Scientists on Reddit

Tom Crowther

Ecologist at ETH Zurich, soil carbon researcher

u/Tom_Crowther ↗AMA only

How we know it's theirs

The 2017 r/science AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 1 post and 55 comments from u/Tom_Crowther, all from 2017, most often in r/science.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/science

On “Science AMA Series: I'm Tom Crowther, a Scientist from Yale University and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. My research shows how human activity affects ecosystems worldwide, leading to global climate change. AMA!”

Hi Tom! My university environmental science professor believes that we can't prove climate change is human-caused, due to the fact that the earth's temperature has always fluctuated for thousands of years-- way before humans even existed. How would you argue against this stance?…

u/Tom_Crowther replied

Ignoring climate change because we will be plunged into an ice age in 20,000 years is like ignoring a bus because we are all going to die when we are 90 anyway. The Earth is always going through massive glaciation…

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Ignoring climate change because we will be plunged into an ice age in 20,000 years is like ignoring a bus because we are all going to die when we are 90 anyway.

The Earth is always going through massive glaciation cycles that take place over tens of thousands of years. We came out of the last glacial period 12 thousand years ago. We would normally be expecting to re-enter an ice age in tens of thousands of years. These fluctuations would also impact humans, but we don't even know what human society will look like in tens of thousands of years.

The problem is that we are undoubtedly causing a MASSIVE fluctuation that is taking place within 100 years.

Excerpt

More moments

A redditor wrote in r/science

Where do you get your funding?

u/Tom_Crowther replied

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I am funded by an EU Marie Curie research grant. So they have absolutely no agendas - they just support innovative science. In all honesty, in the proposal that I wrote to get that grant, I proposed that I would do the experiment under the expectation that the massive soil feedback would not exist. But when the results came in, it was very clear that this feedback is a real thing, which needs to be considered in future climate scenarios