Global warming: ‘It’s going to make a huge mess’
The man who coined the term “global warming” looks back at 35 years of climate change.
By ELIZABETH DICKINSON
AUGUST 3, 2010 Wallace Broecker has written some 460 academic papers in his half-century-long career as a geologist. But this week, everyone seems to remember just one of them: an Aug. 8, 1975, paper in Science titled “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” It was the first time anyone used the term “global warming,” and his paper’s predictions about planetary warming proved remarkably accurate. Not that it makes him sleep any better. “I really feel that this is something we’re going to have to do something about,” he tells FP’s Elizabeth Dickinson. “It’s not going to make a disaster on the planet, but it’s going to make a huge mess, and it’s a mess that could be avoided or lessened if we started to take action.” Foreign Policy: Tell us a bit about how you came to coin the term “global warming” in Science magazine back in 1975. Wallace Broecker: I came to Columbia University as a senior in college in 1952 and was immediately employed in the radiocarbon-dating lab. And I’m still here, 58 years later. I studied various aspects of the carbon cycle there, and [as we watched] carbon dioxide levels going up, physics said the planet should be warming. Yet between about 1941 until the early 1970s, there was no warming. I wondered, “How could it be that we’re not seeing a warming?” Then, in the early 1970s, one of the first long records of climate was released based on an ice core drilled in northern Greenland. I extrapolated [that data forward] and found that there [should be] a natural cooling between the 1940s and about 1980 — half of an 80-year [warming-cooling cycle seen in the ice core]. So I said, “Aha!” Maybe what had happened is that, by chance, the carbon dioxide-induced warming that [physicists] expected had just been balanced by a [natural planetary] cooling. If that were true, we were in for a turnaround when the natural cooling became a natural warming — which would join forces with the carbon dioxide warming. In Science, I argued that we were on the brink of a pronounced global warming, using that term. It was the natural [terminology] to use; I never thought I was naming something. It was only three or four years ago that people picked up on this and realized that I was the first to use it. …
“It’s Going to Make a Huge Mess”
By Abby Gruen, The Star-Ledger
Sunday, August 08, 2010, 7:20 AM On recent trips to Europe, Wally Broecker was treated like a celebrity. From London to Rome, the 78-year-old Columbia University geochemist was mobbed by reporters who hailed him as the father of global warming.
Today, on the 35th anniversary of the publication of his paper “Climate Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global warming” in Science magazine, Broecker is again fielding calls from members of the media. They want to interview the man who was credited for the now-iconic phrase “global warming.” Wally Broecker, an athletic great-grandfather with a halo of fuzzy white hair, just wants to get out of the limelight so he can focus on his research. That’s not working out so well. “I just got off the phone with Foreign Affairs magazine,” he said Tuesday, “And Science magazine is doing something about it as well.” …Looking forward for humankind, though, he has grave concerns. “I’m an optimist, but I’m not very optimistic about this,” Broecker said. “The world is going to experience global warming, and until we see its bad side I am afraid we are not going to do what we need to do.” …
N.J. scientist who coined ‘global warming’ term tries to avoid the limelight 35 years later
my comment, from FP:
I'm sorry, but Professor Broeckner is a case of an old man who doesn't want to die knowing the horrible future his grandchildren will inherit. To dismiss accelerating feedbacks is not supported in the paleoclimatic record. Tipping points such as the albedo effect are crucial to the trajectory of global warming.
To even suggest that CCS is some sort of solution is to condemn the human race and most other species to unimaginable deprivation, since it completely ignores two other absolutely critical aspects of carbon emissions:
1. The warming and acidification of the ocean, a process well underway and for all intents and purposes irreversible on any scale that matters. The food chain in the ocean is already in collapse, and this will lead to enormous numbers of climate refugees, and mass starvation.
2. The "other" greenhouse gases, usually ignored, create toxic ozone when nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, and acetaldehyde interact with UV radiation. Ozone causes cancer, emphysema, and other respiratory conditions in humans. Vegetation is even more sensitive. Ozone poisons plants by damaging the stomata of foliage, interfering with the ability to photosynthesize and produce chlorophyll. Decades of cumulative exposure have made trees more susceptible to disease, fungus, insects, and weather. They are now in a rapidly accelerating, terminal decline. Without trees – their lumber, fruit, nuts, habitat, shade, carbon sink, and beauty, the terrestrial ecosystem based on forests will collapse. Wildfires are already raging. Annual crops losses are also increasing at a time when more food is needed for a growing population. More famine, and who knows what wars, will result.
It's lovely that the originator of the phrase "Global Warming" is so sanguine. I think "Global Boiling" would have been more appropriate.