Lawrence E. Band, Voit Gilmore Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for the Environment, UNC-Chapel Hill

This evening will be spent exploring predictions for climate change and specific impacts on North Carolina. We’ll start with an overview of the series, then move into discussions of specific forecasts and impacts. Climate change forecasts are typically made for global and regional levels. How will these global trends play out in North Carolina? What can we expect in our corner of the world, and how should we prepare for it? We will discuss how we forecast future climate at the scale of a state or region, how we deal with uncertainty, and what we might do to prepare. Emphasis will turn to a discussion of freshwater availability in North Carolina, and how well our current methods of water resources management might cope with climate change.

Richard “Pete” Andrews, Professor of Public Policy and of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, UNC-Chapel Hill

Climate change poses major challenges and policy choices both for America and North Carolina. One such challenge is in determining what North Carolina can do—and what makes sense for us to do—to mitigate the rapid pace of global warming. How can we reduce carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions before they do even more damage than is already inevitable? Another challenge is in determining how North Carolina can best adapt to the global warming that has already occurred and to its consequences, such as sea level rise, droughts, storms, and more. How can we make wise decisions to create a sustainable and productive economy in the context of these trends? A third challenge is deciding what policy changes are needed. North Carolina has already taken some initial policy initiatives, but what further steps are needed, and how will these work as the federal government now begins to create national policies to address these issues? How will these policies affect other important aspects of North Carolinians’ lives—businesses, households, local governments, and particularly people of modest income struggling with the effects of the present economic recession? How can effective climate policies be designed to serve these other needs as well?

Brent A. McKee, Mary and Watts Hill Jr. Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Marine Sciences, UNC-Chapel Hill

North Carolina has one of the most vulnerable coastal zones in the United States in terms of projected climate change impacts. Projected acceleration in the rate of sea level rise and predictions of an increased intensity of Atlantic tropical storms could result in an unprecedented loss of coastal environments and ecosystems. However, our understanding of how coastal wetlands, estuaries, and river systems will respond to these climate changes is very poor, and those responses are not incorporated into current models of coastal change. We will discuss what some exciting new research tells us about what we can expect over the next century in coastal North Carolina.

John Papanikolas, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Deputy Director of the UNC Energy Frontier Research Center

Energy is at the heart of our economic well-being. But limited oil and gas supplies and the impacts of global warming caused by fossil fuels are leading to increasing uncertainty about our energy future. In this presentation, we will explore this important global issue. We will discuss emerging and future technologies that could increase sustainability and efficient use of existing energy supplies. We will also explore the impact of our continued dependence on fossil fuels; control of carbon emissions; an energy future based on nuclear energy, hydrogen, biomass, and solar; and how we can reach that future.

What's the Big Idea?
Campus Box 1020, The Friday Center
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-1020.