Minutes of the May 21, 2012 Meeting
Smoky Mountain AMS Chapter

Around ten people met first for dinner at Calhoun's on the River on Neyland Drive. Afterwards, the meeting commenced with around twenty people in the Biosystems Engineering and Environmental Science building on the UT Ag campus. The speaker was Dr. T.J. Blasing (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) who spoke on "The Global Carbon Cycle". The following was an abstract of his talk: "In 2011, humans put around 10 billion metric tons of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. About half of it stayed there, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. The other half went somewhere else. Some questions addressed are: (1) Where is the "somewhere else?" (2) Why is carbon going there? (3) Will it keep going there? (4) Will it ever come back, and when? (5) What are some consequences of all of this? --- plus, if time permits, some carbon-containing species other than carbon dioxide."

Biography for T.J.: T.J. Blasing graduated from Arrowhead High School in Hartland, WI, in 1962. He subsequently received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin - Madison: Bachelor of Science in Meteorology, 1966; Master of Science in Meteorology, 1968; and Doctor of Philosophy with a major in meteorology and a minor in statistics, 1975. He joined the faculty of the College of Geosciences, University of Arizona - Tucson, in September 1971, and he accepted a position on the research staff of the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in September 1977. He became an adjunct faculty member in the Geography Department at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville in 1982, and taught courses there in meteorology and climatology from 1983 to 1998. His outside interests include soccer, Habitat for Humanity, and world religions. His biographical listings can be found in Who's Who in Technology and American Men and Women of Science.



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