Jan. 24, 2008

Leadership in Climate Change

Sometimes, science develops in grand leaps of eureka moments, but often builds through the gradual accumulation of incremental advances and subtle refinements. Nowhere is this more evident than in the body of investigation known as “climate science.” And that’s where the dogged commitment of researchers across Columbia are making large and small advances every day in efforts to unlock the secrets of how the climate functions, how human action affects the planet, how our changing environment affects societies around the globe, and what to do about it.

The study of Earth’s climate is a vast collection of disciplines that draws upon the expertise of scientists from across the academic spectrum. At Columbia the notion of what is a climate scientist changes almost daily. A quick glance at the CVs of some of the major researchers, as well as the up-and-coming stars, bears this out.

James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is affilliated with Columbia’s Earth Institute, received his PhD from The University of Iowa in astrophysics and for several years published widely on the atmosphere of Venus. Only later did he turn his singular focus and careful study to the question of energy balances and greenhouse gases in our own atmosphere.

Mark Cane of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Stephen Zebiak, director-general of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, well-known climatologists for their work in forecasting short-term climate variations in the tropics, did much of their graduate work in applied math. In 1985, they devised a simple numerical model relating wind speed and sea surface temperature that proved to be a remarkably good predictor of the El Niño phenomenon that periodically brings life-threatening weather changes to large parts of the developing world.

Even Columbia’s legendary seismologists—a group known more for their work studying earthquakes, volcanoes and thermonuclear detonations—are bringing their expertise to bear on the issues of climate change. Meredith Nettles and Göran Ekström of Lamont-Doherty recently discovered a connection between some curious seismic events along the coast of Greenland and the movement of glaciers that link the island’s vast ice sheet to areas of the North Atlantic, which are critical to Earth’s global ocean circulation.

Having led the way in studies to unlock how Earth’s climate works, how human action can affect it, and what the future of our climate might be, Columbia is beginning to play another, crucial role in the climate sciences. The next great step is to devise ways for humanity to mitigate our increasingly unavoidable impact on global systems such as the climate, the biosphere, and ocean circulation and to help societies learn to adapt to the changes. In this effort, the insight of social scientists and public health experts are also crucial to build on the foundation laid by those such as Doc Ewing and Wally Broecker, two of Lamont’s legendary founding scientists.

Today, in the cafeteria at Lamont and the hallways of Schemerhorn, Pupin and even the law or business schools, more scholars are coming together formally and informally to trade ideas, often surprising one another with the similarity of the problems they address or the techniques they employ. The results can have lasting and far-reaching effects in how we look at our planet and in how quickly we address the complex and thorny questions that face us. Indeed, dozens of Columbia scientists have worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

From the science of decision making to low-cost energy sources for Africa’s rural poor, to the demographics of those hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, Columbia is focusing its extraordinary breadth of intellectual resources on expanding human understanding of our relationship to the planet. In the process, the University is also redefining what it means to be a climate scientist in an increasingly uncertain climate future.

- Story by Ken Kostel