Speakers
Details
Daniel Sigman, Ph.D., is the Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He joined Princeton University in 1998 after receiving his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Joint Program in Oceanography. His research group develops techniques for making new measurements in the atmosphere, water, sediments, fossils, and rocks to identify the interactions of physical, chemical, and biological processes that have shaped, and been shaped by, Earth’s climate over time.
Our planet is currently warming due to the human-driven rise in greenhouse gases, most importantly, the carbon dioxide we release when we burn fossil fuels. We will summarize this process and the consequences it is having and will have on Earth’s ecosystems and on humans. We will then turn to a set of questions that often comes up in discussions of global warming: Hasn’t the planet’s climate varied in the past? If so, why is this time such a problem? We will see how scientists are reconstructing climate and climate changes in the past and how this information affects our view of ongoing global warming and its consequences. We will also use the understanding of climate processes that comes from studies of the past to clarify which human actions might be the most effective for reducing the impacts of global warming on humans and the natural world.