News & Blog
Connecting Chemistry and Climate Science: Empowering High School Students to Take Action
By: Kat Husiak As the urgency of climate change becomes increasingly apparent, it is essential to equip young minds with the knowledge and tools to understand and address this global crisis. In May of 2022, I responded to a request from Newport High School looking to supplement their sophomore chemistry curriculum with a guest speaker. As a result, I developed a 50 minute guest lecture to Newport High School sophomores in Bellevue, WA as part of my capstone project for the Graduate Certificate in Climate Science.
Read moreThe First Annual Spring Welcome: The Best of Both Worlds
The Program on Climate Change (PCC) community came together on the evening of Wednesday, April 5th for a Spring Welcome event, a combination of our Winter Welcome and Spring Symposium. Over 90 students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and staff turned out for the event to socialize, talk about research, and listen to a set of short talks by graduate students and postdoctoral scholars over refreshments.
Read morePCC Postdoc Channing Prend is honored as a Fulbright Scholar!
Channing Prend, a post-doctoral student in the School of Oceanography and fellow of the NOAA Climate & Global Change program, is one of three UW researchers to be honored as a Fulbright Scholar! As part of the highly prestigious award, Prend will be hosted by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, researching the “Regional Variability of Air-Sea-Ice Interactions in the Southern Ocean.” This will build off his work using a combination of observations, numerical models, and remote sensing to investigate the role of the ocean in the climate system, especially in the Southern Ocean, as well as his experience in communicating climate science. Congrats, Channing!
Read more here!UW contributors to IPCC report underscore climate change's threat to humanity
Recently, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Working Group II report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, and two distinguished experts on the intersection of human health and climate change from the UW, Dr. Kristie Ebi and Dr. Jeremy Hess, served as lead authors. Dr. Ebi and Dr. Hess specifically authored Chapter 7 of the report, focusing on the “Health, wellbeing and the changing structure of communities,” and Dr.
Read morePCC 2022 Winter Welcome: Together Again
After two years, the PCC Winter Welcome finally made its in-person return on March 1st, 2022! In fact, this was the first large-scale in-person event for many community members in years, hopefully signifying the beginning of a trend towards the revitalization of face-to-face interactions as we continue working to overcome the crisis posed by COVID-19. With around 70 climate-minded scientists, educators, students, and staff in attendance from across the UW and beyond joining us in the Fisheries Sciences Building, the PCC community truly came together to celebrate everything the PCC and its members have achieved during the past year.
Read moreSouth Pole and East Antarctica were warmer during the last ice age than previously thought, new studies show
Two new research papers, co-authored by PCC participants, show that temperatures in East Antarctica and other locations in the South Pole during the last ice age were several degrees warmer than previously thought. Research previously asserted that during the last ice age temperatures in Antarctica were an average of 9° C below modern values. However, that data did not match estimates from climate models and lacked calibration. The new research resolves these issues. Papers co-authored by TJ Fudge (UW ESS), Eric Steig (UW ESS and current PCC Governing Board member), Emma Kahle a recent graduate of UW ESS, and Edwin Waddington (UW ESS), along with many other national and international partners used data from borehole thermometry, snowpack accumulation, and the South Pole Ice Core project to show that temperatures across Antarctica were 4-6° C cooler than today. Both studies reconcile observed data with climate model estimations, support the legitimacy of using models to reproduce climatic shifts, and help explain how the Antarctic responds to large-scale changes in climate.
Read more at UW NewsAlexander and Hess in "3 Ways Climate Change Affects Your Health"
This past Earth Day (April 22nd) PCC Director Becky Alexander and Dr. Jeremy Hess of UW Medicine were interviewed for “3 Ways Climate Change Affects Your Health” produced by the UW Medicine digital publication, Right As Rain. The article touches on the three things climate is changing; more frequent and extreme weather events, snow and ice melt, ocean acidification and higher sea level, but primarily focuses on how climate change affects our health.
Read moreDon’t ask officials what they think of global warming — ask if they want a warning
Professor Dale Durran, past chair and current professor for the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, has recently published an article through the Washington Post, titled “Don’t ask officials what they think of global warming — ask if they want a warning”. The article mainly focuses on the issue of warning the public about events exacerbated by climate change, as our continued use of fossil fuels will only further drastic weather events.
Read moreThicker-leaved plants may thrive due to climate change, which may help temper climate change's effects
Work by a team of scientists including Abigail Swann, who serves on the PCC executive board, and Marlies Kovenock, a former PhD student of Swann, looked into how tropical forests may be adapting to changing climate and how these adaptations have the potential to mitigate the effects of climate change. Tropical forests are currently responsible for absorbing a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but information on how plants and ecosystems may respond to the rising CO2 levels is not abundant, making this research critically important.
Read moreHuman-driven climate change found to increase risk of flooding in the Peruvian Andes, and other glacial lakes
A recent study published by a team of scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Washington shows, for the first time, a direct connection between human-driven climate change and an increased risk of glacial lake flooding. The study focused on Lake Palcacocha, a glacial lake in the Peruvian Andes, and demonstrates how human-induced global warming has increased flood risk, due to the lake's growth as the glacier that formed it continues to retreat. This study will be important evidence in an ongoing court case in which a resident of the town most at risk from increased flooding is suing a German electricity producer for its role in worsening global warming. Additionally, this process can be expanded to other glacial lakes across the world, serving as an instrumental piece in understanding the consequences and risks associated with global warming in affected areas it results in the growth and creation of glacial lakes worldwide. A key researcher in this study was UW professor of Earth and Space Sciences Gerard Roe, whose participation in the study and previous work in creating a method that can determine if an individual glacier's retreat can be directly linked to anthropogenic climate change was instrumental to the study. Roe is also a member of the PCC Executive Board.
Read more at UW News