Ithaca College

Tuesday, August 31st: 

Recent Arctic Warming: Carbon Dioxide or Multi-Decadal Climate Variability?  With Petr Chylek, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Increasing Arctic temperature, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, melting of the Greenland ice sheet, sea level rise, increasing strength of Atlantic hurricanes are these impending climate catastrophes supported by observations? Are the recent data really unprecedented during the observational records? I will present recent analysis of Arctic temperature records and North Atlantic hurricane activities to show that there is no justification for claims that hurricane intensity or numbers have increased significantly with increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2.  Similarly, the Arctic and Greenland temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s were as high as they are today. Finally, I will argue that the current warming of the Arctic region is affected more by the multi-decadal climate variability than by an increasing concentration of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, none of the existing coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models used in the IPCC 2007 climate change assessment is able to reproduce the observed 20th century Arctic climate variability. Thus we may spend hundreds of billions of dollars on curbing CO2 emissions without having a noticeable effect on the ongoing climate change in the Arctic

Dr. Petr Chylek, currently a Remote Sensing Team Leader in the Space and Remote Sensing Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, held faculty positions at several universities including SUNY Albany, Purdue University, and the University of Oklahoma. Before joining LANL in 2001 he was a Professor of Physics and a Senior Chair in Climate Research in the Department of Physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He also spent several years as a visiting scientist at MIT, Harvard University, NMSU, WSMR, and NOAA. He is an author of over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of applied optics, radiative transfer, remote sensing, and climate research. He is a LANL Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the American Optical Society and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

All seminars will be held in CNS 204 at 12:10 (unless otherwise indicated).  Pizza and refreshments will be available for $1.  Remember to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Please bring your own cup.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact the Physics Department at jackerman@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.