CONTACT: Patricia Viets FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Barbara McGehan 3/29/96
Jonathan Overpeck
Climate variations that took place over the past 10,000 years should give scientists a clue to weather patterns of the future, according to the Commerce Department's Jonathan T. Overpeck, head of the paleoclimatology program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
"If the climate system turns out to be highly sensitive to elevated atmospheric trace gas concentrations, then we may be confronted with modes of climate variability without precedent," Overpeck writes in the March 29 edition of Science magazine.
Overpeck says that most attention in the growing area of abrupt climatic change research is focused on the large changes observed during glacial periods, when large quantities of glacial meltwater were available to influence ocean circulation and climatic change. In contrast, he says, the current warm interglacial climate is often characterized as relatively stable, leaving the impression that climates of the future are likely to be more or less "well behaved."
The weight of the paleoclimatic evidence now being collected suggests that these conclusions may be incorrect, Overpeck says. A major challenge of the future will be to anticipate future climate surprises of the type recorded in the paleoclimatic record of the past 10,000 years.
"The primary goal of climate research is to enhance our predictive ability. Major warm-climate surprises of the type apparent in the Holocene interglacial paleoclimatic record may be our biggest worry in the years to come," Overpeck says.