Upcoming Talks

Speaker: Nadir Jeevanjee, GFDL

Scientific confidence in the overall global warming forecast is high. But that forecast relies heavily on complex climate models, which require millions of lines of computer code and many dozens of tunable parameters. How can we be so confident in the face of such complexity?

To a significant extent this confidence stems from several predictions made by the earliest climate models, all of which were later confirmed quantitatively by observations. Examples of these successful forecasts include global warming itself, the cooling of the stratosphere, amplified warming over land as well as the arctic, and delayed warming over the Southern Ocean. I will outline these predictions as they arose out of the course of model development led by Syukuro Manabe at Princeton's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, touching on both the basic science behind the predictions as well as their varied and subsequent confirmation.

Speaker: Åsa Wettergren, University of Gothenburg 

The transition movement and the collapsologists are part of what research has recently defined as a ‘postapocalyptic’ environmental movement, They share the emotive-cognitive assessment that it is too late to ward off the catastrophic consequences of climate change and ecological degradation and that fossil-driven modernity is already collapsing. Drawing on interviews and observations, the talk highlight how transitioners and collapsologists manage emotions like grief, anxiety, fear and hope, and how the emotive-cognitive realization of living in the time of the end has led to new action-orientations and breaking with their past lifestyles.

Speaker: Matthias Heymann, Aarhus University

Human societies always had to deal with environmental conditions and challenges. They gained knowledge from environmental experience and developed practices and technologies to cope with the challenges of nature and adapt to environmental conditions. On the other hand, societies transformed their environment to adapt it to cultural needs. Various concepts have been applied to describe society-environment relations, such as sustainability, adaptation, vulnerability and resilience. In this paper, I suggest a broader lens by developing the concept of environmental coherence for historical research and understanding of human-environment relations. I will develop the concept by looking at two specific cases of natural disaster, first, on the island of Strand on the German North Sea coast in 1634 and, second, in Miami Beach, Florida in 1926.

Speaker: Christoph Kinkeldey, HAW Hamburg

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Speaker: Detlef Lohse, Max Planck Center Twente for Complex Fluid Dynamics Science and Technology / University of Twente

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Speaker: David Thompson, Colorado State University

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Speaker: Christian Flachsland, Hertie School

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Speaker: Meeyoung Cha, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP)

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