David Mcgee works in the department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. In his talk he explains what his group does to understand how rainfall patterns have changed during natural climate changes the past, and what this tells us about the future of water availability in response to human-driven climate change.

1. We can use our observations of the past to begin to understand how this climate beast works. One way that we can do this is to run state-of-the-art climate models with the conditions of ancient climates, as shown on the right here, to explore what changes in the climate system are necessary to produce the rainfall changes implied by paleoclimate data.

We need to better understand the climate system. One of the really exciting, and troubling, aspects of the paleoclimate record is its capacity to surprise us, with changes that are larger or more abrupt than we might have expected. It's important to emphasize that our fundamental understanding of climate change at the global scale--warming with rising greenhouse gas levels--is extremely robust. Where more research is needed is into how climate change will play out at the regional level--in what areas are its impacts on water availability, floods, and heat waves going to be most severe, and how large will these impacts be. Paleoclimate data can help with these investigations, by providing data that ground-truth our understandings of the scale of past rainfall changes. David McGee’s research focuses on understanding the atmosphere’s response to past climate changes. By documenting past changes in precipitation and winds using geochemical measurements of stalagmites, lake deposits and marine sediments and interpreting these records in the light of models and theory, he aims to offer data-based insights into the patterns, pace and magnitude of past hydroclimate changes. His primary tool is measurements of uranium-series isotopes, which provide precise uranium-thorium dates for stalagmites and lake deposits and allow reconstructions of windblown dust emission and transport using marine sediments.

McGee joined the faculty in 2012 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship with a joint appointment at the University of Minnesota and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He holds a Ph.D. in Earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at [ Ссылка ]

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