Radical Collaboration and Climate Change
Costa, Sinervo Announced for TEDxSantaCruz
The clock is ticking, remind two UC Santa Cruz professors who have been confirmed as speakers for the upcoming TEDxSantaCruz: Radical Collaboration conference.
Drs. Daniel Costa and Barry Sinervo will join more than 20 other presenters at on April 24 at the Rio Theatre.
Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, researches the adaptations of marine mammals and seabirds to life in the marine environment. For more than 40 years, Costa has traveled the world to study marine animals, from albatrosses and seals to penguins and seabirds. He’s also been featured in KQED’s QUEST TV program, “Why I Do Science.”
Radical collaboration — between man and marine animal — definitely comes into play in his research.
“Understanding how a changing ocean is going to affect marine animals requires collaboration between marine biologists, physical oceanographers, engineers and modelers,” he says. “As many marine animals move over great distances and dive to great depths, our ability to observe them is extremely limited. We’ve solved this problem by collaborating with marine mammals by having them carry instruments that tell us where they go, how deep how long, and what their environment is like.”
For Sinervo, also a professor in the UCSC Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, climate change is driving evolutionary changes to lizards and frogs.
“We are now at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction,” he says, “with limited time to avert an ecological catastrophe for biological systems and humans.”
Sinervo leads a multinational research team of scientists, working from the equator to the polar regions. He was recently awarded $2 million to study impacts of climate change on California ecosystems at the UC Natural Reserve System, which is the world’s largest system of university-administered natural reserves. Its 39 reserves, on more than 756,000 acres, feature examples of most major California habitats.
In his TEDxSantaCruz talk, he will describe the global evidence for climate change.
“We have to get movement on the climate change issue or risk changes of unprecedented magnitudes in the history of human civilization, or indeed in the earth’s history, as measured over the past 65 million years of climate change.”
Costa and Sinervo will join Christine Hutton, Matt Beaudreau, David Dennis, Bez Maxwell, Ed Reed, Bruce Damer,David Haussler, Barbara Rogoff, and Flora Lu, at this year’s TEDxSantaCruz. More speakers will be confirmed every week between now and mid-April. Here is a list of their bios.
Tickets for the all-day TEDxSantaCruz 2015: Radical Collaboration event are available online. The 2015 theme is Radical Collaboration, and this fourth-annual local conference will take place from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. April 24 at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz.
Last year’s event sold out, so attendees are advised to buy their tickets now.
About TED
TED, which stands for technology, entertainment and design, is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a one-off conference on 1984, TED has grown to support world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. Talks are recorded and free for viewing at TED.com.
Since 2009, the internationally renowned TED conference organization has grown to include TEDx events, which are local, self-organized events around the world. TED licenses independently organized TEDx programs. TEDxSantaCruz 2015: Radical Collaboration will be the fourth daylong local TEDx conference.