The Library is pleased to partner with local non-profit South Pasadena Hometown Exchange to present a Community Room Conversation on the topic of Climate Change. Our distinguished speaker is Tapio Schneider, the Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech and a Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Earth has warmed 1° Celsius over the past 150 years. Most of this warming occurred since the 1970s. For Los Angeles, this means, for example, that the average number of days per year with temperatures exceeding 95° Fahrenheit has increased from 53 in 1970 to 67 today—two extra weeks’ worth of very hot days that prime California’s landscape for ferocious wildfires and put vulnerable populations at risk. Prof. Schneider will walk through the scientific evidence showing that most global warming we have already seen is caused by human activities, and will discuss possible climate futures we may be facing. For while climate change is certain, precisely how climate will change is less clear, with uncertainties arising primarily from difficulties predicting how clouds, such as the marine layer off the coast of California, change with climate.

The South Pasadena Hometown Exchange (S.P.H.E.) is a California nonprofit corporation that aims to provide opportunities for Americans from different backgrounds and with varying viewpoints to come together for friendship and also for purposeful and constructive dialogues, especially on subjects about which people may disagree.

The main program – administered in collaboration with AFS-USA (www.afsusa.org), a leader in international education for more than 70 years – has chaperoned teenagers travel from their hometowns in the United States– not overseas, but – to other communities in the United States, to live for one week with host families, and participate in events and conversations with teenagers and others in the host communities.

S.P.H.E. also presents public speakers on current affairs. The speakers also teach and interact with the teenagers in the exchange program.