At UMD Chemistry Building, Room 200, 7:30 pm on Thursday, Nov. 11.
Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options
Lonnie G. Thompson
The Ohio State University
Lonnie G. Thompson is a Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and a Research Scientist in the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University. His research has propelled the field of ice core paleoclimatology out of the Polar Regions to the highest tropical and subtropical ice fields. He and the OSU team have developed light-weight solarpowered drilling equipment for acquisition of histories from ice fields in the tropical South American Andes, the Himalayas, and on Kilimanjaro. These paleoclimate histories have advanced our understanding of the coupled nature of the Earth’s climate system.
Abstract
Glaciers, among the first responders to global climate change, serve both as indicators and drivers of climate change. Over the last 35
years our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the Polar Regions as well as from low-latitude, high-elevation ice fields from sixteen countries. Analyses of these ice cores and observations of the glaciers from which the cores were drilled have yielded three lines of evidence for past and present abrupt climate change: The near global melting of high-elevation glaciers, particularly in the tropics and sub-tropics, is consistent with climate model predictions that human (greenhouse gas) driven warming will lead to strong warming at high elevations in the tropics (where these glaciers exist). The ongoing, rapid retreat of mountain glaciers, and more recently increased melting along margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets not only contribute to global sea level rise but also threaten fresh water supplies in many of the world’s most populous regions. Climatologically, we are in unfamiliar territory and the world’s ice cover is responding dramatically. The human response to this issue, however, is not so
clear. As a society we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.