Talks on offer

• Dr. Richard Wilkinson- Understanding Climate Change: The Importance of Uncertainty

  

  To understand what the climate will do in the future, it is useful to understand how it has behaved in the past. There are no weather records from one million or even 1000 years ago, and so to reconstruct past climate we need to be inventive! Scientists have devised a variety of ingenious ways of uncovering climate information hidden in other sources. For example, the spacing between the rings in the trunks of ancient trees can tell us about the temperature and rainfall in a given year. And the chemical composition of water stored deep in Antarctica’s glaciers can tell us about the ocean temperature tens of thousands of years ago.

  As you might imagine, these records are far from perfect. The task of processing all of these different sources and combining them to give the best possible understanding of what the climate was like, requires complex statistics and mathematics. In this talk, I will discuss the difficulty of statistically analysing data, mistakes in doing this can even lead to controversies such as the hockey-stick graph dispute and the climate-gate emails.

  Audience: GSCE students (Year 10/11)

  Region: South Yorkshire, North Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire

• Dr. Alex Dunhill- Death and destruction in prehistoric worlds

  Life on Earth has suffered a number of catastrophic blows over the past 500 million years. The fossil record gives a unique perspective on the evolution of life and bears witness to a number of catastrophic mass extinction events. The most severe of these crises, often referred to as the “Big 5”, wiped out as much as 95% of life on Earth. These mass extinctions were predominantly caused by environmental domino effects triggered by massive volcanic eruptions leading to rapid greenhouse warming.

  The fossil record, despite its incompleteness, provides stark evidence of the threats of rapid climate change and parallels are already been made between the “Big 5” and the so-called present day “6th mass extinction”. In this talk, I will explain how palaeobiologists have been able to identify mass extinctions in the fossil record, how, when and why they happened, how life survived and recovered, and whether we should be concerned about the 6th mass extinction.

  Audience: GSCE students (Year 10/11)and A-level (Year 12/13) students

  Region: West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, and York area.

  Website: https://amdunhill.wordpress.com/

• Dr. Aisling Dolan- Antarctic Climates of the Past

  

  Most of us know the cold icy continent that covers the South Pole, but Antarctica has not always been this vast wilderness of snow and ice. During the reign of the dinosaurs, Antarctica was covered in forests and looked very different to today. Further forward in Earth history, at the same time as we find the first evidence for our modern ancestors in Africa, large parts of the West and East Antarctic ice sheets had collapsed under climate conditions not too dissimilar from our own! I will talk you through the fascinating changes that have occurred on Antarctica and talk about some of the models and data collection methods that we use to help us discover the history of the ice sheet.

  Audience: Can be adapted for Primary Years, Secondary Years, GCSE Students

  Region: West Yorkshire, Coventry and Warwickshire.

• Prof. David Schultz- How to Build Your Own Earth to Study Earth’s Climate — Past, Present, and Future

  Imagine the ability to build your own worlds by selecting various planetary characteristics: distance from the Sun, tilt of the axis, location of continents, oceans and mountains, atmospheric composition, etc. You would enter these characteristics on a web page, and then, after pushing the “Go” button, a climate model would run in the background and produce the climate on that world for you. Although producing such an instantaneous simulation of climate is not possible due to the speed of today’s computers, we nonetheless persisted with our vision. The result was Build Your Own Earth (http://www.buildyourownearth.com/), a free web-based tool to engage students in understanding the controls on Earth’s climate.  Three types of simulations are performed: 29 simulations using the modern-day Earth vegetation and topography but varying greenhouse gas forcing, solar constant, and orbital parameters, 11 idealized simulations (e.g., aquaplanet, terraplanet, and ice planet), and 10 palaeoclimate simulations ranging from the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago) to the Ediacaran (600 million years ago).

  In this talk, I will discuss how climate models work, in general, and how we built Build Your Own Earth. I will demonstrate how to use Build Your Own Earth, and, if students have access to computers, tablets, or their phones with internet access during the class, then we can get the students started using the tool as part of the session.

  Audience: Can be adapted for Primary Years (ages 10+), Secondary Years, GCSE and A-level Students

  Region: York and Manchester, and rail-connected areas.