• How will the responses of living organisms to climate change affect its rate and magnitude? More specifically - Is it possible that climate change will cause positive feedbacks between the biosphere (the domain of living organisms) and the atmosphere such that warming begets further warming?
  
• Will increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, through biological pathways, lead to increases in the atmospheric concentrations of other greenhouse gases and cause additional warming of the earth?
  

In this lecture, I will discuss how we are researching these questions, present some of our findings, and put our results into a policy context. I will use examples from our research in the temperate forests of New England and the tropical forests of the Brazilian Amazon.

Jerry Melillo is the co-director of The Ecosystems Center at the MBL and has conducted research there since 1976. He specializes in the impacts of human activities on the biogeochemistry of terrestrial ecosystems. Melillo has studied carbon and nitrogen cycling in ecosystems across the globe, including arctic shrublands in northern Sweden, temperate forests in North America, and tropical forests and pastures in the Amazon Basin of Brazil. He holds a B.A. and an M.A.T. from Wesleyan University and an M.F.S. and Ph.D. from Yale University. From 1996 to 1997, Melillo served as the Associate Director for Environment in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and was the Director of the Ecosystems Studies Program for the National Science Foundation from 1986 to 1988. He is currently the President of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, the environmental assessment body of the International Council for Science. He was recently elected President of the Ecological Society of America and will begin his term this August. Melillo has served as a Trustee of the MBL and is currently on the Board of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. He serves on a number of advisory committees for national and international scientific organizations including the National Science Foundation’s Biological Sciences Directorate and the Swedish Royal Academy’s Arctic Research Program. His recent awards include a Distinguished Alumni Award from Wesleyan University and an honorary Professorship in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His publication record includes more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, two ecology textbooks and three edited volumes on biogeochemistry.

William T. Speck received his B.A. from Rutgers University and his M.D. from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. After completing his residency and fellowship training at Columbia University, he obtained a joint appointment in the Departments of Pediatrics and Microbiology. After three years, Dr. Speck moved to the Department of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University, where he directed the Division of Infectious Diseases and house staff education and subsequently served as Professor and later Chairman and Director of the Department of Pediatrics. In addition, in 1982 he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, an appointment he held for ten years. In 1992 Dr. Speck moved to New York to become the President and CEO of the Presbyterian Hospital, a position he held until 1999, when the hospital merged with New York Hospital and its regional health care system, creating the largest academic health care delivery system in the United States. In August 2000, he joined the MBL as Interim Director and Chief Executive Officer. In 2001, Dr. Speck was appointed Director and Chief Executive Officer of the MBL. A pediatrician by training, Dr. Speck first came to the MBL in the 1970s to conduct research on the effects of drugs and environmental pollutants on developing embryos. He is a member of the MBL Corporation and has served on the Laboratory’s Board of Trustees since 1994.