PUBLIC LECTURE: Climate Change: Consensus or Controversy?

The School of Earth and Geographical Sciences and the Institute of Advanced Studies, The University of Western Australia

Cordially invite you to

The Inaugural Joseph Gentilli Memorial Lecture

The University of Western Australia is pleased to establish this memorial lecture to honour the memory and intellectual legacy of an influential and longserving scholar who devoted 60 years of his life to this institution. Joseph Gentilli (1912-2000) commenced teaching at the University soon after arriving in Fremantle from Italy in 1939, and continued to be actively involved with the Geography Department until 2000.

Abstract: During his long and distinguished career at the University of Western Australia, Joseph Gentilli helped to bring about a comprehensive understanding of the climates of Australia. In addition to his many other contributions, he wrote about “the selective or “greenhouse” effect of the atmosphere” more than 50 years ago (A Geography of Climate, The Univ. of Western Australia, 1952), and more than 30 years ago was calling for a “synchronoptic dynoclimatography” to illustrate how climate patterns were changing (Australian Climate Patterns, Nelson, 1972).

More recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), involving some hundreds of climate scientists brought together to assess information on climate change, concluded in their third assessment that “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the [global] warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities” (Climate Change 2001 Synthesis Report, Cambridge. Univ. Press, 2001). Yet readers of some newspaper columnists, or even of some thriller fiction (Michael Crichton’s State of Fear), would likely conclude that there is no evidence of any global warming or any climate change that was out-of-the-ordinary, let alone evidence that such changes can be attributed to human activities such as the enhanced greenhouse effect.

What arguments do such commentators advance to support their denial of the IPCC findings? And how well do the arguments of such “sceptics” hold up? Is there a scientific consensus on climate change and the greenhouse effect? Or is it just a controversy?

Biography: Neville Nicholls was a Convening Lead Author for the IPCC Second assessment (1995) and is a Lead Author for the Fourth Assessment currently underway. He has been studying climate variability and change in Australia for over 30 years (ie, from about the time Joseph Gentilli called for efforts to illustrate how climate patterns were changing). He was awarded the Priestley medal of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in 1986 and the FitzRoy Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2005. Neville has been involved in the Indian Ocean Climate Initiative study of the nature and possible causes of climate change in the southwest of Western Australia.

ALL WELCOME