Climate change will be the focus of a town hall discussion Thursday, Feb. 23, involving U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, Dr. John Abraham of the St. Thomas School of Engineering, and two other climate and weather experts.
The 4-5 p.m. forum in James B. Woulfe North Alumni Hall, Anderson Student Center, will be free and open to the public.
Joining Abraham and McCollum will be Daniel Luna, chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service in the Twin Cities, and Dr. Mark Seeley, a professor in the Department of Soil, Water and Climate Change at the University of Minnesota. The group will address climate issues that they expect to get attention during the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump “has called climate change a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by the Chinese, and the Republican Congress wants to tear up environmental protections like the Clean Power Act,” McCollum said. “Our discussion will focus on what we all can do to act on climate change and protect our planet from its most devastating impacts.”
McCollum is on the House Appropriations Committee, where she serves as the ranking Democrat on the Interior-Environment Subcommittee and as a member of the Defense Subcommittee. The Interior-Environment Subcommittee appropriated $30 billion in 2015 and funds the Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Forest Service, National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Abraham is a professor of thermal sciences with expertise in climate change, energy production and distribution, and fluid and heat transfer. He joined the St. Thomas engineering faculty in 2002 and has produced 170 journal papers, books, edited works and conference presentations.
