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 can help 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 become one of the major factors in climate change, with the characteristic that their effects on the environment are rapid and ultimately threaten humanity. We will compare long-term natural changes with the anthropogenic change currently underway. We will also show how our expertise as paleoclimatologists allows us to explore threshold scenarios, in particular 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.