Speaker: HMSC Lavern Weber Prize winner-Ron Fujita, Associate Vice President, Research & Development, Lead Senior Scientist II, Environmental Defense Fund

Topic: Can the Ocean Fight Climate Change?

There is an urgent need to dramatically reduce emissions of gases that trap heat, called greenhouse gases.  But because these gases have been emitted in such great quantities for so long, there is also an urgent need to capture and remove them from the atmosphere.   And because the ocean absorbs and stores huge amounts of one greenhouse gas -- carbon dioxide -- there are now proposals to accelerate the ocean’s ability to absorb and store even more.  In this talk, I’ll describe some of these proposals and pose some questions: Will they work?  Are they safe? Is it ethical to use the ocean in this way?  These are some of the important issues that we’ll discuss as proposals to accelerate carbon dioxide removal by the oceans get more serious and attract more financing.