Sunday September 13, 2009


Bicycling as a Form
of Transportation
 

Gil Hanson

7:00 p.m. ESS 001

Sunday  October 25, 2009

Erosion of Long Island's Ocean Shoreline: Problems, Solutions, more Problems and what Stony Brook's doing

Henry Bokuniewicz

7:00 p.m. ESS 001

 Sunday November 8, 2009

Climate Change, Rising Sea Level and Storm Surges: What is in store for Long Island?


Malcolm Bowman

7:00 p.m. ESS 001

 

This Science Night series will consider Environmental Concerns that directly impact
Long Island and Metropolitan New York.

Link here to be placed on the mail or e-mail list to receive announcements.

Directions to ESS Building at Stony Brook University

Teachers and Professional Geologists can receive in-service credit

Link to previous offerings Fall 2007, Spring 2008, Fall 2008, Spring 2009

Bicycling as a Form of Transportation

Gilbert N. Hanson
Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Geosciences
Stony Brook University

7:00 PM Sunday September 13, 2009

In the United States, most communities consider bicycling as a form of recreation and place little emphasis on encouraging people to use bicycling as a form of transportation.

The arguments communities use against developing a network of bike paths are:

  • Expensive for small number of recreation bikers
  • Only used during day
  • Only during good weather
  • Only during the summer

In some communities, however, bicycles are used all year long, in all kinds of weather and at night for transportation.

In this presentation I will present what Munster, Germany, one of the most bicycle friendly communities (Fahrad freundlich), is doing to encourage the use of bicycles for transportation and how some communities in the United States are becoming more bicycle friendly.

The reasons for encouraging the use of bicycles for transportation are:

  • Reduce production of CO2 the anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
  • Reduce ground level ozone.
  • Reduce vehicle traffic.
  • Reduce need for large parking lots.
  • Improve physical fitness and health

Long Island was developed with the concept that cars should be the preferred form of personal transportation. A question that we need to consider is "Should we (or, How can we) convince the public, transportation agencies and politicians that there should be more encouragement of bicycling as a form of transportation on Long Island?"

Links

Bicycling Munster the Bicycle Capital

Bicycling as a Form of Transportation in Munster, Germany

"Erosion of Long Island's Ocean Shoreline: Problems, Solutions, more Problems and what Stony Brook's doing"

Henry Bokuniewicz
Distinguished Service Professor
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences
Stony Brook University

7:00 PM Sunday October 25, 2009

Erosion is a natural condition of ocean beaches but it becomes a problem when we believe we have to do something about it.  A tour along Long Island’s south shore shows that the nature and severity of shore erosion changes from place to place, as does our perception of the problem.  How we deal with erosion has also changed over time.  Coney Island is a recreational resource for millions, and represents a century of societal investment.  Fire Island includes natural wilderness but it is also our natural levee against coastal flooding for south shore communities.  Montauk is a historical and cultural resource but must it be sacrificed to supply sand to the beaches to the west?  Our response to shore erosion will vary from place to place and represents a commitment for posterity.    

 Dr. Bokuniewicz is a Distinguished Service Professor of Oceanography at the University’s Marine Sciences Research Center.  He has worked on problems of shore erosion along Long Island’s ocean beaches for over 30 years with many of the coastal communities, NY State, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service.  He runs, at East Hampton, one of the longest, continuously-active, beach monitoring program in the country. 

Climate Change, Rising Sea Level and Storm Surges:
What is in store for Long Island?

Malcolm Bowman
Distinguished Service Professor
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences

7:00 PM Sunday November 8, 2009

The effects of climate change will have profound effects on human society and ecosystems that support it. Extreme weather events in an era of rising temperatures, more frequent and violent storms riding on the back of an ever increasing sea level will start to change the character of Long Island over the coming decades and will continue for centuries. This is true even if sharp curtailments in global CO2 emissions occur (unfortunately there is no evidence for any reduction – in fact current CO2 emissions are already higher than the worst case scenario presented in IPCC 4th Assessment Report, 2007). The presentation will focus on storm surges, their characteristics and what modern weather and surge numerical models can tell us about the magnitude and frequency of regional inundation threats, those that are realistic and those predictions that tend to be fanciful.

Distinguished Service Professor Malcolm Bowman is a faculty member in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. His research interests focus on the dynamics of coastal fronts, eddies, island wakes and coastal sea straits. His approach uses a combination of observations and model simulations to describe dynamically fundamental physical processes in shallow seas and estuaries. He is the coordinator of the Stony Brook Storm Surge Group, whose current research interests are prediction and modeling of storm surges that threaten the New York Metropolitan area.

If your school requires that you have a sequence of educational opportunities in order to receive in-service credit, please advise them that during the Fall 2009 Semester we will be offering one-hour of in-service credit for each of the: