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Sponsored by Friends of the Moscow Library. She recently published a book on this subject. PESC tried to set up a presentation from her back at the beginning of this year but conflicts got in the way. Her talk should be interesting and perhaps controversial because she presents climate change from the perspective of geologic history. Flyer about E. Kirsten Peters talk, “The Whole Story of Climate Change.”

While the recent work of climate scientists has added
greatly to our understanding of the fragility of climate, the
public rarely hears from geologists— even though
geologists have been studying climate change for almost
200 years. The typical American has the impression that
climate would be stable if it weren’t for industrialization and
the production of greenhouse gases from smokestacks and
cars. However, geologic history reveals a ceaselessly
changing climate going back millions of years before the
modern economy.

As The Whole Story of Climate explains, several long, cold
spells have been punctuated by short, warm ones. We are,
in fact, currently living in one of the short, warm periods
that the Earth has seen many times before. There is even a
serious hypothesis worth exploring that if it weren’t for the
greenhouse gases created for millennia by agriculture we
would today be headed back into a time of bitterly cold
temperatures worthy of the mastodons and mammoths
many of us read about as children.

Elsa Kirsten Peters grew up in Pullman. She was a geology major
at Princeton and earned her PhD in geology at Harvard. She has
taught undergraduate geology at WSU and is the author of several
books, as well as the syndicated “Rock Doc” newspaper column.
She has also published murder mysteries under the pen name
Irene Allen.

On Wednesday April 30, FOC and Save Our Wild Salmon are co-sponsoring the documentary DamNation, which takes a critical look at the dam building era of the 20th Century and the efforts to decommission dams and recover native fish and aquatic ecosystems in the 21st Century. The film starts 7 pm at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre,508 S. Main Street, Moscow. Watch the trailer.

Winter Market: WIRT information table with donation envelopes and the Paradise Ridge Defense Coalition petition for Highway 95 safety measures, on the 1912 Center Plaza if weather permits.