Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley to Speak at ODU on Climate Change

October 18, 2013

David W. Titley

Old Dominion University will host David W. Titley, who led the U.S. Navy's Task Force on Climate Change, for an upcoming President's Lecture Series event being held in conjunction with the international conference "Transatlantic Solutions to Sea Level Rise Adaptation: Moving Beyond the Threat."

Titley, who is currently director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at the Pennsylvania State University, will give the lecture at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 30, at the Ted Constant Convocation Center. His talk, titled "The Evolving Understanding of Climate Risk: The Challenge that Won't Go Away," is free and open to the public.

For more information or to RSVP for the lecture, visit www.odu.edu/ao/univevents (event code: ADT13).

The lecture is the only public event associated with ODU's "Access EU" sea level rise conference - where Titley will also be a speaker. The conference, which runs Oct. 30-31, will bring together European and American experts for the purpose of fostering a community of practitioners actively engaged in adaptation options available to threatened communities.

Titley, who holds a bachelor's degree in meteorology from Penn State, also earned a master's and doctorate in meteorology from the Naval Postgraduate School. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

He served as a naval officer for 32 years, rising to the rank of rear admiral. Titley's career included duties as oceanographer and navigator of the Navy and deputy assistant chief of Naval Operations for Information Dominance. While serving at the Pentagon, he initiated and led the Navy's Task Force on Climate Change. After retiring from the Navy, he served as the deputy undersecretary of commerce for operations, the chief operating officer position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Titley has spoken at venues across the country and throughout the world on the importance of climate change as it relates to national security. He has presented information on behalf of the Department of Defense at congressional hearings and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meetings. Titley also presented a TEDx talk on climate change and speaks regularly on this topic at universities across the country.

TED is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, under the slogan "ideas worth spreading." Created in the spirit of TED's mission, the TEDx program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. Visit YouTube to watch Titley's TEDx talk.