Speaker
Jillian Gregg BS, MS, PhD
Professor, Sustainability Double Degree Program, Department of Crop and Soil Science, Oregon State University, Steering Committee, Alliance of World Scientists, Oregon State University, and CEO, Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, Corvallis OR
Dr. Jillian W. Gregg received a B.S. and M.S. Biology from University of Utah, a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell. She did postdoctoral research at the US EPA. Dr. Gregg founded Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates (TERA), a nonprofit research group determining the impacts of human-caused climate change. She has attained >$2M total in climate change, pollutant impacts, and water relations research. In 2015, Dr. Gregg joined Oregon State University to develop the course on Introduction to Climate Change. This course attracts >1000 OSU students per year, and she has written an online textbook to accompany the course.
She has recently joined the Alliance of World Scientists climate science advocacy group headed by Dr. Bill Ripple at Oregon State University and will be presenting the foundations and expansion of their work in the group’s most recent paper titled: “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency: 2022.” Dr. Gregg and Dr. Ripple will both be available for the discussion session.
Abstract
In this talk, I will tell the story of the development of the Scientists’ Warning to Humanity articles. I start with the original article on the ‘World Scientists Warning to Humanity’ written by the Union of Concerned Scientists and cosigned by >1,700 scientist signatories in 1992. I then move to the ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’ written a quarter of a century later by Ripple and Wolf et al. in 2017 and cosigned by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries. We then follow how the signatories from the ‘second notice’ led to the development of the Alliance of World Scientists and 47 more Scientist Warning Articles, including our recent work on the ‘World Scientist Warning of a Climate Emergency’ series by Ripple and Wolf et al. in 2019, 2021, and 2022. This work collates 32 vital signs of climate change and I will focus on the most recent dataset published in fall, 2022. I will end with a summary of our recent work explaining how ‘Many Risky Feedbacks Amplify the Need for Climate Action’, and consider the ‘needed human action factors’ from the Climate Emergency Vital Signs in considering next steps. I will also show a short clip of our new 30-minute film on the Climate Emergency.
Recording