Lonnie G. Thompson, a Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University’s School of Earth Sciences and a Senior Research Scientist at the Bryd Polar Research Center, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on paleoclimatology and glaciology. He has led more than 50 expeditions during the last 30 years, conducting ice-core drilling programs in the world’s polar regions as well as in tropical and subtropical ice fields.
Recently, Thompson and his team developed lightweight solar-powered drilling equipment for the acquisition of histories from ice fields in the high Andes of Peru and on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The results of these histories, published in more than 200 articles, have contributed greatly toward the understanding of the Earth’s past, present and future climate system. Other Thompson-led expeditions have recovered a 460-meter-long ice core, the world’s longest from a mountain range (Alaska, 2002); the first tropic ice core (Peru, 1983); and cores containing the entire sequence of the Last Glacial Stage as well as cores dating over 750,000 years in age, the oldest outside the polar regions (Tibet, 1992). Thompson’s research has resulted in major revisions in the field of paleoclimatology, in particular, by demonstrating how tropical regions have undergone significant climate variability, countering an earlier view that higher latitudes dominate climate change. Thompson has received numerous honors and awards. In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the John and Alice Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. He has been selected by Time magazine and CNN as one of “America’s Best” in science and medicine. His research has been featured in hundreds of publications, including National Geographic and the National Geographic Adventure magazines.
He and his team are the subject of a book entitled: Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains by Mark Bowen published in late 2005. In 2006,
he was elected member of the American Philosophical Society, alumni member of Phi Beta Kappa and chosen to receive the Roy Chapman Andrews Society 2007 Distinguished Explorer Award. He served as contributing author on Chapter 6: Paleoclimate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change WG, 2007 volume. In 2008 he received both the Dan David Prize and the Seligman Crystal Award.
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Ellen Mosley-Thompson is a professor in the Department of Geography’s Atmospheric Sciences Program and a Senior Research Scientist in the Byrd Polar Research Center. She received her B.Sc. in physics from Marshall University and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Department of Geography (Atmospheric Science) at The Ohio State University.
Professor Mosley-Thompson uses the chemical and physical properties preserved in ice cores collected from the polar ice sheets as well as high mountain glaciers to reconstruct the Earth’s complex climate history. She has led eight expeditions to Antarctica and six to Greenland to retrieve ice cores. She established Antarctica’s most extensive and longest running snow accumulation network at South Pole Station. Professor Mosley-Thompson is involved in an National Science Founndatiion-funded International Polar Year project to recover the first ice cores from the Bruce Plateau to reconstruct a climate history for the Antarctic Peninsula, a region that is warming faster than much of the rest of the planet.
She is also a participant in CReSIS, an NSF-sponsored Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, focused on developing new methodologies and tools for assessing the mass balance of large ice masses such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Professor Mosley-Thompson, and Lonnie Thompson, leads the Byrd Center’s Ice Core Paleoclimatology Research Group.
She has a total of 112 peer-reviewed papers including 18 lead-authored papers. She also has 22 papers in other collections including book chapters. Her papers have appeared in Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Quaternary and Research, among others.
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Laurence C. Smith earned a Ph.D. in earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University in 1996 and is now professor and vice-chair of Geography and professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published more than fifty research papers including in the journals Science and Nature. In 2006, he briefed Congress on the likely impacts of northern climate change and in 2007 his work appeared prominently in the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In 2006-2007 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John S. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. He has won more than $5million in external grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for his research on northern climate change.
Honors include a NASA Young Investigator award (2000), finalist for NASA's Presidential Early Career Award (2002) and a Bellagio Residency from the John D. Rockefeller Foundation (2007). His work has been covered in the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Time magazine, National Public Radio, and The Discover Channel among others.
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Andrew Keeler is an associate professor in Ohio State's graduate school at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs and he conducts research in environmental and natural resource economics and policy. His current research projects focus on the general area of climate change policy. Professor Keeler received his B.A. in economics from the University of North Carolina and his Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Keeler served as the Senior Staff Economist for Environment at the President's Council of Economic Advisers (2000-2001) where he was a member of the U.S. negotiating team for climate change and a diplomatic representative to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on coordinating national sustainability policies. He served on the White House Climate Change Policy teams under both presidents Clinton and Bush. Professor Keeler has also worked as a senior economist at the Environmental Protection Agency's Innovative Strategies and Economics Group (1999-2000) and as an economist for the Republic of Tanzania's Marketing Development Bureau (1982-1985). He has been a consultant on agricultural and environmental policy in Africa and Latin America.
Professor Keeler was a member of the Advisory Committee and the Water Rights Working Group of the Georgia Legislature's Joint Comprehensive Water Plan Study Committee in 2001-2002. Professor Keeler has been published on the economic value of biological indicators in water quality economics, the relationship of engineering and insurance in managing beach erosion, a variety of topics in environmental regulation and enforcement and on solid waste management.
Professor Keeler recently completed a paper commissioned by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners on how federal climate change policies may affect public interest regulation of electricity. He is currently working on a commissioned paper for the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements.
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Matt Roberts is a native of Bolivar, Missouri, where he began working in the family Chevrolet dealership at age five. Roberts received a BA in economics in 1994 from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. From 1994 through 1996, Roberts was a commodity and energy derivatives broker for CA Global Futures AG in Vienna, Austria, with clients throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Roberts specialized in the copper and European petroleum markets.
Roberts received a Ph.D. in Economics from North Carolina State University in 2001. During graduate school, Roberts was a market research consultant to the pharmaceutical industry. Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics and an Extension Grain Marketing Specialist at The Ohio State University, where he has been employed since 2001.
Roberts’ research interests relate to his experience in commodity markets. Roberts has published on technical analysis and the use of derivatives for risk management in agricultural production. His extension and outreach activities focus on biofuels markets and the grain market situation and outlook. He has given testimony before the Ohio House Alternative Energy Committee, and assisted state and federal lawmakers on agricultural and energy issues. Roberts has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Associated Press and Forbes, and has been interviewed on CNBC. Roberts is an active consultant to the commodity industry and nationally-renowned speaker, speaking approximately 50 times per year around the nation on grain, petroleum and biofuels markets and policy.
Roberts lives in Worthington, Ohio, with his wife and three children. They enjoy traveling and mountain-biking as a family. Roberts has been an amateur bicycle racer for 19 years.
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Fred Pearce has been writing about water issues for over twenty years. A former news editor at New Scientist and currently its environment and development consultant, he has also worked for Audubon, Popular Science, Time, the Boston Globe and Natural History. His books include With Speed and Violence, Turning Up the Heat and Deep Jungle.
Fred Pearce was born and educated in the UK. He studied Geography at Cambridge University and has since reported on environment, science and development issues from 54 countries.
He was voted British Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and has been short-listed for the same award in 2000, 2002 and 2003. He is a past recipient of the Peter Kent Conservation Book Award and the TES Junior Information BookScott has over 17 years of private and public sector utility experience, with expertise in energy markets, policymaking, energy supply arrangements, energy demand-response programs and regulatory frameworks. He has testified before local, state, and federal legislative and judicial bodies. Scott periodically provides his expertise to the Battelle Memorial Institute on energy projects for other state and federal government entities including the Ohio National Guard, the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA.
Before becoming the senior energy adviser for the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Scott served as the Senior Energy Researcher at the National Regulatory Research Institute, as well as the Director of Utilities at The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO). During his eight years and many roles at the PUCO, he was responsible for the development of electric, gas, water and telecommunications policy recommendations.
Scott earned a B.A. in communications from Ohio State and a M.A. from the Annenberg School of Communications.
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Morgenstern's research focuses on the economic analysis of environmental issues with an emphasis on the costs, benefits, evaluation and design of environmental policies, especially economic incentive measures. His analysis also focuses on climate change, including the design of cost-effective policies to reduce emissions in the United States and abroad.
Immediately prior to joining Resources for the Future, Morgenstern was senior economic counselor to the undersecretary for global affairs at the U.S. Department of State, where he participated in negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol. Previously he served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he acted as deputy administrator (1993); assistant administrator for policy, planning and evaluation (1991-93); and director of the Office of Policy Analysis (1983-95). Formerly a tenured professor at the City University of New York, Morgenstern has taught recently at Oberlin College, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Yeshiva University and American University. He has served on expert committees of the National Academy of Sciences and as a consultant to various organizations.
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Other experts attending the conference
Brent Sohngen is professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in environmental economics from Yale University in 1996. Sohngen conducts research on the economics of land use change, the design of incentive mechanisms for water and carbon trading, carbon sequestration and non-market valuation of environmental resources.
Professor Sohngen developed a global timber and land use model that has been widely used to assess the implications of climate change on forested ecosystems and forest product markets and to assess the costs of carbon sequestration in forests, including reductions in deforestation. The model has recently been expanded to account for agricultural production and markets.
Professor Sohngen has written or co-written 31 peer-reviewed journal articles, 45 monographs and book chapters. He has been published in a variety of journals including the American Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Ecological Economics and Climatic Change. He co-edited a special issue of Climatic Change in 2006, addressing adaptation to climate change.
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Dr. Moore is a professor in the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. He specializes in community social organization and agroecology within a watershed context. His ongoing research projects include: Sugar Creek Watershed (located in Holmes and Wayne counties of Ohio), biocomplexity linking social and natural ecosystems, participatory rural community social structure and learning communities in headwaters streams, water quality trading in Sugar Creek and the U.S. and Japanese rural social structure. He has received grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture SARE, U.S. Department of Agriculture Water Quality, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation.
Moore earned his M.A. in anthropology from the Ohio State University and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
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C.K. Shum is a Professor of Geodetic Science at the School of Earth Sciences, a research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center, and a Distinguished University Scholar, The Ohio State University. He is a Fellow of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG), and President of IAG’s Section II, Advanced Space Technology, 1999–2003. His research interest include present-day sea level rise, satellite geodesy, gravity field modeling, satellite oceanography, hydrology and geodynamics, ice sheet mass balance, ocean tide modeling, precision satellite orbit determination, and GPS meteorology and space physics. He has published more than 120 journal papers, received a number of awards from NASA, The Ohio State University and other agencies, and served on many national and international committees and review panels. He was a Lead Author in Chapter 5 (Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level) of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 Fourth Assessment Report (FAR). This contribution resulted in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Award to the IPCC organization and Al Gore, Jr. The IPCC FAR contributors also received the Atmospheric Science Librarians International’s High Impact Comprehensive Publication Award in 2007. His work was covered by New York Times, Physics Today, Science News, Columbus Dispatch, and other journals.
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Dr. Moore left his longtime position as Director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire to become the founding director of Climate Central. As coordinating lead author of the final chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Third Assessment Report, Dr. Moore shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Among his other honors are the 2007 Dryden Lectureship in Research from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and NASA’s highest civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service Medal. Dr. Moore holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia.
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Charlie Petit has covered science for more than 36 years as a newspaper, news magazine, and freelance writer.
His career includes 26 years at the San Francisco Chronicle, starting there in 1972. He left it to join the staff at U.S. News & World Report in early 1998. Since January 2005 he has freelanced. Recent articles have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, U.S.News & World Report, Pew Trust, and The New York Times.
Since early 2006 he has worked mainly as a blogger, gathering and commenting on the day’s mass media science news stories for a site maintained by the Knight Sci. Journalism Fellowships at MIT – where he was a fellow in 1984-5. Its URL is ksjtracker.mit.edu.
He is a former president of both the National Association of Science Writers and the Northern California Science Writers Association, and has been an instructor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He is vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Awards: At USNews The American Association for the Advancement of Science magazine prize (1999) for three stories ; American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman News Writing Award (2003) for reporting on ocean circulation; at the SF Chronicle the AAAS prize (1990) for a series on the Amazon rainforest, the American Institute of Physics prize (1991) for reporting on physics at very low temperatures, and regional prizes from the American Heart Association and San Francisco Press Club .
He has a degree in astronomy from UC Berkeley, served in Vietnam with the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s public information office, and lives in Berkeley.
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Dr. Crawford is an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences in the College of Public Health at the Ohio State University. He earned an A.S. in nursing from Purdue University, a B.A. in German, an M.S. in preventive medicine and a Ph.D. in preventive medicine from Ohio State. Crawford has received research grants for studying the health of Ohio police and firefighters to assess the degree to which they are at risk for cancer in relation to other occupations. He has received funding from OSU to conduct pilot research related to preparedness training and exercise simulations, and was just awarded pilot funding to encourage local and state health departments to become involved in carbon footprint mitigation. Crawford teaches a freshman seminar on preparedness issues outside the usual bioterrorism focus, and also teaches courses in occupational health, exposure assessment and the principles of environmental health sciences.
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Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D., is assistant professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C, and is an Affiliated Researcher with George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication. Nisbet's research focuses on the role of strategic communication in science and environmental policy debates, with a focus on how publics make sense of complex science questions and how citizens come to be actively involved in the resolution of science disputes. In this area, over the past five years, he has authored more than 20 journal articles and book chapters, using focus groups, content analysis, in-depth interviews, case studies, and surveys to study the communication dynamics of policy debates. Nisbet has also served as a consultant to the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, and several other leading science organizations and institutions. He has written about the implications of his research at popular outlets such as Science, the Washington Post, The Scientist, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Nisbet holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Communication from Cornell University and an A.B. in Government from Dartmouth College.
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Elliot Diringer is Director of International Strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. He oversees the Center's analysis of the international challenges posed by climate change and strategies for meeting them, and directs the Center's outreach to key governments and actors involved in international climate change negotiations.
Mr. Diringer came to the Pew Center from the White House, where he was Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary. In this capacity, he served as a principal spokesman for President Clinton and advised senior White House staff on press and communications strategy. He previously served as Senior Policy Advisor and as Director of Communications at the Council on Environmental Quality, where he helped develop major policy initiatives, led White House press and communications strategy on the environment, and was a member of U.S. delegations to climate change negotiations.
Before joining the White House, Mr. Diringer was a veteran environmental journalist. As a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1983 to 1997, he covered the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and authored several award-winning environmental series.
Mr. Diringer holds a degree in environmental studies from Haverford College. In 1995-96, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he studied international environmental law and policy.
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Alexander Thompson received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is an assistant professor of political science at Ohio State. He has research and teaching interests in international relations, especially in the area of international organization. His book, Channels of Power: The UN Security Council and American Statecraft in Iraq (Cornell University Press, forthcoming), addresses the question of why powerful states often conduct coercive foreign policies through international organizations—rather than operate alone or through ad hoc coalitions—with an analysis of U.S. policy toward Iraq from 1990 to the present.
Much of Thompson’s research addresses issues of institutional delegation and design at the international level, with specific projects on the domestic politics of dispute settlement in the World Trade Organization, the design and evolution of the climate change regime, the principal-agent politics of multilateral weapons inspections, the concept and determinants of IO performance, and the politics of treaty ratification in the context of trade and investment agreements. He also writes and speaks on the question of unilateralism versus multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy and on the history and future of the global climate regime.
Thompson co-directs, with Sarah Brooks, the workshop on Globalization, Institutions and Economic Security (GIES).
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Bill Becker is the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs. Becker is the former director of the US Department of Energy's Central Regional Office, where he specialized in energy efficiency, renewable energy technologies and sustainable community development. In his diverse career, he has served as a war correspondent in South Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star medal; writer/photographer for the Associated Press; publisher of his own weekly newspaper in rural Wisconsin; editorial writer and columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisc.; associate director of the Wisconsin Energy Extension Service; research director for the Wisconsin State Senate; executive assistant to the Wisconsin Attorney General; Counselor to the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration in Washington, DC; and communications director for the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Becker's specialization in sustainable development began in the 1970s when he proposed and helped implement a pioneering project in which a Wisconsin community relocated from a floodplain and built the nation's first "solar village."
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Jason E. Box is Associate Professor of Geography and scientist at
Byrd Polar Research Center. Box specializes in Greenland ice sheet
climate interactions, working at the intersection of climatology and
glaciology, joining observations and models to assess Greenland ice
sheet ice sensitivity to climate. Fusion of observations and models
yields 'a whole that is of greater value than the individual parts'.
Box uses a variety of data sources, including: time lapse cameras,
satellite imagery, and manned or automated meteorological stations.
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Cristine Russell is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written about science, health and the environment for more than three decades. She is currently a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She was a spring 2006 fellow at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Russell is the president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, a group of journalists and scientists dedicated to improving science communication to the public. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers and a contributor to its Field Guide for Science Writers. She is guest columnist on science coverage for the Columbia Journalism Review’s website and recently published an article on covering climate change for the magazine’s July/August issue
Russell is a former national science reporter for The Washington Post and The Washington Star and appeared on PBS’ Washington Week in Review. She serves on the boards of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and is on the selection committee of The National Academies of Science Communication Awards. She is an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, and has a biology degree with honors from Mills College, Oakland, CA.
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Dr. Peter Curtis is Professor of Ecology and Chair of the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at Ohio State University and is Director of the Northern Forest Carbon Cycle Research Program at the University of Michigan Biological Station in northern lower Michigan. Dr Curtis' group has made continuous measurements of carbon exchange above the forest since 1999, and have compiled detailed ecological records of carbon, nitrogen, and water cycling processes within the surrounding ecosystem. His work is supported through grants from the Department of Energy's National Institute for Climate Change Research, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Integrative Graduate Education Research and Training program of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Curtis received his AB from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D from the University of California, Davis. His research has been reported on by the New York Times, Science News, the Columbus Dispatch, and other outlets.
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Dr. Liang is an assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the College of Public Health at the Ohio State University. Dr. Liang’s research interest focuses on risk assessment, environmental determinants, and epidemiology of water- and vectorbone diseases. His on-going research projects include: socio-environmental determinants of schistosomiasis re-emergence, the impact of environmental change on transmission and control of schistosomiasis, and the global impact of terrestrial surface water dynamics on distribution and emergence of water-related infectious diseases. Over the past five years, Dr. Liang has authored and co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles in this area. Dr. Liang earned his B.S. in biology and M.S. in zoology both in China and his second M.S. and a Ph.D. in environmental health sciences from University of California at Berkeley.
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