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Free public lecture by climate change expert
Published by the Communications and Development Department
6 August 2003
Global environmental change expert Robert Dunbar will look at the issue of global warming . . . and cooling . . . and how climates around the globe are connected, in a public lecture on campus on Tuesday 12 August.
The lecture is the 2003 S T Lee Lecture in Antarctic Studies, one of a series of lectures established and funded by international philanthropist Dr. Seng Tee Lee. Professor Dunbar is visiting Canterbury as guest of the University’s Gateway Antarctica, Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research.
Robert Dunbar is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University, and directs the University’s Earth System graduate programme. His group works on topics related to global environmental change, with a focus on the coastal ocean, air-sea interactions, and polar processes. They are currently working on the impacts of climate change on Southern Ocean ecosystems, and studying sediment cores from fjords and shelf basins around the Antarctic margin.
He and his colleagues and students are also engaged in interdisciplinary studies of global change in collaboration with environmental scientists, economists, lawyers, and policy specialists at Stanford's Center for Environmental Science and Policy within their Institute of International Studies, where he is a Senior Fellow. He is currently in a team to review the Global Carbon Cycle for the US National Science Foundation.
In his lecturer synopsis, Professor Dunbar notes that the Earth has warmed on average about 0.7°C during the past century and even larger changes are expected in the century ahead.
“However this gives the impression of slow and steady warming albeit with some progressive acceleration. This is potentially misleading because it aggregates much more variable and often larger changes in regional climate.
“We also know from the study of past climate change from the tropics to the poles that steady warming events are rare, with polar records in particular showing a pattern of slow cooling and fast warming. Global warming (or cooling) is often accompanied by sudden and much less predictable events - mega-droughts, flooding, large temperature steps - as thresholds in climate stability are passed.”
Professor Dunbar says much can be learned from the developing archives of past climate change, such as cores from ice sheets, corals and sea floor sediments, and from modelling of ocean-atmosphere-ice interactions.
“The early lessons tell us that climates around the globe are connected and we would do well to plan for strong non-linear (and likely unexpected) responses as the earth continues to warm,” he says in the lecture summary.
• Antarctica and Climate Change in the Century Ahead: Causes, Consequences, and Surprises. Free public lecture, Robert Dunbar, Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, in the A1 Lecture Theatre, Tuesday 12 August 2003, 7:00pm.
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