Yesterday was Earth Day, and it was still chilly for late April here in what they call the mid-Atlantic states, but what I always think of as the north country. We are far north for a boy who grew up south of Miami. Nevertheless, around four yesterday afternoon I threw on my jacket and walked across the Penn State campus to the HUB, where Christopher Joyce, science correspondent for National Public Radio, was giving a talk.
His talk was only in part about the Earth and climate. He was mostly there to talk about the importance of telling science stories. Scientists talk to each other in the jargon of science, which is a shorthand, with many words that would take a sentence or two to translate into understandable English. It’s perfectly serviceable in a journal article or at a conference, but it cuts the general public out of the discussion almost completely. His job, he feels, is to get the scientists to speak in the common language of his radio listeners, people who are interested in scientific discovery, curious people who want to be enlightened.
I go to quite a few talks, many of them by scientists, and this was the first one in memory that was not presented with a screen and a PowerPoint projection. Instead, he played us audio clips from stories that he and the other half dozen science reporters at NPR had made. Some of the outtakes, trying to cajole the scientist into making a point, were quite funny. One, about the devastation of last summer’s forest fires in the West, was saddening. You could hear the heartbreak in the ecologist’s voice as he viewed the miles of burned forest without a living green leaf.
Just the week before I had been to a talk by one of Penn State’s brilliant climate scientists, Richard Alley, who spoke about rising sea levels. Alley is a scientist who knows how to speak to the public. He is entertaining, convincing, without an agenda. He tells his audience what scientists know about manmade global warming – it is accelerating – and what they don’t – when specific events will take place. But he used the phrase “scientists are nervous” more than once.
On Sunday, my wife and I planted three apple saplings up the hill behind the house. Across the country, the Protestant denomination we belong to, the United Church of Christ, is planting one million trees in a program called Mission 4/1 Earth. It’s good, but it is not enough. It’s hard to worry about something that will mostly happen at some uncertain time in the future. We are complacent and scientists argue among themselves about, mostly minor, uncertainties.
The Doomsday Clock was created 66 years ago to put a face on the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today it includes other threats, including climate change. I think we need an Earth-day Clock, with the decades ticking off the changes we can expect. In 2020, an ice-free Northern Passage in summer; in 2030, the Jamestown Settlement sinks below the water; in 2040, the Southwest U.S. is an American Sahara. The Doomsday Clock helped scientists speak to the public, and something was done. It’s a race, and we’re all losing.
Scary, scary, scary. My two sons and I disagree on whether or not the world’s climate is truly changing terribly. I’m directing them to this article.
Hi Walter.
I can read in your post that you are very concerned. I want to let you know how the ignorant opposition views these warnings.
Somehow, I am completely convinced that there is nothing to worry about. I was first told that the Earth faced imminent disaster in the 1960’s. That life on Earth would be unbearable by 1990, 2000 at the latest.
I just can’t believe current warnings are anything other than doom-mongering, mostly sincere, by people who have been true believers since childhood.
If climate scientists were active proponents of nuclear energy as a substitute power source, I would be more likely to believe that their motivation was something other than a Thoreau like revulsion of industrial society.
Hi Steve,
I do hope you’re right. I don’t want my children, and prospective grandchildren, to live in a devastated world we have left them. Especially not when we could do something about it. I found this link enlightening in connection with a friend who is a skeptic and says we are in a long cooling trend: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47
Walt