Richard Alley Warns of a “Tipping Point” in Greenland
August 11, 2010 at 11:50 am Ryan Jones 2 comments
Scientists who study climate change point out that no single weather event or natural disaster can be pegged conclusively to global warming. That said, most of those same experts agree that certain catastrophic events — like the record heat wave and huge fires currently ravaging Russia, and the ongoing flooding in Pakistan that the United Nations is calling the worst natural disaster in modern history — match predictions of extreme conditions caused by climate change. Another such event took place last week in the North Atlantic, and a Penn State expert was in Washington this week to weigh in on the potential consequences.
Richard Alley, the University’s Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences and a contributor to the U.N. panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, spoke Tuesday in front of a Congressional committee on global warming. Alley’s expertise is glaciology and ice-sheet stability, making him an obvious candidate to discuss the collapse last week of a 100-square-mile chunk of ice from Greenland. His predictions weren’t encouraging: Describing current Arctic melting as “the biggest and fastest thing nature has ever done,” Alley told legislators that warming oceans may mean Greenland will reach a “tipping point” within the next decade, after which the island’s ice mass would be unsustainable. The eventual melt-off would lead to sea-level rise that would devastate coastal cities around the world.
When he took part in our global warming roundtable a few years ago, Alley sounded optimistic — in spite of everything his own research showed him about our changing planet — that humanity could solve such massive problems. I hope he remains so.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Entry filed under: College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, University Park campus. Tags: climate change, Congress, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, geosciences, global warming, Greenland, Pakistan, Richard Alley, Russia.
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1. Bob Krieger | August 12, 2010 at 9:26 am
Don’t you think it’s time to stop the discredited fear-mongering? It’s the same coterie of agenda driven scientists and UN bureaucrats fitting their evidence to their pre-conceived conclusions.
2. Kristian Berg | August 17, 2010 at 11:27 am
This is hardly fear mongering. This is objective evidence based research. The Penn Stater and University researchers are to be commended for informing the public of their findings and the potential consequences.