Codified in 2015, the Paris Agreement instructed its signatories to pursue policies that would reduce global carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, a goal that requires both serious ambition and strategy. With only six countries ratifying the international treaty into legislation, the need for deliberate and meaningful goals toward net zero is paramount. Chris Forest, professor of climate dynamics in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State, will discuss how the Earth goes from a planet with increasing temperature to one that starts to cool, as well as some of the high-risk issues facing both societal and Earth systems in a talk at 4 p.m. Monday, March 14. The talk is free and open to the public and will take place via Zoom.
Forest’s research focuses on characterizing uncertainties in climate change predictions and estimating climate risk. He served as a lead author on the Evaluation of Climate Models chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report and on a report for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program examining the estimates of temperature trends in the atmospheric and surface climate data. He is also the associate director of the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM) and the director of the Penn State’s Center for Earth System modeling, Analysis, and Data.
Forest’s talk is part of the spring 2022 EESI EarthTalks series, “Energy and Climate Policy, Part 2: Strategies for Getting to Net Zero.” The series is presented by Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.
