Climate disaster a significant possibility says Nobel price winner Steven Chu - News
Since the IPCC report came out in 2007, new data point to even more alarming scenarios. We underestimate the risk and ignore the fact that the planet is threatened with 'sudden, unpredictable, and irreversible disaster,' says Steve Chu, one of the world's leading climate and energy experts.Steven Chu: Biography from Answers.com
Catastrophic damage to ecosystems because of global warming is 'a significant possibility.' We can expect 'disasters in orders of magnitude different from anything we've experienced thus far,' like abrupt, large-scale shifts in the climate system, collapse of ocean circulation and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and heat waves killing thousands of people. It is most likely that cities such as Tokyo, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, New York, and London must be protected behind sea walls because of rising sea levels and extreme weather.
These are some of the conclusions in an interview published today with Nobel Laureate Dr. Steve Chu, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California.
He is currently Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology of University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As global warming warnings grow more dire, Chu is currently pushing his scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and industry to develop technologies to reverse climate change. Chief in Chu's campaign is an unprecedented research pact reached between UC Berkeley, oil industry giant BP, the Lawrence Berkeley lab and the University of Illinois . Chu's role in promoting the clout of the closely aligned research programs at the lab and UC Berkeley helped convince BP to pick the campus for its $500 million biofuels institute.If alarmist Chu and climate realist Freeman Dyson are both physicists, I wonder why we're supposed to believe that Chu is "one of the world's leading climate and energy experts", while we're supposed to ignore Dyson because he's not a climatologist.
Posts
2 comments:
Berkely alarmist Secretary Steven Chu expects...
One good reason: Freeman Dyson has been a great contributor, but he specializes in speculation. He's always been on the look-out for the far-out. He's a professional maverick, who looks to find holes in the conventional wisdom.
Steve Chu is an experimental physicist, who has gotten very clever ideas to actually work. He's not trying to create new paradigms, he's just going where the science is leading. And in the case of atmospheric physics, etc., there are no big conceptual holes that suggest anything unconventional is called for.
I have met and talked with Freeman Dyson, and I used to know Steve Chu fairly well. Steve is definitely going to be more tuned into the scientific mainstream - and in real science, that's a good thing.
Post a Comment