Hot Climate Women Scientists in Cool Places (2013)

Hot Climate Women Scientists in Cool Places (2013)
Published on May 22, 2013
Women scientists in 2013 report their climate research in richly illustrated and powerful ways to the public and students. They are: Jennifer Francis, Julie Brigham-Grette, Natalia Rybczynski, and Lisa Graumlich.

01:06 JENNIFER FRANCIS teaches (1) why the melting of Arctic sea ice is causing extreme weather to the south; (2) how global warming has already weakened the jet stream, (3) why a weakened jet stream can cause longer-lasting droughts, bigger floods, and spring snow storms in the eastern USA, the UK, and eastern China.

18:20 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE describes the rigors and excitement of an international expedition that extracted detailed cores of layered sediments going back nearly 4 million years from a crater lake in Siberia. From 3.2 to 3.6 million years ago (during the Pliocene epoch), carbon dioxide in the atmosphere matched that of today -- 400 ppm. Yet plant pollen (pine, hemlock, fir) deposited in the lake sediments of that time indicate a far warmer climate in the Arctic then (forest rather than tundra), and thus warn us that fossil-fuel-burning over just two centuries of modern times has already set in motion unprecedented shifts in climate that will unfold in the decades and centuries ahead as the polar ice melt slowly equilibrates with the new greenhouse planetary conditions.

26:38 NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI shows the results of her paleontological exploration in the high Arctic. She unearthed fragments of a giant camel of Pliocene age (3.5 million years old) on Ellesmere Island, which confirms that forests reached far into an astonishingly warm Arctic when the atmosphere's measure of carbon dioxide matched that of today: about 400 ppm.

31:17 LISA GRAUMLICH is a paleoecologist who surveys the devastation of climate change already apparent in the mountain western USA: reduced snow pack, retreating glaciers, dying trees, drying rivers, and a longer and far more destructive forest fire season.

38:35 - Conclusions

39:35 - Suggestions for action

42:16 - Thanks to our "older sisters on the path who changed the cultural climate for women in science."

Science writer CONNIE BARLOW serves as host, introducing and summarizing the discoveries of these great women scientists -- and why those discoveries are important today.