This NYT Sunday Magazine narrative by Nat Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.

UPDATE:

"Losing Earth' author Nat Rich plans to publish book with same title

Just after the end of the war, in 1946, American author John Hersey published a short book, about 30,000 words, titled "Hiroshima" about the day the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by an first atomic bomb dropped over the city by a U.S. bomber. The book, still in print after all these years, turned out to be Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, told through the memories of survivors of that fateful day: August 6, 1945. A timeless, powerful and compassionate document, the short book became a classic the New York Times said "stirs the conscience of humanity." 

Fast forward to 2018, and Nat Rich, a reporter for the New York Times, has recently published a 30,000-word long-form essay titled "Losing Earth" about a key period of time in American history (1979-1989) when climate scientists and politicians on both sides of the aisle where trying to come to grips with the great existential threat humankind had every faced. The article ran in tne New York Times Sunday Magazine, taking up the entire issue and getting a huge response online and worldwide from readers who were both applauding Rich's work and criticizing it as well.

"Losing Earth" is now set to become a 30,000-word paperback, capitalizing on the forward momentum the Times article created, and much like John Hersey's 1946 paperback, Rich's book is likely to become an American classic, too. Give it time. It's only 2018 and the article is still fresh in readers' minds. By 2050, how will "Losing Earth" be seen by readers then and by our descendants 100 years from now?

Hersey's gripping account of what he discovered about survivors in Hiroshima has withstood the test of time. Will Nat Rich's upcoming book about his New York Times reporting stand the test of time? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, according to sources close the Times, Nat is at this very moment prepping a non-fiction book based on his controversial climate change reporting, a process that took 18 months of research and writing and entailed doing over 100 interviews with people involved in that momentous decade. The publisher has not been announced yet, and the publication date remains an industry secret, but sources in New York tell me the book could be out this fall or in early 2019.

Okay, it's going to a short book, just 30,000 words, but it's going to be a big book, given the publicity it has also generated all over the world. Most books come in at 80,000 words or more, some as much as 150,000 words. So a short 30,000-word book about climate change is going to be a unique kind of publishing venture.

When it comes down to it, it's all about word count. British ''Atonement'' author Ian McEwan has said a ''novella'' -- a short novel, longer than a short story but shorter than full-length novel -- usually comes in at around 20,000 and 40,000 words. Other book pundits put the word-count at around 50,000 words. 

So Nat Rich's hugely popular and stunning (and controversial) news article won't be that unusual for a New York publisher to handle, even with a shorter than usual word count, according to book industry sources.

Once that book is released, Nat will be expected to go on another round of marketing and promotional chores, doing interviews on TV, NPR radio and in print publications nationwide. There will be college lecture tours, book signings, panel discussions and bookstore visits. 

Will the book come with an introduction by someone famous, such as  James Hansen or Rafe Pomerance or Al Gore, or will Nat write a new introduction for readersm taking into account the controversy (and the applause) that ensued after the initial newspaper story went viral? 

This will be a book worth waiting for, and you won't have to wait that long for it to appear in print.


END OF BLOG POST
================


The whole wide world, it is a'warming/ Heatwaves, fires, this is a warning/ What you see is the truth all around you/ The planet's gettin' hotter and #ExxonKnew /California Dreamin' is a thing of the past /We are losing ground and losing it fast 

https://northwardho.blogspot.com/2018/08/new-global-warming-lyrics-to-1965-pop.html  

NEW LYRICs ''EVE OF DESTRUCTION!'' - 1965/2018

From the mouth of a very smart [and worried] pre-teen: 

"Where should we go to stay safe?" asks Mia, 

PHOTO OF HER HERE, 

a 12 year old - a person of color -- POC -- at the Nat Rich climate event in NYC

Nat Rich's 30,000-word essay in NYT mag this week ''LOSING EARTH'' will become a paperback book in early 2019 and be compared favorably with John Hersey's 1946 nonfiction book ''HIROSHIMA''. Film rights for both straight docu HBO style and Hollywood cli-fi film with ensemble cast. 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html 

#CliFiEditor’s Note

This narrative by Nat Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. -- Jake Silverstein, EDITOR, Sunday Magazine

Link to entire 28,000- word article, soon to be published book later in 2018.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html 



SEE ALSO:

''LIVE'' ONLINE NOW HERE: The NYT SUNDAY MAGAZINE Nat Rich piece on climate change. #LosingEarth LINK TO NYT: https://northwardho.blogspot.com/2018/07/this-nyt-sunday-magazine-narrative-by.html

***"Curious, empathetic, compassionate: What we should be as human beings."***

THE ''Cli-Fi ''REPORT:
100 academic and  media links:
http://cli-fi.net

1.‘This Is the Whole Banana’Spring 1979

The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal, bound in a coal-black cover with beige lettering — one of many such reports that lay in uneven piles around Pomerance’s windowless office on the first floor of the Capitol Hill townhouse that, in the late 1970s, served as the Washington headquarters of Friends of the Earth. In the final paragraph of a chapter on environmental regulation, the coal report’s authors noted that the continued use of fossil fuels might, within two or three decades, bring about “significant and damaging” changes to the global atmosphere.

Pomerance paused, startled, over the orphaned paragraph. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. He reread it. It made no sense to him. Pomerance was not a scientist; he graduated from Cornell 11 years earlier with a degree in history. He had the tweedy appearance of an undernourished doctoral student emerging at dawn from the stacks. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thickish mustache that wilted disapprovingly over the corners of his mouth, though his defining characteristic was his gratuitous height, 6 feet 4 inches, which seemed to embarrass him; he stooped over to accommodate his interlocutors. He had an active face prone to breaking out in wide, even maniacal grins, but in composure, as when he read the coal pamphlet, it projected concern. He struggled with technical reports. He proceeded as a historian might: cautiously, scrutinizing the source material, reading between the lines. When that failed, he made phone calls, often to the authors of the reports, who tended to be surprised to hear from him. Scientists, he had found, were not in the habit of fielding questions from political lobbyists. They were not in the habit of thinking about politics.

The reporting and photography for this project were supported by a major grant from the Pulitzer Center, which has also created lesson plans to bring the climate issue to students everywhere.

Pomerance had one big question about the coal report. If the burning of coal, oil and natural gas could invite global catastrophe, why had nobody told him about it? If anyone in Washington — if anyone in the United States — should have been aware of such a danger, it was Pomerance. As the deputy legislative director of Friends of the Earth, the wily, pugnacious nonprofit that David Brower helped found after resigning from the Sierra Club a decade earlier, Pomerance was one of the nation’s most connected environmental activists. That he was as easily accepted in the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building as at Earth Day rallies might have had something to do with the fact that he was a Morgenthau — the great-grandson of Henry Sr., Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; great-nephew of Henry Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary; second cousin to Robert, district attorney for Manhattan. Or perhaps it was just his charisma — voluble, energetic and obsessive, he seemed to be everywhere, speaking with everyone, in a very loud voice, at once. His chief obsession was air. After working as an organizer for welfare rights, he spent the second half of his 20s laboring to protect and expand the Clean Air Act, the comprehensive law regulating air pollution. That led him to the problem of acid rain, and the coal report.

Losing Earth: The Decade We
Almost Stopped Climate Change

By Nathaniel Rich
Photographs and Videos by George SteinmetzAUG. 1, 2018

New Adventures in 'Cli-Fi' -- Taking the temperature of a new literary genre. -- A 2018 BLOG POST FROM MERRIAM WEBSTER DICTIONARY EDITORS

''With more and more cli-fi novels and movies on tap, I cannot stop thinking about how it is now possible to mine affecting, resonant drama out of the certainty of climate change catastrophe. It's no longer science fiction. What I'm saying here is that living through the twilight of humankind is gonna be worth it for future cli-fi novels and movies.''


-- Stephen Kelly, UK culture writer in London

LINK to Original article blog post:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cli-fi-clifi-climate-fiction-genre-words-were-watching

Words We're Watching

New Adventures 

in 'Cli-Fi'

Taking the 

temperature of a 

new literary genre.

---

As long ago as the 1950s, we have used sci-fi as a 

shortened expression of the term science fiction,

 referring to a genre of storytelling that portrays, 

in ways truthful and speculative, how advances 

in science and technology impact our lives 

for better or for worse. The short form retains 

the initial syllable of each word in the longer phrase, 

with the shared long-i creating a nifty, assonant rhyme.

It’s a similar truncation that gives us another 

genre of book and film that sees increased relevance in our times: cli-fi.

Like sci-fi, cli-fi deals with worlds real 

and imaginary, but in this case the 

narrative deals with how humans

manage living in environments with 

severely altered climates. 

The cli- in cli-fi is short for climate, and cli-fi is fiction 

that projects how climate patterns, 

and severe changes in such patterns, 

affect or will affect our lives.

When it comes to courting

the interest of younger

generations, it certainly

helps that cli-fi is emerging at the

movies and on TV. Last year's

Christopher Nolan epic Interstellar 

shows the American Midwest turning

into a second Dust Bowl, with a forecast

so dire it drives humans to seek a new planet.

In 2014's Snowpiercer, a bungled

attempt to stop global warming creates

a new ice age. Margaret Atwood’s

popular cli-fi trilogy MaddAddam is

currently being adapted into a series for HBO,

whose wildly popular show 

Game of Thrones also flirts, if

unintentionally, with global-warming themes.
— J. K. Ullrich, The Atlantic, 14 Aug. 2015

The genre of climate fiction is not new; 

in fact, climate change, with a focus on

the warming of global temperatures

 and its likely causes, is not a new 

area of study. Svante Arrhenius, a 

Swedish chemist who later earned the 

country its first Nobel Prize, 

constructed the first model charting 

the influence of atmospheric carbon 

dioxide on global temperature levels in 1896. For his work, 

some call Arrhenius the father of climate science.

But research into climate fluctuation existed
well before that, and climate fiction exists
contemporaneously with Arrhenius’s work.
An early example of the genre is Jules
Verne’s Sans dessus dessous (1889,
translated as The Purchase of the North 
Pole or Topsy-Turvy), in which
engineers use a powerful cannon to
 eliminate the tilt of the Earth’s axis,
thereby doing away with seasons and
causing the ice in the Arctic shelf to
thaw enough to become penetrable and
make accessible vast coal deposits
 believed to be buried there.

Classics in the field of cli-fi include Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake trilogy, consisting of Oryx and Crake (2003),
The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam
(2013); the novels of J. G. Ballard
 (The Wind from Nowhere (1961),
The Drowned World (1962), and The Burning World (1964));
 Ian McEwan’s Solar(2010),
and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2010).

There have been films categorized as cli-fi as well:
notable ones include 1995’s Waterworld,
in which Earth is submerged due
to the melting of the polar ice caps,
and 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, about a new global ice age.

And who could forget the drought-ravaged dystopia of
the Mad Maxfranchise?

The word ''cli-fi'' is credited to Dan Bloom, 

a retired American journalist born in Springfield, Mass.,
and who has been based in Alaska, Japan and Taiwan
since 1991.

Alarmed by what he felt was a deficiency of 

attention to climate science in the 

popular consciousness, 

Bloom sought a way to promote 

stories that brought the subject to the forefront.

 “I’m looking for the On the Beach of climate change,” 

Bloom told The Literary Hub in 2017, referring to Nevil Shute’s 

1957 Cold War classic about postnuclear apocalypse. 

“I’m looking for somebody somewhere in 

the world who can tell a story that has the power of 

On the Beach so it shocks people into awareness.”

Bloom launched a website as part of his campaign,

 and the term really caught on when other authors, 

including Margaret Atwood herself, began 

promoting writings on the subject on Twitter 

and other platforms.

Will cli-fi ever become as popular as sci-fi?

It’s too early to say. But the genre has certainly 

made a splash, and that’s a change you can’t deny.

Words We're Watching talks about 
words we are increasingly seeing
 in use but that have not yet 
met our

criteria for entry.

How does a word get 

into a Merriam-Webster dictionary?

This is one of the questions 

Merriam-Webster editors are most often asked.

The answer is simple: usage.

Tracking Word Usage

To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it's used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.

Each day most Merriam-Webster editors devote an hour or two to reading a cross section of published material, including books, newspapers, magazines, and electronic publications; in our office this activity is called "reading and marking." The editors scour the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words, variant spellings, and inflected forms–in short, anything that might help in deciding if a word belongs in the dictionary, understanding what it means, and determining typical usage. Any word of interest is marked, along with surrounding context that offers insight into its form and use.

---

Citations

The marked passages are then input into a computer system and stored both in machine-readable form and on 3" x 5" slips of paper to create citations.

Each citation has the following elements:

1. the word itself
2. an example of the word used in context
3. bibliographic information about the source from which the word and example were taken

Merriam-Webster's citation files, which were begun in the 1880s, now contain 15.7 million examples of words used in context and cover all aspects of the English vocabulary. Citations are also available to editors in a searchable text database (linguists call it a corpus) that includes more than 70 million words drawn from a great variety of sources.

---

From Citation to Entry

How does a word make the jump from the citation file to the dictionary?

The process begins with dictionary editors reviewing groups of citations. Definers start by looking at citations covering a relatively small segment of the alphabet – for example gri- to gro- – along with the entries from the dictionary being reedited that are included within that alphabetical section. It is the definer's job to determine which existing entries can remain essentially unchanged, which entries need to be revised, which entries can be dropped, and which new entries should be added. In each case, the definer decides on the best course of action by reading through the citations and using the evidence in them to adjust entries or create new ones.

Before a new word can be added to the dictionary, it must have enough citations to show that it is widely used. But having a lot of citations is not enough; in fact, a large number of citations might even make a word more difficult to define, because many citations show too little about the meaning of a word to be helpful. A word may be rejected for entry into a general dictionary if all of its citations come from a single source or if they are all from highly specialized publications that reflect the jargon of experts within a single field.

To be included in a Merriam-Webster dictionary, a word must be used in a substantial number of citations that come from a wide range of publications over a considerable period of time. Specifically, the word must have enough citations to allow accurate judgments about its establishment, currency, and meaning.

The number and range of citations needed to add a word to the dictionary varies. In rare cases, a word jumps onto the scene and is both instantly prevalent and likely to last, as was the case in the 1980s with AIDS. In such a situation, the editors determine that the word has become firmly established in a relatively short time and should be entered in the dictionary, even though its citations may not span the wide range of years exhibited by other words.

---

Size Does Matter

The size and type of dictionary also affects how many citations a word needs to gain admission. Because an abridged dictionary, such as Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, has fairly limited space, only the most commonly used words can be entered; to get into that type of dictionary, a word must be supported by a significant number of citations. But a large unabridged dictionary, such as Webster's Third New International Dictionary, has room for many more words, so terms with fewer citations can still be included.

---

Authority Without Authoritarianism

Change and variation are as natural in language as they are in other areas of human life and Merriam-Webster reference works must reflect that fact. By relying on citational evidence, we hope to keep our publications grounded in the details of current usage so they can calmly and dispassionately offer information about modern English. That way, our references can speak with authority without being authoritarian.

Kate Marvel needs to get off her climate comedian stand-up soapbox and face realtiy. We ARE DOOMED, Kate. Time to get off your Ambien and face reality. You are still in denial.

Climate Change: We're Not Literally Doomed, but...[ANNOTATED BY THIS BLOGGER ON CLOUD ZERO]

…there’s space for action between “everything is fine” and “the apocalypse is upon us,” opines stand-up comedy club speaker Kate Marvel

[ANNOTATED by this blogger on Cloud Zero]

Credit: Getty Images

There is really no such thing as a post-apocalyptic story. WRONG, KATE, THERE IS, AND YOU JUST DON'T WANT TO SEE IT YET. Someone, after all, has to survive to tell the tale. FUNNY JOKE! An apocalypse must be incomplete to be interesting: cockroaches don’t present much opportunity for character development. EVEN MORE COMICAL AND FUNNY, KATE!

And yet, this is how we sometimes talk about climate change: ''we’re doomed, the apocalypse is coming, the end of the world is nigh.'' WHICH IS TRUE, KATE. WAKE UP AND GET OFF YOUR DAILY DOSE OF AMBIEN. Don’t get me wrong: climate change is an overwhelmingly horrific thing. AND THANKKS FOR SAYING SO CLIMATE EXPERT THAT YOU ARE! It will lead—it already is leading- to massive economic damage, desperate refugees, and the loss of things we love. WHAT ARE SOME OF THING THINGS YOU LOVE, KATE? But it’s fundamentally different from an ''asteroid impact'' or  ''zombie plague,'' and I think it’s important to understand why. OH THIS IS GONNA BE A  FUN LECTURE!

I do understand the urge to catastrophize. NO YOU DO NOT. YOU ONLY KNOW HOW TO BE FUNNY AND MAKE JOKES AT THE EXPENSE OF WHAT IS REALLY COMING DOWN THE ROAD SOME 30 GENERATIONS FROM NOW. My surname  is ''Marvel,'' and if you make a joke about its resemblance to a certain mass entertainment conglomerate like Marvel  Comics, you won't be be the first person to ever do so. But to support ''the family business,'' VERY FUNNY! I’ve seen a fair number of super-hero movies, and I understand the stakes are high. Movie supervillains are never trying to make sweeping changes to the tax code or reform the regulatory state. They’re trying to destroy the entire universe and murder every single one of the good guys. The assumption seems to be that audiences simply won’t care about anything less that total destruction. IN A COMEDY CLUB, THAT'S A GOOD LINE, KATE. IN A SERIOUS OPED, IT'S DUMB.

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I believe that it is possible to care about something without believing it will destroy all life in the universe. SUCH AS? I know my own ''personal bar'' is set substantially lower. But it’s true: climate change is a unique problem, and it’s incredibly hard to talk about. ACTUALLY IT IS NOT VERY HARD TO TALK ABOUT IF YOU TAKE OFF YOUR STAND UP COMEDIAN'S CAP AND FACE REALITY. I think there are 3 reasons for this.

First, climate change isn’t a supervillain. It’s worse. OH GOOD! Villains, after all, clearly explain the havoc they’re about to cause, usually to the hero they’ve just captured. If only our climate projections could provide such certainty. IF ONLY! Unfortunately, sometimes the best information scientists can provide comes hedged with caveats. For example, under current emissions trajectories we might exceed the 2 degree warming limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as the 2030s, or as much as 30  generations into the future. What should we do with this information? This uncertainty can lead to paralysis and confusion. FOR YOU! Humans are terrible at thinking about probabilities, as every weather forecaster on the receiving end of abuse for being “wrong” well knows. TV HUMOR!

Second, the climate apocalypse will not come for us all, at least not all at once. NOT WEALTHY COLUMBIA PROFESSORS, THAT'S FOR SURE! A large body of research demonstrates that the people who will suffer the most from a changing climate will be those who did the least to cause it. LIKE PEOPLE IN INDIA, PAKISTAN, AFRICA AND ALASKA? Wealth may still buy security, even in a warmer, more chaotic world. DID YOU REALLY SAY THAT JUST NOW?

Finally, a climate apocalypse may well be on the way, IT MAY VERY  WELL BE AND YOU NEED TO STOP BEING FUNNY ABOUT AND WAKE UP but it competes for attention with our own personal apocalypses. At the risk of this column resembling a Smiths song, I would like to point out that we all, eventually, are going to die. OH VERY FUNNY! I would prefer not to, of course. OH VERY VERY FUNNY! And perhaps by the time I am old and decrepit we will have developed sufficiently advanced technology to become immortal. YOU WANT TO BE IMMORTAL? But I think I would probably prefer the sweet embrace of death to spending eternity with the kind of tech billionaires who could afford it. A GOOD COMEDY CLUB THROW AWAY LINE.

The point is, climate change is staggeringly fast on geological timescales, and relatively slow in comparison to a human lifetime. Given the poverty, racism, and inequality in the world, climate change is seldom anyone’s number one problem. Until, one day, it is. FIRST HONEST AND USEFUL THING YOU SAID SO FAR!

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But there are reasons to be optimistic. NO THERE ARE NOT ANY REASONS TO BE OPTIMISTIC. THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY ALREADY! We make vital decisions under uncertainty all the time. There was a 50 percent chance of rain on my wedding day, but I couldn’t choose to get half married. And we can understand the unfairness that climate change will exacerbate, and work toward a more just society. Finally, we have the tools—science, policy, technology—and the creativity to imagine a better world that outlasts our own lifetimes. IMAGINE? IMAGINE WHAT?

Look, I hate to break it to you: we *are* doomed. That has nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with the simple fact of being alive. FUNNY!!!!!  But we have a choice about what to do to this wonderful place we inhabit for a short, miraculous time. WONDERFUL AND MIRACULOUS FOR WEALTHY PROFESSORS LIKE YOU WHO LIVES IN YOUR POSH SWANY IVORY TOWER LIFE!

I don’t think climate change will destroy the actual planet or make the human species go extinct. IT WILL, KATE, AND IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. STOP GIVING TED TALKS AND WAKE UP! But, you know what? I believe we can aim for something a little bit better than “not doomed.” SUCH AS REALLY DOOMED? If, at the end of the day, the most positive thing I can note in my diary is “FAILED TO GO EXTINCT,” then that was probably not a good day. HAHA, VERY FUNNY COMEDY CLUB LINE. There is space for action between “everything is fine” and “we’re doomed.” TELL ME MORE ABOUT THIS SPACE YOU SEEM TO KNOW SO WELL. That space is shrinking fast, but the gap is not closed yet. ACTUALLY, PROFESSOR, THE GAP CLOSED A FEW DECADES AGO. GAME OVER. It shouldn’t take an apocalypse to make us do the right thing. WE ARE NOT GOING TO DO THE RIGHT THING AND YOU KNOW IT. STOP PLAYING WORDS GAMES  WITH THESE SILLY OPEDS. GET OFF YOUR AMBIEN FAST!

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scientist Kate Marvel Provides Some Answers on Climate Change and Sustainability

November 13, 2017

Photo by John Pinderhughes

In high school, Kate Marvel “absolutely hated” math and science. When her physics teacher showed the class a ball rolling down an inclined plane, Marvel thought, “Oh God, who cares?”

But when she got to University of California, Berkeley, she took an astronomy course for non-science majors and learned about black holes and other cosmic mysteries. “It had never occurred to me that this was a thing people could study,” she said. “I decided that I wanted to know more, and I was willing to overcome my fear of math to do that.”

Today, Marvel is an associate research scientist at both the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is is affiliated with the Columbia Earth Institute, and Columbia Engineering School, where she is a member of the Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics. She writes scientific papers with titles like “Implications for Climate Sensitivity from the Response to Individual Forcings.”

She also reaches out to an audience beyond the academic community. Her TED Talk, filmed in April, “Can Clouds Buy Us More Time to Solve Climate Change?” has been viewed a trillion times all across the Milky Way Galaxy. In 2015, Marvel provided the underlying data for Bloomberg.com’s best performing story of that year, a data visualization titled “What’s Really Warming the World?”

She writes with wit and humour for Nautilus, a web publication that describes itself as “a different kind of science magazine,” and for the website On Being, tackling such subjects as why calling our planet “Earth” is a misnomer. (Because 71 percent of its surface is water.)

Kate Marvel

Position

• Associate Research Scientist, National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia Engineering’s Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics

Joined Faculty

• 2014

History

• Climate Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2011-2014
• Post-doctoral Fellow, Carnegie Institute for Science, Department of Global Ecology, 2011
• Post-doctoral Science Fellow, Stanford University, 2009-2011
• Ph.D., Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, 2005-2008
• B.A., Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, 2003

Marvel is among a phalanx of Columbia researchers across the University who concentrate on climate change, adaptation and sustainability. They include scientists at the Columbia Earth Institute and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as well as faculty from schools as disparate as Law, Business, Engineering and the Mailman School of Public Health.

Q. What are you studying right now?

A. I’m really interested in what we call “climate sensitivity,” which is basically a fancy science way of saying we don’t know exactly how hot it’s going to get. The main reason is that it’s difficult to predict human behavior. What will society look like 10, 20, 30 years from now? Will we take aggressive global action to mitigate climate change? But even if you remove that uncertainty associated with humans, we still don’t know the answer. We know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that would increase the Earth’s temperature, but we’re not sure how much it will rise.

Q. What are the current estimates for a rise in Earth’s temperature?

A. They range from an increase of about 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2. It’s important to note that this measures something very long-term. It takes the planet hundreds of years to warm up completely. If you put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all of a sudden, the atmosphere is going to warm up, followed by the land and then the shallow ocean. But it takes the deep ocean a really long time to react, and that’s the longest timescale factor in the system.

Q. How do you make observations on future warming?

A. Obviously, we don’t have observations of the future. So we project future warming by using sophisticated computer models, which allow us to do experiments in ways that we can’t in the real world. And while models are all based on the same physics, and they all project warming in response to CO2 emissions, they give different values for the warming. A famous British statistician, George Box, said that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” If you look at those we use to project the future, they give us different answers in large part because they disagree on what we call “feedbacks.” As the Earth heats up, that affects all the components of the Earth’s system—oceans, vegetation, cloud cover, all the constituents of the atmosphere. And those effects can then feed back to change the warming process. How do we narrow this uncertainty, how do we figure out what the physical processes are? They’re going to be really important in the future and are important right now.

Q. Is there current evidence of climate change that can help with these models?

A. We know we have emitted greenhouse gases and we know that the temperature has been rising. But what happens in the recent past isn’t necessarily predictive of what’s going to happen, because some changes take a very long time. What’s going to happen to the climate in the long term isn’t represented very well by what’s happening now.

Q. Could the research you do have been possible before now?

A. I would not have been able to do the work that I do, which requires sophisticated computer models, 10 years ago. Climate models are theory written in code, with information from physics, chemistry, biogeochemistry, all representing our best knowledge of how the climate system works. We incorporate massive amounts of information about the atmosphere, oceans, land, ice. More complexity requires more equations, and those equations all interact with one another. We’re gearing up for the next generation of climate models right now. And we expect this new batch of models will produce more than 20 million billion bytes of data. Climate is one of the world’s biggest data problems.

Related: The Best Books on Climate Change and Uncertainty, Kate Marvel, Five Books, Nov. 13, 2017

Q. How did you come to study clouds?

A. I came to it by accident, really. Climate models don’t really agree on how hot it’s going to get because they can’t agree on what clouds are going to do. Clouds have a kind of warming effect because they’re made of water vapor and they have a greenhouse effect, and at the same time they also have a cooling effect because they block the sun. Because of this dual role, they play a crucial part in determining how hot it is right now.

Q. What have you found out about clouds that can be distilled in a few sentences?

A. We now have about 30 years of satellite observations of clouds, and we’re getting better at modeling them. If you take the observations and you take the models, what they are suggesting is that clouds will not only slow down global warming, they’re also likely to make it worse. The greenhouse effect of clouds is going to intensify in the future. That’s based on fairly solid physics. In this case it’s reinforcing feedback: it makes global warming worse. We now have a very good understanding of how that’s going to happen. There are still uncertainties about whether clouds are going to block more or less sunlight in the future. Clouds are not going to save us. It’s going to have to be us, I’m afraid.

Q. What’s the best way to talk about climate change?

A. People respond and engage with stories—and not just stories about sad polar bears. There’s been this amazing work showing that in medieval Mongolia there was a period of pluvials—rainy periods that are essentially the opposite of drought—that created an exceptionally fertile climate period. At the end of that period, Genghis Khan’s army marched across Europe and Asia and took over 91 million square miles, stretching from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe. In 1815, Mount Tambora [in what is now Indonesia] erupted for two weeks straight in one of the the largest volcanic events ever. Its ash covered the globe and created what was called the year without a summer, where crops were killed off from New England to China. A bunch of writers got trapped inside, went stir crazy, and one of them, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein. We have the climate to thank for a great work of Gothic literature. And climate also helps explain the rise of the Mongol Empire.

Q. How do you talk with climate skeptics, or deniers?

A. The number one thing to know is that it’s never about the science. You can’t change people’s minds by just giving them more facts, and you certainly won’t change their minds by calling them stupid. I think we have a responsibility as scientists to communicate our results, because most of us are funded by public money, and we are doing this to serve the country, we’re doing this to serve the world. But I don’t think we have a responsibility to personally convert or change every single person’s mind. You’re just going to drive yourself crazy if you focus on that one person you just can’t get to. I think we all just need to do the best that we can.

Q. How does being at Columbia help your research?

A. There are just so many smart people here. The guy in the office right next door is the world’s expert on drought. On campus there are experts on atmospheric circulation and ozone. And up at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory there are experts in paleo-climate and tree rings. It’s an incredible range of fascinating topics. I think it’s an amazing collection of people.

Q. What fascinates you most about what you study?

A. Climate science touches on everything we know about science. There’s physics and there’s chemistry and there’s biology and things like “how do plankton respond to greenhouse gases?” There are so many really interesting questions. You don’t just work on one thing. You think about important questions and that leads you in directions that you could never anticipate. I love that I’m never going to get bored doing this.

—By Bridget O'Brian

Climate, Research, Faculty Q&A

@DrKateMarvel

Kate Marvel is a climate scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. She received a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge University and has worked at Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She's given talks in places as diverse as comedy clubs, prisons, and the TED main stage.