DRI climate change scientist Kendrick Taylor describes new evidence of the potential for rapid changes in the Earth's climate in the cover story of the July-August issue of American Scientist magazine. Dr. Taylor is the chief scientist on a National Science Foundation project to decipher the record of climate change stored more than a half mile deep in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
His eight-page article summarizes current knowledge of the climate change process, drawing on evidence from diverse research approaches that have all led to the same conclusion: the Earth's climate has frequently undergone substantial climate changes in the span of a few decades-rather than over periods of thousands of years. Taylor, a geophysicist in DRI's Water Resources Center, conducted analyses of ice cores he extracted from Greenland's ice shelf more than a decade ago which first suggested the rapid reversals of climate conditions in the past.
He and other scientists point to the release of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in the past 200 years as a new and likely destabilizing factor in the climate change process. American Scientist, read by nearly 100,000 scientists and engineers, is published by Sigma Xi, an international society of scientific researchers. The article can also be read at the magazine's web site at: http://www.amsci.org/amsci/issues/coverstory/coverstory99%2D07.html.