Math & Cultural

Inez Fung: Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Wednesday, November 6, 2013, 7:00–8:15 pm
Berkeley City College Auditorium: 2050 Center Street, between Shattuck Ave. & Milvia St., in Berkeley (near the Downtown Berkeley BART station)

The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Berkeley City College cordially invite you to attend a lecture by Dr. Inez Fung on “Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions," which is part of the series Not on the Test: The Pleasures and Uses of Mathematics.  This lecture series is dedicated to engaging the public through speakers on mathematics whose expertise, passion, and ability to explain what they do with math can be understood by all.

As international, national and local targets for greenhouse gas emissions are discussed and implemented, how well do we know whether the targets are being met?  Trust but verify.  Dr. Inez Fung will show how data assimilation techniques merge observations with models to test the similarity between reported emissions and estimates that have been inferred from their atmospheric signatures.

Dr. Inez Fung has studied climate change for 20 years.  She has created large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of CO₂, dust and other trace substances around the globe.  She is a professor of atmospheric science in UC Berkeley’s earth and planetary science and environmental science, policy and management departments.  Fung’s work in climate modeling predicts the co-evolution of CO₂ and climate and concludes that the diminishing capacities of the land and oceans to store carbon are acting to accelerate global warming.  She is founding director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center and of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.  In 2005, Dr. Fung was named one the “Scientific American 50.”  She is a contributing author to the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.

Please RSVP

To RSVP, please click to http://inezfung.bpt.me.  Please note: You must present a printed or electronic ticket at the doors to guarantee your seat in the auditorium.  Doors open at 6pm.

Want to join the Archimedes Society?

To reserve premium seats in advance and attend a pre-event reception, we invite you to join the Archimedes Society, MSRI's supporting membership of individual donors.  To join the Archimedes Society, please visit https://tinyurl.com/msri-arch.  Please indicate the total number of tickets in the "Comments" field.  Archimedes Society members may bring one guest.  Please RSVP by Sunday, Oct. 27 to reserve seating and attend the pre-event reception.  Food and drinks will be provided at the reception.

The generous support of the Simons Foundation has made possible the "Not on the Test" MSRI-BCC lecture series.

        Not on the Test: The Pleasures and Uses of Mathematics

        9/11/13 - Tony DeRose: "Math in the Movies"

        10/9/13 - Keith Devlin: "Video Games for Mathematics"

        11/6/13 - Inez Fung: "Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions"

        2/12/14 - Ge Wang: "Music, Computing, People"

        3/12/14 - Eugenie Scott: "Science Denialism"

        4/9/14 - Krishna Shenoy: Brain-Machine Interfaces