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QnAs with John Kutzbach
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A professor emeritus of climate science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, John Kutzbach was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 for his work on understanding past, present, and future climates. Kutzbach initially studied engineering, but serving as an aviation forecaster in the US Air Force in France in the early 1960s sparked an interest in atmospheric and earth system science. While in France, visits to caves such as Lascaux, where early humans painted ice-age fauna that lived in the region more than 20,000 years ago, began to develop his interest in early humans. During his career, Kutzbach has used climate models to characterize past climate changes—including those due to orbital variations, ice ages, and the uplift of mountains and plateaus—that have contributed to climate variability over timespans ranging from thousands to millions of years. Kutzbach’s studies of the variability of past climate have answered many questions about Earth’s climatic history and have helped assess the accuracy of climate models.
John Kutzbach. Image courtesy of Gisela Kutzbach (University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI).
In his Inaugural Article (1), Kutzbach and his colleagues used computer modeling to simulate climate and vegetation changes in Africa, Arabia, and the Mediterranean Basin over the past 140,000 years: Changes that may …
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