The annual Rutgers Climate Symposium was held in the Livingston Student Center on Friday, November 20th. The Symposium was attended by undergraduate students, graduate students, and professors from Rutgers, as well as various other universities. The theme of the symposium was Climate Change and Polar Regions. The event, well-attended even at 9am, began will Dr. Jennifer Francis from the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences giving a talk on her current research. Dr. Francis, an extremely accomplished individual, has a love of climate and weather that stemmed from the five years she spent on a sailboat circumnavigating the globe. Dr. Francis’s research focused on extreme weather events and how they may be related to climate change. She began by explaining that as the Earth warms, glaciers melt, releasing more water vapor into the air. And water vapor is a huge energy source for storms. Additionally, as glacier ice decreases in both area and depth, ocean currents and jet streams are affected.
There is 60% less total glacier ice volume now than there was 30 years ago.
In turn, these jet stream and ocean current changes create weather patterns that we get ‘stuck’ in, resulting in disasters such as the extreme rainfall in Spain in 2012, the record Boston snowfall in 2015, and the current absence of rain in California. To put it in the most succinct way possible, Arctic warming, caused by an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, leads to wavier jet streams which then result in abnormal weather patterns. Dr. Jennifer Francis ended her keynote address by stating that global warming is “not something only our grandchildren will have to worry about. We’re seeing the effects of it now. It’s affecting us all, now.”