The Ice Age giants of St. Paul Island outlived those on the mainland for millennia. What finally drove them to extinction?

President Obama recently called trends in climate change "terrifying." The Nelson Institute's Galen McKinley agrees, because "human society is built on the assumption of a stable climate." In this Q&A, McKinley explains why the Earth is warming so fast, and whether there is any hope that things will improve.

The Center for Climatic Research partners with the Aldo Leopold Nature Center to create an outdoors smartphone tour of climate change and its possible effects on the plants and animals found at the ALNC and Wisconsin. 

Steve Vavrus was interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio’s Climate Cast program about the recent decision by Shishmaref, Alaska, to relocate due to ongoing coastal erosion.  The combination of rising sea level, contracting sea ice cover, thawing permafrost, and possibly increased storminess has caused a dramatic loss of shorelines across the Arctic.   Around Shishmaref, located on an island in the Bering Sea, the erosion has become so severe that remaining in the village's centuries-old home is no longer viable.

CCR graduate student research assistant Jiaxu Zhang recently defended her PhD study. Her study focuses on understanding the deglacial evolution of deep Atlantic water masses in an isotope-enabled ocean model. Using the transient simulation results, she does a systematic and quantitative model-data comparison of oxygen isotopes during the last deglaciation for the first time, and emphasizes the role of dynamic warming in the deep North Atlantic during this period. The deep ocean evolution scenario proposed in this study provides a new framework for paleo-data interpretation and will guide paleoceanographers in where to collect data to help verify these hypotheses.

Senior Scientist Steve Vavrus was interviewed by Norman Gilliland on Wisconsin Public Radio’s 'University of the Air' on May 8th.   Vavrus described recent and future climate change in the Great Lakes region, as well as Arctic environmental change and extreme weather trends.

Using computer models with future global warming scenarios, Prof. Zhengyu Liu and an international team led by Prof. Jun Cheng from China recently published a paper on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Their study suggests that interdecadal variability (i.e. variability of periods of several decades) of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will be shortened and weakened under future global warming scenarios. They propose that the shortening of the variability is caused by the changing oceanic wave speed in response to global warming, which subsequently reduces the amplitude of the variability.  The AMOC is a key ocean current that modulates global climate and this finding may have important implications for the future projection of climate and climate variability. 

The University Faculty Senate Committee recognizes Reid Bryson at their meeting. On page 3 & 4 there is the Memorial Resolution of the Faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the Death of Professor Emeritus Reid Bryson written by John Kutzbach, John Young, Zhengyu Liu, and Grant Petty.