Storms of My Grandchildren (14 page)

“Crying wolf” can affect funding. I call it the “John Mercer effect.” Mercer warned, in the late 1970s, that burning fossil fuels may lead to disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, with a sea level rise of several meters. I noticed at the time that the Department of Energy treated the scientists who suggested that Mercer was alarmist as more authoritative.

Even so, I had the feeling that the scientific community was just nudging public knowledge in the direction where many scientists suspected that the answer would lie. It reminded me of Feynman’s story about Robert Millikan’s oil drop experiment. Millikan’s experiment was famous because it showed that electric charge was quantized to exact multiples of an elementary electron charge. But the value Millikan derived for the electron charge was not quite right. Subsequent experimenters began to report values a bit larger, then still larger, and so on—until eventually they converged on what we now know is an accurate value. The scientists always had enough uncertain parameters in their experimental setup that they could rationalize choices yielding a result not too different from Millikan’s. This history suggested a reticence of scientists to report a result that differed too much from the one established by the great Millikan—at least not in a single step—until other scientists gave them more courage.

Feynman liked to needle his experimentalist colleagues about this. Their exposed reticence amused Feynman and embarrassed them, but it was not a big problem for the world. We cannot say the same for reticence about sea level rise, if that reticence delays actions needed to avert a disaster.

In a nutshell, a problem has emerged. Climate inertia and climate amplifying feedbacks, as humans rapidly increase atmospheric greenhouse gases, spell danger for future generations—big danger. Yet the public is largely unaware of an impending crisis. The obliviousness of the public is not surprising—global warming, as yet, is slight compared to day-to-day weather fluctuations. How in the world can a situation like this be communicated credibly?

O
N JUNE 3, 2004, I RECEIVED A LETTER from Frank Loy, the chief climate negotiator for the United States during the Clinton-Gore administration. The letter said that I had been selected by the board of directors of Environment 2004, including Bruce Babbitt and Carol Browner, to receive an award for my climate research and advocacy. I was also invited to join the group’s leadership council and be a featured speaker at a reception in New York with about seventy-five guests. It seemed to be primarily a fund-raising event.

Environment 2004 was, according to its mission statement, “dedicated to assuring the defeat of President George W. Bush and his allies by highlighting the environmental stakes in the next election.” It planned to “make a difference in November by swinging a significant number of voters in a handful of hotly contested swing states that will likely decide the Presidential and a few statewide elections.”

Perhaps this was a chance to clarify the slippery slope that humanity was treading. But I was dubious about both attending the reception and accepting the award. As a registered Independent voter, I prefer not to be tied to either major party, so I did not respond right away.

After my 1988 and 1989 congressional testimony, I had declined most requests for talks and interviews, especially for television. Interviews are a time-consuming distraction from research. Besides, even if I had spent time preparing, I still felt awkward and inarticulate. My fear of speaking was not as bad as it had been earlier in my career, when my brain seemed to freeze up before an audience. Once, at a Pioneer Venus mission meeting in the 1970s, when I went to show a viewgraph, I could not think, so I just went back to my seat—which was very embarrassing. But my colleagues Michael Oppenheimer and Steve Schneider, who gave excellent interviews, were willing to take referrals—so beginning in 1989 I directed global warming interview requests to them.

That worked fine for fifteen years, allowing me to do hands-on science, despite administrative and fund-raising responsibilities. I liked to work with a small number of people on problems where we could experience what Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out.” Mainly I worked with Reto Ruedy, a mathematician and programmer for our global climate model, and Makiko Sato, a physicist who did her Ph.D. research on Jupiter’s atmosphere. We developed a simplified version of the Goddard Institute’s climate model that was fast enough to run hundreds of experiments, and we developed data sets for various observed climate parameters. For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines erupted in 1991, we used our model and a data set for stratospheric aerosols to study the effect of the volcano on global temperature. Our prediction of global cooling over a two-year period turned out to be accurate, increasing our confidence that we understood the effect of climate forcings on global temperature.

Frank Loy’s letter ended that period of sticking strictly to science. It forced me to think about the gap between what was understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what was known about global warming by the people who need to know, the public. Scientists who studied ice sheet stability were concerned that the planet was headed toward disastrous consequences, but they seemed reticent to speak out. I had concluded that further global warming (above that in 2000) must be kept to less than about 1 degree Celsius to avert disaster. But both Oppenheimer and Schneider published papers suggesting that the dangerous level of warming was much more distant, about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. I couldn’t continue to defer interview requests to them; I would need to speak for myself.

It was also becoming apparent that NASA, consistent with Administrator Sean O’Keefe’s admonishment not to talk about “dangerous human-made interference,” seemed reluctant to publicize papers that drew attention to climate concerns. And the Bush administration was not willing to revise its climate policies in the face of new data, contrary to the president’s 2001 Rose Garden declaration. But who was to blame? Future generations might look back and say, “How could they have been so stupid? Why didn’t they do anything?” “They” would include scientists who did not adequately communicate the danger.

I decided to decline the award and speaking invitation from Loy but ask for his help in finding a venue for a public talk, to be given as a private citizen. The talk would be consistent with his aim of making climate a campaign issue. But I wanted a nonpartisan venue, even though, at least implicitly, I would be critical of the Bush administration’s lack of action.

I did not want to call Loy from my office—not because I believed the assertions of a man who said he was certain that my phone was tapped, which seemed unlikely, but because the talk needed to occur independent of my government job. On my next trip to Washington, I called Loy from my cell phone outside Union Station, and he agreed immediately that such a talk would be useful. He suggested that it be given in Washington, hosted by Resources for the Future, on whose board of directors he served. Loy said he would make sure that the talk received extensive media coverage.

Thus began a four-month period of unusual pressure and intensive work, even by my standards. Unlike my 1988 testimony before Congress, which was based on a scientific paper that had been accepted for publication, this talk would be based on papers still in preparation. If those papers were not ready by the time of the talk, I could be open to criticism by others in the scientific community, and the talk could backfire.

My “Slippery Slope” paper was in press, but it was an opinion piece. My paper titled “Efficacy of Climate Forcings,” which provided a comprehensive comparison of a broad range of climate forcing mechanisms, had been in preparation for more than a year. Other papers in preparation investigated Earth’s current energy imbalance and compared climate simulations for the past century with observational data on climate change.

It almost always takes longer to complete a paper than early estimates allow. Jim Pollack and I once joked that there was a missing factor of pi (about 3) in such estimates. But I could not afford such delay. I began waking up in the middle of the night, working for a few hours to make use of that time, and then would take a dose of cold and flu medication to help me get back to sleep.

Summer came and went too rapidly. Time was running out if the talk was to be relevant to the 2004 election. Even though the papers were not quite ready, I called the contact person at Resources for the Future, asking for the talk to be scheduled in early October. There was hesitation, a concern about possible political ramifications that had not been expressed before. It required checking with management.

I got the response on October 4 by e-mail: Resources for the Future had placed the seminar series “on hiatus until early 2005 as part of a reevaluation of our outreach and public education agenda.” The contact person wrote, “We felt this was a good time to review this part of our work, given the national elections that seem to be sucking the policy air out of the room, and the fact that RFF is launching a major policy book in mid-November that is going to occupy much of our time and attention for the rest of the year.”

I felt a sudden deflation, with mixed emotions. It no longer mattered that my papers were unfinished. I could focus on just the science again. But the intense effort of the preceding months was for naught. There would be no chance to better inform the public, prior to the election, about the urgent need to change course on climate policy.

The next day I received a message from Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs employee at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. She included an e-mail message from Rob Gutro, a public affairs employee at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in which Rob informed her about the status of a press release that had been held up at NASA headquarters for a month.

Gutro’s e-mail read: “According to HQ, there’s a new review process that has totally gridlocked all earth science press releases relating to climate or climate change. According to HQ Public Affairs, 2 political appointees, Ghassem and the White House are now reviewing all climate related press releases…thus, the 4 + week review time for Drew’s press release that was slated for issue on Sept. 27th. We’re still waiting to get the release back from the WH. We’ll let you know when it happens.”

I could not sleep that night. I got up and wrote a letter to my former mentor at the University of Iowa, Professor James Van Allen—it was two pages, single-spaced with small margins, and it took about half the night to write. I summarized the climate story, my meetings with the cabinet-level Task Force, and the new revelation that NASA headquarters was cooperating in selective reporting of results—it seemed that by “sound science” the administration meant science that gave the “right” predetermined answer. I described the debacle with Resources for the Future and raised the possibility of giving a talk at the university. I expressed skepticism that the talk would have any effect, but wrote I was afraid that “ten or twenty years from now I may look back and say that I saw and understood what was going on, but I didn’t try to speak up.”

Van Allen was ninety years old, and I had qualms about putting him on the spot. So the next morning, before sending the letter, I called Don Gurnett to ask his opinion. Don had been Van Allen’s best student in the 1960s and was now a physics professor at the university. He agreed that my proposed talk was appropriate and said he would discuss the matter with Van Allen.

My letter made clear the political sensitivity of the proposed lecture—a red flag to a university supported by public funds. The university president asked me, via Van Allen, to verify that I would be speaking as a private citizen and that government funds would not be supporting the trip. I sensed that it was only because of Van Allen’s legendary status in Iowa that my talk was approved as a university “Distinguished Lecture.”

I did not expect my talk to alter votes in the upcoming election. Yet in the back of my mind I wondered: What if this public lecture leads to publicity and debate, and Professor Van Allen indicates agreement with my position? Given his reputation, it might influence fence-sitters in Iowa. At one time there had been a brouhaha about the safety of microwave ovens (manufactured in nearby Amana, Iowa). Van Allen denigrated that concern, offering to sit on a microwave oven while it cooked his dinner. That settled the matter for many people.

I decided to write out my presentation and read it aloud before the audience—not an ideal format, but it would be worse to fumble around and forget important points. Besides, I could send the written version to a few people in the media. Because I was speaking in Iowa City rather than Washington, a printed copy provided the best hope for reaching a broad public.

A call from my colleague Larry Travis greeted us at our hotel, relaying phoned and e-mailed warnings from Andrew Falcon of the NASA headquarters Chief Counsel’s Office. Falcon’s e-mail read: