NASA scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig – projecting and preventing climate change

Kristin Jobin in Mlive.com about a staunch friend of this blog: Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies where she heads the Climate Impacts Group. She is also the co-chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change.

Rosenzweig’s research focuses on projecting climate change and evaluating its potential impacts on agriculture, natural ecosystems, and other sectors vital to human beings. She thinks that an interdisciplinary approach should be taken when discussing solutions to climate change.

“In order for agriculture to be sustainable, the farmers have to be able to make money. I realized early on that we had to bring economists into our studies as well,” says Rosenzweig. “In order to understand and solve our global warming challenges, we need to bring a whole range of disciplines into the act.”

As co-chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, Rosenzweig advocates the importance of adaptation and mitigation programs in the Big Apple’s critical infrastructure systems. “Mitigation is shorthand for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions, or the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. New York has a very strong mitigation program as a companion to flexible adaptation pathways to create a climate-resilient city.”

…Rosenzweig is interested in the destabilizing impact climate change may have on developing countries. Since developing countries tend to be in hotter regions, climate change has potential to weaken their crop production. “It’s projected to really have a destabilizing effect on those agricultural regions. Also, in countries that tend to be poor, they don’t have the adaptive capacity that we have. They don’t have our great extension service like at MSU and all the folks working to help the farmers. They have some programs like that in developing countries, but they don’t have the resources to be ready.”…