Global Warming Researchers Say They Need Breathing Room

It's an exhilarating time for climate researchers: The pressing questions of when the greenhouse effect will begin to be felt and how severe it will be have thrust their work into the eyes of the public and the policymakers. But while high visibility has injected money into the climate research field and imbued scientists with a sense of social relevance, it's also brought frustrations. Climatologists say the frustrations include dealing with impatient politicians and the media, who often trivialize the issue, cast it falsely as a raging scientific debate, and demand quick answers and simple courses of action. And while many scientists see opportunities expanding for young researchers, others worry that once a politically expedient "solution" is reached to deal with the emissions of greenhouse gases--regardless of the state of the actual research--the funding bubble will burst, just as acid rain research funding did two years ago. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., is not intimidated by the pressures of public policy demands and media scrutiny. In his mind there are three types of scientists who gravitate to a hot research topic such as global warming. There are those who are passionately interested, those who will work in any field to solve a real-world problem--and then there is the third class, the contrarians, whom he defines as "the people out there trying to get attention by taking the other side." Schneider says that the media never tire in their efforts to create a "raging debate" over whether the greenhouse effect is a real phenomenon, when in fact the debate within the scientific community is more about the timing and degree of global warming. Another top atmospheric scientist agrees. "Some people in our field get very frustrated that a very simple story has been distorted enormously," says Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, a National Oceano- graphic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility in Prince-ton, N.J. "The press amplifies the signal at the extremes of the problem and finds scientists to go along." Mahlman describes an "unstable interaction between the scientist and the press," in which researchers must be careful in everything they say to avoid having it blown out of proportion. "There is an ethical responsibility of the scientist to remain squeaky clean," he says. "We must remember we're experts in science, not experts in public policy." That is, he restricts his comments to what is known about global climate change and leaves the weighing of alternatives and cobbling of solutions to the greenhouse gas emissions problems up to politicians. Despite its recent emergence into the public consciousness, the concept of a greenhouse effect has a distinguished history. "This issue is one that's been scientifically agreed upon as a fundamental fact for more than a century," says University of Washington atmospheric scientist Robert Charlson. For instance, in 1896, Swedish researcher Svanta Arrhenius published a paper entitled, "On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground" (Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 41:251). In 1929, another Swede, Anders AngstrOm, saw that there was more than just gases affecting global climate--dust particles, such as sulfates, scatter sunlight (Geografiska Annaler, 11:156-69). Interest in global warming perked up after Syukuro Manabe at Princeton University did the first correct calculation, showing that increasing CO2 could cause global warming (Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 24:241, 1967). Today the field has expanded to the point at which about 20 major groups worldwide are engaged in climate modeling. --S.V. But the pressure to say something definitive, even in the absence of scientific certainty, is enormous. "I was verbally abused in a congressional hearing last October because I wouldn't testify that the best thing to do about global warming is to do nothing," Mahlman says. Schneider's style is different; he dives frequently into the treacherous public policy waters. He recently met with Canadian and United States officials preparing to attend the Earth Summit slated for June in Brazil and argued for a 25 percent reduction in current CO2 emissions. He has also leaped from the ivory tower with his advocacy of a carbon tax to better reflect the cost of fossil fuels to the global environment. Robert Charlson, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, who is less inclined toward the limelight, has seen his recent work on atmospheric sulfate particles "trivialized" in the mass media. While science publications gave knowledgeable coverage, Newsweek--a wide-circulation magazine--seriously misrepresented the report, Charlson contends. In a February 3 article entitled "The Benefits of Dirty Air--Pollution may negate the greenhouse effect," the magazine said his work indicates that the same sulfates that cause acid rain are the solution to global warming and that scientists are constantly reversing course--condemning air pollution one week and praising it the next. Charlson says that his paper, the result of a major collaborative effort, demonstrated that atmospheric dust particles from sulfate emissions can, to a limited degree, negate some of CO2's warming effect (Science, 255:423-29). However, this light scattering is not a panacea for global warming, since it is in effect only during the daytime and only over heavily industrialized sections of the globe. The point was that sulfate aerosols are significant factors in the global warming equation and are worthy of further study and inclusion in climate models. "There's no debate among scientists on the existence of a greenhouse effect. But the uncertainty is over what the weather is going to do," says Charlson. And the answer, despite public pressure, may take two decades or more to produce. "So, we better bite the bullet and get on with it," he says. Charlson sees a danger that the pressure to solve the global warming problem will lead to a move toward "targeted research," a centralized research program with specific objectives dictated by a single agency or committee. "I feel strongly that the topic is fundamentally a research topic that has to be given breathing room and must not be dictated by the policy types," he says. But Michael McCracken, an applied physicist working on global climate models at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLL), does not oppose targeted research efforts. "There can't be one type of research," he says-- targeted and basic studies can coexist. He sees the need for the research effort being coordinated on the federal level through the Committee for Earth and Environmental Science, chaired by Frederick Bernthal, a deputy director at the National Science Foundation, and with members from a number of federal agencies involved in global climate change. Targeted research efforts like global warming are bound to set up an antagonism in the academic community, because this "mission-oriented" research tends to be done at a large center like LLL or NCAR, where researchers from a wide variety of fields and expensive resources, such as supercomputers, can be concentrated in a single location. Plus, McCracken feels it's difficult to integrate and coordinate independent-minded academicians in addressing a large policy issue like this. "Trying to get academic researchers to work together is like herding cats," he says. Academic investigators are good at focusing on very specific problems and training researchers, but not in putting together large, multi-component, cross-disciplinary research efforts, he says. "The trend scientifically is that one investigator cannot put out a result and expect it to be accepted," he says, as was happening in the 1970s. The models are now too complex and the trend has shifted heavily toward collaboration and integration of research. In fact, Charlson's "trivialized" paper typifies this new wave in atmospheric science. To gain acceptance of the role of sulfate aerosols in global warming and to provide rigorous review of the results, Charlson brought together the top U.S. climate modelers to produce the paper. Pennsylvania State University is responding to the immensity of the climate modeling challenge and is providing an effective environment for collaborative, multidisciplinary research, according to Eric Barron, a climatologist who directs the Earth System Science Center. The Penn State center was established in 1986 and was designed to prevent it from being isolated from the university's traditional disciplinary departments, as has often happened in the past with academic environmental institutes. Environmental institutes too often end up as broad departments with diffuse interests and as such engender little respect from their peers in geophysics, meteorology, or civil engineering. To avoid disciplinary isolation, Penn State gave the center money--$750,000--to hire new faculty, but did not grant the center the power to grant tenure. So the new hires had to come through the departments. "It makes the center eager to work with the departments and the departments eager to work with the center," Barron says. The center then acts as an aggressive advocate for cross-disciplinary research projects. To support this research, the center has recently purchased its own Cray YMP-2E supercomputer. Barron says the system works: "We really have attracted top- notch people," he notes, adding that researchers hired through the center are not scientific snobs and are willing to cross disciplinary boundaries. "It's sort of a new bunch of scientists these days. The problems are demanding it." Barron echoes Charlson's plea for investigational freedom. "If you've got really good people," he says, "you cannot direct them. Good scientists are in their jobs because they like to follow their noses." Global climate change research is definitely one of the growth areas in terms of federal funding, says Barron. Under the president's fiscal year 1993 budget, about $1.4 billion would be allocated to agencies such as NASA and NOAA to do research and administer grants. "It's been a healthy increase, but still probably isn't healthy enough," given the magnitude of the problem, Barron says. The chance to do socially relevant research is a big plus for Joyce Penner, an atmospheric chemist at LLL. "It's exciting to be in a field that has real relevance to real issues and lives," she says, noting that she would never chose to work on "esoteric problems." She has her own tactic for dealing with the limelight. "I stay out of it," she says. When she does discuss global climate issues and is pressed for her opinion, "I tell them I'm fairly confident that we will see a temperature change in the future. I'm not confident when, and I'm not confident how much." But Penner says she sees a danger that the visibility of the issue, which has provided steady growth in funding and in the field, could lead to heavy-handed governmental control of research and, eventually, to a massive downturn in funding. "In a certain sense it's provided more funding, but there's a fear that our science will be driven strictly by political decisions," she says. For instance, political decisions were made on how to deal with sulfur emissions that cause acid rain. The research budget was cut by 40 percent in the fiscal year 1990 budget, the acid rain reductions strategies were embodied in the Clean Air Act passed in 1991, and the issue has been relegated to the back burner, Penner says. She fears a similar fate for global warming research. "People are concerned about the policy going forward without the knowledge base being there. Once a decision is made, the funding base is cut and you never get to know if you made the right choice," she says. "I think it's dangerous to make expensive political decisions now. Later, you'll have more reasons and abilities." For now, she advocates a go-slow approach to policymakers. Penner sees research opportunities in atmospheric sciences expanding, and women are becoming more widely represented in the field--three out of 10 members of the NAS atmospheric chemistry committee are women. "It's a booming field, there's no doubt about it," says Mahlman. But the curious thing about this and any other hot- topic research field is that the funding is never proportional to the perceived severity of the problem. "The funding doesn't come up nearly as fast as the rhetoric does," he says. The jobs are out there, however. "Every grad student we've ever released from Princeton has gone on to good jobs." The importance of an interdisciplinary focus cannot be overemphasized, he says, and backgrounds in chemistry, hydrology, or biosphere ecology are necessary adjuncts to climate modeling. So what are the goals and expectations for next 10 years? LLL's McCracken says he's hesitant to make a forecast for the future of climate research. Back in 1965, the President's Science Advisory Council proclaimed that within two to three years, supercomputers would allow scientists to make useful predictions down to the regional level on CO2 and climate change. Almost 30 years later, no such fine detail is possible. In the next 10 years, he says that with the advent of massively parallel computers, researchers should begin to have the resources to attempt the really big calculations that might explain relevant questions like what caused the Little Ice Age of the 1600s to 1700s, or what effect the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo has had on world climate.

Global Warming Researchers Say They Need Breathing Room

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