Apr 1
Weathering with You— When it rains it pours: Climate change and extreme events
Program Description
Dr. Erika Wise and Dr. Feng Wang join us for a presentation on why we’d expect global warming to cause more extreme rain events, and how we can tell if recent climate events are “weird.”
Film Synopsis
Set during a period of exceptionally rainy weather, a high-school boy runs away from his troubled rural home to Tokyo and befriends an orphan girl who can manipulate the weather.
After running away from his remote island village to Tokyo, teenager Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) finds his struggles to survive in the metropolis mirrored in the unusually rainy and overcast weather. When he meets Hina (Nana Mori), a teenage orphan with a mysterious ability to stop the rain, the two embark on an exciting business venture selling sunny days. From director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name), Weathering with You is a viscerally animated portrait of climate, spirituality, and adolescence.
Photo credit: CoMix Wave Films / Toho
About the Speaker
Erika Wise realized she was not cut out for Iowa winters after a year as a University of Iowa faculty member, and she is now a professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies extreme events like floods and droughts and tries to understand what happens in the climate system to cause them, and how they might change in the future. To figure this out, she relies on long-term climate records found in the Earth’s amazing natural archives, like trees, corals, and glaciers.
Feng Wang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences at the University of Iowa. Recognizing himself as an interpreter of climate chronicles, he uses tree rings to study Earth's climate change from the past to future and examines how climate has shaped our forest ecosystems through time.