Good Morning.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to congratulate the graduates, your parents and your partners on this special day.

As Dean Pinkham mentioned, I started and direct a Masters Program in Climate and Society. The roots of this program lie in work we did 25 years ago to create a theory for the El Niño phenomenon. It soon dawned on us that the model we developed might be used for prediction. We started by trying “forecasts” of past events, and were immediately successful. (This is still the only thing I have done in science that worked the first time.) But it is one thing to predict the past, and quite another to predict the future. In 1985, our model was consistently calling for an El Niño in the following year, 1986.

What should we do with our forecast? The 1982 El Niño, which caused a large loss of life and property, was still fresh in people’s minds. Should we hold back, and not scare people – especially since the forecasts were new and so little tested? Should we inform people, so they would have a chance to prepare? We decided to go out on a limb and make the forecast public. The forecast turned out to be right, but what should a decision-maker—a farmer, a public health official, a water manager—make of it?

How do we go from a mathematical model of the climate system to practical advice? Answering this question required a multidisciplinary group of researchers from around the world, working to put our new knowledge of the climate system into service for society, especially those hit hardest by its twists and turns: the developing countries. Knowing a wet year is coming, farmers in Peru switch crops from cotton to rice. Knowing a dry year is likely, water managers in Ceara, Brazil hoard their scare resource. In India and elsewhere planting times are altered in response to climate forecasts. The uses of climate forecasts continue to grow.

On this day of celebration I would like to end here on this upbeat note, a success story of the application of climate science. But alas, my line of work confers an obligation to speak, Jeremiah-like, about global warming.

Knowing I would be here with you today led me to reflect on what I was doing when I earned my Masters degree. What I thought of was…that I smoked. The tobacco industry did a dazzling job of obfuscation, but, really, I could have found the truth had I wanted to. Existing research left no doubt that smoking destroys health. I could have applied my research and analytic tools and changed my behavior sooner, but smoking was pleasurable and I wasn’t looking for reasons to give it up.

Today, we know that we are changing the climate by burning fossil fuels. This is a fact. Many institutions, including our own government, are throwing up smokescreens, but the scientific case is solid, and accessible to anyone who chooses to look for the truth.

Sea level is already rising in a world where most people live near coasts. It doesn’t take much of a rise to affect New York City’s underground infrastructure or to destroy the Everglades, or to put much of Bangladesh underwater. The more sea level rises, the more of the world is threatened.

Global warming will permeate all aspects of your life, your work, your means of transportation, the way your home is built, the food you eat, your sense of security. Either we change the way we live to mitigate the problem, or we play catch-up and try to adapt to the flooding, the droughts, the ecosystem changes, the human conflicts that will be generated as climate change progresses.

The time to act is growing short. The warming in the pipeline is about equal to the 1°F change that has already happened. The climate system cannot be stopped on a dime and put in reverse. It’s a big ship that takes a long time to turn.

My generation may have laid the scientific groundwork, but we have yet to make much headway in steering our world in a less dangerous direction. I don’t have the answers, and sometimes I despair of the Earth my grandchildren will inherit. But looking out on all of you gives me great hope. Global warming is possibly the greatest challenge for your generation, but every generation has faced great challenges. For all our faults, we have proven ourselves to be a resourceful species. You have mastered a considerable body of knowledge and have acquired strong analytical skills. You have tools that no one even imagined just a few decades ago. Now the question for you is: What will you do with your knowledge, your skills, your tools?

Time IS short, but there is still enough time, time for you to find the new technologies, the new policies to shape ways of living and working that will forge a new, sustainable relationship with this our home planet.