Richard Alley presents Ashtekar Frontiers of Science Lecture on the past and future of climate change and energy

The Ashketar Frontiers of Science lecture series welcomed Richard Alley, an Evan Pugh University Professor of geosciences at Penn State, to deliver his lecture “Finding the Good News on Climate and Energy,” on Saturday afternoon.

This year marked the 30th anniversary of the series, consisting of free public lectures founded by Abhay Ashtekar, the founding director of the Institute for Gravitation and Cosmos and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The challenge is, we really do rely on fossil fuels for our well-being,” Alley said. “We got to change it in 30 years…while climate change is making our lives harder. At the end of that, we can have a better world.”

Alley, an honored geology researcher, studies and predicts the future of changes in climate and sea level. Throughout his career, Alley participated in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, authored over 300 refereed scientific papers and was the presenter for the PBS TV miniseries on climate and energy Earth: The Operators’ Manual.

This lecture, centered around the effects of fossil fuels on climate change, detailed the history of fuel usage and how Pennsylvania played a role in the beginning stages of oil use and deforestation.

“We are Pennsylvania, we are Penn’s woods,” Alley said. “Rothrock wrote about the Pennsylvania desert about 1900. That wasn’t a desert, it still rained. But, essentially, Pennsylvania was treeless.”

The tree deforestation was mainly due to the outdated use of stone furnaces for fuel, which became replaced as technology moved on.

Audience member and Penn State student Aaron Santos was surprised by this old technology.

“Two square miles of trees disappearing every year for every single Pennsylvania furnace… it’s shocking,” Santos said.

Alley also delved into finding oil in the ground in Pennsylvania. This revolutionary discovery developed the first modern oil well and started the fuel resource’s rise to the top.

However, though the world “loves” and depends on fossil fuels, this won’t survive long-term use according to research in the field.

“The idea that somehow we can have a sustainable future that involves fossil fuels is just laughably wrong,” Alley said. “We either burn and then we learn…or we learn while we burn.”

This is also a pressing issue according to Alley, as he reports on sea levels rising far beyond the United States’ shores and wiping out entire towns. Two other incense forms of weather, droughts and floods, are expected to rise incredibly.

Many areas of the world are already considered hard to reside in, and Alley predicts that this could spread sooner than many realize.

“We could make places on Earth fatal within the lifetimes of our students,” Alley said.

Alley was also joined by Charlie Anderson, a professor of biology at Penn State and chair of the Eberly College of Science Sustainability Council.

Anderson detailed the council’s work to create a sustainable practice and reduce emissions of “power-hungry” instrumentation.

“Even though our college comprises about 5% of the university population, we emit about 6.5% of the university’s greenhouse gases,” Anderson said. “This fact has motivated us to be leaders in helping to decarbonize the university’s activities.”

The next lecture on the Ashtekar series will take place at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 24, presented by Morteza Kayyalha on computing.