Kerry Emanuel is a professor of meteorology teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has specialized in atmospheric convection and the mechanisms acting to intensify hurricanes, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 influential people of 2006. In 2007, he was elected as member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Emanuel, a conservative, has often disagreed with his fellow Republicans on the matter of global warming and has tried to remove politics from the debate. He is the author of three books, including “What We Know About Climate Change,” and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Salon and Mother Jones magazine.

Emanuel will be the guest speaker at a Durham Friends event on Aug. 17 at 7 p.m.

Emanuel, 55, who has spent considerable time in Maine and has a brother in Camden, recently spoke to the Tri-Town Weekly about the effects of global warming here in Maine, the reluctance of conservatives to embrace the concept of climate change and what would happen if you wrapped the earth in ice.

Q: With the recent spate of extreme weather in the world, many are pointing to global warming as the cause. What does science have to say about this?

A: Science is in the process of learning about that. Whenever you have a shift in the distribution of climate and then changes in weather, it becomes most notable in certain events. Take a very simple thing like temperature and look at high temperatures in the United States over the last 100 years and form a bell-shaped curve. In the middle of that curve could be a place like Maine where it could be, say, an average of 70 degrees in the summertime and then maybe with a cold tail it could be 50 and with a hot tail it could be in the 90s or over 100. Because of the distribution with climate change, you may not notice there have been days that are 77 degrees instead of 75 but you will notice when there are more days over 100. People notice that a lot.

Q: Is it fair for people to blame global warming on this?

A: There are certain things you can blame on it and certain things you can’t. If you look at the temperatures across the United States, we are basically experiencing a 3-1 ratio in terms of breaking high temperatures versus low temperatures.

Q: Was there an “a-ha” moment in your career that definitively linked greenhouse gas emissions to global warming?

A: I don’t think any of us in my profession had a breakthrough moment like that because climate change is a gradual thing. Back in the 1980s, in the early days of this research, if you had asked me if I saw any evidence of climate change, I would have said no. A lot of things have changed since 1985. There has been 30 years of research and the science itself has progressed a lot. We now understand the physics of the problem and also have the analysis. There are some things that people like to blame for these changes but it’s very hard to make a case for scientifically, including Hurricane Sandy, which was not necessarily attributed to global warming. We do know that hurricane activity in the North Atlantic Ocean has gone up dramatically in response to climate change.

Q: It seems that the problems have been identified, but how about the solutions to global warming?

A: There are a lot of ideas presented, some are factual, and some aren’t. There are three things we can do: reduce our emissions by using less fossil fuels, which is hard because we’re addicted to the stuff. Another solution is to actually take carbon out of the atmosphere through clean air capture and storage. We take it out, liquefy it, and store it underground. We actually know how to do that now but it would raise the cost of energy by a factor of 2. It would be a disaster to an economist and wouldn’t mean much to a scientist. If an initial investment were made in this technology, the cost could go down. The third option is to do something artificial to compensate for the greenhouse gases, which could get very dangerous because we’re not entirely sure of the outcome. We know how to put gases in the atmosphere, which would bring the temperature back down but have adverse effects on rainfall. You would have to keep it up, you couldn’t stop, and things could go to hell in a handbasket quickly. Most people I talk to who are in the policy arena think the best strategy is to do just a little bit of everything, including conserving energy and try and migrate away from fossil fuels.

Q: You are a conservative, yet seem to be a maverick within your own party. Why is there such an aggressive level of denial from some Republicans on the matter of global warming?

A: From people I’ve talked to, the problem stems from the fact that conservatives mistakenly thought the solutions for global warming were coming from the far left. Politically it was looked at as a big government solution. The key to getting conservatives on board is to remind them that up until 20 years ago, conservatives were very strong environmentalists. The Montreal Protocol (an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances believed to be responsible for ozone depletion) was passed under the Reagan administration. He was a strong advocate. Richard Nixon was responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency. There’s a long history of environmentalism stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt. It’s getting conservatives to understand that solutions don’t’ have to come from the left. If the right continues to deny there is a problem, the solutions by default will come from the left.

Q: In Maine, some have pointed to global warming as the reason for depleted shellfish stocks and an unusual pattern for lobster molting. Would science back this up?

A: There are a lot of things affecting fisheries and climate change is one of them. The lobster population is large because we have fished out all the cod, is one theory I’ve heard. The world’s oceans are in serious trouble. The shark population is declining. They have been in the oceans for eons and even if you don’t like sharks, you have to recognize they are an important part of the marine ecology.

Q: Have we reached a tipping point with global warming? What can we expect in 50 years?

A: What we’ve found is that the changes have been gradual. How that registers in the human psyche is up to the individual. Global warming is being blamed for a number of things, fairly or not. This happened before with the El Nino weather pattern when everyone was blaming it for everything. If your grandmother had a toothache, it must be because of El Nino. As an example, if you covered the earth with ice, it would stay cold because it would reflect the sun away. The earth is evidently capable of rapid transitions.

Q: Some of us in Maine would welcome global warming in, say, the middle of January.

A: That’s a good point, there is a potential upside to this. There will be winners and losers in global warming and you always have to weigh the costs. Shipping can be done through the Northwest Passage and land will be more arable. Civilization in geological terms is only as old as the blink of an eye, 7,000 years is nothing. It’s very finely tuned to the climate we’ve had and no accident that we developed during a stable geological period. If you change it in either direction there would present a challenge.

“There will be winners and losers in global warming and you always have to weigh the costs,” says Kerry Emanuel, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading expert on the issue. He’ll be discussing climate change Aug. 17 at the Durham Friends Meetinghouse.