Happenings at the last meeting It was our first zoom meeting for the club for some time. Some of us had trouble negotiating the zoom log-in. Hopefully if we have another zoom meeting we will be better prepared. Our guest speaker was Greg Holland who is an Emeritus Senior Scientist with the US Capacity Centre for Climate and Weather Extremes at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research. Wow! Greg gave a very informative and alarming presentation on climate change and the effect of greenhouse gases. His talk covered three main topics: How is the world warming? How does climate change impact us? What can we do about it? It is not possible to cover all his presentation and it would difficult to do it justice. However there are a couple of points that I found particularly interesting that I would like to explain. One of his slides looked at the global warming that can be attributed to human endeavours - anthropogenic warming. The slide has a plot the measured global temperature, the expected temperature without that would be expected with and without human activity. Greg was clear to state the effect of human actions has accelerated in the 1960s. From this data there has been a significant impact in recent years.  Greg says that business as usual will lead to a 4 to 6° increase; we are currently at more than 1° increase. Greg was concerned that when the permafrost melts it releases methane which promotes more global warming leading to more permafrost melting. Thanks Greg for an interesting talk which prompted many questions leading to no time for usual Rotary business.  Here are a few of our smiling faces.
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