The Earth's Climate
The Earth's Climate
Dante Lauretta
Planetary science is going to become more and more prominent because global climate change is going to start to become a real concern. It’s going to start to really hit home that it’s happening, and people will no longer be able to deny it. Understanding planetary systems and feedbacks between emissions of gases into the atmosphere and weather patterns, and erosion, and volcanism, and glaciations and all this is going to be very intensely studied. We’ll be able to look at Mars and look at Venus and start to understand planetary systems as a whole. In order to understand what’s happening to our home planet, we’re going to have to understand how other planetary systems work as well, so I think that’s going to drive a lot of interest in planetary science.
Alexander Pavlov
Planetary science in general is very interesting because it allows us to extend our knowledge of the atmosphere to other places. Many people are just focusing on the climate issue. It’s very important. But sometimes you get a much more general perspective if you start to look at atmospheres which are drastically different, and actually you can learn something about the current Earth’s atmosphere by comparing. Even though we study the atmosphere of Mars just because it’s interesting by itself, we actually can learn quite a few things about Earth, about how the Earth’s atmospheric composition changes over time.
When you’re looking at roughly a hundred years’ history of the Earth, you can’t really understand whether what we observe right now is a fluke, or something natural, or something caused. Global warming, for example—was it caused or was it something just naturally existing? To understand that, we really need to look how climate and composition of the atmosphere changed over time for billions of years—because climate system does change over time, slowly or very fast; it just depends on what’s going on in the Earth. By studying the past, we’re trying to understand what’s going on now.
William Boynton
I think one of the things we may be getting into, to some extent, is worrying a little bit more about what’s going on with Earth’s climate. What can some of the things that happen with atmospheres on other planets tell us about things we might not understand about the atmosphere on Earth? I think that’s one place where it might make sense for us to move off in.
The Earth's Climate, Page 2
The Earth's Climate, Page 2
Robert Strom
When I first started this [research], global warming was well established. The thing that was very controversial was what’s causing it. Is it human caused, or is it a natural phenomenon that is occurring? That was debatable when I was teaching. When I retired, that was no longer debatable. It’s actually human caused, from emitting greenhouse gases, CO 2. This all started during the Industrial Revolution. We started getting out of equilibrium in about 1850 or so.
At that point I decided I was going to write a book on it. It took me five years to do it and I just finished it now. It became very clear to me that we had an enormous problem that was being ignored by politicians. It’s a problem not for me because I’m not going to live long enough, but it’s a problem for our grandchildren. They’re going to have an awful problem unless we do something about it now. It could lead to catastrophe. In fact at the extreme warming it could easily lead to the end of civilization as we know it, unless something is done now. We have to do it now. We can’t wait 30 years, until everything starts falling apart. If you wait that long it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do about it because of the inertia of the system. That’s why we have to start now. So that book [Hot House: Global Climate Change and the Human Condition] is dedicated to the grandchildren of the world. I hope that the parents and grandparents will do something about it.
When the grandchildren grow up and get to be the leaders, if we haven’t done anything about it it’s going to be too late. There’s nothing we can do about it, except some very expensive things which I call geo-engineering which scare me almost as much as global warming.
The optimistic thing is, we can do it. We have the technology. Technology got us into this mess and it can get us out. So I’m optimistic in the sense that yes, if we go ahead and start now—and they’re some encouraging signs that we may be doing this—we can conquer it. We’re still going to experience global warming, but the thing is, it’s possible to keep it below the critical level, so it isn’t the disaster. Attitudes are beginning to change, which is good.
I’m really concerned about it, because I love humanity. Gosh, you know, if you look at some of the kids, they’re brilliant. Some of the students that I deal with are great, wonderful people and extremely smart. To lose that to me would just be awful, a tragedy that I don’t even want to think about. So that’s why I wrote the book. That’s my sayonara.