Storms of My Grandchildren (17 page)

As the Pacific Ocean has moved into the El Niño phase in 2009, I expect global temperature to move back to record or near-record levels. There is a lag of a few months between the Niño index and global temperature, so 2010 should be a year that is back to near-record global temperature levels, dispelling the notion of a coming ice age. We are still at solar minimum in the sun cycle, though, which does drag down the temperature, so the next El Niño may produce merely a near-record, not a record, global temperature.

A more important measurement during the next several years will be ocean heat content. There is an improving global network of ocean floats with regular yo-yo temperature probing of the upper 750 meters of ocean, along with limited measurements at greater depths. These should provide a better measure of ocean heat uptake and thus the planet’s energy imbalance. If solar irradiance begins to pick up, as most solar physicists predict, I expect ocean heat uptake to reflect that change. Measurements of heat storage over the next solar cycle, especially if global aerosol measurements are also obtained, have the potential to help confirm our understanding of the state of the planet, the causes of climate change, and the change of global climate forcing that is needed to restore the planet’s energy balance and stabilize climate.

When I met him there, he gave me the verdict on the talk from the judge: Abigail said that it was good and understandable, but she thought that it would be very difficult to get the public to pay any attention, given issues with health care and many other matters that would have higher priority. Van asked if the talk had achieved what I intended—which of course I affirmed.

As I sat in his office, I wondered how in the world I could ever have been intimidated by such a kind and gentle man. He gave me a copy of an op-ed piece that he had recently written, making the case for robotic space exploration and termination of the manned space program. I had never agreed with his position on that subject, but there was no reason to debate it. He asked if there was any progress on the aerosol measurements I had proposed fifteen years earlier, the polarimeter and interferometer. I could report that work had started on the polarimeter, but I was skeptical about whether it would ever be completed, given likely reactions to my current criticisms. It was the last time that I saw Van.

Articles describing my talk appeared in a few newspapers. CNN.com quoted me as saying, “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now.” The Associated Press reported that I had said the administration wanted to hear only scientific results that “fit predetermined, inflexible positions,” which I described as “a recipe for environmental disaster.”

There was still a week before the election. I was given a last hope for bringing public attention to the matter when I received a call from a reporter at National Public Radio (NPR). The reporter had obtained a copy of a memo to NASA employees from Glenn Mahone, head of NASA’s Office of Public Affairs. He wondered whether there was something nefarious about the memo, as it concerned procedures aimed at maintaining “consistency.” I concurred that the intent seemed to be to keep everybody on a predetermined message, a dangerous approach for a science agency—indeed, it seemed reminiscent of the Catholic Church and Galileo.

I told him that NASA press releases were being funneled to the White House for approval or changes. I suggested that it would be very useful if NPR could make clear what was happening and that I might be able to provide contacts who would confirm the story. Specifically, I had spoken with Rob Gutro and his colleague Krishna Ramanujan on the day before my Iowa talk. They seemed scared stiff, which was understandable, as they had young families to support. They said that I was “not going to get cooperation” from them, they had “been talked to,” and they “could be fired.” They explained that Glenn Mahone had driven from NASA headquarters to the Goddard Space Flight Center and had personally chewed them out in front of their superiors. Gutro and Ramanujan were not even NASA employees; they were contractors working for the Goddard Public Affairs Office. Mahone’s action, to say the least, seemed highly inappropriate.

I urged NPR to pursue the matter, said that I would cooperate, and provided contact information for both Gutro and Ramanujan. Despite their reservations about possible retribution, I thought that they might be willing to cooperate if NPR provided assurance that the full story would come out. I never heard anything back from NPR.

On Election Day, I made the short drive down the road to the polling place, at a junior high school. I live in Pennsylvania, another purple state, so my vote would count. That evening Anniek and I made popcorn and settled in to watch the returns. Iowa was interesting—it was too close to call until the next day, decided by a handful of votes (Bush won). But the election hinged on Ohio, and by midnight it was becoming more and more clear that Bush had won Ohio and would be president for four more years.

I wanted to be in my office the next day in case anybody had concerns over the election’s implications—given my public endorsement of Kerry. Also I wanted to send a memo to the president’s science adviser. So as Bush’s victory became nearly certain, we decided to return to New York City late that night.

It is a half-hour drive over two-way roads between our house and the interstate highway. As we came around a curve, suddenly there was a deer in front of us. I hit the brakes, losing steering control, unable to react fast enough. We slammed into the deer, whose body was hurtled down the road. We sat stunned for several seconds. The deer lay motionless, apparently dead. Then, at age sixty-three, for the first time since childhood, I burst into tears. I am not sure if I was crying for the deer, the nation, or the planet.

I
N ORDER FOR A DEMOCRACY TO FUNCTION well, the public needs to be honestly informed. But the undue influence of special interests and government greenwash pose formidable barriers to a well-informed general public. Without a well-informed public, humanity itself and all species on the planet are threatened. That is a strong assertion, but I hope the remaining chapters of this book leave you convinced of its validity.

The morning after the election I sent a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, requesting an opportunity to discuss the state of global warming science with the president’s science adviser, John Marburger. I received no response, which was not surprising, given my public criticism of the Bush administration.

I thought a public talk might be an alternative. My talk in Iowa City had been before a single university audience, and maybe in a different setting I could do a better job of making the science story clear. An opportunity for a public statement arose in August 2005, when Ralph Keeling asked me to give a lecture in honor of his father, Charles David Keeling, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December. David Keeling, who died that June, is famous for the painstaking, precise observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide that he initiated in 1957. He doggedly continued this monitoring for decades, continually fighting bureaucratic obstacles. In so doing, David Keeling brought to the world’s attention the reality of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The timing seemed right. I had been working for more than a year on the paper “Is There Still Time to Avoid ‘Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference’ with Global Climate?” A one-hour lecture at the American Geophysical Union meeting, the largest conference in geosciences, would deserve attention if it were backed by a solid scientific paper. As it turned out, for somewhat different reasons, even the White House took notice.

I worked hard on the paper for months. It was nearly in final form a week before the meeting, when I had to set it aside and start preparing my talk. I was still working on the talk the day before the meeting, sitting on the floor at JFK airport, my laptop computer plugged into the nearest electrical outlet—with Anniek at the gate a few hundred yards away, keeping tabs on the status of our delayed flight.

I was struggling with the bottom line, the summary: Should a scientist connect the dots in the climate story all the way to policy implications? My experiences in the five years since we published our alternative scenario paper provided some relevant perspective. In that paper we showed that if global fossil fuel emissions peaked early in the twenty-first century and then declined steadily, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be kept below 450 parts per million and climate change might be tolerable. We argued that such a path was technically feasible, because of the great potential of energy efficiency and non-carbon energy sources, but their ascendancy would require appropriate policies, especially an increasing price on carbon emissions.

Based on my encounters with the vice president’s Task Force and the Council on Environmental Quality, the trials of the automobile manufacturers versus California and Vermont, and meetings such as the one I attended at ExxonMobil headquarters, I had an empirical basis for inferences about obstacles to needed policies. Thus, I tentatively wrote my concluding paragraphs:

If an alternative scenario is practical, has multiple benefits, and makes good common sense, why are we not doing it?

There is little merit in casting blame for inaction, unless it helps point toward a solution. It seems to me that special interests have been a roadblock wielding undue influence over policymakers. The special interests seek to maintain short-term profits with little regard to either the long-term impact on the planet that will be inherited by our children and grandchildren or the long-term economic well-being of our country.

The public, if well informed, has the ability to override the influence of special interests, and the public has shown that they feel a stewardship toward Earth and all of its inhabitants. Scientists can play a useful role if they help communicate the climate change story to the public in a credible, understandable fashion.

I was hesitant because I could be getting into a quagmire. Scientists, politicians, and the special interests all would advise me to stick strictly to the science. But scientists are equipped to connect all the dots in an objective way. Do they have an obligation to do that? Can scientists maintain their scientific objectivity if they get involved in policy-related discussions? And after this one additional talk, could I get back to just doing science?

Coincidentally, I had met a good sounding board for such questions a few months earlier: Bill Blakemore of ABC Television. We had participated in a discussion at Wesleyan University, in which we agreed that the media needed to do a better job of informing the public about human-made climate change. Bill had arranged for me to give a presentation to the president of ABC News and other senior staff members in mid-November about the current understanding of climate change. During the discussion at ABC I promised to provide them my “Keeling” talk when it was ready.

Blakemore is a gentle, expansive person who feels like a close friend after one conversation. His broad experience and curiosity also imply a certain wisdom, which is probably why I included an implicit question when I e-mailed him my draft presentation before my American Geophysical Union talk in San Francisco: “I do not intend to make it political, but I think I need a couple of sentences regarding special interests, to help explain why we are not taking sensible steps. I’m still struggling with this aspect, how to remain an objective scientist.”

Blakemore responded that it struck him that the last two paragraphs were “statements of fact or of your belief and do nothing to detract from your function as an objective scientist. This is, after all, a story and a scientific object of study about what human action has done and is doing to the planet, so your statements in these last two paragraphs are not even out of place regarding the scientific subject you present. All communication is biased. What makes the difference between a propagandist on one side and a professional journalist or scientist on the other is not that the journalist or scientist ‘set their biases aside’ but that they are open about them and constantly putting them to the test, ready to change them. I base this on a close study of the modern philosophy of science, especially that of Karl Popper and Peter Brian Medawar and this is all aside from the fact that no one is going to object to a serious scientist trying to alert the public about the import of alarming news.”

There is a counterargument against my explicit criticism of “special interests.” Mahatma Gandhi warned his followers to be “most careful about accusing the opponent of wickedness…Those who we regard as wicked as a rule return the compliment.” And I realize that the captains of industry must be a big part of the global warming solution; the needed changes of energy infrastructure require their leadership. But it is hard to find solutions if we do not paint the picture accurately. So I decided to retain the concluding paragraphs.

The heart of my “Keeling” presentation described “multiple lines of evidence indicating that the Earth’s climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences.” I concluded that it was necessary to begin fundamental changes to the energy infrastructure within a decade, so that global carbon dioxide emissions would stabilize in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and decline in the second quarter. This would allow the atmospheric carbon dioxide amount to peak in the neighborhood of 450 or 475 ppm. If other greenhouse gases were reduced by feasible amounts, additional global warming could be kept at less than 1 degree Celsius. I argued that this proposed scenario was technically feasible, but it would require strong policy leadership and international cooperation. I pointed out the multiple benefits of such an energy strategy, for human health, clean air and water, and national security.

It is especially appropriate that this talk was in honor of David Keeling. Keeling developed a technique that greatly reduced the average error in measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He realized that the changes he was observing in the amount of carbon dioxide were systematic and real, not due to measurement error. Keeling then set upon making measurements with the focus and dedication of a scientist who knows that he is onto an important problem and has the tools to address it. Despite being a loving family man, he missed the birth of his first child because he religiously went out every four hours to measure carbon dioxide.

Keeling’s measurements near his home or laboratory in California showed that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air decreased during the day as trees and other vegetation assimilated carbon dioxide during the process of photosynthesis. At night, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased as plants respired. Human-made sources of carbon dioxide, mainly fossil fuel burning, also affected observations, depending on the proximity of sources.

Keeling needed to sample air in remote locations to investigate global carbon dioxide changes. So he set up acquisition of daily air samples at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and soon thereafter at the South Pole. The air Keeling was sampling on Mauna Loa was pristine Pacific Ocean air, high in the atmosphere, brought to Hawaii by westerly winds, uncontaminated by local human sources.

The annual increase of global mean carbon dioxide is one of the key quantities that we must keep our eye on to understand the state of the climate and prospects for the planet’s future. I discuss these key quantities in the afterword, and I will keep these quantities updated on the Web site identified there.