Dr. Michael T. Ledbetter, a former science officer at the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will present a lecture Monday, April 12, showing evidence that the Earth is warming and what steps should be taken to reverse the trend.

The lecture from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Dickinson Hall Auditorium is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by UALR’s International and Middle Eastern Studies. Contact coordinator Jacek Lubecki at 501-683-7029.

Ledbetter, a UALR professor in the Department of Earth Science, will offer a frank discussion of the likelihood for reversing the warming trend and the negative conclusions about that change drawn from what he calls the “Climategate” scandal that has erupted from negative interpretations of pilfered e-mails sent by climate scientists, mostly at one research facility in Great Britain.

Ledbetter received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from Memphis State University and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island. He was on the faculty at University of Georgia and San Jose’ State University prior to coming to UALR.

For 12 years he served as acting director of the Marine Geology and Geophysics Program at the NSF, a program officer in the National Undersea Research Program at NOAA, and director of the Arctic System Science Program at NSF.  In 2002 he joined UALR as dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and is currently a professor in the Department of Earth Science teaching teaches courses in Physical Geology, Weather Studies, Oceanography, and a new course in Climate in Fall 2010.  He jointly teaches Science and Society in the Donaghey Scholars Program.

In his previous position at NSF, Ledbetter recommended research proposals for funding involving interdisciplinary global change research in the Arctic. In that capacity he travelled to the Arctic on a regular basis, including the summit of the Greenland Ice Cap, the North Slope of Alaska, and once to an icebreaker frozen into the drifting Arctic Ocean ice pack a few hundred miles south of the North Pole.

While in Washington, D.C. he testified before a presidentially appointed committee on the Arctic, briefed several National Academy of Science committees, gave presentations to Congressional staff, the Smithsonian Associates, and other groups in Washington.