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What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science - Softcover

Brockman, Max

 
9780307389312: What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307389316 ISBN 13: 9780307389312
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Will climate change force a massive human migration to the Northern Rim?

How does our sense of morality arise from the structure of the brain?

What does the latest research in language acquisition tells us about the role of culture in the way we think?

What does current neurological research tell us about the nature of time?

This wide-ranging collection of never-before-published essays offers the very latest insights into the daunting scientific questions of our time. Its contributors—some of the most brilliant young scientists working today—provide not only an introduction to their cutting-edge research, but discuss the social, ethical, and philosophical ramifications of their work. With essays covering fields as diverse as astrophysics, paleoanthropology, climatology, and neuroscience, What's Next? is a lucid and informed guide to the new frontiers of science.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Max Brockman is an agent at Brockman, Inc. a literary and software agency. He lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?

Laurence C. Smith

Like so many other cultural shifts, it gathered long, then broke quickly. At last the world--including a majority of people in the United States--has acknowledged that global warming is real.

Changing the public's opinion was not easy. It took the work of thousands of scientists, painstakingly accumulated over more than three decades. Their findings were then steadily communicated to the world through massive synthesis reports in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), displaying a level of organization unprecedented in science. These reports document the evidence, now overwhelming, of our new man-made climate.

Pivotal to the public opinion shift were ardent "Third Culture" scientists--among them James Hansen, at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Lonnie Thompson, at Ohio State University; Richard Alley, at Pennsylvania State University; and Mark Serreze, at the University of Colorado--with a talent for grasping the most significant discoveries and channeling them to the public through books, interviews, YouTube, and popular magazines like Rolling Stone. These efforts at

public outreach represented a significant shift in the culture of science. As a graduate student in the mid-1990s, I witnessed the widespread, if subtle, scorn directed at the remarkable astronomer and writer Carl Sagan by his professional colleagues for his efforts in publicizing his scientific work. But today, and especially in climate-change science, public outreach is part of the job and a cause for appreciation and emulation by scientific colleagues.

Other events, largely unforeseen, also figured prominently in converting the public. The graphic horrors wrought by Ka_trina--regardless of that hurricane's cause--sowed national unease via millions of televisions and computer screens. The failed presidential bid of Al Gore in 2000 freed him to film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006--and, together with the IPCC, he won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The 2006 decision of Wal-Mart to embrace and aggressively market green technology reached millions more, including many who wouldn't be caught dead at an Al Gore movie. In my home state of California, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asserted, "The [climate] debate is over"--and from a scientific and public-opinion standpoint, he was right.

The burden of proof is past, so what's next? The debate has, if anything, intensified; the line of scrimmage has simply moved downfield. Questions like "Is it real?" and "Is it our fault?" have morphed into "What will happen?" "Where?" "How fast?" and "What are we going to do about it?" Science may have led us to these questions, but our answers will reverberate far beyond science. At stake is no less than the global pattern of human settlement in the twenty-first century.

So, what will happen? Here is what we know currently: First, the warming is just revving up. It is 90 percent certain that continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above the current rates will induce far greater climate change in the twenty-first century than we've yet experienced.1 In every plausible population-growth or greenhouse-gas-emission scenario for the next century (barring some as-yet-undiscovered nonlinearity in the climate system), basic physics dictates that Earth's climate must continue to warm, with global average temperatures rising between 1.8¡C and 4.0¡C (3.2¡F and 7.0¡F) by the end of this century.2 How high we go depends on how much carbon we choose to load into the atmosphere; the lower value is the IPCC's optimistic estimate, which assumes a stabilized global population and the adoption of clean-energy technology. The high value is the estimate based on unabated dependence on fossil fuels.

If those temperature changes don't sound large to you, they should. Even the most optimistic number (1.8 ¡C) triples the warming we had in the twentieth century. Furthermore, thanks to the long life of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the sluggish response of the world's oceans, we are already "locked in" to much of that warming, regardless of what policy changes we enact. The global temperature increase to 2030 is all but committed, and even if we could cap greenhouse gas emissions immediately at 2000 levels, we would still experience about half the projected warming by midcentury. But over the long run, policy changes will have a large impact: only 20 percent of the projected 2100 temperature rise is currently locked in. At this point, it is still possible--through aggressive societal action--to blunt the warming. But we cannot stop it.

The hotter temperatures will increase evaporation, drying soils and raising the frequency of drought, especially in two broad belts from 20¡ to 40¡ north and south latitudes--that is, in both hemispheres. The number of extremely dry days will increase sharply in the southwestern United States, southern and eastern Europe, southern Africa, and eastern South America.3 Water vapor in the air will also increase, in obedience to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which states that the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere must go up 7 percent for every 1¡C rise. Because water vapor fuels weather systems, the frequency of extreme precipitation events--and therefore floods--will go up right along with it. Deadly, power-sucking heat waves--like the killers in France in 2003, the United States in 2006, and Japan in 2007--will happen more often. Sea level will continue to rise (it's rising now, around three millimeters per year), the only uncertainty being exactly how fast and how high. Low-elevation coastal areas, including Florida, the Netherlands, island nations, and impoverished Bangladesh, will face inundation in the coming decades.

If you saw An Inconvenient Truth or read climate-change stories in the press, you already know most of this bad news. Alongside more speculative notions about hurricanes and wildfires, they are the most widely reported scientific predictions for the twenty-first century. However, even these are not the starkest forecasts of our climate models. The most robust changes will sweep across the northern high latitudes, starting at about the 45th parallel running through the northern United States, Canada, Russia, and Europe. North of that line, the climate changes will be unrivaled on Earth. Temperatures will rise at nearly double the global average--driven mostly by milder winters--and precipitation will increase sharply as well.

Already the impacts are obvious in the extreme north, where melting Arctic sea ice, drowning polar bears, and forlorn Inuit hunters are by now iconic images of global warming. The rapidity and severity of Arctic warming is truly dramatic. However, the Arctic, a relatively small, thinly populated region, will always be marginal in terms of its raw social and economic impact on the rest of us. The greater story lies to the south, penetrating deeply into the "Northern Rim," a vast zone of economically significant territory and adjacent ocean owned by the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. As in the Arctic, climate change there has already begun. This zone--which constitutes almost 30 percent of the Earth's land area and is home to its largest remaining forests, its greatest untouched mineral, water, and energy reserves, and a (growing) population of almost 100 million people--will undergo one of the most profound biophysical and social expansions of this century.

There are a number of reasons why these northern latitudes have never been a magnet to southern settlers. Sunlight is strongly seasonal. In the extreme north and within deep continental _interiors,...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307389316
ISBN 13 
9780307389312
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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gpsr@libri.de

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