Posted October 11, 2005

WIU Department of Geography faculty member Dr. Redina Herman will present "A Discussion of Scientific Issues Surrounding Global Warming" for the WIU Science Journal Club (SJC) Friday, October 14, 2005 at 3:00 p.m. in Currens Hall 205.

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of focus on global warming. This followed a lot of focus on a returning ice age during the 1980’s. It would be nice to know what’s really going on, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, this is not that presentation (or at least mostly not that presentation.) Before we can figure out what’s really going on, we have to look at what the data is telling us. There are a number of scientific issues that must be considered when asking the question: Is global warming real? This presentation will talk about scientific considerations such as: the temperature record, the normal cycle between glacial and interglacial periods, changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution, infrared absorbers such as greenhouse gases, UV reflectors such as sulfates, global and regional model results, local versus global-mean effects and finally, trying to put it all together. My current area of research is radiative transfer, so some time will be spent on the radiative transfer considerations and what these radiative transfer results mean for the future global-mean surface temperature.