What is Happening to Northern Climates?

Senior College at Belfast, in collaboration with the Camden Conference, will offer a course this winter entitled What is Happening to Northern Climates?. This year the topic of the Camden Conference is the Arctic and its focus will be on the geopolitical implications for a changing Arctic region. The Senior College course will highlight the science forcing those changes and projections for the future. The Camden Conference will take place February 20-21, 2021. The College course will run for 6 (1 ½ hours ea.) sessions, beginning January 11th and ending February 15th, 2021. The course will be an excellent tutorial about how and why our climate is changing. As such, it will be a very strong preparatory experience for those planning to attend the February Camden Conference on “The Geopolitics of the Arctic: A Region in Peril”.

Severe wildfires, southern hurricanes, extreme weather, the warming Arctic, melting glaciers are all part of our daily news cycle. It is impossible not to recognize that no matter where we live, our world is being impacted by a global transformation. Senior College at Belfast is pleased to offer a course that will help us understand our changing climate. Perhaps more importantly, it will bring home how climate change in northern latitudes affects us locally AND what we can do!

Lectures and discussions will put in perspective – fire, drought, tropical storms, changes in weather patterns, melting permafrost, land ice vs sea ice and so forth. The course will explore effects of changing greenhouse gases, including vegetation change and, of course, sea level rise in terms that we will all understand. The role and attribution of humans in the process will be examined and explored. Senior College at Belfast is proud to present this timely and relevant course.

The course will be taught by Dr. Susan Conard. Susan has a PHD in Ecology from the University of California, Davis and worked with the US Forest Service for more than 25 years including time at the White House reviewing climate change reports. She is now retired, but still serves as Co Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

Please Note: To Register there is a $20 course fee, All course fees are waived for High School students and teachers. To learn more and register, click here or for more information call Nancy Perkins at 207 218-1369.