The Earth's climate has always changed, but why is the Anthropocene an unprecedented change?

Gilles Ramstein, CEA Research Director at LSCE.
Conference organized by the ISEM laboratory.

This seminar will illustrate how modeling the Earth system enables us to understand the climatic changes our planet has undergone over its long history. In particular, we will look at the principles that regulate temperatures and the hydrological cycle over billions, millions and hundreds of thousands of years, making it possible to sustain life on Earth.
However, mankind has become a major factor in climate change, with the characteristic that its effects on the environment are dazzling and ultimately threaten mankind. We'll be comparing long-term natural changes with current anthropogenic changes. We will also show how our expertise as paleoclimatologists enables us to explore threshold scenarios, in particular how an acceleration in the melting of the Greenland ice cap could have major consequences for the hydrological cycle in Africa, with impacts on the loss of agricultural land, population migration and the dispersal of vector-borne diseases.