WHO:

Dr. Benjamin Horton, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

WHAT:

The Penn Science Café lecture series, free and open to the public, takes science out of the laboratory and treats it to a night on the town. The Café is your chance to ask a leading expert your questions about science.

WHERE:

Bubble House, 3404 Sansom St., Philadelphia

WHEN:

Thursday, Jan. 24, 6 p.m.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Menu items available for purchase.

With Al Gore and the U.N. Climate Panel earning this year’s Nobel Prize, global warming and climate change will remain “hot” topics in politics, scientific research and on talk shows for years to come. But now that international debate has called for international action, where do we stand? Where are we in the battle against global climate change?

This month at the Penn Science Cafe, Benjamin Horton, director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory at Penn, tackles the hard questions with clear, if not easy, answers. Horton says we can expect global temperatures to increase by 1 to 6 degrees centigrade in the next 100 years, causing global sea levels to rise by more than 20 feet. Heat waves, droughts and wildfires will be more frequent and more intense. The Arctic Ocean could be ice free and more than a million species could be driven to extinction in the next 50 years.