ABSTRACT

While the physics of climate change is well understood, much less well understood is how it will impact humans. What we can see is that the impacts of climate change are strongly non-linear and we can expect them to accelerate in the future. The good news is that the price of alternative, climate-safe energy is rapidly dropping. For the first time, we are able to largely solve the climate problem by transitioning away from fossil fuels at little or no cost to society. At this point, climate change is not a scientific or technical problem, but a political one.

About the Speaker:

Andrew Dessler is a climate scientist who studies both the science and politics of climate change. He is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and director of Texas A&M's Texas Center for Climate Studies. His scientific research revolves around climate feedbacks, in particular how water vapor and clouds act to amplify warming from the carbon dioxide that humans emit. He is also interested in the intersection of climate change and human society, with the goal of helping us better cope with the impacts of climate change. This includes work quantifying climate extremes and how climate change can alter them, as well as analyzing how climate change will stress crucial energy, water, and other infrastructure and human systems. During the last year of the Clinton Administration, he served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Based on his research and policy experience, he has authored two books on climate change: The science and politics of global climate change: A guide to the debate (Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed. 2019, co-written with Edward Parson), and Introduction to modern climate change (Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed. 2021). This latter book won the 2014 American Meteorological Society Louis J. Battan Author's Award. Prior to his work on climate, his research focused on stratospheric photochemistry. He authored the book The chemistry and physics of stratospheric ozone (Academic Press, 2000) about his work on that subject. In 2011, in recognition of his work on outreach, he was named a Google Science Communication Fellow. In 2021, he won the American Geophysical Union's Climate Communication Award. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union. From 2012-2015, he was Chair of the AAAS section on Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences. He is currently President-elect of the AGU's Global Environmental Change section. He served for 7 years as a member of NASA's Earth Science Advisory Committee and twice served on NASA's Senior Review of Operating Missions. His educational background includes a B.A. in physics from Rice University and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University. He also did postdoctoral work at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and spent nine years on the research faculty of the University of Maryland. Prior to graduate school, he worked in the energy group at The First Boston Corporation doing mergers and acquisitions analysis. He lives in College Station, TX with his wife, two kids, and two lazy dogs.