I recently had the opportunity to get a tour of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (http://sio.ucsd.edu). I attended this tour to learn more about the new SPHEAR (Scripps Partnership for Hazard and Environmental Applied Research) program. It was an incredible experience and I felt fortunate to learn about the research projects currently in progress at Scripps. When I first learned about SPHEAR, my intention was to learn more about how the private industry could support the research projects associated with satellite communications to support ocean monitoring and sensors to capture important data. What I learned on this tour expanded beyond this focus and I decided to add this blog to express the importance of understanding our climate, its changes, and impacts to agriculture.

As you can imagine, Scripps has some impressive equipment to collect data from the ice core samples taken from polar ice. This equipment is able to determine the atmospheric composition for the given year determined. Given what I assume is centrifugal force that forces the isotopes with more atomic mass to the outside, the atmospheric makeup for a specific year can be determined (e.g. oxygen and CO2) in parts per million. By studying the atmospheric makeup, the researches are able to chart the stability of our climate way before agriculture as we know it existed.

Based on the data charted and studied to date, our climate did not stabilize to a predictable certainty to support year-after-year farming until 10,000 years ago. What does this all mean and what is the point of this blog? Mr. Kirk Gardner, who gave me the tour, explained that the researchers shared their data with anthropologists to confirm that our transition from food gatherers to farmers did not all happen from advanced evolution of intelligence, but that the transition to agriculture happened because our climate allowed it. If our climate today was as unstable as it was 10,000 plus years ago, we could not, with some predictability, count on average temperatures, rainfall, and seasons to produce the crops, forests, and pastures to support continuous food sources in a non-nomadic civilization.

Will our climate experience the instability that it once did 10,000 years ago? Probably, but that could be tens of thousands of years from now. My point is not to predict the next instability in our climate, but to point out the importance of keeping track of these changes and do what we can to protect and sustain our environment by considering the impacts of our actions.