March 8, 2023
Ancient Stories, Great Floods, and an Atlas to the Future
Ben Strauss
CEO and Chief Scientist, Climate Central
Speaker: Ben Strauss/ Introducer: Lanny Jones
Minutes of the 22th Meeting of the 81st Year
President John Cotton called the meeting to order at Springdale Golf Club at 10:15 AM. Ralph Widner read the minutes of the March 1st meeting. One hundred one people attended the meeting.
Guests:
Jennifer Duran (guest of Lanny Jones)
Nancy Light (guest of Donald Light)
Katherine Widner (guest of Ralph Widner)
Lanny Jones introduced Benjamin Strauss, noting that he is chief scientist and CEO of Climate Central, an organization he joined in 2015 that gathers data on the global climate
Strauss began with an apology for not being able to stay for lunch because he had just flown in from Miami and immediately after his talk would be flying to California..
He explained how his interest in climate change began when he was only a kid, at a time when he knew simply that he wanted to make a difference for good in the world. In college, he learned about the origins of the world, and he frequently referred to a photo of the earth taken from space that he kept pinned to his wall as a reminder of the fragility of our planet. Eventually, he decided that his life’s work would be on climate change, and this was the subject of his dissertation. He developed a kind of evangelical zeal for alerting people to the seriousness of the issue because most people seemed to go about their daily lives with no apparent awareness of the problem.
Strauss was one of the four founding members of Climate Central. When he
was finishing his dissertation, one of his advisers told him that he had raised money to start an organization that would focus on climate change, and would he, Strauss, be interested in joining the venture. Strauss has made his focus within the general topic of climate change on sea-level rise which, as he pointed out, is somewhat ironic. He describes himself as a “mountain” person, yet his life’s work is now devoted to sea-level rise, the most obviously visible feature of climate change.
Publicity about the work of Climate Central was included on the front page of the New York Times (above the fold, Strauss told us proudly) in 2015, the year of the Paris climate conference, when Strauss himself was interviewed by Anderson Cooper.
Strauss had a “eureka” moment when he saw David Attenborough’s documentary on the Great Barrier Reef. In it, Attenborough interviewed indigenous people who live near it and who tell a story that has been passed down orally for 10,000 years, the story of a great flood that submerged the Barrier Reef, and is very similar to the biblical story of Noah’s flood. The Genesis story is told in Hebrew, and when Strauss looked closely at the translation into English, he concluded that such phrases as “all the fountains of the great deep burst apart,” and “the cosmic waters of the ocean depths” indicate that Noah’s flood was not the result of forty days of rain, but came from the ocean and was in fact massive sea-level rise that occurred over many thousands of years. Many cultures, Hindu, Polynesian, as well as Middle Eastern, have similar stories attesting to a time of huge sea-level rise that changed the configuration of land masses around the world.
Strauss then showed us projections of what the land masses of Australia and India would have been 15,000 years ago when, for example, Tasmania would have been part of Australia, and Sri Lanka, of India. Then he showed map projections of what sea-level rise could mean 10,000 years in the future for such cities such as London, New Orleans, and San Francisco.
Our speaker concluded his talk by saying that while we face many insoluble
problems, climate change is not one of them. This is a problem that we do know how to solve—but only if we commit ourselves to it and to the wide and deep transfer of values that solving it will require.
Respectfully submitted,
Joan Fleming
Guests:
Jennifer Duran (guest of Lanny Jones)
Nancy Light (guest of Donald Light)
Katherine Widner (guest of Ralph Widner)
Lanny Jones introduced Benjamin Strauss, noting that he is chief scientist and CEO of Climate Central, an organization he joined in 2015 that gathers data on the global climate
Strauss began with an apology for not being able to stay for lunch because he had just flown in from Miami and immediately after his talk would be flying to California..
He explained how his interest in climate change began when he was only a kid, at a time when he knew simply that he wanted to make a difference for good in the world. In college, he learned about the origins of the world, and he frequently referred to a photo of the earth taken from space that he kept pinned to his wall as a reminder of the fragility of our planet. Eventually, he decided that his life’s work would be on climate change, and this was the subject of his dissertation. He developed a kind of evangelical zeal for alerting people to the seriousness of the issue because most people seemed to go about their daily lives with no apparent awareness of the problem.
Strauss was one of the four founding members of Climate Central. When he
was finishing his dissertation, one of his advisers told him that he had raised money to start an organization that would focus on climate change, and would he, Strauss, be interested in joining the venture. Strauss has made his focus within the general topic of climate change on sea-level rise which, as he pointed out, is somewhat ironic. He describes himself as a “mountain” person, yet his life’s work is now devoted to sea-level rise, the most obviously visible feature of climate change.
Publicity about the work of Climate Central was included on the front page of the New York Times (above the fold, Strauss told us proudly) in 2015, the year of the Paris climate conference, when Strauss himself was interviewed by Anderson Cooper.
Strauss had a “eureka” moment when he saw David Attenborough’s documentary on the Great Barrier Reef. In it, Attenborough interviewed indigenous people who live near it and who tell a story that has been passed down orally for 10,000 years, the story of a great flood that submerged the Barrier Reef, and is very similar to the biblical story of Noah’s flood. The Genesis story is told in Hebrew, and when Strauss looked closely at the translation into English, he concluded that such phrases as “all the fountains of the great deep burst apart,” and “the cosmic waters of the ocean depths” indicate that Noah’s flood was not the result of forty days of rain, but came from the ocean and was in fact massive sea-level rise that occurred over many thousands of years. Many cultures, Hindu, Polynesian, as well as Middle Eastern, have similar stories attesting to a time of huge sea-level rise that changed the configuration of land masses around the world.
Strauss then showed us projections of what the land masses of Australia and India would have been 15,000 years ago when, for example, Tasmania would have been part of Australia, and Sri Lanka, of India. Then he showed map projections of what sea-level rise could mean 10,000 years in the future for such cities such as London, New Orleans, and San Francisco.
Our speaker concluded his talk by saying that while we face many insoluble
problems, climate change is not one of them. This is a problem that we do know how to solve—but only if we commit ourselves to it and to the wide and deep transfer of values that solving it will require.
Respectfully submitted,
Joan Fleming