Climate Change: What Could Happen and What Can Earth's Past Tell Us? Bette Otto

Speaker:

Bliesner

21 Oct 2010

8:00 PM

Sun Room, Memorial Union

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Bette Otto-Bliesner is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. She uses computer-based models of Earth's climate to investigate past climate change and climate variability across a wide range of time scales. She is particularly interested in the naturally forced climate change of the glacial-interglacial cycles of the last million years. Otto-Bliesner was a lead author on the Fourth Assessment Report generated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007. She received her PhD in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sigma Xi Lecture and part of the Live Green! Sustainability Lecture Series and Women in STEM Series.

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” This bold statement from the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is based on many observations, including increases in global air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising sea level. In this presentation, we will explore the evidence for climate change over the last century and the role of human actions. We will also consider the increasing array of impacts expected over the next century and beyond as greenhouse gas emissions continue to disrupt the Earth system. These include longer droughts and other changes to precipitation patterns, increasing acidity of the oceans and loss of coral reefs, and melting from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contributing to greater sea level rise. These future changes will be put in the perspective of Earth’s past. Evidence from natural recorders of climate such as tree rings and ice cores tells us about past warm periods and their causes, about megadroughts lasting decades or longer, and about sea level much higher than present.