Presented by Dr. Sean Munger, Historian

Old St. Francis History Pub

This event was originally scheduled on Tues., 2/26, but was cancelled due to snow – come out for this newly rescheduled event!

Like everything else in the world, climate change has a long history. Far from being something discovered only recently by instruments of modern science, the warming of the Earth’s climate has been known about for a long time, and suspected for an even longer time before that. But who made the discovery that the planet is warming, and under what circumstances? The answers might surprise you. Many of the people involved in the story of climate change were Northwesterners, or had some connection to the region. Climate, how it changes and the quest to understand it, have touched the Northwest in many ways. Even beyond individual people who have shaped its history, like climate scientists Roger Revelle (born in Seattle) and Jennifer Francis (educated at UW), numerous places, institutions and events in the Northwest loom large in the story of climate change. Crater Lake, Lewis and Clark, the Hanford plant, salmon, the wildfire events of 2015 and 2017: all of these have something to do with the history of climate change, whether recent or distant. This talk will fill in some of the murky background of climate history, and showcase how the Northwest is connected to it.