Richard Alley at AGU 2009: The Biggest Control Knob

The webcast for Dr. Alley’s presentation is now up, so I recommend watching the video. It is concerning the role of CO2 on climate over geologic time.

As my own side note, Alley is one of my favorite scientists…he’s pretty much “the guy” when it comes to ice core work and has done a lot with paleoclimate (over the ice core record especially), abrupt climate change, glaciology, and sea level rise. He’s a very interesting character who always puts things in a nice perspective, and often humorous ways of teaching (e.g., his Johnny Cash geology lesson).

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Interactive Carbon Cycle

Professor Galen McKinley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has recently put up a web page which discusses the global carbon cycle and its connection to climate change. Within, is an applet in which the user can play around with various inputs of carbon sources and sinks, and see how this determines future CO2 concentration and global mean temperature. It might be worth playing around with for a while to see how various future scenarios might look.