Speakers@Wooster

The great global warming debate will heat up at The College of Wooster on Tuesday, Feb. 20, when Richard Alley, professor of geosciences and associate of the EMS Environment Institute at Penn State University, presents “Possibilities in Problems: The Good Side of Global Warming” at the 26th annual Richard G. Osgood, Jr., Memorial Lecture. The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. in McGaw Chapel (525 E. University St.). A dessert reception will follow the lecture.

Alley’s research and teaching focuses on the paleoclimatic records, dynamics, and sedimentary deposits of large ice sheets with an aim toward understanding the climate system and its history. He is an author for the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which released a major report earlier this month that contained grim predictions about global warming for the coming decades. His research is ultimately directed toward projecting future changes in climate and sea level.

Alley, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his M.S. and his B.S. from The Ohio State University, has worked to bring clarity and honesty to the climate debate in public and governmental arenas. His popular book on abrupt climate change, The Two-Mile Time Machine, won the national Phi Beta Kappa Science Award for 2001. He has also participated in many lively public debates on global climate change and on the anthropogenic influences on climate.

Alley has been on many national advisory panels on climate change, including serving as chair of the study group on Abrupt Climate Change for the National Research Council. He has also testified before the Senate and discussed climate change in a private meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney. In addition, he has received numerous awards that recognize his excellence in teaching and his fundamental contributions to the understanding of the Earth’s climate system.

The Richard G. Osgood, Jr., Memorial Lectureship in Geology was endowed in 1981 by his three sons in memory of their father, a paleontologist with an international reputation who taught at Wooster from 1967 until 1981. Funds from this endowment are used to bring a well-known scientist interested in paleontology and/or stratigraphy to campus each year to lecture and meet with students. The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Geology and the Richard G. Osgood, Jr., Memorial Lecture Endowed Fund in conjunction with The Environmental Action and Analysis Program (funded by the Henry R. Luce Foundation). For additional information, please call 330-263-2380.

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