A new seminar series was launched in 2024 as an opportunity for WHOI scientists to invite external speakers of international repute for a seminar and discussions on climate and the oceans. The goals are to:
- Promote interdisciplinary science on the ocean’s role in climate
- Provide the opportunity for students, postdocs and WHOI scientists to interact with an external scientist
- Create community and inter-departmental collaboration within WHOI
Upcoming Events
Tuesday, May 1, 2025 • 12 PM • Redfield Auditorium
Malin Pinsky, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California Santa Cruz
Tuesday, May 25, 2025 • 12 pM • Clark 507
The ocean at the microscale
Roman Stocker, ETH Zurich
Past Events
Tuesday, April 23, 2024 • 3 pM
Perspectives on the warming Earth: A near miss and the ultimate cost
David Archer, University of Chicago
Abstract: I will present two bookended ruminations on anthropogenic climate change, one looking backward into the past, the other about the future. The first segment considers the question of what would have happened if the natural CO2 concentration in the atmosphere had been different than it turned out to be. If it had been lower, the radiative forcing from fossil fuel CO2 would have started impacting the weather sooner, which would have left less time for the technological development needed for decarbonization. We got lucky! The second segment is on how we assess future damages from climate change. The present-day value of future climate damages is called the social cost of carbon, and is based on the idea of discounting, to account for perpetual exponential growth and human selfishness. What if the discount rate were zero? We come up with a scale estimate of costs in present-day terms by integrating a fractional change in Earth’s human carrying capacity through time, multiplied by the present-day rate of global economic activity. In order to get this published, we had to figure out in what mythical world this calculation would be actually correct, which turns out to be an extrusion of today into the indefinite future, with no growth or technological development, and everyone living forever, like Groundhog day. Because carbon release alters climate for hundreds of thousands of years, the “ultimate” cost of carbon exceeds the “social” cost of carbon by many orders of magnitude.
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Tuesday, November 19, 2024 • 3 pm
Antarctica and the global climate system: Observations, models, and chaos
Nick Golledge, Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington
Abstract: The Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough freshwater to raise global sea level by 58 m. Understanding the timescales and magnitudes of its response to environmental drivers is therefore societally useful. Equally important, however, is an appreciation of its dynamical coupling with other Earth system elements, and the mechanisms by which these elements interact. This presentation will span all of these aspects, starting with field observations and data-constrained models. We will explore how validating our models with empirical data allows for reliable future projections, and how artificial neural networks now allow us to improve the robustness of those scenarios. From there we expand our horizon with simplified geometry experiments that can tell us about large-scale regime shifts over millions of years, revealing the way that ice sheets 'resonate' with environmental forcing. Finally, we'll look at how dynamical systems approaches can tell us something about Earth system behavior in a more conceptual sense, where growth and increasing connectivity allow for self-organization, and where positive feedbacks can sometimes drive a system towards chaos.
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