Talk Archives

Understanding how climate change will stress our human systems can lead to better decisions and better outcomes for people. Using computer representations that can capture the entire Earth system, geoscientist Geeta Persad conducts research that sheds more light on our climate future and solutions at hand.

Join us for the screening of The Ants and the Grasshopper, a documentary that tells the story of a Malawian activist trying to save her home from extreme weather. The film weaves together the most urgent themes of our times: climate change, gender and racial inequality, the gaps between the rich and the poor, and the ideas that groups around the world have generated in order to save the planet. This event is a collaboration between the LBJ School, Hot Science - Cool Talks, and Texas Global.

Tropical cyclones cause on average more than 10,000 deaths and $40 billion in damages globally each year. Not only are hurricanes destructive because of the damaging winds but heavy rainfall and storm surge lead to flooding, rip currents and even tornadoes. Are hurricanes becoming more powerful and destructive and to what extent are these changes caused by climate change? Dr. Kerry Emanuel shares his research on hurricane prediction models and the long-term risk of hurricanes.

Is it possible to change an individual’s perceptions about climate change?  Definitely!  Join us for a conversation with Michael Ranney, whose research focuses on understanding and explaining challenging information, including concepts such as global warming and its impacts.  Prof. Ranney shares interventions that have proven to be effective in increasing the acceptance of climate change by people across the political spectrum.

Environmental injustice refers to the uneven distribution of environmental benefits and burdens based primarily on race, but also other marginalizing factors such as income and gender. In this conversation, Dr. Bruno will describe how this phenomenon spans across Texas and its history, with a focus on Port Arthur, Texas, where the largest petrochemical refinery in the Northern Hemisphere is nestled within a Black community. Dr. Bruno will describe the importance of integrating social science and environmental reconstruction methods to assess environmental injustice over time.

Caves with their luminous rock formations fascinate both explorers and scientists. But trapped in these glittering crystals are tiny droplets of water that have preserved what rain and snow were like thousands of years ago. Dr. Isabel Montañez shares her fascinating research in creating a timeline for Northern California’s climate history going back nearly 20,000 years.

With more than 500,000 objects floating in space and only about 2,000 functioning, space junk is growing exponentially. When these objects stop working, they drift aimlessly into the cosmos. These rogue bits of metal and space debris pose a danger to the technologies we rely on and to the future of space exploration. Dr. Moriba Jah examines what we can do to make space safe, secure, and sustainable in the long term.

There is a water crisis in the U.S. During the past decade, 63 million Americans were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once. Dr. Kimberly Jones will discuss the disproportionate access to safe and reliable water in American communities and how researchers, lawmakers and communities can work together to solve this crisis.

Much of what we experience in our lives each day is entirely forgotten. So what leads our brains to store experiences in memory that help us navigate the world? Perhaps the most important signal is mistake-making. Formal schooling unfortunately conveys the message that becoming more skillful means making fewer mistakes, which is demonstrably untrue. Come and learn how mistakes lead to advantageous changes to our memories and are the key to learning.

What can an Aye-Aye teach us about human vision? Chris Kirk explains how his research related to these intense-looking and enigmatic primates helps us understand human vision.