School of forestry and environmental studies

School Notes: School of the Environment
May/June 2014

Ingrid C. “Indy” Burke | http://environment.yale.edu

F&ES students pitch climate story at Sochi Olympics

A group of students from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies traveled to Sochi, Russia, to make sure that the issue of climate change would become a prominent story line for the international media during the Winter Olympics. Working with the nonprofit group Protect Our Winters, the five students spent ten days reminding journalists, spectators, and athletes how outdoor sports—and the economies that depend upon them—could ultimately be imperiled on a warming planet. The group, which called itself “Team Climate,” helped former Olympians pitch op-eds about the climate challenge to major media outlets. And in a running blog, they shared their own stories and successes from the games. “The weather in Sochi has been getting steadily warmer all week, peaking at a balmy 64 degrees,” Kaylee Weil ’12 ’14MEM, wrote in a February 16 blog post. “It’s not only the story of the hour and the story of the day here. It’s the story of the games.” Their campaign was borne out of the F&ES course International Organizations and Conferences.

The warming of ancient Earth

According to a recent Yale F&ES study, the release of volatile organic compounds from Earth’s forests and smoke from wildfires three million years ago had a far greater impact on global warming than ancient levels of carbon dioxide. Using sophisticated Earth system modeling, a team led by Nadine Unger calculated that concentrations of tropospheric ozone, aerosol particles, and methane during the mid-Pliocene epoch were twice the levels observed in the preindustrial era—largely because so much more of the planet was covered in forest. Those reactive compounds contributed a net global warming as much as two to three times greater than the effects of carbon dioxide, according to the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The research provides evidence that dynamic atmospheric chemistry played an important role in past warm climates, underscoring the complexity of climate change and the relevance of natural components, according to the authors. The researchers do not address or dispute the significant role in climate change of human-generated CO2 emissions.

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