Richard Alley
On Friday, May 3, he will present a second lecture in the same location titled,Slip Slidin' Away: Ice Sheets and Sea-Level Rise. This lecture, which starts at 2 p.m., is more specialized, but is still of general interest. Both lectures are free and open to the public.
Alley is an American geologist and Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at the Penn State University who has authored more than 170 refereed scientific publications about the relationships between Earth's cryosphere and global climate change. He is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a "highly cited researcher."
In 1999, Alley was invited to testify about climate change by Vice President Al Gore, in 2003 by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology in 2007 and again in 2010.
Alley's 2007 testimony was due to his role as a lead author of "Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground" for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has participated in the joint UN/WMO panel since 1992, having been a contributing author to both the second and third IPCC assessment reports.
Alley has written several papers in the journals Nature and Science and chaired the National Research Council on Abrupt Climate Change. In 2000, he published the book, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future. He has appeared in numerous climate change-related television documentaries and has given many public presentations and media interviews about the subject.