“I don't think I've seen anything like it,” says Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University who specializes in unusual earthquakes. “It doesn't mean that, in the end, the cause of them is that exotic."

“We have significant challenges today, and climate change will only exacerbate those challenges,” says Upmanu Lall, director of the water center at Columbia University in New York City. Lall is the lead author of the assessment’s chapter on water.

“A lot has happened in 20 years,” said John Furlow, a contributing author and deputy director of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. “Now it’s seen much more as a societal or economic issue than a narrow environmental one.”

Gisela Winckler, a climate scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, recently took part in “Ask a Scientist,” an event co-hosted by the Climate Museum and the Earth Institute.

Radley Horton, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, discusses how truly oppressive heat expected to occur by 2070 will be “transformative for all areas of human endeavor—economy, agriculture, military, recreation.”

Research by Park Williams, a Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory bioclimatologist, found that since the 1980’s, climate change contributed to an extra 10 million acres of burning in western forests— an area about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

“Everything is tech-driven on the West Coast,” said Jeannette Wing, who left Microsoft Research last year to become the director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “But the East Coast is more well-rounded. It is about technology, but not just technology for its own sake.”