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| A pod of walruses struggles for balance atop floating sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, which has thinned in the last decade. |
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| Scripps Professor Emeritus Richard Somerville |
In an open letter published in the Nov. 19 issue of the journal Science, Somerville and nine colleagues said that further delay on controlling greenhouse gas emissions could have serious consequences for society.
"We call for the science community to develop, implement, and sustain an independent initiative with a singular mandate: to actively and effectively share information about climate change risks and potential solutions with the public," the authors wrote.
Beginning Nov. 29, negotiators from countries around the world gather in Cancun, Mexico, for the 16th Conference of the Parties convened by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. There national representatives will attempt to come to agreement on global actions to address climate change consequences.
Somerville will appear at a workshop on communicating climate change being held during the 2010 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting, which begins Dec. 13 in San Francisco. Somerville will discuss the need for the science community to play a greater role in the dissemination of information on climate change risks and potential solutions. He will also present a talk at the AGU Fall meeting on the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its future role. The IPCC has been criticized despite the valuable role it has played to date in summarizing knowledge about changing climate and even as predicted consequences of global warming begin to take place.
Having served a prominent role in the 2007 IPCC report that garnered criticism, Somerville brings special insight to a discussion of the world's leading authority on climate change. During his talk, Somerville will draw on examples from his recent online essay published in Climatic Change, titled "How much should the public know about climate science?"
Scripps Institution of Oceanography: scripps.ucsd.edu
Scripps News: scrippsnews.ucsd.edu
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and education in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide. Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration.
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