The research of Jonathan Overpeck '79 — director of the Institute for the study of Planet Earth at the Uiversity of Arizona and a co-author of the U.N. report on climate change that earned a Nobel Prize — took him to the holy mountain of Kailash in far western Tibet in 2007.
'We're going to see massive landscape changes everywhere'
I REMEMBER OVERPECK WELL — WE WERE FELLOW GEOLOGY MAJORS. I KNOW him as "Peck." He was the kid who always asked the simple questions that made the rest of us roll our eyes, but Professor Don Potter would get excited. It turns out that those were the questions dissertations were made of, only the rest of us were too limited to realize that. "It was really Don Potter who got me into geology by making it so exciting," Overpeck says, "and I suspect there are a lot of us out there who are doing geology because of Potter."
In his senior year, he took advantage of the newly created Senior Fellowship at Hamilton to work on his first paleoclimatology project — he collected and analyzed pollen found in an interesting bog feature on Potter's land in the Adirondacks. A professor at Brown University let Overpeck analyze the samples in his lab, and this relationship pulled him to Brown, the foremost place in the world to study paleoclimate, for a Ph.D. after graduating from Hamilton in 1979. "It was that Senior Fellowship that really made the difference," he says. "It got me into research and gave me the contacts. My first professional paper came out of that thesis."
After a stint at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia, Overpeck went to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he was responsible for bringing a new focus on paleoclimatology to the study of climate and weather. At both Lamont and NOAA he worked with James Hansen, an early and outspoken champion of the concept of global warming. In 1999 Overpeck became director of the interdisciplinary Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. Overpeck's research takes him all over the world, from the Himalayas in Tibet to the Cariaco Basin in Venezuela to the Amazon lowlands in Peru to the ice sheets in Greenland, where he takes core samples, analyzes them, and then places the data within computerized models in an effort to unravel the globe's complicated climate history. This is the research that forms the bedrock of the incontrovertible and mounting scientific evidence that the Earth is, indeed, getting warmer over time, particularly within the last century.
"All of this research is used in trying to figure out — with more confidence — what's going to happen in the future," Overpeck says. "I've been one of the key people in making paleoclimate part of mainstream climate dynamics, and now all of the modeling groups in the world are interested in paleoclimate dynamics. Why? Because we have this rich record of climate change going back millions of years, and we can use it to figure out what these models can do well and what they can't do so well."
The big shift is toward predicting what the climate will be like decades from now. "The changes we see in the next 100 years are going to be big," he says. "We're going to see massive landscape changes everywhere. And things are happening faster than we thought possible. I first got into this as a totally intellectual exercise, but after 25 years of studying climate change, I'm scared — I'm scared that humans will not get their act together fast enough."
And how did "Peck" feel when he found out the IPCC was sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore? "We didn't even know we were nominated," he says. "I found out we won by getting a phone call from NPR — I was the only one they could get ahold of, so I had to do the interview. It was really exciting and sort of sunk in slowly. It's really neat to see that people are connecting climate change and world peace."
