It's All About Dating: From Nexters to Climate Change

Abstract

By this time each academic year, I find myself on the edge of being defensive with regards to the societal relevance of deep-time paleoclimate research. This is no doubt more a reflection of my attitude after weeks of interaction with an auditorium full of Nexters (post-date Generation X, if you haven’t kept up) in my course ‘Global Environmental Change: Modern and Ancient Perspectives’ rather than a function of the scientific issue as a whole. Most of these students appreciate processes in real-time but are taxed by the concept that projected future climatic conditions could affect them. Thus, it isn’t surprising that they struggle with how anyone can get excited over bubbles in ice or why they should be convinced that stable isotope data obtained from samples millions of years old and illustrated as squiggly lines on a plot should translate to predicting climatic conditions during their ‘sunset’ years. It is my impression, however, that the skepticism over the relevance of pre-Quaternary paleoclimate research to societal issues such as global climate change extends well beyond the classroom. Conversations with colleagues across the country and abroad indicate that many of us struggle with this issue both within and outside of the geologic community. To what degree are ‘deep-time’ records of paleoclimatic conditions and paleo-atmospheric composition, which rarely have a temporal resolution better than 1000s of years, insightful to the current global warming debate and future climate projections? And thus, to what degree can this research realistically impact climate policy decisions? Paleoclimate studies of intervals distributed throughout the past billion years of Earth history provide compelling evidence that geologic records offer a unique perspective on global climate change that is not obtained from studies of modern systems or perhaps arguably from Quaternary records. There is growing recognition that Earth has experienced repeated abrupt …