Broecker Wallace S. - Fixing climate: what past climate changes reveal about the current threat--and how to counter it

FIXING CLIMATE

What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threatand How to Counter It

WALLACE S. BROECKER and ROBERT KUNZIG

HILL and WANG

A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

New York

Hill and Wang
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2008 by Three Books Publishing, LLC
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Published in 2008 by Hill and Wang
First paperback edition, 2009

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Broecker, Wallace S., 1931

Fixing climate : what past climate changes reveal about the current threatand how to counter it / Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-4501-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8090-4501-X (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Climatic changesHistory. 2. Global warming. I. Kunzig, Robert. II. Title.

QC981.8.C5B738 2008
551.6dc22

2008004445

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-4502-0
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-8090-4502-8

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Gary Comer
Friend, philanthropist, and champion of climate research

One morning in the spring of 2002, a letter came in with the pile of e-mail that Wally Broeckers assistant prints out for him each day. It was a real paper letter, delivered by the U.S. Postal Service, from someone who, like Broecker, was old enough to consider letters a normal means of communication. The writers name was Gary Comer, and as Broecker soon learned, he was the founder of Lands End, the mail-order clothing company. He was also, it seemed, a passionate yachtsman, particularly in Arctic waters, which is how he came to be writing to a climate scientist.

The previous summer, Comer explained, he had been cruising off Greenland on his 151-foot motor yacht, Turmoil . Almost on a lark, he and his shipmates had decided to see if they could navigate the Northwest Passage, along the northern coast of Canada all the way to Alaska. European explorers, Comer knew, had spent four centuries trying to find that seaway through the Arctic ice, before Roald Amundsen finally succeeded in 1906. The most notorious of many failures had occurred in the 1840s, when the two ships of a British expedition commanded by Sir John Franklin were trapped in ice off King William Island for a year and a half; all hands ultimately died, many while trying to walk out, and some were apparently cannibalized by their starving shipmates. Such precedents hadnt worried Comer, because he had his seaplane with him. But neither had he expected to steam right through the passage in nineteen days, his path barely encumbered by ice. That unnerving experience had gotten him concerned about global warmingand, being the sort of man who creates $2-billion companies from scratch, he wanted to take action. As he began to educate himself on the subject, one name he kept hearing was that of Broecker, who as long ago as 1975 had been one of the first scientists to warn of the dangers of global warming. Would Broecker like to come out to Chicago for a meetingsoon, please?

As Broecker read this, he was sitting in his office at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, on the Hudson River about ten miles north of New York City. It was a room he had sat in for more than forty years, in a building he had helped build in 1954a rambling, one-story cinderblock building, frequently added on to since. Morning light was streaming through the bank of windows on one wall, past the twenty-foot-long stuffed blue snake that hung above his expansive wooden desk. It was falling in dusty beams onto the bearded lady mannequin and the poster of Dolly Parton reclining on a haystack; onto the dozens of smaller photos of the graduate students and postdocs he had mentored; onto the long line of bound PhD theses that filled his bookshelf; and onto the motley assortment of curios and mementoes that a scavenging mind had collected over four decades of scientific roaming, on land and at sea. Later, after they had gotten to know each other, Comer would refer to Broeckers beloved Geochemistry Building as the pigsty, but Broecker was happy there, like a pig in mud. Science is his lifeand he had managed to make that office and Lamont into a world center of climate science.

Broecker wrote back that his teaching duties precluded a trip to Chicago for at least two weeks. A few days later he got a phone call: Comer couldnt wait that long, and would come to him. They met for breakfast at the Clinton Inn in Tenafly, New Jersey, not far from Broeckers home, and not far from the airport where Comers jet had landed. Scientist and billionaire immediately hit it off. Both had been born within a few years of each otherComer in 1927, Broecker in 1931to working-class families in Chicago; Comer had never gone to college. Both men were straight talkers, both were at the top of their fields, and both abhorred red tape. They even liked the same breakfast, eggs sunny side up.

Since his trip through the Northwest Passage, Comer had sold Lands End and been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He wanted to do something about climate, and do it fast. Broecker, for his part, had been thinking of retiring. Comers enthusiasm rejuvenated him. Over the next four years, Comer would invest his own money in climate research in a uniquely red-tapeless way: by giving it to established scientists to hire graduate or postdoctoral fellows. Broecker would select many of those mentors and give the program its scientific focus. Somewhere along the way Comer suggested Broecker write a popular book about climate. Broecker decided he needed the help of a popular science writer and invited Kunzig, whose book about oceanography he had liked, to collaborate with him. This book is the result.

Broecker has been studying climate, and in particular the way it has changed in the past, for more than half a century now. His career has coincided precisely with the emergence of man-made global warming as a problem. In the summer of 1955, while Broecker was a graduate student collecting some of the first radiocarbon dates of the end of the Ice Age, Charles David Keeling was making the first reliable measurements of the amount of carbon dioxide, or CO, in the atmosphere. Within a few years Keeling would report that the CO concentration was risingas it has continued to do relentlessly ever since, in direct relation to the use of fossil fuels. In recent years the rise has even accelerated, thanks largely to the coal-fueled economic booms in China and India, but also to the failure of the industrialized countries to restrain their own emissions.

The volume of research has followed the same upward trend; climate science is incomparably more sophisticated and specialized than when Broecker started out. Since 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of hundreds of scientists from around the world, has tracked the swelling mountain of evidence in a way that no individual scientist possibly could. In its latest and most urgent report, released in 2007, the IPCC said the evidence showed unequivocally that Earth is warming; eleven of the last twelve years rank among the twelve warmest since 1850. The report concluded with more than 90 percent certainty that the warming is caused by greenhouse gas emissionsand thus that it will continue. Reviewing the forecasts from more than a dozen computer models, the IPCC gave as its best estimate that Earths average temperature would warm anywhere from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius (3.2 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100, depending in part on how much CO we emit between now and then. The reasons for concern, the panel said soberly, had gotten stronger since its last report in 2001.