Global warming in geologic time David Archer is a computational ocean chemist at the University of Chicago.
I have been a professor in the Department of The Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago since 1993. I have worked on a wide range of topics pertaining to the global carbon cycle and its relation to global climate, with special focus on ocean sedimentary processes such as CaCO3 dissolution and methane hydrate formation, and their impact on the evolution of atmospheric CO2.
I currently teach classes on global warming, environmental chemistry, and global geochemical cycles. I have written a textbook for non-science major undergraduates called Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, published by Blackwell Press, and a book for a popular audience called The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 1000,000 Years of Earth's Climate, published by Princeton University Press. I am a contributing editor to the climate science blog site realclimate.org.
About the Lecture
Using results from models of the atmosphere/ocean/sediment carbon cycle, the impacts of fossil-fuel CO2 release will be examined – including the effect on climate many thousands of years into the future, rather than for just a few centuries as commonly claimed. Prof. Archer will explain how aspects of the Earth system, such as the growth or melting of the great ice sheets, the thawing of permafrost, and the release of methane from the methane hydrate deposits in the deep ocean, take thousands of years to respond to a change in climate. The duration of our potential climate adventure is comparable to the pacing of climate changes in the past, which enables us to use the geologic record of past climate changes to predict the trajectory of global warming into the deep future. In particular, the record of sea level variations in the past suggests that the ultimate sea level response to fossil fuel CO2 use could be 10 to 100 times higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast for the year 2100.
