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About Dr. Robert E. Kopp

Around the world, sea levels are rising in response to warming oceans, melting glaciers, and shrinking ice sheets – and even faster rise is projected in the coming century. In this talk, I will explore the different physical processes driving sea-level rise, the geological record of past sea-level changes, methods for assessing the probability of different levels of future changes, and the implications for future coastal flood risks.

About the Seminar

Robert Kopp is Director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences and a Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. He also serves as co-director of Rutgers’ Coastal Climate Risk & Resilience (C2R2) initiative. Prof. Kopp's research focuses on understanding uncertainty in past and future climate change, with major emphases on sea-level change and on the interactions between physical climate change and the economy. He is a lead author of Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus  and of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report. He previously served as a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Assessing Approaches to Updating the Social Cost of Carbon and a contributing author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2011, Prof. Kopp served as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy and as a postdoctoral fellow in geosciences and public policy at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in geobiology from Caltech and his undergraduate degree in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago. Prof. Kopp is a Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor's Scholar and a past Leopold Leadership Fellow. He is a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s James B. Macelwane and William Gilbert Medals and the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA)’s Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal.