The moment of awe lasted exactly that -- a moment -- and then the calculations began. How fast would the station have to be going to pass from horizon to horizon in a matter of minutes? Factor in Earth's orbit in the opposite direction, and the lengthened radius given its distance from Earth...
This was, in fact, what they did for fun after full days of presentations. Relaxation after hours spent discussing the dating of glaciers in Antarctica and New Zealand, the modeling of ancient rainfall patterns and ocean currents, and the monitoring of earth quakes on Greenlandic glaciers.
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The late Land's End billionaire Gary Comer caught the climate bug on a boat trip to the Arctic. He and his shipmates decided to dare the famed Northwest Passage, and were shocked at how easy it was. Where was the ice?
The question pulled at him and he, who had never gone to college, immediately dove into the science of historical Ice Ages. One name kept coming up again and again in his research -- Wally Broecker -- a climatologist at Columbia who, among other contributions, put forward the idea of a "conveyor belt" to explain global ocean circulation.
When Comer and Broecker finally met they hit it off immediately. Believing that a better understanding of past abrupt climate changes is critical to averting one now, Comer quickly began pouring money into the work of Broecker and his colleagues.
For the last half dozen years the group of scientists, postdocs and graduate students funded by Comer have gathered on his remote Wisconsin estate to push the science forward through formal presentations, conversations over beer, and even folk songs around the campfire.
Although Comer passed away recently, the tradition has continued.
Which is how I found myself, Tuesday evening, sitting around a campfire joining in the chorus of a U Penn professor's song about Milancovitch theory (which hypothesizes that Ice Ages are spurred by changes in Earth's orbital cycles).
The things scientists can do now are amazing. Plankton shells on the deep ocean floor can tell us about precipitation patterns thousands of years ago. Calcites in ancient river basins can tell us when glaciers thousands of miles away melted.
And what all of this adds up to is: when climate changes, it changes abruptly. Past ice ages have built over periods of about 90,000 years, and warmed in about 10,000 years. Human civilization has never experienced warming of this magnitude before, but the tastes we have had haven't been pleasant.
Villagers in the European Alps had front row seats for the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century. In one instance, a rush of melt water washed away a Swiss village, taking out 500 homes and killing 50 people.
The only thing scarier than what scientists know about climate change is what they don't know.
The last time Earth's climate was near what it is today, half of Greenland was gone. And here's the really scary part: scientists don't know much about how glaciers melt. It's one thing if the water melts slowly and ripples into glacial rivers called "tongues." It's another thing if the melt water seeps into cracks in the glacier and makes it down to the glacier's bed. A melted bed could unhinge the glacier and speed up melting exponentially.
In the case of the Swiss glacier, plumbing -- the way the glacier melted -- was the problem. Glacier dynamics can be counter-intuitive. For instance, "termination," when the glacier begins melting rapidly, comes at the moment that the glacier is at its biggest.
This is was the state of the Swiss glacier in 1818. Its front was sitting at the edge of a steep slope. When big chunks of ice would break off its front (a normal process called calving), they would fall into the valley below. There, they broke apart and refroze, forming an ice wall that closed off the narrow valley.
When spring came, this wall dammed the Danse River, which normally would have rushed with melt water. The villagers saw the inevitable, but couldn't act quickly enough -- the melt water burst through before they were able to carve a small tunnel to release the accumulated water in at a manageable pace. And away they went.
So where does that leave us now? When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its most recent report in 2007, it updated its 2001 predictions to show how much quicker things were happening than they had expected. Already, IPCC scientists are saying the 2007 report, too, was too conservative.
Gary Comer was a smart investor, though. He didn't put all his money on the public and policymakers waking up to the science in time. He also put money into developing tools to get us out of this cesspool of greenhouse gases if we don't act in time.
The last presentation of the conference was by Klaus Lackner, a Columbia professor and an entrepreneur. Before his death, Comer partnered with Lackner to build a synthetic tree with "leaves" coated with a resin to capture carbon dioxide at higher-than-natural rates and then sequester it.
The project is still in its adolescence, but provides a counterpoint to the runaway disaster to which so much of conference's findings pointed. We got ourselves into this mess and maybe -- just maybe -- we'll be able to get ourselves out.
