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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

Monday, December 14, 2009 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

photo of Compton Tucker

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Compton Tucker

"Worlds in Collision: Science, Politics, Belief, and Climate Change"

graph of survey results, per cent of public believing in global warming, declining from 85% in 2006 to 72% in 2009

ABSTRACT -- Despite voluminous observational data, some of it collected from NASA satellites, a growing number of Americans do not believe the planet is warming, do not believe human activities are causing the warming, and/or do not believe the consequences of global warming will be severe. Disputed issues include the causes of increased global air temperature, whether this warming is unprecedented or within normal climatic variations, whether this temperature increase is an artifact of poor measurements, and what the consequences of global warming will be. The controversy over global warming is significantly more pronounced in the popular than scientific literature, indicating the public is difficult to reach on this complex topic.

The speaker will briefly review the global warming controversy and discuss why the climate change skeptics are able to gain traction and increase doubt about global warming.

SPEAKER -- Compton Tucker specializes in studying the earth with satellite data. He was among the first researchers to employ coarse-resolution satellite data to exploit the time domain for studying global photosynthesis on land, determining land cover, monitoring droughts, providing famine early warning, and predicting ecologically-coupled disease outbreaks. He has also used large quantities of Landsat data to study temperate, subtropical, and tropical forests as well as tropical glacier variation from the 1970s to the present. From 2006 to 2009 he was on NASA detail to the Inter-Agency Climate Change Science Program where he was the co-chairperson of the Interagency Working Groups on Observations and Land Use and Land Cover Change. He is the author of > 155 journal articles that have been cited > 13,000 times.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov