By John Carberry
You want climate change? Toby Ault will give you climate change.
The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences assistant professor will take you through Ithaca’s past – from the depths of the coldest period of the past half million years, about 150,000 years ago, through the Eemian thaw about 30,000 years later, back into the latest ice age’s peak some 22,000 years ago and finally through the most rapidly warming century science has seen since – the one we’re in right now.
All in 50 minutes, “and with a little bit of human evolution in there, too,” Ault said.
It’s all part of an innovative series of short, audience engaging talks spread throughout this weekend’s Charter Day celebration of Cornell’s sesquicentennial. Organizers designed the “One 50-Minute Lecture” series (the name being a play on Cornell’s 150thbirthday) as way to highlight some of Cornell’s brightest faculty on topics that are interesting and accessible to the broad range of guests expected on campus.
Ault and climate change were a natural fit.
“It’s really important when you study climate change, you talk about climate change,” said Ault, who most recently grabbed national headlines for his work with NASA predicting an upcoming “megadrought” in the U.S. Southwest. “And when we understand the climate change of the past, we have more confidence in why climate is changing now due to human activity.”
That last point, Ault stressed, is key. Taking a long look at climate change right here in the Finger Lakes region shows long periods of deep glacial ice, and (geologically speaking) subsequent swift shifts to warm periods that stretch for more than 10,000 years. The most recent ice age to seize the region peaked more than 20,000 years ago, and released it’s grip about 12,000 years ago – giving us deep glacial valleys, a north-flowing Cayuga Lake, and the signature waterfalls that hold a place on almost every Ithaca tourism brochure. Looking at those changes, Ault said, researchers can see “pacemakers” such as the planet’s relationship to the sun, and “amplifiers” such as atmospheric carbon dioxide, and watch how these complex players set the stage for the world in which we live.
That long view, he said, makes the past 100 years even more alarming.
“This past century has seen a very substantial warming,” Ault said, adding that temperatures have increased as much in the past 100 years as they did from the end of the last ice age up until that point. “That’s just the blink of an eye from a paleo-climate perspective.”
One question Ault will explore with his audience is how the current caretakers of this region, we humans, are acting as an amplifier, and how we can stay ahead of this rapid change. In addition to shifting and more intense weather patterns, and unprecedented pressures on the natural environment, Ault noted that this is the first rapid global warming to take place over a planet plowed and planted by human farmers.
“In many ways, we owe our big brains, our creativity, and our capacity to work together to the volatile climate changes of the past,” he said. “We’re going to need these human faculties more than ever if we’re going to survive.“
How we act to mitigate a climate shift we are helping to amplify, and how quickly we adapt to the changes that cannot help but come, is the challenge of the next 150 years. And meeting that challenge, added Ault, an admitted “cautious optimist” on the question, begins with researchers engaging everyone else on the science and the big picture of climate change.
And that, in the instant case, begins at 5 p.m. in G01 Auditorium on Uris Hall (more info and registration details here).
John Carberry is managing editor for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
