Monthly Climate Science and Energy Engineering Dinner

with much more detail about this event.

On Tuesday, August 12th, at 7:00pm the and will be hosting our monthly Climate Science and Energy Engineering Dinner, which will usually occur on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.

The event will be at the , by 9th Ave & 34th St in Manhattan, within easy reach of the A/C/E & 7 subways, and one block from Penn / Moynihan station. The diner has a large menu with affordable prices, generous portions, and is willing to do separate checks for a large group, with everybody using their own credit card.

The topics of conversation will be

• Climate Science: you have to be able to debate climate science in order to reach out to conservatives, and also, even if you don't talk with conservatives, there is a lot of controversy over just how bad things will get, and how fast.
• Energy Engineering: We have to decarbonize the economy, but there are many unresolved / controversial issues to discuss -- which zero carbon sources of energy are preferable, how to decarbonize transportation, particularly aviation. To get public cooperation, we have to figure out a path to decarbonize that won't involve too much negative impact on per capita GDP, or too much disruption to our way of life.

This Month's Topic: Accuracy of Past Predictions:
There have been many, many people modeling the climate and making predictions. Climate skeptics love to cherry-pick a bunch of failed predictions and claim that they are representative of the state of climate science, but that's not really honest.

lists a lot of the predictions by the most famous climate scientists, and particularly those made by the IPCC, and as you can see, they have been reasonably accurate.

Note there are weather conditions called

• "El Niño", when currents in the central Pacific Ocean flow one way, and
• "La Niña" when they flow in the opposite direction.

Scientists are not yet able to predict which condition will occur in a future year. El Niño years tend to be hot, and in La Niña, the heat gets redirected to the ocean depths where we're not measuring it.

1998 was a whopping-hot El Niño year, and then the first decade of this millenium was a whole series of cooler La Niña years, so actual detected warming was a bit less than predicted for that decade. But In the mid-teens, warming really took off again, and warming seems to have accelerated greatly, faster than expected, in 2023 and onward.