Expert Workshop and Symposium on Climate Change Communication and Collaboration

The Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C) is a two-year research project funded within the Austrian Climate Research Program (ACRP). The introductory expert workshop and public symposium entitled “Climate Change Communication and Collaboration: Translating Awareness into Collective Action” took place on June 16th, 2010 at MODUL University Vienna. Photos of the event as well as the slides of the keynote speakers (see short biographies below) are now available for download:

• David D. Herring, Communications Program Director, U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Climate Program Office
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• Prof. Dr. Helga Kromp-Kolb, Head of the Institute of Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences
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• Prof. DDr. Arno Scharl, Vice President and Head of Department, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
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• Dr. David Stainforth, Senior Research Fellow, London School of Economics, Grantham Research Institute
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• Moderator: Thomas E. Bowman, MA, President of the Bowman Design Group and Founder of the Climate Solutions Project
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Short Biographies

David Herring serves as Director of the Communications & Education Program within NOAA's Climate Program Office, in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he works to promote public climate science literacy. Central to this endeavor is the new NOAA Climate Services Web Portal (www.climate.gov), published in December 2009, for which he serves as Program Manager. David also conceived a new series of public dialogs called “Community Conversations on Climate”, which brings together climate scientists, policy experts and citizens into facilitated dialogs about causes and impacts of climate change. Before joining NOAA in 2008, David spent 16 years working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, as an Education and Outreach Project Manager in the Earth Sciences Division, where he also served as the Terra Mission Outreach coordinator. David led the effort to build NASA’s award-winning Earth Observatory, Visible Earth, and NEO websites. He received his Masters Degree in 1992 from East Carolina University, where he trained in science and technical writing, journalism, and science education.

Helga Kromp-Kolb is a climate researcher and heads the Institute of Meteorology and is chair of the University Senate at the University of Applied Life Sciences and Natural Resources in Vienna. Her scientific expertise is in the area of climatology and meteorology in particular environmental meteorology and environmental research. After a leading position at the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik/ Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics and after being an Associate Professor at San José State University in Californa / USA she has been teaching and researching at the University of Applied Life Sciences and Natural Resources in Vienna, a position she has held since 1995. She is a member of the Austrian, German and American Associations for Meteorology. Her scientific expertise is in high demand in numerous advisory bodies and councils. Ms Helga Kromp-Kolb was awarded with the “Konrad Lorenz Award” in 1991 and “Austrian Scientist of the Year Award” in 2005.

Arno Scharl is the Vice President of MODUL University Vienna and Head of the Department of New Media Technology. Prior to his current appointment, he held professorships at the University of Western Australia and Graz University of Technology, was a Key Researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management, and a Visiting Fellow at Curtin University of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. Arno Scharl completed his doctoral research and habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He has edited books on Environmental Online Communication and The Geospatial Web (www.ecoresearch.net/springer; www.geospatialweb.com), founded the ECOresearch Network (www.ecoresearch.net) and served as co-chair of the 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection. His current research interests focus on the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology, Web mining and media monitoring, virtual communities and environmental online communication.

David Stainforth is a Senior Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute. He is a physicist by training and has many years experience of climate modelling. While a researcher at Oxford University he co-founded and was chief scientist of the climateprediction.net project, the world's largest climate modelling experiment. He has been both a NERC Research Fellow and a Tyndall Research Fellow at Ox-ford University. His current research interests focus on how we can extract robust and useful information about future climate, and climate related phenomena, from modelling experiments. This includes issues of how to design climate modelling experiments and how to link climate science to real-world decision making in such a way as to be of value to industry, policy makers and wider society.

Thomas E. Bowman is one of the premier interpreters of global change, climate and energy science, and green business strategies. He is a social entrepreneur, advisor, communication strategist, and science interpreter. As President of Bowman Design Group, he led award-winning climate exhibition designs for the Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences and Birch Aquarium at Scripps, and the Ocean on the Edge exhibition at the Aquarium of the Pacific. As a consultant with Bowman Global Change, he contributed to the federal Climate Literacy education guide, organized a groundbreaking meeting for assessing public attitudes to global warming, and authored its influential summary report. Bowman founded the Climate Solutions Project to develop public intervention strategies with a blue-ribbon team of experts in climate science, social science, economics, ethics and social marketing. He writes a monthly column on green business strategies and received an inaugural Small Business of the Year award from the California Air Resources Board in 2009 for generating annual cost savings while slashing his firm's greenhouse gas emission by 65% in just two years.

* Photo Credits: MODUL University Vienna/APA-OTS/Schedl (More Photos)