Keynote Speakers
Welcome to our Climate Conference
Climate of H.O.P.E. (How Our Planet is Evolving)
Keynote Speaker #1
Dr. Frank Niepold
Senior Climate Education and Workforce Program Manager and Coordinator at National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
8:15am - 9:05am - Auditorium
Topic: The State of the Planet: Where we are now and all the latest climate data is telling us. Link to Dr. Niepold's Keynote Presentation
Bio: Frank Niepold is the Senior Climate Education Coordinator at NOAA's Climate Program Office (CPO) in Silver Spring Maryland, co-manage the NOAA CPO Communication, Education and Engagement Division, co-manage the Climate Ready Workforce program, Climate.gov Education section lead, a co-chair of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Climate Engagement and Capacity Building Interagency Group, the U.S. National Communications Report chapter lead on Education, Engagement, Training, and Workforce Development for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), former Action for Climate Empowerment National Focal Point for the United States, founding member of the CLEAN Network and co-chair of the CLEAN Network Leadership Board. Frank is the “Teaching Climate” lead for NOAA’s Climate.gov web portal that offers learning activities and curriculum materials, multimedia resources, and professional development opportunities for formal and informal educators who want to incorporate climate science into their work.
Contact information: frank.niepold@noaa.gov
Keynote Speaker #2
Dr. Amanda Townley
Title: Executive Director, National Center for Science Education
Time: 10:10am -11:10am
Location: Auditorium
Topic: Every classroom is a climate classroom. The importance of science education. Here is a link to Dr. Townley's Presentation
Bio: Amanda L. Townley is the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and defending accurate science education, including climate change education. Prior to her position at NCSE, Townley was an associate professor of middle grades and secondary science education at Georgia Southern University. Townley specialized in science teacher education, evolution education research, and science-literacy-focused public outreach. Her research centered on the intersections of science and society, specifically the acceptance and rejection of evolution and climate change, misconceptions and misuse of the nature of science in anti-science movements, and the impact of perceived conflicts between scientific understandings and culture on science literacy. She received her doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the University of Alabama.
Contact information:
townley@ncse.ngo
Interactive Lunch Keynote
Dr. Alden Adolph
Title: Associate Professor of Physics and Engineering Studies at St. Olaf College
Time: 11:15-12:25pm
Location: College and Career Center
Topic: Feedback Loops and Albedo Effect. Link to Dr. Adolph's Slide Presentation
Bio: Dr. Alden Adolph teaches Physics and Engineering at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Her research focuses on the physics of snow, and she is particularly interested in the physical and optical properties of snow and their relationship to snow temperature. Her work spans across scales from snow microstructure to its implications for changing snow patterns across the globe. She conducts local field work involving many undergraduate students in the St. Olaf Natural Lands and has traveled to the Greenland Ice Sheet for multiple field measurement campaigns. Her current research on the reflectivity of wet snow is supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Alden earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College. While waiting for the snow to fall, Adolph enjoys running, hiking, and spending time with her husband and son and their two cats, Hans and Dansgaard.
Climate Explorer: This tool allows you to graph predicted air temperature at the county level (along with many other variables!). Figure in the presentation copied below.
Ice-Drill Education General Site: resource for lots of educational materials related to polar research
Albedo Activity - activity to explore albedo with students in the classroom
Virtual Field Labs - albedo themed virtual field lab coming in 2025!
Presenter information and contact
Interactive Lunch Keynote
A Real Ice Core from Greenland
Time: 11:15am -12:25pm
Location: White Gym
Topic: What Can Ice Cores Tell us about Climate Change
A 65 cm half round piece of ice core from the Crete74 borehole will be on display for you to observe and take pictures.
The depth is from ~359 meters and it was drilled in June of 1974 in Greenland.
The data at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/2428 (specifically the ct74sc.txt file) gives an accumulation rate of 0.287 meters ice equivalent per year. Based on that accumulation rate, a very generalized estimate for the age would be 722 AD.
Table 1 of the Clausen et al. 1988 paper (see https://doi.org/10.3189/S0260305500004080 ) lists the accumulation rate as 0.298 meters ice equivalent per year. And the table also says that the oldest ice in the core is 553 AD. Based on that accumulation rate in the paper, a very generalized estimate for the age of the ice we gave NOAA would be 768 AD.
The average/mean between these two estimates is 745 AD.
Both of these estimates assume a constant accumulation rate through time, which is not a great assumption but we can't find any depth-age data to further refine the estimate.
Keynote Speaker #3
Dr. Richard Alley
Title: Professor of Geoscience at Penn State
Time: 1:35pm -2:25pm
Location: Auditorium
Topic: Hope for the Future - Importance of educating our youth - Link to Dr. Alley's Keynote Presentation
Bio: Dr. Richard Alley (Ph.D. 1987, Geology, Wisconsin) is Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. He studies the great ice sheets to help predict future changes in climate and sea level, and has made four trips to Antarctica, nine to Greenland, and more to Alaska and elsewhere. He has been honored for research (including election to the US National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Membership in the Royal Society), teaching, and service. Dr. Alley participated in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), and has provided requested advice to numerous government officials in multiple administrations from both major political parties including a US Vice President, multiple Presidental Science Advisors, and committees and individual members of the US Senate and House of Representatives. He has authored or coauthored over 300 refereed scientific papers. He was presenter for the PBS TV miniseries on climate and energy Earth: The Operators’ Manual, and author of the book The Two-Mile Time Machine
Presenter information and contact
https://www.geosc.psu.edu/directory/richard-alley