Future Challenges: Understanding the Risks Ahead

Different regions of the country will be affected in different ways, some more than others. Lamont scientists are among Columbia University experts to elaborate on impacts that will probably affect every American’s way of life. 

New and developing Lamont research suggests that microplastics are turning up even in the most remote and essentially untouched areas of the planet, coming to rest in places such as Greenland and Antarctica, transported by snowfall.

A report by the utility company Con Edison, developed in collaboration with Lamont and the consulting firm ICF, evaluated the effects that climate change will be expected to have on current infrastructure, design specifications, and procedures.

New research led by Lamont atmospheric scientist Mingfang Ting reveals that climate change has triggered two changes that threaten crop production in the U.S. corn belt; warming temperatures are both increasing the evaporation of soil moisture and causing summer storms to carry more moisture away from the region.

Starting in 536 A.D., the sky went dark for more than a year. Lamont geologist Dallas Abbott and her colleague John Barron from the U.S. Geological Survey offered a new interpretation of the event and how it happened.

Lamont-led research about the extreme cold period in Scotland in the 1690s that caused immense suffering indicates that Scotland’s political isolation from larger and more prosperous England made the catastrophe much worse.

Lamont graduate student Anna Barth’s work visualizing the eruption patterns of a Yellowstone geyser won a grand prize in the American Geophysical Union’s competition on Data Visualization and Storytelling. 

Lamont scientists have identified systematic meanders in the globe-encircling northern jet stream that have caused simultaneous crop-damaging heat waves in widely separated breadbasket regions – a previously unquantified threat to global food production that, the workers argue, could worsen with global warming.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, Lamont’s Taro Takahashi and his colleagues documented how the oceans both absorb and give off huge amounts of carbon dioxide, exchanging it with the atmosphere.

Lamont researcher Nicole Davi is interested in the relatively new field of paleotempestology — the study of past storms as revealed in tree-ring records.

New research co-authored by Lamont climate dynamicist Suzana Camargo finds that the rains that come once a hurricane has weakened may actually be more intense than when the storm is at its strongest.

As humanity faces the escalating challenges posed by climate change, Lamont is opening its doors to its neighbors and the general public for three unique evenings of discovery and engagement.