April 21, 1999
Climate Expert Michael MacCracken to Talk on “Global
Warming: The Increasing Effects of Human Activities on Climate”
at Middlebury College on April 28
Michael MacCracken, a senior figure in the United
States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), will give a talk,
titled “Global Warming: The Increasing Effects of Human Activities
on Climate,” at Middlebury College on Wednesday, April 28
at 7 p.m. The event will take place in the library of the Geonomics
Center for International Studies on Hillcrest Road off College
Street (Route 125), and is free and open to the public.
MacCracken is executive director of the National
Assessment Coordination Office of USGCRP, the portion of the program
responsible for assessing how global warming will impact the United
States. His talk is the 1999 Scott Margolin Lecture in Environmental
Affairs.
The lecture will include a number of topics related
to the cause of global warming, the evidence that it is occurring,
and its impact on the world. McCracken will discuss the fact that
emissions from fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, and non-sustainable
agriculture are releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse-effect
gases into the atmosphere, thereby altering atmospheric composition.
He will point to evidence-including rising ocean
and land temperatures, melting glaciers, the rising sea level,
and increasing rates of precipitation-that suggests human activities
are now having a discernible influence on the global climate.
MacCracken also will discuss prospects for the next
century that global average temperatures will rise one to three
and a half degrees centigrade, and that the sea level will rise
by 10 to 95 centimeters by the year 2100 if emissions are not
reduced below projections, and he will also review substantial
changes that will occur even if emissions start to be curtailed
early in the next century. He will show how these types of change
will lead to a range of possible environmental impacts that will
affect every region of the world.
Contact Dan Bedford of the Middlebury College geography
department at 802-443-5210 or bedford@middlebury.edu.