Is Climate Science Real?: A Look at the Scientists Who Made it So

    Is climate science real? A look at the scientist who made it so.

Have you ever been challenged by someone who thinks human-caused climate

change is just a “theory”, not real science? I have just finished reading a book by Sarah

Dry called “Waters of the World—The story of the scientists who unraveled the

mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere – and made the planet whole”(Scribe

2019). She takes us on a 150-year tour leading to the discovery of a constantly changing,

interconnected global climate system and the discoveries that CO 2 emission in the

atmosphere, from the burning of fossil fuels, is altering the planet.

Meteorologists, mathematicians, oceanographers, and naturalists who laid the

groundwork for earth systems science asked questions, collected data from around the

world, and set up experiments to test hypotheses. How did all these giant boulders get

here from afar? How do glaciers move? Why are western polar-moving currents in a

gyre stronger than eastern tropical-moving currents? What causes the monsoon, and

can it be predicted? How do tropical storm clouds form and why do they seem to form

so suddenly? Can you tell the temperature of water by its isotopes?

Fishermen, sailors, captains, pilots, the military, and stargazers all helped

answer these questions by gathering data as citizen scientists, collecting jars of

rainwater and samples of air, by measuring winds, salinity, and temperature, by looking

at the sky through hand-held spectrometers, and by sharing ice cores dug for arctic

exploration.

    Before the 1800s it was widely believed that the earth was slowly cooling off from

the intense heat of her creation. That all events in her past could be explained

geologically, by the rising and wearing down of mountains. Giant boulders had been

deposited by floating icebergs on the great biblical flood. The weather was local. Climate was

steady and unchanging. The deep-sea was a cold, still, dead zone. All ocean currents

were formed from surface winds.

    In the 1840s, Louis Agassiz threw cold water on the hot earth hypothesis by

suggesting that a huge ice sheet had once covered much of North America and Europe

explaining the huge erratic boulders, clay deposits, and striations on bedrock found

there. Milutin Milankovitch, as a prisoner of war during WWI, formulated mathematical

calculations to predict the tilt, wobble, and orbit of the earth around the sun over long

periods of time. These cycles, now called the Milankovitch Cycles revealed the variable

distribution of sunlight throughout the year around the globe and that there had been

many ice ages in the past.

In the 1850s, John Tyndall, the father of climate science climbed Mer de Glace in

the Swiss Alps every summer planting stakes to track the movement of the glacier. Back

in the lab, he created a large vice grip squeezing blocks of ice, thereby discovering that

ice under pressure melts. Glaciers, he posited, must melt and flow, then refreeze, then

melt again, skidding downhill. He also began testing vials of air sent to him from afar to

test the properties of gasses in absorbing heat. He discovered that water vapor, carbon

dioxide, and hydrocarbon vapors absorb heat readily and could act as a giant blanket

around the earth trapping heat.

    In the tradition of empirical naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Piazzi

Smythe, the father of mountaintop astronomy, climbed the peak of Alta Vista, Tenerife,

to study the celestial atmosphere. His observatory, high enough to escape terrestrial

interference, led to the discovery of water vapor in the atmosphere—those visible rain

bands one sees near the horizon as the sunsets. He devoted much of his life to “crowdsourcing” weather data to citizen scientists around the globe with small, hand-held

spectroscopes, to be able to better predict the rain. He spent the last part of his life

photographing and classifying clouds.

    After three years in the early 1900s, with no summer monsoon rains, millions

across India died from starvation. Gilbert Walker, a mathematician at Trinity College,

Cambridge was recruited to run the Meteorological Station at the foothills of the Himalayas. His task was to find the source of the monsoon rains and to be able to

predict them. In searching for the Monsoon variable, and as a mathematician, he

collected meteorological data from around the world—observations made by sailors in

the navies and merchant marines, and by fishermen. Data on temperatures, rainfall,

winds, and currents arrived by post and telegraph. Put into a statistical format, Walker

looked for solid correlations. Although he never did solve the problem of predicting

monsoons, his work leads to the awareness of the global climate. What happens in certain

permanent pressure zones—the center of the action— like the Azores High or the Icelandic Low

affects the weather elsewhere. The Southern Oscillation, a seesaw of atmospheric

pressure between the Indian and the Pacific Ocean influences much of the rainfall and

temperature of the tropics.

    Joanne Simpson, first U.S. female Ph.D. in meteorology, pilot, and lover of clouds

taught World War II pilots how to fly their planes in the tropics. She wanted to

understand tropical cumulus clouds and the sudden storms that seem to come out of

nowhere, so she learned to fly. Piloting her plane into the middle of clouds, and into the

eye of storms, she measured pressure and temperature. Cloud seeding and

meteorological predictions were the rage in mid-century, and she along with many

meteorologists found their research funding there. Cloud-seeding and hurricane

manipulation eventually were realized to be dangerous interferences of natural

processes. Weather prediction has become more sophisticated, partly due to her work

sending up balloons to collect data and her understanding of tropical weather patterns.

Henry Stommel wondered about how water moves, particularly why the currents

on the western side of a gyre (the Gulf Stream) where water flows towards the poles, are

so much stronger than on the eastern side (the Canary Current) where the water flows

towards the tropics. His investigation into this western intensification led to a lifetime in

oceanography. He is one of the rare scientists and full professors (MIT, Harvard) who

achieved this with only a B.S. in Astronomy. Measuring pressure and temperature of the

seas and by networking with others around the globe to measure currents at different

depths, he and his colleagues discovered eddies in the deep sea, a zone thought to be

still and stable. His work led to an understanding of the thermohaline circulation, that

cold water near the poles becomes saltier and heavier, sinking and moving towards the

tropics where it again rises. This understanding of global currents helped us understand

the North Atlantic gyre and the dissipation of heat around the globe.

    Danish paleoclimatologist, Willi Dansgaard collected bottles of rainwater from

colleagues around the world. By isolating Oxygen isotopes in a mass spectrometer, he

discovered that the heavier O 18 condensed as rain, and the lighter O 16 evaporated. This

allowed him to measure the temperature of water by looking at its isotopes. Wondering

if the same process would work in ice, he pursued what he later called his “one really

good idea,” and persuaded the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and

Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) to share ice cores from Camp Century in Greenland

with him. His one really good idea revealed clear layers in the ice, like rings on a tree,

showing annual temperatures including seasonal variations. 100,000 years of history,

50 years per meter, came from his one mile of ice core stored here in Hanover. His

figures were not an anomaly; they matched with muddy ocean floor cores that were

being taken from the sea. These frozen annals of the earth’s past showed the climate has

always been changing, sometimes suddenly.

It was not until the 1980s that scientists began to mention human activity, land

use, and burning of fossil fuels, as a driver in the global climate. That knowledge has come

slowly and has met with an immense push-back. The ice cores clearly revealed increased

temperature and increased CO 2 over that past 150 years since the industrial revolution.

Waters of the World is not a simple read—there is a lot of information. Even

though many of the folks in these chapters were playful in their approach to knowledge,

seeing the planet as an area for exploration, and welcoming help from others, there is

also a sad reminder that the world of science can be just as petty and competitive as the

rest. But it is a good book to have on the shelf for the next time someone challenges your

dedication to climate work and the validity of Earth System Science.

Strafford resident, Micki Colbeck has a Master’s Degree in Conservation Biology, serves

on the Strafford Conservation Commission, and is a regular contributor to the Valley

News Perspectives as A Solitary Walker. You can reach her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.