As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed 7 Questions  to Richard Alley, one of the world’s leading climate researchers, and he obliged us with a very thoughtful interview on the present and future of this important area of study.  Alley, Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, studies how glaciers affect climate, sea level, and landscapes. He has won both teaching and research awards for his work, which has included five expeditions to Greenland and three to Antarctica. He is also the author of The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Richard Alley: Big Picture: will the ice sheets fall in the ocean and flood the coasts; and, what does the history of the Earth’s climate tell us about the near future.  In more detail, we have just submitted or are about to submit several papers, on which I’m coauthor with students or postdocs or colleagues, that address: i) outburst floods rushing from one lake to another beneath an Antarctic ice stream; ii) why we need to know about the deformation of till (unconsolidated sediment) beneath the ice streams, to predict what the ice sheets will do; iii) when, after Europeans reached North America and transmitted diseases to the native peoples that caused huge die-off, what the resulting change in human activity did to the atmosphere; iv) the role of meltwater wedging open crevasses in determining the rate at which ice-sheets grow and shrink during ice ages; v) new ways to use the deposits left by glaciers to learn how large and rapid the climate changes were that caused the glaciers to leave those deposits.

David Archer, a leading climatologist and contributor to the blog RealClimate, offers solutions for reducing our impact on the Earth’s climate. In his book,The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, he tackles the growing problem of the buildup of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and what we can do about it.

According to Archer, there are many possible strategies for making significant cuts in CO2 emission, each of which are based on technology and methods that already exist. Each of the following examples could cut CO2 emission by a billion metric tons per year, and a portfolio of several of these changes could significantly slow the growth of atmospheric CO2.