WHO DOES IT?

There are many sayings about the difficulty of predicting the future. My favorite is, “Predicting the future is hard to do because it hasn't happened yet.” It is especially hard when you are trying to predict what will happen 100 years from now and the science behind the prediction is really only 50 years old. It was the work of Keeling and Revelle in the 1950s mentioned earlier that jump-started the science community's work on climate change and global warming. It is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that does the predictions today.

My own involvement in climate change research has been more as an observer than as a participant. My first exposure to the issue was in 1978 when a group I am in, called the JASONs, took it up. The JASONs are a collection of academics mostly that meet every summer for about six weeks to work on problems of importance to the government. In 1978 a subgroup of the JASONs led by Gordon MacDonald, a distinguished geophysicist, began a study of climate change for the US Department of Energy. The JASONs always have many pots on the stove and I was working on something else. However, we all were fascinated by the climate issue, and nearly everyone sat in on the sessions and critiqued the report.