The Global Carbon Cycle: Impact on Carbon, Energy and Climate

Our global "clean energy" goals are really about controlling the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  This requires a change in the way carbon is moved around among the various forms and places it exists in and on the Earth.  Over the past 100 years, Earth's carbon cycles have undergone revolutionary change as a result of an unprecedented transfer of carbon from geologic storage to the atmosphere. Today, about 10 gigatons of carbon per year is being transferred out of geologic reservoirs into the atmosphere, 99% of it due to human activities.  Come learn some surprising facts about how the carbon cycle works, how it responds to stresses, how we know where the atmospheric CO2 comes from, and whether we can engineer a sustainable carbon cycle.

Register in advance here, no tickets available at the door. 

Speaker: Donald DePaolo, is the Associate Laboratory Director for Energy and Environmental Sciences of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  His research interests are in the application of radiogenic isotope geochemistry and principles of physics and chemistry to problems in geology, geophysics, and environmental science.  Don will lead us through an analysis of the carbon cycle from a global geologic perspective.  He will explore how earth stores carbon and carbon dioxide and the carbon fluxes over millions of years and will look at the recent changes in atmospheric greenhouse gasses and the sources of those changes.  He  will explore the possibility of engineering the carbon cycle to mitigate climate change.  Come look at the big picture of our relationship to earth, carbon based fuels, and the global carbon cycle