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Climate change: The evidence and our options

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Abstract

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low to middle latitudes, provides some of the strongest evidence to date that a large-scale, pervasive, and, in some cases, rapid change in Earth’s climate system is underway. This paper highlights observations of 20th and 21st century glacier shrinkage in the Andes, the Himalayas, and on Mount Kilimanjaro. Ice cores retrieved from shrinking glaciers around the world confirm their continuous existence for periods ranging from hundreds of years to multiple millennia, suggesting that climatological conditions that dominate those regions today are different from those under which these ice fields originally accumulated and have been sustained. The current warming is therefore unusual when viewed from the millennial perspective provided by multiple lines of proxy evidence and the 160-year record of direct temperature measurements. Despite all this evidence, plus the well-documented continual increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, societies have taken little action to address this global-scale problem. Hence, the rate of global carbon dioxide emissions continues to accelerate. As a result of our inaction, we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.

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  1. The Ohio State University, USA

    Lonnie G. Thompson

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Correspondence to Lonnie G. Thompson.

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This paper is based on the Presidential Scholar’s Address given at the 35th annual meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, Phoenix, Arizona. I am grateful to Bill Heward for inviting me to give the address. I thank Mary Davis for her help editing the text and figures. I wish to thank all the field and laboratory team members from the Byrd Polar Research Center who have worked so diligently over the years. I am especially indebted to the hard work of our current research team: Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Henry Brecher, Mary Davis, Paolo Gabrielli, Ping-Nan Lin, Matt Makou, Victor Zagorodnov, and all of our graduate students. Funding for our research over the years has been provided by the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Paleoclimatology and Polar Programs, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, Gary Comer Foundation, and The Ohio State University’s Climate, Water and Carbon Program. This is Byrd Polar Research Center Publication 1402.

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Thompson, L.G. Climate change: The evidence and our options. BEHAV ANALYST 33, 153–170 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392211

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