Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It - Softcover

Broecker, Wallace S.; Kunzig, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809045028 ISBN 13: 9780809045020

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2009

Synopsis

The product of a unique collaboration between a pioneering earth scientist and an award-winning science writer, Fixing Climate takes an unconventional approach to the problem of global warming―and offers a possible solution. Hailed by his colleagues as "one of the our greatest living geoscientists," Wallace S. Broecker, a longtime researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, warned about the possible consequences of global warming decades before it became a compelling public issue. Hooked on climate studies since his student days, he has learned, largely through his own findings, that climate does change―naturally, dramatically, and rarely benignly. He also knows from experience that when mankind pushes nature as we are currently doing by dumping some sixty to seventy million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, climate will change even more dramatically and less benignly. As Broecker points out, if a well-meaning fairy godmother were to turn us all into energy-saving paragons at the stroke of midnight tonight, the resulting reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide might lessen but could not turn aside the great warming tide now headed our way. There is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope in the development of new technologies that are directed not only at the reduction of carbon dioxide output but also at its harmless disposal.

About this title

About the Author:

Wallace S. Broecker (1931-2019) was a geologist whose landmark 1975 scientific paper “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” popularized the phrase, and whose predictions about the dangers of increasing carbon monoxide levels in the atmosphere brought national attention to environmental crises.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University, joining its faculty to become the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Wallace received many science awards for his work, including the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1996 and Sweden’s Crafoord Prize in Geosciences in 2006.

Known as the “Grandfather of Climate Science” or the “Father of Global Warming,”―who also coined the term “the global conveyor” for the ocean currents that circulate warm water around the planet―Wallace wrote several books including Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat―And How to Counter It (with Robert Kunzig).

Robert Kunzig is a freelance science writer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
The boy’s journey to meet the beast began in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1955. Broecker arrived there at the end of August on a DC-7 from New York. It was his first transcontinental flight, and he spent it with a geomorphology book open on his lap, trying to understand the landscape from twenty thousand feet. Back then the pilots made a point of showing you the Grand Canyon at least. It was still a long, noisy flight, though—more than eight hours. When Broecker finally reached Los Angeles, he couldn’t see much; the plane descended into LAX through thick smog.
Los Angeles was booming; its population had increased by half in the 1940s and was on its way to doing the same again in the 1950s. The city we know today, a megalopolis built around cars, was taking shape. The network of streetcar lines, which as recently as the gas-rationing days of World War II had carried more than 100 million riders per year on more than a thousand miles of track, was in its final agonies. During the war, people had mistaken some of the first severe smogs for Japanese gas attacks, and even by 1955 the true equation—cars plus sun equals smog—wasn’t firmly anchored in the public mind. That summer workers were ripping up the rails of the Glendale-Burbank line, once one of the busiest. Congress had passed its first air pollution law in July, providing modest funds for research, but the catalytic converter was still twenty years away. Ozone levels in Los Angeles were higher that September than they’ve ever been since. City officials talked about shutting down refineries and gas stations; the governor talked about declaring the city a disaster area. The heat made things worse. On September 1, the temperature rose to 110 degrees Fahrenheit—an all-time record for Los Angeles. (It would not be equaled until 1988, the year global warming first dominated the headlines.) Around the city, hundreds of old people died from the heat that day.
That was the day Broecker delivered the first scientific talk of his life. The lecture hall was gorgeously situated, in the Southwest Museum of the American Indian—a Mission Revival–style building on a hill northeast of downtown, out toward Pasadena—but it was un-air-conditioned, and it was stifling. Through the tall, arched window at the back of the hall, Broecker would on a clear day have seen the Pacific, thirty miles away; but on September 1, 1955, he couldn’t even see the Los Angeles skyline, five miles away. On either side of Broecker, the walls were lined with display cases of Indian artifacts. Before him sat eighty or so archaeologists, a mixed crowd of seasoned diggers and more scholarly university types. The diggers and the scholars, Broecker had already gathered, were in a spat about when Indians had first arrived in North America from Asia, the diggers favoring an early date. Broecker knew nothing of all this and little of public speaking. Painful memories of a college speech class came bubbling up, along with the question of just what he, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in geochemistry, was doing there, delivering a special address to the 2nd Great Basin Archaeological Congress.
He was following orders, for one thing. His boss back at Lamont, Columbia professor J. Laurence Kulp, had been too busy to attend the congress himself. Like Broecker, Kulp wasn’t much interested in archaeology. But the geochemical technique they were using at Lamont was of extreme interest to archaeologists—indeed it was revolutionizing the field. Radiocarbon dating had been invented just eight years earlier by Willard Libby at the University of Chicago, and there were still only a few labs in the world capable of doing it. Kulp had put Broecker in charge of the one at Lamont; he had even given the kid an assistant. Green as Broecker was, he knew all about radiocarbon dating. All he had to do was explain it to a bunch of archaeologists who knew next to nothing. That realization got him through the dreaded talk in the leaden heat. He may even have sounded a little smug.
Afterward, in any case, the man who had helped organize the conference strode up the center aisle and stood facing him. Phil Orr, archaeology curator at the Santa Barbara Museum, was clearly more of a digger than a scholar; although he smoked a pipe, it had a cigar butt in it. He was a short man with a potbelly stuffed into jeans and cowboy boots. His face was shaped like an interstate-highway shield—a wide forehead, uncluttered by hair, narrowing to a pointy, straggly bearded chin. That forehead overhung deep-set eyes that seemed made to squint. Orr eyeballed Broecker.
“Kid,” he said, for he was plenty old enough to be Broecker’s father, “I can see that you know a lot about physics and math. But I also see that you don’t know a goddamned thing about the earth.”
He paused to let that sink in, and to relight the cigar butt.
“Come with me for three weeks and I’ll change your life.”
Broecker’s life back home contained outsize responsibilities. At twenty-three, he had a wife, Grace, and two daughters under the age of three. (Four more children would arrive before the decade was out.) They were all surviving on a graduate student’s stipend, in the hope that the graduate student would soon make something of himself—get a PhD, for a start. Broecker called Grace. She said that as long as Orr paid for everything, Broecker should go along on this road trip or field trip or whatever it was.
Two days later the two men hit the road in Orr’s old station wagon. They climbed out of the brown-aired valley and crossed the Mojave Desert, heading north on Highway 395. Following the Los Angeles Aqueduct to its headwaters, along the eastern flank of the Sierras, they drove up the Owens Valley, past Mono Lake, and on into Nevada. Along the way Broecker got to know Orr. The résumé was unusual. Orr had been raised on a Wyoming ranch, had trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, and had once stuffed a panda for Chicago’s Field Museum. He was also a longtime member of E Clampus Vitus, the fraternal order of pranksters, Mason-mockers, and stuffed-shirt deflaters. This last item was particularly endearing to Broecker; the young man guffawed at the story of how Orr and a few other Clampers, dressed in tails and top hats, had driven a hearse to a Fourth of July picnic, solemnly marched a casket out into the midst of the festive gathering, and then opened it to reveal a case or two of beer on ice. By the time the two men pulled into Carson City, where Orr had once mounted a coal mine exhibit for the local museum, they understood each other. Orr deposited Broecker at a motel, then disappeared—to go out drinking or to visit a girlfriend, Broecker was never sure which.
Nevada is empty now, but it was far emptier then; the population was around a tenth of the current one. Carson City, the capital, was a large village. When you left Carson City or even Reno, you really left—you did not pass miles and miles of subdivisions. Instead you plunged straight into sagebrush desert—into “savage nakedness,” as John Muir once described it. The land was naked because it got around seven inches of rain a year. When Orr and Broecker were there, in late summer, the rabbitbrush scattered among the sage was blooming bright yellow, adding a little adornment, but the landscape was still basically brown. Around thirty-five miles northeast of Reno, the station wagon chugged up a low pass in the Virginia Mountains. From that crest, Orr and Broecker glimpsed the basin beyond. The sight startled Broecker just as it startles everyone the first time.
Nevada is famous for its basins and ranges; they march in orderly succession across the state, like waves breaking on the Sierra Nevada. But this basin was different: it was filled with blue water. John C. Frémont, the first white man to be startled by the sight of a twenty-five-mile-long turquoise lake ringed by brown desert mountains, called it Pyramid Lake, because it had a small pyramid-shape island off its eastern shore. To Frémont, in 1844, the lake would have been far more inexplicable than it was to Broecker. The notion of a worldwide Ice Age was only just beginning to be toyed with then by European geologists, and Frémont didn’t have Phil Orr with him to explain what the Ice Age had done to western Nevada.
Pyramid Lake, Orr told Broecker, is a remnant of the Ice Age, and of a mighty ancestor called Lake Lahontan. The ice sheet that covered Canada and much of the Midwest never made it to this part of Nevada; nor did the mountain glaciers that surged out from the Rockies and the Sierras. But the glacial climate seems to have been colder in the Great Basin, and it was certainly much wetter. With no outlet to the sea, and without today’s desert heat to evaporate it, all that water falling from the sky and rushing down off the Sierran glaciers just piled up. At its highstand, Lake Lahontan was larger than Lake Ontario; it covered much of western Nevada, occupying seven distinct basins that formed a ragged necklace around the Trinity Range. As the climate warmed and dried, the lake sank below the sills that connected the basins, one after another. The basins that weren’t fed directly by rivers from the Sierra dried up. The only ones left today are Walker Lake, terminus of the Walker River, and Pyramid Lake, terminus of the Truckee River and also the deepest part of Lake Lahontan.
As Lake Lahontan rose and fell, its waves cut terraces in the mountainsides wherever it paused for a while. Sometimes it even cut caves. By 1955, Orr had already dug extensively in a place called Fishbone Cave, high above Winnemucca Lake in the next basin east of Pyramid. He had found human artifacts and bones, which he believed were very old—he belonged to the...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0809045028
• ISBN 13: 9780809045020
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272