January 26, 2011
Seeing Climate, Seeing Change
Heidi Cullen
CEO and Director of Communications, Climate Central
Minutes of the 16th Meeting of the 69th Year
The 16th meeting of the 69th year was called together by President Robert Varrin. Because of heavy snow only 21 members were in attendance. Thomas Fulmer led the invocation.
There was a moment of silence in honor of fellow member William A Schreyer, who died on January 22, 2011.
Harvey Rothberg read the minutes of the January 19, 2011 meeting.
Jock Mc Farlane introduced as speaker Dr. Heidi Cullen, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Communications of Climate Central, which was founded 3 years ago and is headquartered in Princeton. She earned a bachelors degree in Engineering and Operations Research and a PhD in Climatology and Ocean/Atmospheric Dynamics, both from Columbia University. She was The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert, and now reports on climate for the PBS News Hour. Last year she published a book, “The Weather of the Future."
Dr. Cullen spoke about the science of climate, the current state of mass communications about climate, and the challenge of building a sense of urgency sufficient to produce action to limit global warming.
The science comprises data gathering, data interpretation, modeling the atmosphere, and making predictions from the models.
Data indicate that the past 3 decades have produced monotonic annual increases in carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Through counts of isotope Carbon 14 this can be attributed to fossil fuel combustion, and this is confirmed by the warming of the troposphere while the stratosphere has been cooling. Physics tells us, and experience confirms it, that as the background state of the atmosphere warms, the extremes of heat, cold, and precipitation increase in magnitude and in frequency.
While global weather is a complex system, credible models have been built, and these suggest that by 2040 disastrous heat waves like that of 2003, which killed tens of thousands in Europe, will be every-other-year events, and by 2070 such temperatures would be representative of a relatively cool summer.
Currently, the mass media convey very little of this. President Obama made no mention of it in his State of the Union Address; science coverage in the print media is fast declining; and the broadcast media focus only on the superficialities of extreme weather events without going into the complexities of the underlying causes. Without a simplistic single cause for each effect broadcasters are reluctant to open the subject. There is some hope in the few not-for-profits like Climate Central that have sprung up with a mission to communicate the science of global warming to the public at large.
This is challenging because people tend to think of global warming as something remote in time and place rather than as the immediate and critical issue which it is. The complex relation of global warming to extreme weather events is not readily understood. The precondition for people to focus seriously on this is that they trust scientists and believe that there is widespread agreement among them on the basics of the issue, which there is. The challenge is to get people intellectually and emotionally excited about complex science and make them aware that if you wait to feel the effects of climate change it will be too late to stop it because all attempts will be swamped by inexorable negative feedback loops.
Respectfully submitted,
Arthur C. Eschenlauer
There was a moment of silence in honor of fellow member William A Schreyer, who died on January 22, 2011.
Harvey Rothberg read the minutes of the January 19, 2011 meeting.
Jock Mc Farlane introduced as speaker Dr. Heidi Cullen, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Communications of Climate Central, which was founded 3 years ago and is headquartered in Princeton. She earned a bachelors degree in Engineering and Operations Research and a PhD in Climatology and Ocean/Atmospheric Dynamics, both from Columbia University. She was The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert, and now reports on climate for the PBS News Hour. Last year she published a book, “The Weather of the Future."
Dr. Cullen spoke about the science of climate, the current state of mass communications about climate, and the challenge of building a sense of urgency sufficient to produce action to limit global warming.
The science comprises data gathering, data interpretation, modeling the atmosphere, and making predictions from the models.
Data indicate that the past 3 decades have produced monotonic annual increases in carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Through counts of isotope Carbon 14 this can be attributed to fossil fuel combustion, and this is confirmed by the warming of the troposphere while the stratosphere has been cooling. Physics tells us, and experience confirms it, that as the background state of the atmosphere warms, the extremes of heat, cold, and precipitation increase in magnitude and in frequency.
While global weather is a complex system, credible models have been built, and these suggest that by 2040 disastrous heat waves like that of 2003, which killed tens of thousands in Europe, will be every-other-year events, and by 2070 such temperatures would be representative of a relatively cool summer.
Currently, the mass media convey very little of this. President Obama made no mention of it in his State of the Union Address; science coverage in the print media is fast declining; and the broadcast media focus only on the superficialities of extreme weather events without going into the complexities of the underlying causes. Without a simplistic single cause for each effect broadcasters are reluctant to open the subject. There is some hope in the few not-for-profits like Climate Central that have sprung up with a mission to communicate the science of global warming to the public at large.
This is challenging because people tend to think of global warming as something remote in time and place rather than as the immediate and critical issue which it is. The complex relation of global warming to extreme weather events is not readily understood. The precondition for people to focus seriously on this is that they trust scientists and believe that there is widespread agreement among them on the basics of the issue, which there is. The challenge is to get people intellectually and emotionally excited about complex science and make them aware that if you wait to feel the effects of climate change it will be too late to stop it because all attempts will be swamped by inexorable negative feedback loops.
Respectfully submitted,
Arthur C. Eschenlauer