Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future
ONE self contained 29 min. program
This is a re-broadcast and partial update of one of the most appreciated and also rare programs by TUC. This program will be followed by two updates with Dr. Thompson.
Thompson issues a warning that the mountain glaciers he knows and loves are melting ever more dramatically within the last twenty years. He is the leading expert on glaciers with 30 years of on location research.
Thompson saw one of the first ice cores that was recovered from a glacier when he was in graduate school. He was fascinated by the amount of data on earth history, past climate and world changing events that can be read from these ice cores and made the exploration of ice his life’s work. He teaches in the Department of Geological Sciences and is Senior Research Scientists at the Byrd Polar Center at Ohio State University.
In three decades he has explored most of the mountain glaciers of this world, has learned their history going back tens of thousands of years via the ice cores he and his team drilled at altitudes that no helicopter can reach. He came to San Francisco in early December 2007 to issue this warning.
Thompson was the honored speaker at the December 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The hotel where Dr. Thompson spoke recorded the event for the AGU. This is the only other audio or visual record of this amazing talk. Recorded 12/12/2007
The melting of the world’s glaciers is an unfolding emergency. This archival program was updated in December 2009 using the following information:
Dr. Lonnie Thompson’s most recent research on Mount Kilimanjaro was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (11/3/09)
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/47/19743.full?sid=4051f11f-1c2f-4182-98be-e2dddd593820
Dr. James Hansen sent out an e-ail on Dec. 12 announcing the publication of the following paper: Survival of Tibetan Glaciers: New PNAS paper on black soot & Himalayan glaciers is available at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/12/07/0910444106.full.pdf+html
A NASA press release on this work is expected in mid-December.
Jim
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
