The County covers climate change talk by Putnam

The County covered a talk about climate change and the last ice age by Aaron Putnam, the George H. Denton Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute. Putnam spoke at the Geological Society of Maine’s annual spring meeting on April 5 at the University of Maine at Presque Isle about research he and other climate scientists have done with mountain glaciers to figure out how and why glacial moraines (accumulations of glacial debris) have retreated since the beginning of the last ice age, according to the article. “Any unifying theory of climate dynamics requires us to answer those questions,” said Putnam. “The outcomes (of our research) suggest that an extraordinary warming jolted the Earth out of the ice age and took place over the course of only a millennium or two. This challenges traditional climate models that say the slow change in the Earth’s orbit around that time ended the ice age.” And the research team used the GFDL Earth System Model to determine that the Earth warms when westerly winds shift north or south, as they did during the last ice age, the article states. “We think this points to the inherent capacity of the climate system to snap abruptly between different modes of operation when pushed. As we are now pushing the climate system by releasing fossil fuels and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the system might again switch,” Putnam said. In his talk, Putnam said people can contribute to reducing the effects of climate change by using renewable energy sources for electricity and heating, buying food locally or growing their own food, and limiting unnecessary road and air travel. “Earth’s changing climate is the great existential threat to civilization of our time. We need to make sacrifices for our children and grandchildren in the same way that our grandparents did for us,” Putnam said.