Video: Dr. Maureen Raymo – A Symphony in the Climate System

Understanding past climate and natural climate variability is the key to understanding current climate change Dr. Maureen Raymo is a geologist and climate scientist at the Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Dr. Raymo has spent her career studying natural climate variability. The first woman to receive the acclaimed Wollaston Award, she seeks to understand how and why climate changes naturally, on timescales of hundreds of millions of years to thousands of years.

In this short video from the Yale Climate Forum, Raymo briefly explains some of the phenomena behind natural variations in Earth’s climate. As Raymo explains, neither solar activity or the long term cycling of our distance and position from the sun can explain current climate change observations.

“What we’re seeing right now is not natural,” says Raymo.

Raymo describes our rapid rise since the start of the industrial revolution to 400 parts-per-million (ppm) of CO2 as “living in a Pliocene atmosphere” of 3 million years ago when the Earth last had this level of carbon dioxide in the air. The world was much warmer then. Due to the current, unprecedented rate of change in CO2, “the whole rest of of the climate system, the oceans are trying to catch up, the ice sheets are warming, everything’s trying to catch up to this Pliocene atmosphere.”

“There is this symphony going on in the climate system,” says Raymo. Her and her colleagues’ task is to better figure out what the Pliocene world looked like, with its 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2, to better understand the trajectory upon which we are now headed. “When everything comes to equilibrium,” says Raymo, “how much of the Antarctic ice sheet will be there, will sea level have risen 10 meters, 20 meters, 30 meters.”

“Historically, I can see the climate community has always underestimated the rate of change in the climate system. So…”

 

Image credit: blueforce4116, courtesy flickr

Thomas Schueneman
Thomas Schuenemanhttps://tdsenvironmentalmedia.com
Tom is the founder and managing editor of GlobalWarmingisReal.com and the PlanetWatch Group. His work appears in Triple Pundit, Slate, Cleantechnia, Planetsave, Earth911, and several other sustainability-focused publications. Tom is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Get in Touch

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Articles

Get in Touch

2,600FansLike
121FollowersFollow
1,832FollowersFollow

Latest Posts