Climate change is becoming THE challenge of the 21st century, and is likely to impact most of the human enterprise, as well as planetary life support systems, in increasingly unprecedented ways.

Professor Jonathan T. Overpeck will discuss global implications, including the imperative to act quickly on climate change, or risk major Earth system tipping points. He’ll then drill down to the scale of the U.S. and Great Lakes region to provide a more relatable sense of what is at stake.

Professor Overpeck, William B. Stapp Collegiate Professor of Environmental Education and the Samuel A. Graham Dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, is an interdisciplinary climate scientist and has written over 210 published works on climate and the environmental sciences. He served as a Working Group 1 Coordinating Lead Author for the Nobel Prize winning IPCC 4th Assessment (2007). He is a Fellow of AGU and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and tweets about climate-related issues @GreatLakesPeck.

This is lecture #1 in the "Facing the Future: The Challenge of Climate Change" Friday themed lecture series which will explore how climate change is impacting every corner of our earth, and every aspect of our lives.