By BILL CHAISSON
I began working as a journalist while I was still a professor. I started out as a music journalist and feature writer, doing freelance work for the local alt-weekly in Rochester, New York and for a friend of mine who was an editor in Denmark. I was a professor of geology and had a contract position at the University of Rochester. The school paid me half the salary of an assistant professor (“hard money”), and I was left to raise the rest of my salary through writing proposals for grants to pay for my research (“soft money”).
I was in a Ph.D. program for 8 years — 6 to 8 years is pretty normal in geology — then did post-doctoral work for a couple years and then worked as a professor for five years. This added up to a 15-year career in academic geology. My speciality was climate science, which I got into largely because that is where the grant money was for a person with my interests. I was trained as a micro-paleontologist and biostratigrapher, which means I studied very small fossils (the size of sand grains) and I used them to build age models. An age model is required in order to be able to know when an event happened in the geologic past.
There is growing concern, especially among young people, about what climate is going to do in the next several decades. During my working life as a scientist I studied what climate was doing between 5 and 2 million years ago (the Pliocene Epoch) and what it was doing in the last half million years (the late Pleistocene). The older period represents the period during which the latest period of glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere got underway and the latter represents a period of very large amplitude swings back and forth between glacial and interglacial intervals.
In the 1970s it was discovered that glaciations are periodic. During the latest glacial interval (there have been several in Earth’s 4 billion year history) the initial smaller-amplitude period (glacial + interglacial) was 40,000 years. After 1 million years ago, when it shifted to a larger-amplitude 100,000-year period; so the last glacial period was the ninth one since the shift. Geologists are literally waiting for the 10th one.
I write about this as a matter of fact because I went to sea five times on deep-sea drilling expeditions, and we cored the sediments of the ocean floor and brought them up to the ship to examine them. I have seen these climate cycles in ocean sediments, starting with regular changes of color (which represented regular changes in mineralogy) and continuing through other lines of evidence, including my own work with fossil planktonic foraminifera, one-celled organisms that make carbonate shells that collect on the sea floor.
• • •
Hardly anyone claims that there has been no climate change in the past. The evidence is too overwhelming. The common claim now is that climate change is entirely natural and that human-caused (“anthropogenic”) climate change is a myth. Climate scientists who are familiar with the ocean record scratch their heads at beliefs like that because they have been immersed in the record of natural change for years. They know how quickly climate has changed in the past and they know that what is happening now is unprecedented.
Bolides (meteors, comets) have struck the Earth in the past (and left craters) and changed climate abruptly. The most well known is the event that apparently caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (and many other less charismatic animals, including nearly all of my beloved foraminifera), but there have been others. There have also been massive volcanic eruptions on a scale not repeated during human history (or even human existence) that abruptly changed climate. But we would definitely have noticed if either of these causes were responsible for what is going on now.
I think baseball fans in the 1990s could tell that something about the game had changed. People who had watched baseball for decades could see that some of the players had become enormously muscular and it was affecting their batting and pitching abilities. People knew the players were using steroids, that they were “juicing” their performance. That is the way climate scientists look at anthropogenic climate change: they know how this game works, they know its rhythms, its amplitudes, so when something weird happens, they look for a cause.
That the cause is greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, from the burning of fossil fuels is not really in doubt in the scientific community. The increase has not been linear over time because the ocean has absorbed a great deal of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and become measurably more acidic as a result (and marine biologists have a growing understanding of the consequences).
The change does not take the form of uniform warming either. That the average global temperature has been warming is the measurement of an abstraction. Scientists know that, but they forget that the media doesn’t know that and the public doesn’t know that. As someone who changed from a career in science to a career in media, I am well placed to say that scientists have a ways to go before they get good at explaining what the heck is going on with the climate.
Wisely, one thing that they have begun to emphasize is the weirdness. Records started falling all over the place when steroid use became widespread in baseball. Records are already falling all over the place when people watch the weather. When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City on October 29, 2012 it was an unprecedented event in several ways. At least one climate scientist predicted at the time that it would become the new normal. Cyclone Idai hit the east coast of Africa on March 14 and was, if anything, more devastating than Sandy. Here we go.
• • •
As someone who worked around other scientists for many years, the idea that they have cooked up anthropogenic climate change as a conspiracy to get rich with grant money is kind of hilarious. Scientists are intensely dedicated to funding their own research. Funding for climate research has not expanded at the rate that the number of climate scientists has grown. Therefore scientists are very competitive and quite keen to prove their colleagues wrong, and getting them to collaborate can be a bit like herding goats. The competitiveness also inspires very rigorous peer review. Many scientists who challenge climate change can’t get their papers published, not because there is a conspiracy against them, but because standards are very high, and their studies are poorly organized, use cherry picked data and ignore much of the existing literature on climate change.
Climate scientists aren’t looking for climate change. They are just studying nature and they expect it to behave in a predictable way based on their study of millions of years of history. They are like baseball fans who think they know what to expect from batters and then are puzzled when players start hitting balls further than they ever have.
I stopped studying climate because it was too hard to get funding for my research. People still cite some of papers though, which is gratifying. Now climate science is more like watching baseball; I’m not playing, but I know the rules of the game and like watching people play who are good at it. And the climate scientists are still watching nature like it’s a baseball game. But the game I’m watching is being played just like I remember it, but the game they’re watching just keeps getting weirder.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.