Easter Island and Basic Climate Change Resources

Hey guys, as we move forward into issues dealing with environmental change I thought it would be good for you to have access to the raw data. The NOAA Paleoclimate Program has a great site that gives overviews of all the kinds of proxies we use to infer past climates, as well as the data and reconstructions of past climate themselves, so you can look at them. A lot of the very same data that the scientists who Diamond talks about in Collapse used are housed on the site. There are also informational areas about issues like global warming, etc. I think you'll have fun learning about this stuff.

Check out this cool pollen viewer for past tree species distributions. You can see the glaciers, the old coastlines, and how the trees migrated in response to climate change.

Now, for Easter Island, PBS has a good general resource for exploring the island. And, here are the Google Earth KMZ files for Easter Island that you saw in class.