Richard Alley is not an alarmist. He’s a mild-mannered, bearded, bespectacled geoscientist with a keen eye for witty nature photography and a low-key style of delivery on such tedium as the paleoclimatic observations to be made from 10,000-year ice core samples and ancient tree rings.
Which is to say he makes excellent use of toilet jokes as he forecasts the apocalypse.
The Pennsylvania State University professor and international expert on ice sheets (think: Greenland, Alaska and Antarctica) has served on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has spent much of his career documenting evidence of global warming in very cold places.
For anyone who has spent any time at the poles, bathroom humor apparently is a crucial, um, ice-breaker. It’s vitally important to keep laughing as you shovel the snow out of the outhouse each morning.
Alley delivered his lecture on the significance of the disappearing polar ice sheets this week to a packed house at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, leaving the crowd not exactly laughing but possibly more upbeat about the prospects for the future of the planet.
Yes, the Earth’s atmosphere is warming, and he has no doubt human activity is accelerating that process. His photos of Muir Glacier in Alaska in 1860 and the tiny portion that was left in 2000 drew gasps from the audience.
As the huge polar ice sheets continue to melt, the seas will keep rising, ocean temperatures will change and weather patterns will be altered dramatically, he said. Droughts in some regions will become permanent conditions, ecosystems will be lost, economies destroyed – if not in our lifetimes, in those of our children and grandchildren.
Then he clicks to the final slide in his show and it is a magnificent polar ice formation at the edge of the ocean with a glorious rainbow arcing overhead.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said as the audience released a grateful, collective sigh.
Alley remains hopeful – not because of brilliant leadership to address climate change around the world – yet – but because he’s betting that the human race will respond to this challenge as it has to so many others.
“History has shown that we usually figure it out,” he said.
Trouble is, we’re not accustomed to working together to solve problems, and on this one we can’t go it alone.
The crowd nudged Alley out of his scientific cloister, asking him to recommend policies for addressing the threat that climate change presents.
Moving away from our dependence on fossil fuels for energy is an essential first step, he said. “We have to change anyway. The oil companies are very smart, and they can see peak oil from here.”
Conservation is the cheapest source of new energy and one that can be available immediately. Developing alternative energy sources is also important.
Beyond that, research into methods for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – while practically science fiction at this point – shouldn’t be ignored, he said.
“Investing in smart young people always pays off.”
The IPCC estimates that responding to global warming will cost 1 percent of the economy of the world. Failing to act could cost 20 times that.
But mobilizing creaky political institutions and corporations obsessed with quarterly profits is excruciating.
Even the puniest initiatives, such as the push in Congress to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for vehicles sold in the U.S., are met with a storm of resistance from lobbyists and narrow, self-serving interest groups.
“Our nation lags behind most of the industrialized world, including the entire European Union, Japan, China, Australia and Canada, in average fuel economy,” said Sen. Ken Salazar in (finally) endorsing the bill to increase CAFE standards Wednesday.
Passage of the bill is such an obvious first step – a baby step, really – toward joining the global community in confronting the specter of climate change.
So much more is needed.
“I think we can do this,” said Alley as he stood beneath the soaring image of a glacier glistening under the bright Arctic sunshine. “I think we can,” but he confessed, “I’m nervous some days.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
