News & Blog
Pathways to Climate Careers: The Undergraduate Cohort Career Panel
Climate Sciences is a growing field seeing expansion in both educational and career pathways. This growth is seen within UW as more and more students partake in climate change courses, programs, and research. As education in environmental and climate sciences expands, knowing where to take a climate education beyond college is important. To address this, UCo, The PCC’s Undergraduate Cohort, hosted the “Careers in Climate Panel.” The panel, hosted on the evening of Tuesday, February 13th, featured professionals currently working in climate-focused careers, including UW and PCC alumni.
Read moreForecasting the spatial extent of marine heatwaves
by Jacob Cohen, UW Oceanography, Recipient of a PCC Graubard Graduate Fellowship The ocean has absorbed 90% of recent warming associated with anthropogenic climate change; as a result, extreme ocean heat events, known as marine heatwaves (MHWs), are becoming more frequent and more intense. These extreme events can have detrimental impacts on marine ecosystems as well as coastal industries. Accurate MHW forecasts will allow local decision makers and industries to respond to and plan for these events.
Read moreCan ecological forestry improve public health outcomes? The Graubard Fellowship supports a case study in the Central Sierra
by Claire Schollaert As wildfires become more frequent and severe due to climate change and postcolonial fire management practices, there is growing consensus among the forest management community that prescribed burning should be used on the landscape to reduce excess fuels and mitigate extreme wildfire risk. Despite the benefits of prescribed burning to forest restoration goals, these managed fires still produce smoke, which may impact the health of surrounding communities.
Read moreFrom Knowledge to Power: The PCC Could Lead Climate Action - Here's Why it Must
By Brett Anton In the last few weeks of my UW education, I was struck by something one of my professors left me with. “If this is how scared the scientists are…” he said, and then just trailed off. It was not a joyful sentence to finish, but the professor, a member of the ESS department here at UW, had a point.
Read moreConnecting 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 News