University of Minnesota Moment: Global Warming

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Marty Moen with the University of Minnesota Moment. This past summer, Minnesota faced a warmer than usual season, and the powerful hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast have raised questions about Global Warming. Katherine Klink, assistant professor of geography at the university's College of Liberal Arts, says Global Warming does appear to be occurring.

[Klink]: Yes I do. And there's a couple reasons for that. I think the temperature measurements that people have been making for the last hundred-fifty years or so are pretty convincing. Coupled with the paleo records, the past evidence of climate change, that show the trends and the relationships between temperature and carbon dioxide and green house gasses, for example. And also, the climate models, which are not perfect, but they are consistent and sort of physically based, dynamically based, models that do show that you actually can't replicate the pattern, the spatial and temporal pattern of temperature change, so all of those things kinda together, make me think that yeah, global warming is happening. To what degree that's due to human activities is still a question that I think needs to be investigated, but there's certainly some aspect of human impact there. Whether Rita and Katrina and an active hurricane season this year are specifically related to global warming, I think is still an open question, but it is certainly true, I think it is certainly true, that that kind of thing would be expected under global warming.

[Moen]: For the University of Minnesota Moment, I'm Marty Moen.