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Resilient-Sustainable Cities at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) cordially invites you to a presentation by the esteemed sociologist and human geographer Karen O'Brien on ethical transformation in response to climate change. Please join us at the NCAR Foothills Lab in Boulder on Friday, May 18th at 1:30pm.  Details below.

The talk will address the following issues
• Importance of metaperspectives (the bigger picture, the longer story)
• Integration of perspectives, disciplines, and “ways of knowing” transdisciplinarity
• What is transformation and why is it important that it is deliberative, ethical and equitable?
• How do we approach change, and how can we change our approaches to change?
• Why do worldviews, beliefs and values matter?
• What are the leverage points for large-scale, systemic change?
• What is our role as scientists?

Bio: Karen O’Brien is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research has focused on climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation and the implications for human security, as well as on the relationships between globalization and environmental change. Her current research looks at the relationship between personal, cultural, organizational and systems transformation, including how transdisciplinary and integral approaches to global change research can contribute to a better understanding of how societies both create and respond to change. She has participated in the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, as well as the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX). She has written and edited a number of books, including Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures (Oxford, 2008), Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance (Cambridge, 2009) and Climate Change, Ethics, and Human Security (Cambridge, 2010).

Abrupt climate transitions, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events, occurred frequently during the last glacial period, specifically from 80–11 thousand years before present, but were nearly absent during interglacial periods and the early stages of glacial periods, when major ice-sheets were still forming. Here we show, with a fully coupled state-of-the-art climate model, that closing the Bering Strait and preventing its throughflow between the Pacific and Arctic Oceans during the glacial period can lead to the emergence of stronger hysteresis behavior of the ocean conveyor belt circulation to create conditions that are conducive to triggering abrupt climate transitions. Hence, it is argued that even for greenhouse warming, abrupt climate transitions similar to those in the last glacial time are unlikely to occur in the future as the Bering Strait remains open. Earlier studies suggested that the Bering Strait may also have contributed to the formation of the Quaternary-style climate. Therefore, it seems that the Bering Strait may have played a central role in the glacial-interglacial climate stability.

In this presentation, we describe, motivate, and present preliminary results from the dense GNSS meteorological network (~20 stations) in the central Amazon Basin in Brazil; a network that has been developed for studies of deep convection/water vapor interactions and feedbacks.  This meso-scale (~80km x 80km area) ground-based network of GNSS receivers and meteorological stations was constructed in and around Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil in April of 2011.  The motivations for the network are several-fold: 1) gain insight into smaller-scale water vapor fluxes/convergence and convective activity, for example, the role of “cold pools” in the transition from shallow-to-deep convection and organization of convection at the mesoscale; 2) constrain (“close” with sondes/profilers) the atmospheric component of the hydrological cycle during deep precipitating convection during the GPM-CHUVA IOP Belem (June 2011); 3) create high spatial/temporal resolution (3D with slant path/tomography) water vapor fields for model initialization and/or providing constraints for testing physical parameterizations.