A University of Wisconsin climate scientist said climate change affects Wisconsin forests, during a lecture for the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research Symposium on Thursday. 

A new study suggests the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is less stable than researchers once thought. As in the past, its collapse in the future is likely. The finding is based in part on the results of a paper published this week in Nature, co-led by University of Wisconsin–Madison atmospheric scientist Feng He and Oregon State University’s Peter Clark, which looks back at the last two time periods in which the planet transitioned from a glacial state, when ice sheets covered large swaths of the globe, into an interglacial state, such as the one we are in now.

With the state-of-the-art computer modeling of the changing climate/vegetation from 140,000 years ago to the present for Africa, Arabia, and the Mediterranean Basin, the study explains when and where the climate was wetter or drier and how the vegetation changed. The simulated environmental changes agree with observed paleoenvironmental data in most areas. The results will help assess whether and how climate, hydrology, and vegetation changes may have influenced human dispersal out of Africa.

The year’s not over, but 2019 will already go down as the wettest year ever across the Midwest and Wisconsin since record-keeping began in 1895. Wisconsin received 41.75 inches of precipitation through last month. The amount of rain and snow so far this year beat out the previous record of 40.09 inches set back in 1938, according to Steve Vavrus, senior scientist with the Nelson Institut's Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The city of Madison is teaming up with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to identify the problems that come with climate change and ways to adapt to them.  UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts and UW-Extension Dane County will present those impacts to help the city plan proactively.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts will contribute climate data informing the work of a state task force charged with advising Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Last year, scientists announced that a human jawbone and prehistoric tools found in 2002 in Misliya Cave, on the western edge of Israel, were between 177,000 and 194,000 years old.  The finding suggested that modern humans, who originated in Africa, began migrating out of the continent at least 40,000 years earlier than scientists previously thought.

For a Baldwin Foundation-supported climate education project, Michael Notaro and Rosalyn Pertzborn led a teacher-training workshop in August 2019 for teachers from Blessed Trinity in Dane, Wisconsin on the implementation of protocols for the NASA Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program.  The aim is to increase climate science understanding, local environmental inquiry,and access to climate scientists across rural Wisconsin communities, focused on schools along a north-south transect along the Wisconsin Ice Age Trail through the Curtis ecological tension zone.