CU Global Thought

Nestled in the forest behind a guard house just north of the border between New York and New Jersey off Route 9W is one of the world’s greatest meccas for climate change research.

Here, perched on the lip of the Palisades, a half-hour north of Manhattan, is a sylvan 180-acre campus where researchers have helped to untangle mystery after mystery about how our planet actually works. No other geoscience lab was as influential during the second half of the 20th century as Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. It is where the very phrase “global warming” was coined.

“Columbia’s scientists are the Paul Reveres of climate change,” said Peter de Menocal, the director of the Center for Climate and Life at Lamont. “They have been ringing this bell loudly and with increasing urgency since the 1980s.”