What do we know about climate change and how do we know what we know about it? We have incredibly robust evidence that the Earth is warming because of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and the release of other chemicals that humans have use for various purposes including refrigerants. Scientists, indigenous people, farmers, and naturalists the world over are seeing this in the calving of ice sheets, in melting glaciers, in the drunken arboreal forests, in rising sea levels, in the migration of plants, animals, and microbes, and more. To make it plain: there is no scientific controversy remaining about whether humans have induced climate change.
Today's guest, Dr. Richard Alley, is one of the foremost scienists on climate change. He has been studying glaciology, ice sheet stability, and paleoclimates from ice cores, primarily in Greenland, where he has discovered corroborating evidence that the polar regions are warming and that glaciers and ice caps are melting. He has been published in the world's two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, and has about 170 scientific papers to his credit. He is also the author of The Two-Mile Time Machine (pictured at right), a book that guides its readers to begin understanding the last 110,000 years of climatic history by using ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet. Perhaps most impressive to the non-scientific audience, he was one of the lead author for "Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground" Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's AR4 in 2007, the same year the IPCC co-won the Nobel Prize with Al Gore.
Given all of this evidence, what should we be doing about it? What can we do in our private, our community, and our political lives to make a difference on climate change? Listen in this afternoon, Friday April 2nd on The Lion 90.7 from 4-5 pm and hear what Dr. Richard Alley has to say about. As always, feel free to call in.
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