MISSION TO BOLIVIA In a 1997 expedition, Lonnie G. Thompson, right, recovered ice with a solar-powered drill. George Steinmetz
Lonnie G. Thompson Thomas Nash
DINING ATOP A MOUNTAIN Dr. Thompson's team camped out for nearly a month to gather data to examine climatic changes. George Steinmetz
BACK TO THE LAB Ice cores, those long cylinders of glacial ice drilled by the team, were carried to a waiting truck. George Steinmetz
A TEAM Ellen Mosley-Thompson has worked with her husband. Andrew Spear for The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS Published: July 2, 2012
COLUMBUS, Ohio — One day in 1991, high in the thin, crystalline air of the Peruvian Andes, Lonnie G. Thompson saw that the world’s largest tropical ice cap was starting to melt. It was the moment he realized that his life’s work had suddenly become a race.
The discovery meant other ice caps were likely to melt, too, and the tales of past climate that they contained could disappear before scientists had a chance to learn from them.
Driven by a new sense of urgency over the ensuing 20 years, he pulled off a string of achievements with few parallels in modern science. He led teams to some of the highest, most remote reaches of the earth to retrieve samples of the endangered ice.
Then last October, the race against the clock became much more personal.
Dr. Thompson woke up in a Columbus hospital room, a strange dream rattling in his brain. He looked down. “Wires were coming out of my chest,” he said. Machinery had been implanted to keep him alive. Longer term, doctors told him, only a heart transplant would restore him to full health.
Dr. Thompson, 64, is one of the most prominent of the generation of scientists who, in the latter decades of the 20th century, essentially discovered the problem of global warming [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ]. Now those scientists are beginning to age out of the field. Many of them say they grapple with the question of how hard to keep pushing themselves. Could one more finding or one more expedition help turn the tide of public awareness?
Some have continued working into their 70s and 80s. One of the most vocal about the need for action, Stephen H. Schneider of Stanford University, fought off a rare form of cancer several years ago, only to die of a blood clot in 2010 after speaking in Europe about climate change. He was 65.
Of this pioneering group, few were hardier than Dr. Thompson, who has taught earth sciences at Ohio State University [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/ohio_state_university/index.html ] since the 1970s. Though he routinely spent up to two months a year camped in dangerous conditions atop mountains, he despised derring-do. His enterprise was driven by a lust for hard data.
Hauling six tons of equipment to South America, Africa, Asia and Europe, he and his small team raced to recover long cylinders of ice from glaciers that had built up over thousands of years. The layers in those cylinders contained dust, volcanic ash, subtle variations in water chemistry, even the occasional frozen insect — a record of climatic and geologic changes that could be retrieved, preserved and interpreted like a series of tree rings.
Dr. Thompson became one of the first scientists to witness and record a broad global melting of land ice. And his ice cores proved that this sudden, coordinated melting had no parallel, at least not in the last several thousand years.
To some climate scientists, the Thompson ice core record became the most convincing piece of evidence that the rapid planetary warming now going on was a result of a rise in greenhouse gases caused by human activity.
“The reason Lonnie’s stuff is so powerful is that it’s so simple,” said Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist at Harvard and director of its Center for the Environment.
“His evidence dismisses the idea that this is some sort of 300-year or 500-year cycle, which is what the skeptics and the deniers want to say. You say: ‘No, because Lonnie’s ice didn’t melt then. It’s melting now, but it didn’t melt then.’ ”
Colleagues say Dr. Thompson neglected his own health in pursuit of his science. Now, largely confined to his office and home in Columbus, he said he has begun to appreciate the clarity afforded him by his circumstance.
“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it’s not all bad,” he said. “It really forces you to sit down and think about what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and how you are using your time.”
He had recently married a fellow student, Ellen Mosley, who was drawn into Antarctic field work and became a leading Ohio State researcher in her own right. Collaborating with John Mercer, an earth scientist at the university known for his studies of glacial geology in Latin America, Lonnie Thompson was drawn to tropical ice.
The very idea of ice in the warmest part of the world seems to defy common sense. But it is cold atop high mountains everywhere, and major ice caps exist on towering mountain plateaus far from the earth’s poles. Even in the mid-20th century, some of them had never been explored.
Besides, in the tropics, “nobody thought there would be ice that would be very old,” recalled Wallace S. Broecker of Columbia University, then and now the leading American paleoclimatologist (At 80, Dr. Broecker is among the climate scientists still working long past retirement age).
In 1974, with $7,000 from the National Science Foundation [ http://www.nsf.gov/ ], Dr. Mercer and Dr. Thompson led a scouting party to Quelccaya, on a volcanic plain 18,000 feet above sea level. They confirmed that annual layering caused partly by seasonal dust could be seen in the ice.
After a series of frustrated attempts to drill through the ice, including one involving a helicopter, Dr. Thompson resorted to mules, horses and donkeys to mount a 1983 expedition that drilled through 537 feet of ice with a solar-powered drill.
At the time, he could not find a way to get the ice home frozen, so the layers were teased apart on the mountain and melted into thousands of plastic bottles that were hauled back to Columbus for chemical analysis.
The results were startling. The ice record stretched back 1,500 years, and it recorded huge oscillations in the climate of the region — intense dry spells alternating with wet spells. Vast lakes had come and gone in the valleys, the dust from their dried-up beds leaving chemical imprints in the ice. The record also showed changes in water chemistry similar to those seen at the poles, leading Dr. Thompson to infer major temperature swings in the tropics.
In the next few years, Dr. Thompson drilled at other sites in South America, recovering ice as old as 25,000 years and confirming the patterns seen at Quelccaya. His results, along with records other scientists were gathering from the sea floor, roiled the field of paleoclimatology.
A realization began to dawn that the tropics were important to global climates of the past. It had been clear since the 1970s that the ice ages were caused by wobbles in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, but the ice sheets mainly grew in the Northern Hemisphere, which has most of the world’s land. Scientists had evidence that the ice sheets influenced climate all over the planet, but they had had trouble figuring out how.
Dr. Thompson’s results became part of a growing body of science suggesting that signals were being transmitted from the North Pole to the South Pole via the tropics, through huge shifts in winds, rain patterns and other variables.
The work had implications in other fields, too. Some archaeologists had begun to think climate swings were responsible for the rise and fall of cultures in the Andes and along the Peruvian coastal plain. And Dr. Thompson’s ice cores gave them evidence that climate had indeed changed drastically enough to send entire civilizations into collapse.
A Series of Challenges
By the late 1980s, concern about global warming was rising, and some scientists believed the ice caps and glaciers of the tropics would be among the first to show the effects.
On a return trip to Quelccaya in 1991, Dr. Thompson noticed substantial melting at the edges of the ice cap, and some on top. Laboratory tests confirmed that the annual climate signals recorded in the chemistry of the ice were being blurred.
He picked up the pace with his team, who were among the first Western scientists allowed onto the ice caps of highland China, retrieving ice that may be as old as 750,000 years. He drilled several other times on the Tibetan plateau, in the Russian Arctic, in Alaska, atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, in New Guinea, in the Alps.
In his book about Dr. Thompson, “Thin Ice [ http://www.mark-bowen.com/book_ti.html ],” published in 2005, Mark Bowen described an incident on a peak called Huascarán in Peru. Dr. Thompson’s tent collapsed and started blowing off the mountain with him inside; he managed to stop it only by driving an ice ax through the floor, and then waited out the night. In his travels, he forded flooding rivers on horseback and coped with altitude sickness, coughing fits and blinding headaches. His West Virginia farm upbringing came in handy as he challenged Mongol porters to contests shooting wild game. Other times, he went hungry. Once, in China, dinner was a bowl of stewed camel paws.
Somehow he and his team got the ice they were after and found ways to haul tons of the frozen cylinders back to Columbus, where roughly four miles of ice cores are kept at 30 degrees below zero and protected by backup generators.
Dr. Thompson’s career has not been entirely free of controversy.
During an expedition to Tibet in 1997, a graduate student working with him, Shawn Wight [ http://chronicle.com/article/Research-at-What-Cost-/13035 ], was forced off the mountain by altitude sickness, got an infection while hospitalized and died. A judge found Ohio State not liable, but the case led universities across the country to re-examine their policies on field expeditions.
Some scientists have challenged Dr. Thompson’s analysis of the signals in his ice cores, saying that the chemical changes he interprets as temperature swings probably reflect a more complicated mix of changes in temperature, precipitation and atmospheric circulation patterns. Mathias Vuille, an atmospheric scientist at the State University at Albany, who admires Dr. Thompson’s achievements, said that his analysis on this point “is hard to reconcile with other evidence.”
And an especially intense controversy has erupted about Dr. Thompson’s interpretation of ice he recovered atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Though Dr. Thompson sees the rapid disappearance of ice there as a reflection of climate change, his critics cite more regional than global factors, like precipitation.
While Dr. Thompson has defended his interpretations on these points, he does have some regrets. One is that those years of frenzied drilling led him to fall behind in publishing his data, so some of the evidence he has gathered is not yet available to the broader scientific community.
Still, it is clear that Dr. Thompson managed to retrieve ice cores from a half-dozen places in the world where they can no longer be found in pristine form today. Some of the ice he drilled on Kilimanjaro, for instance, has since disappeared entirely.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson does most of her fieldwork in Antarctica, but she has played a major role in interpreting the ice her husband recovered. Both are convinced that their own analysis is merely a start, and they have put money they have won from scientific prizes into an endowment to preserve the ice cores for future generations.
‘It’s Not Your Time’
As a young man, Dr. Thompson stayed in shape by training for and running marathons. He now realizes his health began a slow decline sometime in his 40s.
Dr. Bowen, a physicist and mountain climber, accompanied Dr. Thompson on several expeditions to write the definitive book about him. He said that atop Mount Kilimanjaro, “my heart went out to Lonnie as I lay in my tent at 20,000 feet and listened to him just hack away, coughing his lungs out. It happened almost every night for four weeks, yet we were all amazed when he got up during the day and was still as productive as four normal people.”
Fifteen years ago, Dr. Thompson was treated for asthma, but he now suspects that the diagnosis was incomplete. He learned in 2009 that he had congestive heart failure, but kept to a schedule of expeditions to New Guinea and the Alps.
For a time, “he was in complete denial,” his wife said. His doctors cannot say for certain that his work contributed to his health problems. Dr. Thompson notes that he has a family history of heart disease.
Last fall, he reached a point where he could barely walk. He wound up in the hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness for days as his failing heart struggled to keep him alive. More than once, his wife and their daughter, Regina, were told he might not survive the night.
It was deep in one of his comatose periods, he figures, that he had the dream. He described jumping through space and landing in a beautiful spot filled with flowers and streams. There, he said, a figure in white spoke to him.
“It’s not your time,”’ the figure told him. “You have another purpose.”
Dr. Thompson is not a particularly religious man, and he does not try to explain the dream, but his memory of it is vivid.
The battery-powered equipment doctors implanted in his chest helped him get better and leave the hospital as he waited on the organ list. By the spring, he had resumed a limited work schedule, cranking out papers with colleagues around the world.
He was at his desk on May 1 when the phone rang. He walked next door to his wife’s office.
“My heart is here,” he told her.
He underwent the transplant that evening. The donor’s family most likely does not know that the decision they made saved the life of a world-famous scientist. He is writing a letter in hopes of thanking them some day.
Back in his office in early June, after the transplant, his face glowed a healthy pink. “I feel better than I have in 20 years,” he said.
Dr. Thompson knows he needs to go slowly, but he has already started eyeing an unexplored ice cap in China.
One of the greatest achievements of modern climate science was the recovery of ice cores in Antarctica that allowed a detailed reconstruction of the earth’s climate for the past 800,000 years. Dr. Thompson suspects an even longer record could be recovered by drilling at the right spot in Tibet.
Last year, he pulled strings in Russia and asked for an astronaut on the International Space Station to photograph a certain ice cap. A Chinese scouting party has already checked it out, and drilling a core seems possible, if he regains his strength.
Other people could probably do it without him, but that is not a thought he cares to entertain.
“I’m going back,” he said with a wide grin. “I’m looking for the oldest ice on the planet.”
Storms batter eastern U.S. Lighting flashes Saturday morning, June, 30, 2012, in Hebron, Md. (AP photo/Salisbury Daily Times, Kristin Roberts)
Storm damage in Hershey At least 50 100 ft. tall pine trees were broken in half next to the Hotel Hershey during a severe storm that blew through parts of Hershey and West Hanover Township Friday morning. (Sean Simmers, The Patriot-News)
Western Wildfires This aerial photo shows the destructive path of the Waldo Canyon fire in the Mountain Shadows subdivision area of Colorado Springs, Colo., Thursday, June 28, 2012. Colorado Springs officials said Thursday that hundreds of homes have been destroyed by the raging wildfire. (AP Photo/Denver Post, RJ Sangosti)
By The Associated Press Published: Wednesday, July 04, 2012, 12:00 AM Updated: Wednesday, July 04, 2012, 9:30 PM
WASHINGTON — Is it just freakish weather or something more? Climate scientists suggest that if you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, take a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.
"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."
Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research [ http://ncar.ucar.edu/learn-more-about/climate ] in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.
As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."
"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."
Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — a large, powerful and long-lasting straight-line wind storm — blew from Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.
Fueled by the record high heat, this was among the strongest of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Scientists expect "non-tornadic wind events" like this one and other thunderstorms to increase with climate change because of the heat and instability, he said.
Such patterns haven't happened only in the past week or two. The spring and winter in the U.S. were the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the weather extremes to come, scientists say.
Since Jan. 1, the United States has set more than 40,000 hot temperature records, but fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/ ]. Through most of last century, the U.S. used to set cold and hot records evenly, but in the first decade of this century America set two hot records for every cold one, said Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 hot to 1 cold. Some computer models say that ratio will hit 20-to-1 by midcentury, Meehl said.
"In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt said.
The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.
While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."
But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, such as Meehl, disagree: "This is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future."
Climate Change Belief Increased In U.S. After Extreme Weather, NOAA Chief Says
By ROD McGUIRK, AP Posted: 07/06/2012 2:41 am Updated: 07/06/2012 10:02 am
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Increasingly common experiences with extreme climate-related events such as the Colorado wildfires, a record warm spring and preseason hurricanes have convinced many Americans climate change is a reality, the head of a U.S. scientific agency said Friday.
Many Americans had previously seen climate change as a "nebulous concept" removed from them in time and geography, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco.
"Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it's having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events," Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.
"People's perceptions in the United States at least are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change," she said.
Among the extreme events, she noted record-breaking wildfires in the West in the past two years, including in Colorado, where blazes recently damaged or destroyed nearly 350 homes and killed two people.
Last spring was the warmest in the Unites States since 1895, when records were first kept. For only the third time since hurricane records started in 1851, two hurricanes formed over the North Atlantic before the season officially began June 1.
Lubchenco said that while it was impossible to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the pattern of extreme events was consistent with forecast consequences of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
She said her agency was experiencing "skyrocketing" demand for climate change data and projections from individuals, businesses, communities and planners across the United States.
In fact, there are even studies suggesting that extreme heat can strangle a country’s livelihood. A 2008 study [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w14132 ] by three economists, led by Northwestern’s Benjamin Jones, found that poorer countries experience a plunge in economic output during hotter-than-average years. It’s not just that drought kills off crops. Industrial output declines, and political unrest becomes more unlikely.
What’s curious, however, is that this happens mainly in poorer countries — wealthy countries are far more immune to the heat penalty.
One explanation for the difference, of course, is air conditioning. Today, most Americans can minimize their exposure to sweltering weather. We can wake up in our thermostat-tuned homes, hop into our AC-cranked cars, and drive to our cooled offices. Granted, not everyone’s so lucky — plenty of people don’t have office jobs, and blackouts have left thousands here in D.C. without power — but indoor climate control is a major feature of the industrialized West. And it appears to have large economic benefits.
Stan Cox, in his fascinating book, “Losing Our Cool [ http://www.losingourcool.com/ ],” offers a long list of ways in which air conditioning has transformed the U.S. economy. Here’s a description from the National Building Museum of the state of affairs in the 1920s, before the invention of AC:
Before air-conditioning, American life followed seasonal cycles determined by weather. Workers’ productivity declined in direct proportion to the heat and humidity outside — and on the hottest days employees left work early and businesses shut their doors. Stores and theaters also closed down, unable to comfortably accommodate large groups of people in stifling interiors. Cities emptied in summers…. Houses and office buildings were designed to enhance natural cooling, and people spent summer days and evenings on porches or fire escapes.
Everything changed after the discovery in 1928 of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were used as coolants in air-conditioning (and, we later learned, chewed a hole in the ozone layer). Retail stores could now operate year-round. Americans could flock to otherwise inhospitable regions in the South and Southwest. Cox has even argued [ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/05/losing_our_cool_air_conditioning_ext2010/ ] that AC was a major factor in the resurgence of the Sunbelt-based Republican Party.
But there’s a flip side. All this AC could prove unsustainable. The amount of energy consumed by U.S. homes for air conditioning has doubled in the past 12 years, according to Cox, and now accounts for nearly 20 percent of our electricity use. What’s more, developing countries like China and India want in on what’s viewed as an utter necessity. The New York Times recently reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/world/asia/global-demand-for-air-conditioning-forces-tough-environmental-choices.html ] that sales of AC units are rising 20 percent per year in those two nations.
If all of these countries keep burning coal to satisfy demand for indoor cooling, the result will be more carbon dioxide in the air. (The newer, ozone-friendly HFCs used in the units are also highly potent [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6071/922 ] greenhouse gases.) That means a hotter planet overall, which will, in turn, require even more air conditioning to survive. As a reminder, here’s how frequent [ http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/ ] 100°F days will become across the United States if carbon emissions keep rising at their current rate:
Source: Global Climate Change Report, 2009
The current “freak heat wave” will become the norm for one-sixth of the year in D.C. (That’s in addition to all the other climate consequences — sea-level rise, droughts, agricultural disruption — that could prove far more difficult to adapt to.) In our endless quest to cool ourselves, we’ve managed to heat the world. So is there a way to break this cycle?
One oft-discussed option is to make air conditioning more energy-efficient. And that might mean more than just tinkering with existing units. In countries like Japan and South Korea, many homeowners find it wasteful to cool a whole vacant house all at once, preferring to focus on individual rooms where people are actually sitting. Better insulation and ventilation can reduce the need for AC, as can plant-covered “green roofs [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_roof ]” that cool buildings naturally. There also exist promising alternatives to traditional AC, including ground-source heat pumps [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump#Ground_heat_exchanger ], which channel hot air in a house down into the ground during the summer.
In his book, Cox suggests going even further: He argues that people might be better off in some respects if they learn to rely less on artificial temperature control. There’s scant evidence that keeping office temperatures at icy levels improves productivity. Indeed, it’s possible that the human body is actually healthier when it’s not kept enshrouded by air conditioning all the time. Some researchers have even suggested [ http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Diet/story?id=2120381&page=1 ], for instance, that our reliance on indoor cooling has helped spur an obesity epidemic.
Some parts of the developed world are slowly pushing to temper their addiction to air conditioning. In Japan, Cox notes, the government has pressured businesses to keep thermostats at a mild 81°F during the summer. After some initial resistance, businessmen took off their suit jackets and adjusted. Similarly, malls in Hong Kong are now pledging [ http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/in-hong-kong-a-pledge-to-turn-down-the-ac/ ] to turn down the AC to save energy.
Still, on a day when temperatures are reaching dangerously high levels in many parts of the United States (the high is approaching 105°F in D.C.), calls for conservation are a tougher sell. Mostly it’s worth noting how different heat waves today are from the heat waves of the 1920s — because of how drastically we’ve adapted.
“Record daily high temperatures during the months of June, July and August have been broken or tied 26 times in the past 17 years. Thirteen of those record-setting hot days have been broken or tied in just the past three years”:
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