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

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

This seminar will illustrate how Earth system modeling helps us understand the climate changes our planet has undergone throughout its long history. We will focus in particular on the principles that regulate temperatures and the hydrological cycle over billions, millions, and hundreds of thousands of years, making sustainable life on Earth possible.
However, humans have risen to become major drivers of climate change, with the distinct characteristic that their impacts on the environment are rapid and ultimately threaten humanity. We will compare long-term natural changes with the ongoing anthropogenic changes. We will also demonstrate how our expertise as paleoclimatologists allows us to explore threshold scenarios, particularly how an acceleration in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could have significant consequences for the hydrological cycle in Africa, with impacts on the loss of agricultural land, population migration, and the spread of vector-borne diseases.