The GeoPlanet Doctoral School Institutes together with the AstroCeNT Particle Astrophysics Science And Technology Centre invite to a series of three lectures on climate change, motivated by this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. The online lectures will take place on 17-19 November, each starting at 17:00 CET (16:00 UTC) on the Zoom platform (Meeting ID: 912 8419 2198, Passcode: 429389; Zoom link), and will be streamed live on YouTube (links are posted below the abstracts). The lectures are a teaser for the GeoPlanet School on climate change to be held in spring 2022. Lectures are open to the public.
- Nov, 17th: Climate crisis or planetary crisis? by prof. Szymon Malinowski
- In the presentation a brief summary of our understanding of the recent state of the climate and the range of possible futures will be presented. Then, links between the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis will be discussed. Finally, arguments will be presented that there are no shortcuts to the crisis solutions at hand and to avoid the worst consequences we must address both crises together.
- https://youtu.be/1k4ddXXJ7qg
- Nov, 18th: Is climate change really that bad? by prof. Ilan Kelman
- Headlines on climate change scream its destruction: millions of forced migrants, crushing disasters, terrible wars, and drowning coastlines. Science paints a much more nuanced picture, sometimes involving these devastating scenarios while cutting through the rhetoric and hyperbole to present balanced understandings of the implications of human-caused climate change.
- https://youtu.be/SAAqV5vDv9I
- Nov, 19th: Stochastic resonance in climate change, by prof. Roberto Benzi
- In this talk I will review the mechanism of stochastic resonance and in particular its relevance in paleo-climatic variability. The idea was introduced in a paper in collaboration with G. Parisi, A. Sutera and A. Vulpiani in 1982. I will discuss how the idea of stochastic resonance was born and which were the basic physical motivations. Next I will address the main point of the paper, namely the rather unique role of the noise in the system and its cooperation with external forcing. At the time the paper was written, this effect was entirely new in physics not only within climate theory: nobody ever thought about this possibility. The paper by Parisi and co-workers, showed for the first time that this cooperation may occur in non linear systems like Earth climate. Later on, this cooperative effect was generalised for chaotic systems by Benzi, Sutera Vulpiani and, by now, there exist thousands of applications which exploit the mechanism of Stochastic Resonance in physics, biology and other scientific research.
- https://youtu.be/ZM0HJXVRD8M
The lecturers are world-renown experts in their fields.
Professor Szymon Malinowski deals with cloud physics and measurements of turbulence in the atmosphere and for most of his career he has worked on aspects of applied meteorology. Currently, professor Malinowski is the director of the Institute of Geophysics at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw. Professor Malinowski is a popularizer of science – among others, one of the founders of the “Nauka o klimacie” portal, co-author of the book under the same title and the winner of the Popularizer of Science 2017 competition in the “team” category. He is the protagonist of a documentary directed by Jonathan L. Ramsey, “It’s Okay To Panic”, in which he warns of the impending climate catastrophe.
Professor Ilan Kelman (http://www.ilankelman.org and Twitter/Instagram @ILANKELMAN) is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, including the integration of climate change into disaster research and health research.
Roberto Benzi is full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Roma “Tor Vergata”. After his training at the University of Roma “La Sapienza” he joined the IBM Research Center in Roma as Manager of the Computational Fluid Mechanics Group at the IBM European Centre for Parallel and Vector Computing. In 1988 he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Roma. He is very well known for his contributions in Climate Theory, Turbulence, Computational Fluid Dynamics and Theory of Dynamical Systems. He has received several international awards among them the IBM International Prize for Outstanding Technical and Scientific Innovation in 1984; the LF Richardson Medal from European Geophysical Union in 2006. In 2021 he has been awarded with F. Toschi et al. with the IgNobel prize in physics for the work on pedestrian dynamics.
Image: “Climate Change” by Kai Stachowiak under Public Domain license.