A Scientific Primer on Climate Change with a Focus on Oregon and the Pacific Northwest
This talk will cover the basic scientific elements of global warming and climate change including how the greenhouse effect works and the important difference between weather and climate. We will then look at how the climate has (or hasn’t) changed across Oregon and the Pacific Northwest and what we expect for the future. Finally we’ll look at recent extreme and/or hazardous weather events in a broader climatological context.
Speaker: Dr. Paul Loikith
Dr. Paul Loikith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Portland State University. He is the director of the Portland State Climate Science Lab and the Interim Director of the Portland State Institute for Sustainable Solutions. Dr. Loikith received a BS in Meteorology from Rutgers University and a PhD in Atmospheric Science from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Prior to joining PSU in 2015, he was a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. As an atmospheric scientist, Dr. Loikith’s current research interests span weather and climate scales and include the atmospheric drivers of extreme weather events, how those drivers may change over time, and fundamentals of atmospheric circulation, all with a focus on the western United States.