Global Warming’s Key Players Featured in
FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE

1. Vladimir Romanovsky is one of the world’s leading experts on permafrost. Originally from Russia, Romanovsky operates a network of sixty monitoring stations throughout Alaska. Permafrost, he explains in Field Notes from a Catastrophe, acts as a filter, separating the “signal” of global warming from the “noise” of natural climate variability. Romanovsky’s research has shown that in most parts of Alaska, permafrost temperatures have risen by three degrees since the early 1980s. In some parts of the state, they have risen by nearly six degrees.

2. Konrad Steffen is the director of Swiss Camp, a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. A native of Zurich, Steffen set up Swiss Camp, in 1990, to study conditions along the ice sheet’s “equilibrium line.” It soon became clear that in Greenland, equilibrium was becoming increasing hard to find. The question Steffen is now trying to answer is: “Are we disintegrating part of the Greenland ice sheet over the longer term?”

3. Bill Bradshaw and Chrisina Holzapfel are evolutionary geneticists whose research focuses on a single species of mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii. Their lab, at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, houses upwards of one hundred thousand Wyeomyia smithii in various stages of development. In 2001, Bradshaw and Holzapfel became the first scientists to demonstrate that global warming had begun to drive evolution.

4. Harvey Weiss is a professor of archaelogy at Yale University. In 1978, Weiss discovered a lost city in what is now known as Syria, which in ancient times was known as Shekhna and today is called Tell Leilan.  During his excavations, Weiss discovered that Tell Leilan had been completely depopulated around the year 2200 BC. He came to believe that the city had been decimated by a severe drought, a hypothesis that was at first dismissed, but has since been corroborated by numerous paleoclimatic studies.

5.  James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, is often called the “father of global warming.” In 1981, he forecast that “carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise of natural climate variability” around the year 2000. In 1990 he offered to bet a roomful of fellow-scientists a hundred dollars that either that year or one of the following two years would be the warmest on record. Hansen won the bet in six months.

6.  Robert Socolow is a professor of engineering at Princeton University and the director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. Socolow first became interested in the problem of climate change about five years ago. “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,” he explains in Field Notes. “And, in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But, in the climate case, the experts—the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice cores—they are more concerned. They’re going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’”

7.  Peter Clavelle is the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Under his leadership, Burlington has has probably done as much as any municipality in the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, (The Burlington Electric Department may be the only utility in the U.S. whose vehicle fleet includes mountain bikes.) Many of us are very frustrated with the lack of vision and action by the federal government, but there’s a choice to be made. You either can bemoan federal policies or you can take control of your own destiny.”