Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Page B
Authors: Elizabeth Kolbert
Tags: Non-Fiction
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led to periods of prolonged drought. More recently, a group of researchers examining ocean-sediment cores collected off the coast of Venezuela produced an even more detailed record of rainfall in the area. They found that the region experienced a series of severe, “multiyear drought events” beginning around A.D. 750. The collapse of the Classic Mayan civilization, which has been described as “a demographic disaster as profound as any other in human history,” is thought to have cost several million lives.
The climate shifts that affected past cultures predate industrialization by hundreds—or, in some cases, thousands—of years. They reflect the climate system’s innate variability and could not have been foreseen by the societies that experienced them. Caught by surprise, the Akkadians made sense of their suffering as divine retribution. The climate shifts predicted for the coming century, by contrast, are attributable to forces whose causes we know and whose magnitude we will determine.
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS, is situated just south of Columbia University’s main campus, at the corner of Broadway and West 112th Street. The institute is not well marked, but most New Yorkers would probably recognize the building: its ground floor is home to Tom’s Restaurant, the coffee shop made famous by Seinfeld .
GISS, an outpost of NASA, started out, forty-five years ago, as a planetary-research center; today, its major function is making climate forecasts. GISS employs about a hundred and fifty people, many of whom spend their days working on calculations that may—or may not—end up being incorporated in the institute’s climate model. Some work on algorithms that describe the behavior of the atmosphere, some on the behavior of the oceans, some on vegetation, some on clouds, and some on making sure that all these algorithms, when they are combined, produce results that seem consistent with the real world. (Once, when some refinements were made to the model, rain nearly stopped falling over the world’s rainforests.) The latest version of the GISS model, called ModelE, consists of 125,000 lines of computer code.
GISS’s director, James Hansen, occupies a spacious, almost comically cluttered office on the institute’s seventh floor. (I must have expressed some uneasiness the first time I visited him, because the following day I received an e-mail assuring me that the office was “a lot better organized than it used to be.”) Hansen, who is sixty-three, is a spare man with a lean face and a fringe of brown hair. Although he has probably done as much to publicize the dangers of global warming as any other scientist, in person he is reticent almost to the point of shyness. When I asked him how he had come to play such a prominent role, he just shrugged. “Circumstances,” he said.
Hansen first became interested in climate change in the mid-1970s. Under the direction of James Van Allen (for whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named), he had written his doctoral dissertation on the climate of Venus. In it, he had proposed that the planet, which has an average surface temperature of 876 degrees Fahrenheit, was kept warm by a smoggy haze; soon afterward, a space probe showed that Venus was actually insulated by an atmosphere that consists of 96 percent carbon dioxide. When solid data began to show what was happening to greenhouse gas levels on Earth, Hansen became, in his words, “captivated.” He decided that a planet whose atmosphere could change in the course of a human lifetime was more interesting than one that was going to continue, for all intents and purposes, to broil away forever. A group of scientists at NASA had put together a computer program to try to improve weather forecasting using satellite data. Hansen and a team of half a dozen other researchers set out to modify it, in order to make longer-range forecasts about what would happen to global temperatures as greenhouse
The climate shifts that affected past cultures predate industrialization by hundreds—or, in some cases, thousands—of years. They reflect the climate system’s innate variability and could not have been foreseen by the societies that experienced them. Caught by surprise, the Akkadians made sense of their suffering as divine retribution. The climate shifts predicted for the coming century, by contrast, are attributable to forces whose causes we know and whose magnitude we will determine.
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS, is situated just south of Columbia University’s main campus, at the corner of Broadway and West 112th Street. The institute is not well marked, but most New Yorkers would probably recognize the building: its ground floor is home to Tom’s Restaurant, the coffee shop made famous by Seinfeld .
GISS, an outpost of NASA, started out, forty-five years ago, as a planetary-research center; today, its major function is making climate forecasts. GISS employs about a hundred and fifty people, many of whom spend their days working on calculations that may—or may not—end up being incorporated in the institute’s climate model. Some work on algorithms that describe the behavior of the atmosphere, some on the behavior of the oceans, some on vegetation, some on clouds, and some on making sure that all these algorithms, when they are combined, produce results that seem consistent with the real world. (Once, when some refinements were made to the model, rain nearly stopped falling over the world’s rainforests.) The latest version of the GISS model, called ModelE, consists of 125,000 lines of computer code.
GISS’s director, James Hansen, occupies a spacious, almost comically cluttered office on the institute’s seventh floor. (I must have expressed some uneasiness the first time I visited him, because the following day I received an e-mail assuring me that the office was “a lot better organized than it used to be.”) Hansen, who is sixty-three, is a spare man with a lean face and a fringe of brown hair. Although he has probably done as much to publicize the dangers of global warming as any other scientist, in person he is reticent almost to the point of shyness. When I asked him how he had come to play such a prominent role, he just shrugged. “Circumstances,” he said.
Hansen first became interested in climate change in the mid-1970s. Under the direction of James Van Allen (for whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named), he had written his doctoral dissertation on the climate of Venus. In it, he had proposed that the planet, which has an average surface temperature of 876 degrees Fahrenheit, was kept warm by a smoggy haze; soon afterward, a space probe showed that Venus was actually insulated by an atmosphere that consists of 96 percent carbon dioxide. When solid data began to show what was happening to greenhouse gas levels on Earth, Hansen became, in his words, “captivated.” He decided that a planet whose atmosphere could change in the course of a human lifetime was more interesting than one that was going to continue, for all intents and purposes, to broil away forever. A group of scientists at NASA had put together a computer program to try to improve weather forecasting using satellite data. Hansen and a team of half a dozen other researchers set out to modify it, in order to make longer-range forecasts about what would happen to global temperatures as greenhouse
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