BIOMES Seminar Series - Spring 2025

Seminar Abstract:
In this talk, I’ll speak about the development of climate models as a tool for understanding and predicting the evolution of our planet’s oceans, atmosphere, land, and cryosphere. I’ll be focusing on the ocean component of these models, and discussing the challenges that ocean modelers face when running numerical simulations of such a nonlinear and turbulent system. Specific examples of ocean turbulence, such as eddies, will be discussed from two perspectives: (1) understanding their governing physics and influences on the large-scale climate state, and (2) improving their representation in modern state-of-the art climate models. I’ll then speak about an exciting application of ocean modeling: marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). I’ll be presenting a hierarchy of modeling approaches that I’ve employed to inform ocean alkalinity enhancement, a particularly scalable and promising effort within the mCDR space.

About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

About the Seminar:
This talk provides a brief overview of the history and cultural significance of Onondaga Lake, a site central to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the traditions of the Onondaga Nation. We will explore the lake’s importance to the Haudenosaunee, its role in the growth of Syracuse as an industrial hub, and the environmental and cultural impacts of that development.

A key focus will be the 2024 return of 1,000 acres of land to the Onondaga Nation and indigenous stewardship efforts. This discussion will highlight the historical context of this land transfer, its significance for the Onondaga people, and the broader implications for the region. By examining the lake’s past and its connection to the 1000 acres this talk will provide insight into the connections between history, culture, and the environment in Central New York.

About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

Co-hosted with Yale Planetary Solutions

About the Seminar:
Yes, we can still save Earth. Science fiction author and journalist Annalee Newitz will discuss how to get out of dystopian doomscrolling paralysis by using one of the most powerful tools of science fiction: worldbuilding. This storytelling technique helps us prepare for many possible futures, without ever losing sight of evidence gleaned from historical data and practical experience.

Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

About the Seminar:
Climate-induced wildfires have ravaged LA, 2024 was just declared the hottest year on record. Donald Trump has recently been inaugurated and both branches of Congress have majorities who are beholden to fossil fuel interests, not following the science.
It is easy to despair.

But the climate crisis doesn’t care who is sitting in the White House. We have just a few years left to equitably reduce emissions down to the levels scientists tell us are necessary in order to stave off even worse outcomes.

So what’s the best course of action? Shall we abandon federal action and head to city halls and state capitols? Shall we give up on politics? Must we all become clean energy entrepreneurs? Shall we change our own lifestyles --- get off the grid; go vegan; abandon our cars? Or shall we stay and fight?

There is no answer that is right for everyone. But there are numerous ways each of us and all of us can do our parts to reduce climate pollution now and set ourselves and the country on a path to cleaner air and water, a truly clean energy economy, and a more sustainable planet for future generations.

What will it take to keep the transition to a clean energy economy going? How can we make a difference and stay motivated over the next few years? This conversation will offer ideas and insights into effective paths forward for making a difference on climate in 2025 and beyond.


About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

Join us for this seminar featuring a discussion between Craig Brodersen and Yuan Yao and moderated by Reid J. Lifset, exploring the role of machine learning and AI in environmental science on the integration with traditional research methods, challenges like data biases and scalability, and ethical considerations in AI-driven decision-making. The conversation will cover real-world applications, including processing massive datasets of digital images, and will conclude with an audience Q&A.

Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

Seminar Abstract:
The long-held hypothesis that a strong negative feedback exists between chemical weathering of silicate rocks and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations is complicated by other less thoroughly explored sinks and sources to the long term global carbon cycle. Namely, processes such as sulphuric acid dissolution of carbonates and petrogenic organic carbon oxidation increase atmospheric pCO2, and thus the balance of these competing weathering fluxes dictate the net impact of weathering on atmospheric CO2. While modern river chemistry studies are contending with these complications, deep-time analysis of CO2-producing weathering reactions remains hampered by limited tools. Here we summarize ongoing work investigating the role of lithologic variation, and glaciers and ice sheets, in modifying river chemistry utilizing a suite of isotope system measurements (uranium-series, lithium, strontium), a proxy for organic carbon oxidation (rhenium), dataset compilations, inverse geochemical modeling and reactive transport modeling. This work seeks to disentangle how different processes strengthen or weaken the ability of the terrestrial land surface to consume carbon dioxide and deliver alkalinity to the ocean, with implications for carbonate dioxide removal strategies such as enhanced rock weathering.

About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

About the Seminar:
Climate change is projected to continue to have strong and primarily negative effects on the performance and stability of temperate plant communities. Many of these effects are direct and will affect individual plants and plant populations by altering ecophysiological processes and demographic rates. For example, increasing temperatures have been shown to increase plant respirative demand and so warmer growing seasons are projected to reduce overall carbon budgets. However, many other negative climate change effects act indirectly by altering biotic interactions between plants and other organisms within a community, and these changes can have consequences for plant outcomes comparable to direct physiological effects. One of the main ways in which climate change is expected to alter biotic interactions is through changes in the timing of peak activity of previously-interacting species.

In this talk, I will focus on how changes in plant phenology – the relative timing of repeated life history events such as flowering, fruit set, leaf-out, and senescence – determine how understory plants like wildflowers and tree seedlings interact with other members of temperate forest communities. I will primarily cover topics related to plant-plant and plant-herbivore interactions and especially how climate change could cause phenological mismatches between species-pairs or functional groups. Throughout the talk, we will keep an eye toward how climate change is projected to alter biotic interactions and what these changes could mean for community stability, resilience, and ecosystem services in a warming world.

About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

About the Seminar:
Societies around the world are increasingly preparing for intensifying climate change, such as for floods, heat waves, and fires. These adaptive responses underscore new frontiers for climate research to better support action. For example, people experience climate change and climate policies in very different ways, and adaptive actions to date have struggled to address these differences, sometimes exacerbating issues of affordability or human security, rather than improving them. Further, climate governance is blossoming, with many new approaches being tried but little insight on what is actually working and for whom.

In this presentation, I introduce new approaches being applied in research aiming to support climate adaptation. I will first describe a framework for action-oriented adaptation science, attuned to differential risks and the challenges constraining effective, equitable, and sustainable responses. I will then feature two partnership-based research projects focusing on climate risks and adaptation solutions often overlooked to date: (1) the intersectional risks inherent in season-long exposures to extreme heat and innovations needed to address them, and (2) proactive flood adaptations that have substantially reduced risks in recent decades to little fanfare and prospects for community-tailored adaptation “moonshots” moving forward.

Throughout, the presentation will reflect on core needs and opportunities to advance the usability of science for adaptation and the effectiveness of diverse efforts to deal with and prepare for increasing climate risks.

About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

Garam Byun will present "Environmental Risks to Dementia: Climate Change Meets Aging"
Climate change is reshaping our environment, bringing challenges such as extreme temperatures and worsening air pollution. Simultaneously, rapid population aging is increasing the number of individuals with dementia. These intersecting trends create a pressing public health concern: understanding how environmental factors impact dementia. This presentation will explore recent studies from South Korea and the United States on the effects of temperature and air pollution on dementia risk. Additionally, we will discuss why individuals with dementia may be particularly vulnerable to these environmental exposures, highlighting the need for targeted public health strategies.

Samuel Shaheen will present "What can watersheds teach us about carbon capture?"
The chemical reaction of silicate minerals with carbon dioxide (CO2) and water removes CO2 from the atmosphere, helping to stabilize Earth’s climate on long timescales. A proposed strategy for negative carbon emissions involves spreading crushed silicate-rich rock on areas like croplands to accelerate CO2 drawdown. However, determining the effectiveness of this process requires precise measurements that account for complex natural processes. In this talk, I will discuss efforts to use stream chemistry to understand the relevant chemical reactions occurring in the watersheds they flow through, including the application of emerging models coupling hydrology and chemistry at the watershed-scale.

Elisa Tedaldi will present "Climate change communication: a matter of what you say or how you say it?"
Emotional messages can motivate environmental action, but does their efficacy depend on the content or delivery? In our experiment 3,463 participants were randomly assigned to listen to an audio message: a control or one of six messages on climate change’s impact on extreme weather, varying in emotional content and delivery. Compared to the control, all messages equally increased belief in climate change’s impact, support for government action, and worry about extreme weather and climate change. Participants were more willing to share the ‘neutral content emotionally-delivered’ message than the’neutrally-delivered’ one. These findings offer key insights into emotions' role in climate communication.

About the Seminar:
Climate change is escalating flood risks globally, affecting one in four people. Flood risks exacerbate health and economic crises, increasing morbidity and poverty among vulnerable populations. This paper uses a multi-year randomized controlled trial in Bihar, India, covering 3.6 million people across 319 flood prone communities, to provide causal estimates of how an early warning system (EWS) for floods can mitigate these impacts. During the 2022 and 2023 flood seasons, a last-mile intervention improved EWS implementation: treatment households were 7.30 and 15.21 percentage points more likely to receive an alert in 2022 and 2023, respectively. This, in turn, increased household trust in warnings, and reduced the incidence of unannounced floods in treatment communities. Within the set of high-flood communities, households in treated communities scored 0.16 standard deviations on an ex ante adaptation index, 0.18 standard deviations higher on a physical health index and 0.12 standard deviations higher on an economic well-being index. Underlying these aggregate impacts, are marked changes in household behavior and outcomes: treated households in high-flood areas are more likely to store supplies, protect livestock, and safeguard important documents. They experience fewer waterborne diseases and slip-related accidents, cutting health expenditures. Finally, they were less likely to reduce essential consumption or mortgage assets during the floods. We estimate that for every $1 spent, treatment households saved up to $273 on just medical expenses during severe floods.

About the Series:
Over the last fifteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.