Kate Brown, an award-winning historian at the University of Maryland, discusses “plutonium cities” in the U.S. and Soviet Union at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 13, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

A day later, Kerry Emanuel, an influential professor of meteorology at MIT, presents Uncertainty, Modeling and Climate Change at 4 p.m. Friday, Jan. 14, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

Titled Plutopolis: How Secrecy, Security and Radiation Made Model Communities and Model Citizens in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Brown’s talk is sponsored by the politics department and the Mellon Innovation Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Emanuel’s talk is sponsored by the chemistry, physics and geology departments and the environmental studies program. To learn more, please contact 207-786-6924.

Brown is the author of the book A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2005). Her presentation at Bates will compare the communities surrounding early plutonium plants, in Hanford, Wash., and Maiak, Russia.

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 influential people for 2006, Emanuel was in the news the previous year thanks to a study, published less than a month before Hurricane Katrina, linking the increasing force of hurricanes to the rise in global temperature.

The event concludes the undergraduate careers of some 456 members of the Bates’ class of 2010, representing 33 states and 33 countries.

The 2010 Bates honorands are:

• Rennie Harris, the choreographer who brought hip-hop to the mainstream world of dance
• James McCarthy, a scientist recognized internationally for helping to communicate the science of climate change
• Jane Pauley, the veteran television journalist
• Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and 1977 Bates graduate
• Teresa Woodruff, a researcher responsible for pioneering work in the care of women who will become infertile due to cancer treatment

With his company, Rennie Harris Puremovement, this North Philadelphia native has been a pioneer in choreographing, teaching and expanding the scope of hip-hop. The troupe is internationally known for such works as the autobiographical Prince ScareKrow’s Road to the Emerald City; the spiritually driven Facing Mekka; and the critically acclaimed Rome and Jewels, a hip-hop opera that transports Romeo and Juliet into the world of rival B-boys and street gangs. (Harris previewed the work at the Bates Dance Festival in 1999.)

Harris began his performing career in the 1980s with the Scanner Boys, a group that he helped found, and in the mid-1980s he toured internationally with the Fresh Festival, the first hip-hop tour. He founded Rennie Harris Puremovement in 1992, and the company gained national visibility in 1995 through performances with Dance Africa America.

Honors that Harris has received in recent years include, in 2007, one of 50 United States Artists Fellowships and the Artist of the Year Award from the governor of Pennsylvania. Harris has also created works for The Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He has been likened to such choreographers as Ailey and Bob Fosse, and was described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “Philadelphia’s greatest cultural export.”

A passionate public intellectual within the global climate discussion, McCarthy led the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability working group for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. After the Nobel Peace Prize went to the IPCC in 2007, McCarthy said the prize acknowledges that “if we really internalize and act on this statement about climate change, the world will be a more peaceful place.”

McCarthy is Harvard’s Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and he has led many national and international committees and research programs relating to ocean and climate science. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2008-09 served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

McCarthy researches the regulation of sea plankton productivity, focusing on regions around the world affected by seasonal and inter-annual climate variation. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Gonzaga University and a doctorate from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

During nearly three decades at NBC, Pauley covered events that have defined our time, from the fall of the Iron Curtain to the attacks of Sept. 11. At NBC, Pauley also anchored evening newscasts and hosted a weekly newsmagazine, Real Life with Jane Pauley, and MSNBC’s retrospective news program Time and Again.

Pauley has been honored with numerous awards including multiple Emmys, the Radio-Television News Directors Association’s prestigious Paul White Award and the Gracie Allen Award for outstanding achievement from American Women in Radio and Television.

She is widely admired for her openness about her personal struggle with bipolar disorder in the early 2000s, which she wrote about in the memoir Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue (Random House, 2004). In September 2009, she lent her name to the Jane Pauley Community Health Center in her home state of Indiana. Serving local residents regardless of insurance or income, the center emphasizes the integration of medical, dental and behavioral health.

Pauley received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University in 1972. A resident of New York City, she is married to Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

From this early introduction to the literary life, Strout has developed a career distinguished by three full-length fiction works (all published by Random House) nationally acclaimed for their power to conjure up captivating characters with complex emotional lives. 1998′s Amy and Isabelle won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and a Los Angeles Times award for a fiction debut, and was made into a movie for ABC television in 2001. Abide with Me (2006), the story of a small-town clergyman’s fall and redemption, was a national best seller and Book Sense pick. Olive Kitteridge, a “novel-in-stories,” won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction and became a New York Times Best Seller.

All these works are set in Maine. Strout was born in Portland and spent much of her youth in Maine, a state that means “just about everything” to her, as she told Bates Magazine in 2006. Majoring in English at Bates, Strout earned her first fiction byline in 1982 and since then has published short stories in The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine and various literary journals.

While paying her dues as a writer, Strout worked a variety of jobs including waitress, mattress salesperson and nightclub pianist. She holds a law degree from Syracuse University and teaches in a low-residency writing program at Queens University, Charlotte, N.C. She lives in New York City.

The approach reflects Woodruff’s focus on the human condition in the context of research. “We’re trying to create a total shift in how we interact with female cancer patients to anticipate their lives as survivors and their ability to bear children,” she says of her work.

Woodruff is a Thomas J. Watkins Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine as well as professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is chief of the newly created Division of Fertility Preservation and founder and director of the Institute for Women’s Health Research, and she helped to create and now runs the nation’s first Oncofertility Consortium, a National Institutes of Health-funded initiative that represents medical innovators from the oncology and fertility fields.

Her awards include the Endocrine Society’s Richard E. Weitzman Memorial Award for exceptionally promising young investigators, and she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Woodruff, who earned a doctorate in biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology from Northwestern, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 40 editorials and book chapters.

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Lindzen has researched and taught atmospheric and climate science for more than 30 years and was lead author of a chapter in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At Bates he will attempt to show how the popular view of global warming is based on the misrepresentation of both authority and language. He will present facts and reasoning that lead him and other prominent scientists to question whether humans are having a significant effect on the climate. The rhetoric that permeates the debate on these topics will also be discussed.

Lindzen’s talk is part of a program on climate change organized by the Dean of Students office for first-year students. His visit affords a unique opportunity to learn about a less-heard view of climate change from one of the most highly respected and qualified scientists in the field of climate and atmospheric science.

On March 12 and 13, two decisive actors in the effort to curtail global climate change offer back-to-back talks at Bates College.

Bill McKibben, the environmental journalist who wrote the first book aimed at a general readership about climate change, gives a talk titled “Global Warming: Fighting Against It, Living With It” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12, in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Sören Hermansen, named one of Time Magazine’s 2008 Heroes of the Environment for his leadership in a Danish island’s conversion to fully sustainable, carbon-neutral energy, speaks at 2:45 p.m. Friday, March 13, in Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, Alumni Walk.

Both events are open to the public at no charge. Sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, the McKibben event is part of the series “The Civic Forum: Maine in a Transnational Age.” For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

The Hermansen event is sponsored by the Program in Environmental Studies at Bates. For more information, please call 207-786-6490.

McKibben is an American environmentalist and journalist who writes about global warming, alternative energy and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. His first book, The End of Nature (Random House, 1989), is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

In late summer 2006, McKibben helped lead a walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming, a demonstration that some newspaper accounts called the largest to date in America about climate change. He founded Step It Up 2007, an organization advocating that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With 1,400 global warming protests in all 50 states in April 2007, Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in U.S. history.

McKibben’s second book, The Age of Missing Information (Random House, 1992), is an account of an experiment: He collected everything transmitted on the 100 channels of cable TV on the Fairfax, Va., system (at the time among the nation’s largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was released in a new edition in 2006.

Subsequent McKibben books have explored the Book of Job and the environment; human population; and what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering. Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007) addresses shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, McKibben lives with his wife and daughter in Ripton, Vt.

Since 1997, Sören Hermansen has led the 4,300 inhabitants of the Danish island of Samsø, where he was born, away from dependence on imported fossil fuels and toward sustainable, carbon-neutral energy use. Once reliant on oil for heat and coal for its electricity, island residents today heat their buildings with solar and geothermal technology and island-grown straw, and produce enough electricity from the wind that Samsø is a net exporter of electricity.

In 1997, Denmark’s government announced a renewable-energy contest challenging communities to show that they could live without fossil fuels. As leader of the Samsø Energy and Environment Organization, Hermansen persuaded his fellow islanders — through gentle coaxing, persistence and occasionally, free beer — to make the difficult changes in mindset, technology and lifestyle that would free the island from its fossil-fuel addiction.

Hermansen had a hand in the adoption of myriad sustainable technologies around the island, from wind turbine construction, to solar heat and electricity, to the use of biomass grown on the island, such as straw and wood chips, for residential heating.

The islanders “formed energy cooperatives and organized seminars on wind power,” writer Elizabeth Kolbert reported in “Island in the Wind,” an article about Samsø in the July 7, 2008, issue of The New Yorker. They supported the construction of wind turbines on the island and offshore.

“They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.”

While some island residents continue to run their vehicles on fossil fuels, the island’s wind-generated electricity offsets the carbon produced by vehicles. Samsø shows that renewable energy can directly benefit its users through more than just moral satisfaction, too, as shareholders in some of the wind turbines receive dividends from the sale of power.

“We always hear that we should think globally and act locally,” Hermansen told Kolbert. “I understand what that means — I think we as a nation should be part of the global consciousness. But each individual cannot be part of that. So ‘Think locally, act locally’ is the key message for us.”

Today, as director of the Samsø Energy Academy, Hermensen has told the story of Samsø at conferences around Europe and in Asia, as well as the United States.

Historian of science at the University of California, San Diego, Naomi Oreskes gave a lecture on the science of climate change and the notion of scientific consensus at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Oreskes focused on the established agreement within the scientific community on the existence of climate change and the implications of these changes.

Sponsored by the College Lecture Series, her talk offered insight into the involvement and tension of political influence in the scientific community. The event was open to the public free of charge.

Oreskes’ research aims to bring attention to scientific facts about climate change that have been downplayed or ignored by political figures for as long as 30 years, delaying action to deal with greenhouse gases. Her analyses of abstracts published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 revealed that nearly 20 percent explicitly say that Earth’s climate has been impacted by human activities, with another 55 percent implicitly endorsing the consensus.

Her essay on science and society “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” was published in the journal Science in December 2004 and cited in Al Gore’s influential documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Oreskes has also taught at Harvard, New York University and Dartmouth, and has worked as a consultant for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, she received the George Sarton Award Lecture from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she completed an American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship in 2002.

She has been cited by National Public Radio, The New Yorker, USA Today, Parade and the Royal Society’s publication, “A guide to facts and fictions about climate change.”

Bates is one of eight colleges and universities in Maine, and more than 100 nationwide, to sign an agreement to become “carbon neutral” — that is, to reduce institutional emissions of carbon-based greenhouse gases such that they no longer increase the atmospheric total of such gases.

In February, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. She is one of 62 chief executives in the coalition’s Leadership Circle, which provides guidance, peer encouragement and direction to the effort.

Hansen’s commitment on behalf of the college came just weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, issued a report that leaves little doubt about the link among human activity, greenhouse gas emissions and the warming of the Earth’s climate, a phenomenon with potentially devastating consequences.

“Many Bates students, faculty and staff members are vitally concerned about all aspects of environmental stewardship,” Hansen says. “We’ve worked hard for many years on researching and teaching about the environment, and Bates also has a proud history of success in programs ranging from Dining Services’ food-waste management to our recent decision to purchase green energy.”

She says, “The time was right for Bates to step forward.”

Patterned after the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, the ACUPCC commits Bates and its fellow signatories to an ultimate goal of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions through a five-step process:

1) Completing an institutional inventory of emissions (which in Bates’ case should be done this spring); 2) setting a target date and milestones for achieving climate neutrality; 3) taking immediate short-term steps to reduce emissions; 4) integrating sustainability into the curriculum and the educational experience; and 5) making the action plan, emissions inventory and progress reports publicly available. (The agreement also calls for participants to step up research relevant to climate change.)

“Colleges and universities play a very important role in sustainability,” Hansen says. “We are, after all, educating future leaders, so we have both a special responsibility and a special opportunity to instill students with a sense of the urgency and complexities of finding solutions to the problems of living on Earth.”

She adds, “As institutions, we should also be able to demonstrate operationally how to make innovative, sustainable choices. And we should encourage other institutions to follow our lead in working to protect the environment.”

Winning individual hearts and minds to the cause will be key to the Bates effort, says environmental coordinator Julie Rosenbach. “We can work on policies, incentive programs and infrastructures to help people with their decisions,” she says.

“If you tell people, ‘We have to stop climate change,’ it’s totally overwhelming,” she added. “But if you give them concrete steps to take, most people are interested.”

Three national nonprofit organizations that advocate environmental sustainability initiated the ACUPCC: EcoAmerica, Second Nature and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The latter two are involved specifically with higher education.

Presidents Bernie Machen of the University of Florida, Michael Crow of Arizona State University and Jo Ann M. Gora of Ball State University were among the first to sign the commitment, late last year. As of March 5, 108 colleges and universities were on board.

Michael J. Retelle, a professor of geology at Bates, is one of 13 scientists across the nation to share nearly $1,500,000 in National Science Foundation funding for Arctic research related to global climate change.

The NSF funds, awarded for a four-year period beginning March 1, support an ongoing project to create a 2,000-year climatic history of the North American Arctic. The researchers are analyzing layers of sediment deposited annually upon Arctic lake beds for clues to climatic conditions during the past two millennia, clues such as sediment thickness and chemical composition.

The NSF grant totals $1,476,442, of which Retelle’s share is $50,190. That money will defray costs of analyzing six lake-floor core samples that Retelle collected in 2003 from lakes on Devon, Cornwallis and Bathurst islands, near Greenland in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. Retelle and three students (including Dan Frost, a senior from Farmington, Maine) will process the samples this summer.

Titled “Collaborative Research: A Synthesis of the Last 2,000 Years of Climatic Variability from Arctic Lakes,” the NSF-funded project is intended to provide a context for better understanding of current climatic trends. “It’s important to try to put the recent climatic warming in a longer-term perspective, and to try to tease out whether what we’re looking at is part of the range of natural variability or, indeed, if it’s a result of human alteration of the atmosphere,” Retelle explains.

“The further we can go back and see how the natural system works, the better we can put this recent warming into context and try to understand what’s controlling it.”

Analyzing core samples from 30 lakes across a region of the North American Arctic from Alaska to the northwest Atlantic, the researchers will integrate their results of their work and, they hope, be able to announce findings by 2007. The project extends a 400-year Arctic climatic history project whose results were widely publicized in 1997.

Retelle explains that, as records (or “proxies,” in scientific parlance) of the weather from year to year, layers of lake sediment can be likened to tree-growth rings. Thicker layers can signify warmer summers that promoted plant growth in the lake or rainstorms that washed soil into the lake. Also informative are levels of carbon, nitrogen and substances like biogenic silica, a hard remnant of algae.

Retelle and his assistants will analyze the samples through a variety of means, including an X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy system at the University of Laval, Quebec.

Climate is a central theme of Retelle’s work, and in nearly 30 years’ worth of visits to the Arctic, he has seen climate-related changes that he calls “actually frightening.” He points to Ellesmere Island, 480 miles from the North Pole, where floating coastal ice shelves have receded dramatically and lake ice that once persisted year-round is now seasonal. “There are radical changes,” he says.

The grant is the latest in a series of NSF awards that Retelle has received for Arctic lake-bed study and for bringing students into this research. (More than 20 of Retelle’s students have conducted research in the Canadian Arctic for senior thesis projects.) He has done geological research in the Arctic since 1976, when he worked as a field geologist and engineer on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

Retelle, of Monmouth, has worked at Bates since 1987. His teaching and research are focused on geological events of the past 1,600,000 years — called the Quaternary Period — and specifically ancient environmental records from glacial, lake and marine sediments in Maine as well as the Canadian arctic.

Here in Maine, with Thomas Weddle of the Maine Geological Survey, Retelle has published findings from an ongoing survey on the impacts of the retreat from Maine of Ice Age glaciers, including changes in sea level. He also works with students in assessing seasonal effects of weather at the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, Phippsburg.

Retelle is a senior researcher for the Svalbard Research Experience for Undergraduates, a summer project funded by the NSF and hosted by Mount Holyoke College, that brings six students to the Norwegian Arctic to research the effects of climate change upon high-latitude glaciers, melt-water streams and sedimentation in lakes and fjords.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in earth sciences from Salem (Mass.) State College, and earned graduate degrees in geology at the University of Massachusetts.

Since 1999, Kreider has been global warming and energy campaigns manager for the National Environmental Trust, a nonprofit membership organization established to inform citizens about environmental issues.

In her talk, titled Ten Years After the Rio Earth Summit: Where Have We Gotten on Global Warming? Kreider tracks efforts to curb climate change since the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which produced the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the world’s first treaty designed to address global warming.

In her lecture, Kreider will cover points that include the failure of the Framework Convention, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and U.S. reluctance to commit to it, existing measures to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas production and the domestic political context for the issue, and President Bush’s recent controversial plan for voluntary greenhouse gas cutbacks.

A 1992 graduate of Rollins College, Kreider has been a campaign manager for Greenpeace and communications director for Ozone Action, and has worked as a Truman Fellow in a variety of federal agencies.