INTERVIEW:Wally Broecker's concerns for the environment run deep. Forget green living and recycling, he says - the only thing that will undo our destruction is investment in radical technology, writes Belinda McKeon.
IN 1955, WHEN Wally Broecker first came face to face with the reality of climate change, it was all a bit of fun. Then 24, a graduate student in geochemistry, and a little infatuated with the new method that was radiocarbon dating, Broecker found himself on the edge of a Nevada valley, surrounded by mile upon mile of desert rock.
The landscape was brown, dusty and dry; it looked as though it had been parched since the beginning of time. And yet, glinting in its centre was perhaps the bluest lake Broecker had ever seen, 40km long and pure turquoise.
To Broecker, this was no paradox. He knew his geology, and he knew how this lake had come to be; the Ice Age had visited Nevada too, leaving glacial lakes and basins like this one in its wake. What staggered Broecker was not what was left, but the evidence of what once had been. His radiocarbon work revealed that the lake had once been much wider, that its waters had once been much higher, reaching miles up into the valley, miles away from the site of the present shimmering bowl. Vast changes in climate had wrought vast changes in the landscape, and such a close encounter with those changes, through the carbon traces that told of them, left the young Broecker exhilarated. That day in Nevada was the beginning of a career dedicated to the deciphering of the relationship between carbon and climate, between what lingers on and what changes form abruptly and momentously.
Broecker, now in his late 70s, still works in the same university in which his scientific career began - Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a lush campus overlooking the Hudson River valley in upstate New York. In the 1950s, Broecker was an assistant with a knack for carbon-dating; now, he is the university's much-loved and much-lauded professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, working every day in an office crammed with the curios of a career spent plunging through the Earth's surfaces, and of a career that has itself been crammed with ideas, discoveries, students and with collaborators. Fixing Climate, the book he has just co-authored with the science writer Robert Kunzig, is the latest on a list of some 450 publications by Broecker, but represents something of a departure for him in method and in style; usually, he writes scientific papers for journals such as Natureand American Scientist, and his previous books have been textbooks for his own students, quirky and frank, written quickly in longhand and illustrated with cartoon covers.
Those covers tap into a love of jokes and pranks that has been with Broecker all his life. At the evangelical college Wheaton, in the late 1940s, he locked a janitor in a bell tower, buried a granite bench in a pile of clay, and dumped a box of mothballs on an unpopular librarian. During a visit to Lamont by an important Chinese scientific official in the 1990s, he removed the wheels from the car of the colleague assigned to drive the visitor around. "I've always been kind of feisty," he says now, with something approaching a sheepish grin. Where did that feistiness come from, in a boy raised in a strict evangelical household, in a community scorched by the flames of hellfire every day? Broecker doesn't need to think about this answer; he's a scientist, after all. "Just my genes, I guess," he says.
Since he bought an old washing-machine engine with his paper-round money at the age of 12, hooked it up to a soap box derby car, and drove it around his Chicago neighbourhood, stopping only to chat with police - who, he says, "didn't have the heart" to arrest him - or to demand five cents of gas (and to holler "fill her up!") from an open-mouthed pump attendant, Broecker has been in search of fun in one form or another. The most thrilling moments of his career as a geoscientist, he says, have been the moments of cracking codes. "The thing that drives you is when you beat nature," he says, "when you find out the secret."
For Broecker, there have been several such moments, and each helped to further strengthen his position as a founding father of climate studies, as a pioneer and a seer. As early as 1957, he could see that rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could lead to rising sea levels and to drought, and in the 1980s his research into the phenomenon of oceanic "conveyor belts" made clear for the first time the relationship between ocean currents and the potential for abrupt and dramatic climate changes. Much of the oceanographic history Broecker still teaches at Columbia - he shows no signs of retiring, no appetite for the abrupt changes that it, in turn, would bring - is in fact the history that he has shaped and made over the course of his career.
And, if Broecker has his way, he'll continue to make history in climate studies - this time, by helping to bring about the technological action that, he believes, is our only chance of arresting the catastrophe of global warming. Fixing Climateis a manifesto for such action, a sober fulfilment of the illustration on the cover of Broecker's last dashed-off textbook, Fossil Fuel CO2 and the Angry Climate Beast, which showed a sweating man on the verge of poking a vicious-looking dragon. Fixing Climateneeds no cartoons to make clear that the level of CO2 currently being emitted is a prank and a provocation that could prove fatal for those doing the poking.
"We're doing a very, very stupid thing with the planet," says Broecker, "and we have to wake up. We need to be on a war footing. I mean, if there were a war, it would get done, it would be the priority, rather than a 10th priority." And to posit environmental action even as a 10th priority of the current administration is to be overly optimistic, Broecker believes. "It's ludicrous. Really heartbreaking. I mean, this administration doesn't like science, it's that bad. It's anti-science. I mean, that's really scary."
Over the past 30 years, Broecker has spoken several times before the US Congress on environmental matters - in front of Al Gore more than once - but he has declined invitations to speak to Congress in recent years, he says. "I know people who have [spoken], and it just doesn't do any good." Neither is he optimistic about the prospect of a sufficiently pro-environment US president come November. "I don't think any of the three candidates running are going to risk their futures by doing too much about climate," he says. "I'm a very optimistic person, but I'm not optimistic about this. We really need world leaders with guts, and we don't have them."
Fixing Climatehacks a vivid path through the history of climate research and through the story of Broecker's own career (which is where Kunzig comes in as co-author: though Broecker drives the book, he is present only in the third person throughout) to fully bring home the stark truths with which contemporary researchers are faced, and to build an urgent case for the state in which the planet finds itself today. All the green living and recycling and carbon offset schemes in the world won't achieve a thing, Broecker argues, unless action on a much bigger - and costlier - scale is taken, and that scale involves the kind of investment in technology that only truly climate-conscious governance can ensure.
Broecker is not vague about his hopes for climate technology; he has studied the options, and he has declared his loyalties. They lie with a technique developed by Broecker's Columbia colleague Prof Klaus Lackner, which has had some success in small-scale pilot runs at mechanically "scrubbing" or sucking CO2 gas out of the atmosphere and disposing of it, perhaps deep in the oceans. "I am a firm believer that if we can't do this now, we are in huge trouble," says Broecker. It's a solution, he says, which could satisfy the environmentalists (although he has just this morning had a letter of protest from Greenpeace, opposing the notion of burying the CO2 in the oceans) as well as the oil and coal companies ("because it recognises that fossil fuels aren't going anywhere"), and it may even, he says, offer a way of leapfrogging over the Kyoto process. It's a blunt approach, one that refuses to dally around with attempts at prevention, and heads instead right for the task of cure, or at least of respite - although he insists, with a definite weariness in his voice, that to truly work, this technology must be accompanied by an international agreement for a carbon tax and a reduction to zero per cent carbon emissions.
The only alternative to the "scrubbing", says Broecker, is the scientist Prof Paul Crutzen's idea of injecting vast amounts of sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere, using balloons or similar devices. This would be up to 10 times cheaper than the C02 option, and would cool the planet down in the short term, but Broecker doesn't quite trust it as an option; it's a "band aid", he says, needing to be expensively renewed yearly, and it would bring a drastic side-effect.
"We would never have a blue-sky day again," he says. "The sky would be bleached white forever. Or at least until we got our act together and lowered the CO2."
Broecker is serious about the need for technological investment, from governments and from corporations. He writes personally to CEOs such as Richard Branson of Virgin and Fred Smith of FedEx, he canvasses politicians; he is deeply involved, and involved in a future that, he knows, is edging increasingly beyond the bounds of his own lifetime. No matter.
"We're stewards of this Earth," he says. "We have been raping this planet. We have been skimming the cream. And now we're up against a wall." It might not be the fun it used to be for Wally Broecker, this climate-change game. But, then, he has his eye on a changing of the rules.
Fixing Climate , by Wallace Broecker with Robert Kunzig, is published this week by Profile Books (€22.85)