Chair's Column

 

From the Desk of the Chair
Jan 22, 2013

Dear Students, Colleagues, Alumni, and Friends,

As we finish our winter session at Hunter College, I would like to welcome you to the new year, and wish you a happy and healthy year ahead, and a productive one in your studies and work at Hunter College. Our major news in the Department of Geography to start off the year is the arrival of a new faculty member, Dr. Carson Farmer. Dr. Farmer will be contributing to our GTECH program, as well as teaching other courses related to transportation for example. We extend a warm welcome to Dr. Farmer.

I thought I would start out the year, for those of you who are interested, in pointing you to some information regarding how the climate fared in the year 2012. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Dr. Jeff Masters, one of the founders of Weather Underground, has a fantastic weather/climate blog. His post of January 15 has some great information, as well as additional links:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2328

In this post you can see how temperatures in 2012 compared to earlier years; the dates and locations of some of the extreme temperatures of 2012; a very interesting discussion of how much of the recent global temperature variations can be attributed to natural causes and how much to human impact; and a number of links to additional sources of related information.

Sincerely,

Allan Frei, Chair
Department of Geography, Hunter College
CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities
afrei@hunter.cuny.edu