Professor Charles Kennel is going to highlight the importance of acknowledging that climate change is not only measurable and noticeable by looking at global temperature, but that assessing a set of planetary vital signs plays a crucial role as well. By relying too much on one indicator, we risk that we over focus on it.
Are there possibilities to use the tools at hand - such as observations from space and ground networks; demographic, economic and societal measures; big data statistical techniques; and numerical models - to inform politicians, managers, and the public of the evolving risks of climate change at global, regional, and local scales?
About the speaker:
Charles F. Kennel is Distinguished Professor, Vice-Chancellor, and Director emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California. He was educated in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard and Princeton. He served as UCLA's Executive Vice Chancellor, its chief academic officer, from 1996 to 1998. From 1994 to 1996, Kennel was Associate Administrator at NASA and Director of Mission to Planet Earth, a global Earth science satellite program. Kennel's experiences at NASA influenced him to go into Earth and climate science, and he became the ninth Director and Dean of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of Marine Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, serving from 1998 to 2006.
