Speaker Bios
Michael Raupach
Research Scientist in CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. He leads the Continental Biogeochemical Cycles Research Team.
He is a co-chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international program bringing together research efforts on the natural dimensions (atmospheric, terrestrial, oceanic and paleological) and human dimensions (economic, social and institutional) of the global carbon cycle.
His major research interests are:
- Biosphere-atmosphere interactions: the flows and stores of energy, water and carbon in landscapes, at local, continental and global scales;
- Global and continental change, especially the effects of climate and human land use on the terrestrial cycles of water, energy, carbon and nutrients;
- Fluid mechanics of turbulent flows, especially over rough surfaces;
- Wind flows and the spread of windborne materials in the lower atmosphere, especially within vegetation canopies, over hills, around trees and windbreaks, and around bushfires;
- Soil erosion by wind, including studies of the windborne transport of solid particles, erosion control by vegetation, and wind erosion and long-term agricultural sustainability.
He received his BSc degree, with honours in mathematical physics, from the University of Adelaide in 1971, and a PhD in micrometeorology at Flinders University, South Australia. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Edinburgh, he joined CSIRO in 1978.
He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
He is the author or co-author of more than 100 papers in international scientific journals, and over 80 conference papers and technical reports. His work is widely cited.
Kevin Gurney
Purdue University
Kevin Gurney is an Atmospheric Scientist, Ecologist and Policy expert currently working in the areas of carbon cycle science, climate science, and climate science policy. Gurney received a BA in Physics from University of California at Berkeley, an MS in Atmospheric Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MPP in Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Ecology from Colorado State University.
Gurney has worked in NGOs, think tanks, and academia and has focused on topics within global change and climate change. His recent work involves simulation of the global carbon cycle using the inverse approach, characterizing fossil fuel CO2 in North America and the linkages between terrestrial carbon exchange and climate variability.
He also has worked extensively on climate policy and has worked with NGOs (WWF, UCS, WRI, Greenpeace) and negotiators for almost a decade at the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. Gurney has published extensively within the peer-reviewed scientific literature in journals such as Nature, Tellus and the Journal of Geophysical Research and has co-authored a 1995 book with MIT Press, titled Mending the Ozone Hole.
In addition to carbon cycle science and policy, Gurney has worked on stratospheric ozone depletion, radionuclide dose assessment, energy systems modeling, and climate-economic modeling.
Tae Yong Jung, Ph.D.
Senior Energy Economist, The World Bank, USA
Dr. Jung received his Ph.D. in Economics from Rutgers University. He spent seven years at the Korea Energy Economics Institute. While in Korea he was a member of several government committees on energy and environment. His research areas are energy and environmental modeling. He has special interest in economic development and environmental concerns. He was one of lead authors of IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenario (SRES). He has been a visiting fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of USA, Economic Research Institute of Kyoto University, and National Institute for Environmental Studies of Japan. He joined Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Japan in 1999. He was a project leader for the Climate Policy Project. In 2004, he established an energy and environment modeling network in Asia, which promotes energy and environmental modeling activities in Asia.
He moved to the World Bank at the end of 2005. Now, he is involved in the Bank’s report on ‘clean energy and development: towards an investment framework’.
Linda O. Mearns
Institute for the Study of Society and the Environment
National Center for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, Colorado 80307
USA
Phone: (303) 497-8124
Fax: (303) 497-8125
Lindam[AT]ucar.edu
Linda O. Mearns is Director of the Institute for the Study of Society and the Environment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. She holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography/Climatology from UCLA. She has performed research and published in the areas of crop-climate interactions, climate change scenario formation, climate change impacts on agro-ecosystems, uncertainty in regional climate projections, and analysis of climate variability and extreme climate events in both observations and climate models. She has particularly worked extensively with regional climate models. She has most recently published papers on exploring the effect of different spatial scales of climate change scenarios on determination of agricultural and economic impacts of climate change, and probabilities of regional climate change. She has also published a series of articles on the effects of changes in climate variability (in contrast to changes in mean climate) on simulated crop yields. She has contributed to or been a Lead Author on the IPCC Climate Change 1992, 1995, and 2001 Reports on the subjects of climate variability in general circulation models, impacts of climate change on agriculture, regional projections of climate change, and climate change scenario development. She is a member of the IPCC Task Group on Scenarios for Climate Impact Assessment, and is Lead Author for the chapter on Regional Projections of Climate Change in IPCC Working Group 1 for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and a Lead Author on chapter 2 in Working Group 2 on New Assessment Methods. She is also participating in several Synthesis Products of the US CCSP. She is a member of the NRC Climate Research Committee (CRC) and Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) Committee. She was made a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in January 2006.
Dr. Richard Dawson
Newcastle University (UK) and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Richard.Dawson[AT]newcastle.ac.uk
Richard Dawson is a researcher in the Institute for Research on the Environment and Sustainability at Newcastle University (UK) and core researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. As well as working at Bristol and Newcastle Universities, Richard was a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science research fellow at Kyoto University in 2003. Richard is also a member of the steering committee of the AIMES Young Scientist's Network.
Richard was awarded a PhD for work on the analysis of complex infrastructure systems by the University of Bristol (UK) in 2003. He has in this and more recent work made contributions towards the development of methods for probabilistic analysis of complex systems, risk assessment and uncertainty analysis. This work has been particularly novel because of its applicability to very broad scales and extended temporal scales (up to 100 years in the future). He is particularly interested in how systems can adapt and be better managed under the highly uncertain climatic conditions. He has demonstrated these techniques on a number of hydrological and coastal systems now and under conditions of a changing climate. This work has been used to provide evidence to the UK Treasury's spending review regarding economic impacts from natural hazards and has also informed the policy debate regarding coastal governance in the UK. In 2003 Richard was awarded the Robert Alfred Carr prize by the Institution of Civil Engineers for some of this work.
Currently Richard is a core researcher on the Cities theme with the Tyndall Centre where he is seeking to extend some of these ideas to consider the more considerable challenge of Urban systems. This research seeks to answer the question: How can cities grow whilst reducing GHG emissions and reducing vulnerability to climate impacts? To achieve this, emissions accounting methodologies are being coupled with climate impacts models at a city wide scale.