Hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, drought and extreme temperatures catch our attention. But what do these weather events tell us about overall trends and how the global climate is changing? We hear a lot about global warming and climate change, who is responsible and how some of it may be natural. But what are the facts and how do we have a meaningful conversation about climate change? On August 25th, Dale Kaiser leads an important conversation about climate and why it’s important for us all to pay attention. Dale Kaiser is a climate scientist who retired from ORNL at the end of 2017. Before joining ORNL in 1990, he worked with NOAA and NASA in the Washington, D.C. area. Most of his research involved analysis of regional (U.S., former-Soviet Union, and China) climate records to understand how climate has been changing in those regions over the last century. He is lead or co-author on numerous peer-reviewed literature publications and ORNL/Dept. of Energy climate reports. He also was an author on regional climate change reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Dale holds a B.S. in Secondary Science Education from the State University of New York at Oswego, and an M.S. in Meteorology from the University of Maryland, College Park. He and his wife Terri have two grown children and live in west Knoxville.