth sciences from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, before earning his Ph.D. in geology with a focus in paleoclimatology at Oregon State University.
Hoffman previously served as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, a Mitchell Hamline School of Law Science Communication Fellow, and an Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Science Communication Fellow. He is now the climate and earth scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, where he focuses on urban, local, and regional climate trends and making data accessible to the public through unique data visualizations, exhibit spaces, and educational multimedia.
Hoffman’s talk was co-sponsored by the Global Change Center, Hahn Horticulture Garden, and the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. Stephanie Huckestein, education and outreach coordinator for the Hahn Horticulture Garden, first heard Hoffman speak about climate change at the American Public Garden Association’s Education Symposium in Richmond, Virginia.
“He is a dynamic speaker and truly passionate about his work,” said Huckestein. “Immediately after hearing Dr. Hoffman’s talk, I was interested in him sharing his passion with our audience. I am so pleased that the Global Change Center and the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology were eager to co-sponsor this event.”
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Dr. Scott Edwards, Professor, Harvard University, will give the Seventh Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Seminar in the Biocomplexity Institute Auditorium on Friday, January 19, 2018 at 12:20 pm. His talk is titled, “Genes or gene regulation? Understanding the evolutionary genetics of flightlessness in birds”.
Dr. Edwards is a distinguished scientist at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Harvard, his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his postdoctoral training at the University of Florida. Dr. Edwards’ research program uses interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate field, museum, and population genetic studies to understand the basis of avian diversity. He has published scientific articles in fields ranging from evolution, ecology, behavior, population genetics, and molecular genetics. In addition, he has written numerous articles for general audiences. His work has attracted major funding support from NSF throughout his career. Dr. Edwards has been very active in student mentoring and education, received numerous grants for student diversity, mentoring, and conference/workshop activities. Among his many awards in recognition of his scientific work and educational activities, he has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and named Fellow of both the American Association of Science and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Event Co-sponsors: Department of Biological Sciences, College of Science Diversity Committee, College of Natural Resources and Environment, Women and Minority Artists and Scholars Lecture Series, Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, Office of Inclusion and Diversity, VT Life Sciences Seminar, and Ecology/Evolution/Behavior Seminar.
The Global Change Center recently awarded an Undergraduate Science Policy Fellowship to James Maze to attend the Washington Semester Program during summer semester 2018.
JAMES MAZE
James is majoring in Water: Resources, Policy, and Management at Virginia Tech. He is interested in integrating engineering-based solutions with government policy to solve problems related to water quality and water scarcity.
During spring semester 2017, James partnered with four graduate students to create an environmental policy addressing climate change. He and his team were finalists in the NYU Policy Case Competition and traveled to New York to present an energy infrastructure policy agenda. The previous summer, James worked at the Knoxville field office of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, where he was involved with land reclamation projects, drought management planning, and inspection of water treatment plants.
James is excited to receive this fellowship and sees his upcoming summer in Washington, DC as an opportunity to gain valuable work experience and a deeper understanding of environmental policy at the national level. After graduation, James intends to go to law school.
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The School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at Virginia Tech offers the Washington Semester Program to all undergraduate students, regardless of major. The program provides a unique 11-week immersion into work experience within the nation’s capital. Students work on challenging science policy issues that shape communities locally and nationally while obtaining academic credit.
The Global Change Center (GCC) offers competitive fellowships to undergraduate students to cover the cost of in-state tuition, housing and fees to attend the Washington Semester Program. You can read more about this program here.
January 9, 2018 | In a study involving 19 European Union nations, researchers have found that future climate change will make power outages more costly for European households.
The study is the first to consider the effect temperatures have on household power outage costs and to incorporate the role of climate change when analyzing such costs.
Dr. Klaus Moeltner
“Climate change is one of the biggest issues facing our planet today and we need to examine how it can impact household expenses,” said study co-investigator Klaus Moeltner, a professor of agricultural and applied economics in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “This is especially important when looking at European homes where heating and cooling systems comprise a significant portion of electricity usage.”
Economists, including Moeltner and Jed Cohen, a senior researcher at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and a Virginia Tech alumnus, evaluated power outage costs by determining residents’ willingness to pay to avoid power outages.
Their findings, published recently in the new online journal Nature Energy, reveal that as climate change continues to impact temperatures and home electricity usage, households will be willing to pay more to avoid summer outages and less to avoid winter outages, making summer outages more expensive and winter outages less expensive. Results also show that increases in summer outage costs will outpace decreases in winter outage costs, making power outages in Europe more costly to households, on average.
Across the 19 countries analyzed, current patterns show that the average resident relies more on electricity to heat their homes in the winter than they do to cool their homes in the summer, suggesting that they experience greater discomfort during winter power outages than during summer outages. However, under predicted climate change, which will bring increased temperatures and more severe storms, researchers estimate that this dynamic will begin to shift. Researchers expect the shift to be region – and season – specific as all nations begin to pay less during winter outages and specific regions start to pay more for summer interruptions.
“The majority of household energy consumption in the EU is from space heating,” said Moeltner. “This explains a lot of the patterns we discovered. Right now, households pay more for electricity in the winter because they use their space heaters a lot. But in the future, when temperatures are higher, households won’t need to use them as much and their winter energy costs will decrease.”
Investigators looked at power outage size, demographic data, and country climates, grouping the countries into cold, mid, and warm nations. Results showed that outages that affect entire nations have the greatest effect on respondent willingness to pay to avoid outages.
Winter outages that impact entire nations are expected to decrease hourly costs by 3 percent, and similar summer outages are estimated to increase hourly costs by 20 percent per person affected by 2055. Demographic results revealed that urban dwellers, older residents, and women are willing to pay more than their counterparts to avoid power outages.
“While some of the results seem intuitive – urban dwellers usually have greater income and benefit more from public infrastructure, so it makes sense that they would be willing to pay more than rural residents – our findings provide a more complete picture of electricity use related to heating and cooling and the benefits it provides,” said Moeltner.
The researchers – from Virginia Tech, the Energy Institute, Johannes Kepler University, and Energie AG Oberoesterreich Trading Company – used average daily temperatures from the past 10 years and predicted climate change patterns, along with survey data collected from phone and postal interviews, to model power outage costs as a function of temperature.
Phone and postal surveys provided electricity cost values by estimating household willingness to pay to avoid potential power outages. Respondents were given hypothetical scenarios in which they could choose to pay a varying bid price to avoid an outage in January or an outage in July.
As power outage costs are expected to increase with summertime power outages under climate change conditions, researchers recommend European nations secure their energy grids from summertime outages, and as Europe looks to fulfill its 2030 greenhouse gas targets, officials should consider incorporating the impacts climate change is predicted to have on power grid security into their plans and investments.
“This research shows how applied economics and the physical sciences can team up to answer important research questions at large spatial scales,” said Moeltner. “Changes in the natural, physical environment will have numerous economic implications, and we need to understand both components to derive meaningful policy recommendations.”
Please join us for a special lecture in Fralin Auditorium on Thursday evening, January 25, 2018 at 6:30 p.m.! The Hahn Horticultural Garden, the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, and the Global Change Center are pleased to welcome Dr. Jeremy Hoffman, a Climate and Earth Scientist from the Science Museum of Virginia. Dr. Hoffman is passionate about communicating science with broad audiences and is a talented speaker. His lecture will be titled: “Birds, Bees, Flowers, Trees: The Phenological Impacts of Climate Change”.
The community is welcome to attend. Please plan to arrive early because space is limited to 100 people.
January 3, 2018 | Geosciences Associate Professor Brian Romans is setting sail for the Southern Ocean with a group of scientists who will drill into the ocean floor offshore of West Antarctica to better understand how polar ice sheets respond to climate change.
The JOIDES Resolution
Romans’ two-month trip, departing Jan. 5 from New Zealand, is part of the International Ocean Discovery Program, Expedition 374. Working alongside 30 geologists and paleoclimatologistsfrom around the world, Romans will drill into ocean floor in the Ross Sea, offshore of West Antarctica, with the goal of recovering sediments that can show the dynamic history of the region’s vast ice sheet.
“The eventual impact of this research will be to improve climate models used to forecast future global change,” Romans said. “Earth scientists have shown that regions near the poles — the Arctic and Antarctic — are highly sensitive to changes in global climate. This so-called ‘polar amplification’ phenomenon can result in warming of both the atmosphere and the oceans, which can, in turn, affect the stability of ice sheets. One of the most critical questions in climate science is if the well-documented melting of land ice could accelerate, leading to even more rapid melting and, ultimately, collapse of an ice sheet.”
Accelerated ice sheet melting presents a global threat, with sea levels rising much faster than currently predicted. Additional consequences are numerous, including changes in ocean circulation patterns and in how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back to space by vast, white-colored ice sheets. One of the largest continental ice sheets on Earth, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is experiencing more warming than other significant ice sheets, Romans added.
Ongoing monitoring and the seeking of new data from drilling efforts in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet by climate scientists, glaciologists, and oceanographers is vital. Observed measurements from the past several decades of ice sheet change could be missing part of the picture.
For example, Romans will query how did the West Antarctic Ice Sheet respond to climate change during longer time periods, from centuries to millions of years. “Studying this history will improve our ability to foresee changes that may happen in the future,” Romans said.
Romans previously has sailed on the International Ocean Discovery Program’s primary research vessel, the JOIDES Resolution. In 2012, he traveled to the North Atlantic Ocean, near Newfoundland, Canada, where he helped recover sediments recording oceanographic change going back from 50 million years.
Sediments that accumulate on the ocean floor near ice sheets provide a record of past processes, said Romans. When ice sheets melt, they discharge massive amounts of sediment generated by glaciers as they eroded bedrock on land. This sediment is transported to areas where it can accumulate for long periods of time, resulting in a record that scientists can use to reconstruct ice sheet history, he added.
A melting ice sheet also produces icebergs where the land-based ice sheet meets the ocean. These icebergs contain rocks and sediment that can became embedded within the ice as the glacier eroded into the landscape. As icebergs break off and float away, eventually melting, the rocky debris drops to the ocean floor, where it becomes part of the sedimentary record. Documenting the presence, number, and characteristics of the “dropstones” can be used to study iceberg discharge from an ice sheet, said Romans.
“Although a scientific ocean drilling expedition like ours is a complex and costly endeavor, it is the best way to efficiently collect the sediment samples necessary to do this research,” Romans said.
The International Ocean Discovery Program is an international science collaboration to acquire sediments and rock from beneath the ocean floor to study fundamental Earth processes. Scientists from U.S. institutions participating in the expeditions are supported by the National Science Foundation.
Follow Brian Romans on his expedition
Romans will be updating his research progress and posting photos from offshore of West Antarctica, at his research blog. He also can be found on Twitter and Instagram. To follow the JOIDES Resolution ship, look for them at Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
