Teale Lecture: Moving Past Doubt: History, Truth, & Anthropogenic Climate Change

The Edwin Teale Lecture Series at UConn brings distinguished speakers to the university to speak on aspects of nature and the environment. In November, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the Univeristy of California, San Diego gave a lecture entitled Moving Past Doubt: History, Truth, & Anthropogenic Climate Change which is now available online here.

Infographic: The 2011 Hurricane Season in Review

Suburbia and Climate Change

Back in December, The Atlantic Cities ran an article discussing the effects suburban settlement patterns has on climate change. The article, entitled The Missing Link of Climate Change: Single-Family Suburban Homes, discusses how smarter land use planning can drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions. Suburban developments are often built away from industrial and commercial centers, which creates the need to travel longer distances (compared to more mixed use or urban settlement patterns) for everything from commuting to work to buying groceries. As you can see in the chart above, energy use is much greater in suburban single family homes mainly due to transportation needs. The overarching message of the article may best be summarized by this excerpt:

...what if we could also simply reduce the miles people drive by in a sense pushing their many destinations closer together?

TEDxPSU: Dr. Michael Mann - A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future

TEDx events are independently organized TED events that follow the general TED format, but are organized locally. I came across Dr. Michael Mann's presentation at TEDxPSU on twitter (follow him: @MichaelEMann). Dr. Mann is known for his extensive research in paleoclimatology- including the Hockey Stick Graph that displays recent, rapid global warming.

ESRI Map of Carbon Dioxide Emissions

ESRI has produced a map that displays carbon dioxide emissions from 1960 to 2008. The map is dynamic in that it allows the user to pick the year, or consecutive years, to display in addition to having the ability to "play" the map as an animated timeline. Another cool feature of the map is that it has two sets of symbology; the map displays countries' total emissions as a color and relative emissions are represented by dots. For more information, including how the map was made, visit ESRI's Map Story Profile.