Climate272
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Taro Takahashi Wins Top U.N. Award for Environmental Leadership
The United Nations has awarded Taro Takahashi, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, its highest honor for environmental leadership, the Champions of the Earth award, for his research on the oceans’ uptake of carbon dioxide and its implications for global warming. He was presented with a trophy and a $40,000 prize on Thursday, April 22,…
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Study Reconstructs Asia’s Most Devastating Droughts
Key to Understanding Monsoon and Climate’s Impacts
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Illuminating the Science: Art and Climate Change
On Thursday I’ll be attending Illuminating the Science: Art and Climate Change. The event’s project is surely ambitious. It claims not only that climate data might be better communicated, or made more robust, through the arts, but that indeed “the landscape of numbers can be populated by dreams in the form of images, dance or music,…
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Addressing urban water scarcity in developing countries: Chennai, India
Ensuring an adequate water supply isn’t only an issue for large urban centers like New York or Los Angeles. It’s also a vital concern of the growing populations of cities in the developing world. Veena Srinivasan, of the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University, shared her work on ‘The integrated water paradigm: a…
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El Niño Begins to Dissipate
Though weak El Niño conditions still exist, it appears that the climatic phenomenon that developed over the course of last summer has finally begun to dissipate. As reported earlier, El Niño is the name given to sustained sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean. It is the warm…
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Wally Broecker: 50 Years of Climate Science Innovation
Since arriving at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in 1952, for a college summer internship, Wally Broecker has come up with some of the most important ideas in modern climate science. He was one of the first researchers to recognize the potential for human-influenced climate change, and to testify before Congress about its dangers. He helped pioneer…
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New Book Explores Link Between Climate and Ocean Currents
Wallace Broecker is a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has helped shape our understanding of how the ocean moves heat around the globe, and how this so-called “great ocean conveyor” can switch the climate to a radically different state. Many scientists used to think that only periodic changes in earth’s orbit—so-called Milankovitch cycles–…
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New Program Tackles Climate Threats to Food Security
A new multimillion dollar research program by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research aims to alleviate climate-related threats to the food security, livelihoods and environment of people living in the developing world. One of the key intellectual forces behind this initiative has been the IRI‘s Jim Hansen. He’ll be leading efforts within the program…
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Studying the Impacts of Climate on High-Altitude Ecosystems
Columbia University researchers Laia Andreu Hayles and Daniel Ruiz Carrascal traveled to Colombia last month to investigate the impact of climate on high-altitude ecosystems in the Andes. Supported by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Center, Andreu and Ruiz are exploring the potential of several high-altitude tree species to reveal information about past climate variability and…
By studying thousands of buildings and analyzing their electricity use, Columbia Climate School Dean Alexis Abramson has been able to uncover ways to significantly cut energy consumption and emissions. Watch the Video: “Engineering a Cooler Future Through Smarter Buildings“