
Keynote Speaker
Richard Alley, a noted geologist and host of the PBS documentary Earth: The Operator’s
Manual, will present the keynote address for Theme Semester 2021.
As a professor of geoscience at Penn State, Dr. Alley is widely credited with showing
that Earth has experienced abrupt climate change in the past—and likely will again,
based on his meticulous study of ice cores from Greenland and West Antarctica. In
recent years, he has served as one of the authors on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, whose members shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice
President Al Gore. He believes that climate change does not have to be a partisan
issue ― that we can deal with climate change without raising the temperature in the
political climate.
Further details, including the date and time of his keynote address, will be announced
in the summer of 2021.