Dr. Park Williams. Contributed photo
On May 16, Dr. Park Williams, Associate Research Professor at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory will address the RMA in their weekly meeting.
Water is fundamental to sustaining life on Earth and critical to economic growth and development. Widespread severe droughts and extreme weather events are expected to become more frequent as the world warms. While many places have too little water, others are faced with the problem of too much.
Climate change plays a central role: stressing the availability of water, increasing risk of flooding, and threatening water quality.
Scientists study how drought and flood risk may evolve in coming years and decades, especially as the contrasts between wet and dry regions intensify, rain belts shift and precipitation extremes amplify.
Dr. Williams is a bioclimatologist whose research straddles the fields of climatology and ecology with specific interests in the climatological causes and the ecological consequences of drought. His research aims to improve understanding of drought and its effects on terrestrial systems, including forests, the carbon cycle, agriculture, and humanity.
His research has included the causes and consequences of drought in North America. He and colleagues have determined for the first time the role that climate change has played in the ongoing California drought. His work also shows that since the early 1980s, approximately two times more western US forest area burned than would have been the case in the absence of human-caused warming.
Williams earned his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a postdoctoral researcher at UC-Santa Barbara and Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining Lamont in 2013. His awards include the 2017 Palisades Geophysical Institute Young Scientists Award – Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and the 2016-2018 Fellowship from Columbia University’s Center for Climate and Life. He is the author or co-author of over 20 scientific publications.
The Greenwich Retired Men’s Association offers a free program every Wednesday that is open to the public, both men and women; no reservations are required.
Their social break starts at 10:40am followed promptly by our speaker at 11:00am. Programs are at the First Presbyterian Church, 1 West Putnam in Greenwich.
For additional information see www.greenwichrma.org.
On May 23, David Weisbrod will present a talk entitled “The 2008 Crash: View from the Trenches”