Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

Should nuclear power be used as a part of the energy mix to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what factors should be considered in that decision? Those questions will inform the topic "The Future of Nuclear Energy," a presentation sponsored by the State College chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby. The speakers will be Arthur T. Motta, professor of nuclear engineering at Penn State, and David J. Allard, director of the Bureau of Radiation Protection at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Creating long-term integrated water resources plans is a challenging problem, where planning alternatives are characterized by multiple, conflicting objectives such as lowering cost while maintaining high performance. Such systems also exhibit deep uncertainty (situations in which stakeholders do not know or cannot agree on the likelihood of perturbations to the system) due to climate change, land use, and population growth.

Geochemistry Forum: Calorimetric and Solubility Studies of Uranium Minerals and Nano-clusters, presented by Dr. Melika Sharifi, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Penn State

Andrew Anderson, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage

Tom Richard, Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering; Director, Penn State Institutes for Energy & the Environment; Bioenergy & Bioresource Engineering, Penn State

When it comes to our understanding of tropical motion systems and tropical precipitation, the last two decades have been characterized by fast advances. Yet our conceptual understanding of tropical motions remains incomplete. Here I present a conceptual framework that may provide insight into the nature of tropical motion systems and the mechanics of convective coupling.

Dr. Casey Wichman, Research Director, Energy and Environment Lab, University of Chicago

Department of Geosciences Colloquium Series: Non-traditional tracers of Earth's O2 history, presented by Chadlin Ostrander, Arizona State University

The lecture will focus on understanding the natural levels of variability within a species in its environment and how the geographic distribution of plants and animals impacts whether or not a population will persist. Ecologists are increasingly faced with the need to predict how populations of plants and animals will perform under new conditions due to factors including climate change and invasive species. These new conditions can impact growth, survival, and reproduction, which in turn determine whether populations increase, decrease, or remain stable through time.

Water Insights Seminar Series: Water Affordability in the United States, presented by Casey Wichman, Research Director, Energy and Environment Lab, University of Chicago

Achieving truly deep decarbonization is a uniquely difficult problem requiring fundamental changes in multiple interconnected systems (energy, agriculture, industry). Decisions made with the intent of avoiding the most severe climate change climatic impacts happen in the face of deep and dynamic uncertainties. Deep decarbonization decisions may also create multiple winners and losers and is thus a problem of managing social change in addition to technology transition.

The prospect of climate disruption haunts contemporary culture and political debate today in a way that no environmental threat has before, and it is commonplace to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. Is this prioritization of climate destabilization as the defining threat of recorded human history justified? Here I investigate the image of time underlying this apocalyptic narrative to show that it depends upon, and attempts to manage, the explosion of our horizons of time represented by “deep” geological timescales.

Geochemistry Forum with Dr. Joshua Garber, Scholar-Postdoctoral Student, Geosciences Dept, Penn State, presenting "Laser-Ablation Depth Profiling of Eclogite-Facies Zircon Interpreting U-Pb Dates and Uranium Mobility in Deeply Subducted Rocks"

Fault Detection and Isolation for a Complex Decentralized Wastewater Treatment Facility

Several shrub species from our yards and ornamental gardens are escaping and spreading into forests. We will discuss how a unique trait - holding onto their leaves for a longer time than native species - makes them successful and can impact native plants and animals.

Alex McKiernan will give the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ 2019 Lattman Visiting Scholar of Science and Society Lecture. His talk, titled “Truth, Trust, Relationships, Progress: The Work of Unfracturing."

A behind-the-scenes look at the changing world of journalism. National journalists discuss how the media is changing and what it means for communicating science to the public and policymakers. They will share their personal perspectives on how to get your stories told and what makes a good science story, and “do’s and don’ts” of dealing with journalists. This lively session will encourage Q and A. The event is free and open to the public. The event will also be livestreamed via Zoom: https://psu.zoom.us/j/792474210

Meteorology and Atmospheric Science Colloquium with Dr. Sarah Larson, Assistant Professor, Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State, presenting "Air-Sea Interaction and Large-Scale Sea Surface Temperature Variability"

Part of the Food-Energy-Water Nexus Initiative Fall 2019 Speaker Series—Steve Davis, Associate Professor, Earth System Science at University of California-Irvine

While there are thousands of studies on the labor market effects of the minimum wage, very few of them focus on its effects on immigrants, especially unauthorized immigrants. To fill this gap, this paper models and tests the effects of the minimum wage on the employment and wage of low-wage low-educated immigrants, depending on their immigration status. Theoretically, we develop a three-sector segmented labor market model with two types of workers.