David Schlom’s Climate Truth Blog

Hello All!

This is my first posting so bear with me while I get this sorted out. I am a science journalist and educator — I specialize in space and earth science topics. In my work, I am fortunate to be able to talk directly to some of the world’s leading scientists in their fields. I also feel a tremendous responsibility toward them to get their scientific findings out to a wider audience and help that audience to understand what they are doing and why it is important work. For example, this past week I have interviewed a volcanologist and a paleontologist and lined up an interview with a very famous scientist (can’t divulge who it is just yet but hang in there). One of my favorite interview subjects is Annie Druyan, the widow of the late Carl Sagan, who warned us about the impending climate crisis back in the 70s and 80s when most folks just weren’t paying much attention. Al Gore certainly was and Dr. Sagan was one of his greatest influences.

So that’s what I do and why I have some creds in this field. I am NOT a climate scientist and I do not claim to be an expert. But I do have access to people who are. And I talk with them a lot to try and clear up obfuscations and misunderstandings that the general public has on this issue.

For my first blog — I’d like to play Al Gore for you and tell you about two teachers I had (hopefully you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth). Unlike Mr. Gore, I had tremendous respect for both of these teachers. One, I’ll call Dr. R and the other I’ll call Dr. H. In Dr. R’s astronomy and Earth Science classes at CSU Chico, we learned about the greenhouse process. He went to Harvard and actually was there when Sagan was and like Sagan, became very interested in the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. Venus is the world in our solar system most like hell. It’s surface temperatures are 900 degrees F and the surface pressure there would be the equivalent of being under a thousand feet of water! Dr. R then compared our modest greenhouse effect and explained to us (using mathematics — the language of science) how our climate balanced the incoming energy from the sun with the outgoing infrared energy that was radiated back out to space at night — cooling our planet. A little bit of a greenhouse effect is a good thing — it keeps our planet from turning to a frozen ball of ice. Without it — the Earth would be COLD beyond imagining. Look at the geological evidence all around you — ice has played an important part in Earth history and we oscillate between warmth and ice. I’ll discuss the reasons for this in a later post. Dr. R then posed a question to us: what happens if we continue to pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to overcome the modest greenhouse effect and start down the road to becoming more like Venus? We did the calculations and I was astonished to see that we really receive about the same amount of energy from the Sun as Venus does (it is a bit less because of our distance from our star but not enough to account for the temperature extremes — Venus shouldn’t be that hot!). In that class, I first heard the words “Global Warming.” It was 1988.

Then I had a meteorology professor (Dr. H) a brilliant and kind man who spent lots of outside time with his students. He had a friend who was a state climatologist who had compiled massive amounts of temperature data for the state. His take on “warming” was that it was merely an illusion — that temperatures were being taken in the wrong locations — cities — and that the anomalous temperatures were due to the urban heat island effect.

So I’d bounce back and forth between these two learned professors. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t sure about this issue but I was informed and decided to pay close attention to it. Needless to say, I made up my mind on this quite a while ago when the data started to indicate planetwide warming and the melting of ice all over the world started to make a lot of noise with those drip…drip…drips…

Recently I saw both of my professors. Dr. R was right all along but never gloated or crusaded about it. He was just a brilliant man and a person that respected the scientific process. Dr. H is the one who really amazed me. Last I heard, he has changed his mind about climate change. That’s when science is at its best. When the data holds up to scrutiny, critical minds change their opinions and knowledge moves forward.

But not always. In my next post, I’ll examine why GW persists as a “controversy” rather than an accepted part of life in the 21st century and why intelligent, well educated, good hearted people can be dead wrong. We’ll leave the stupid, uneducated and mean spirited ones to themselves.

Dave Schlom

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 10:22 am, and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.