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Monthly Climate Science & Energy Engineering Dinner |
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Purpose We meet monthly for dinner on the second Tuesday of the month to discuss climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering. We feel that you can't be of much use as an environmentalist unless you are technically well-informed. Environmental problems are scientific problems, and how to solve them is an engineering question. If you are not technically well-informed, you will make inaccurate statements about science that are an embarrassment to the environmental movement, and the solutions you advocate will be ill-advised and/or counter-productive. So the purpose of these dinners is to create a space for informative discussion of climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering. Environmentalists who are scientifically poorly-informed have an infamous track record of making predictions (often dire) that do not materialize as scheduled, and advocating solutions that are poor engineering choices. |
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Date, Time, & Venue We will meet on the second Tuesday of every month from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at the Skylight Diner see (map) at the southwest corner of 9th Avenue and West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan, within easy reach of the A/C/E & 7 subways, and a block away from LIRR and NJ Transit at Penn Station. The restaurant has a large menu with many cuisines and does separate checks for large groups, so everyone can pay with their own credit card. |
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Register
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025 at 7:00 pm. Register Here. |
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This Month's Topic
Ironically, the parts of the planet most affected by global warming are also the coldest -- the poles, which are warming 2.5 times faster than the planet as a whole. They've been observed from space since 1979, allowing us to observe the steady retreat of Arctic sea ice. It turns out that global wind and precipitation patterns are driven by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and as that difference decreases, those patterns will change, disrupting agriculture. Some are advocating geoengineering, where human interventions try to cool the planet. The most popular proposal would be to inject sulfate particles into the atomosphere to cool the planet, which could be done extremely cheaply, only cost a few billion dollars per year. But it could have drastic unforseen consequences, and everyone agrees that it is a poor substitute for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Even if geoengineering cools the planet, higher CO2 levels would still be very problematic. CO2 is about 420 ppm now, when it hits about 800 ppm, everywhere on the planet, outside, will begin to feel like a stuffy room, affecting human comfort. And higher CO2 levels will change the pH of the oceans, fundamentally changing the chemisty of all the life in them. |
Supporting Organizations
(Thus Far)
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Organizer: Bill Chapman Cell: 212-810-0470 Email |