UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jose D. Fuentes has spent much of his career studying the impacts of climate change on ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest. This year, the professor of atmospheric science at Penn State had the chance to share that knowledge with the people of Brazil, who may be among the most impacted by a changing climate.
Fuentes is spending four months in Brazil this spring and summer on a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to foster collaboration between scientists in the two countries and to speak about the impacts of climate change. His primary host in Brazil is Universidade de Taubaté professor Gilberto Fisch.
“People need to understand that the impacts of atmospheric warming are not happening uniformly throughout the planet — and two regions of Earth most affected are the Arctic and rainforests,” Fuentes said. “We care about the rainforests, of course, but we are so far away. The people there feel the effects.”
Fuentes pursues research in climate science and air quality. His research focuses on physical, biological and chemical processes that control trace gas emissions, particles and energy exchanges between Earth and the atmosphere. His most recent notable work exposed that air pollution decreases bees’ ability to find food.
As part of his Fulbright, Fuentes delivered a series of lectures at universities across Brazil on climate science for general audiences made up of undergraduates, graduate students and faculty from fields like agricultural sciences.
“At one presentation they threw me a curve ball — the room was packed with 100 people and my host asked if they’d like to hear the talk in English or Spanish,” Fuentes said. “They all raised their hands for Spanish. I was not prepared at all; my slides were in English. But at the end of that presentation, I answered questions for more than one hour. This is how enthusiastic people are.”
Fuentes said the climate science lectures take a general audience through the basics of the Earth system and how greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to increase in the atmosphere and oceans. He incorporated real-world examples of how climate change is already impacting weather events.
“For example, we looked at Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico,” Fuentes said. “We run our numerical models without atmospheric warming and then with warming and then we can quantify the effect of climate change. People really like this idea of trying to identify these events associated with climate change from the local, to the regional and then global scale.”
That message hit close to home for Brazilians, Fuentes said, adding that the Amazon rainforest is important culturally but also to the climate and the water cycle that delivers water to much of the country. He said recent research has shown the dry season is growing longer in the Amazon region, and that drastic future scenarios could involve hitting tipping points that may cause parts of the rainforest to switch to another ecosystem state or even vanish.