The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html#1
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky
enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still
hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.
Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the
history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding
chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now
the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he
became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson
Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United
Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize
“outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the
environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other
publications and was identified by the British Institute of
Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the
aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream
by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect
westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out
from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned
they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three
years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he
prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back
in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the
nation’s leading climatologists.
How Little We Know
Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as
anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change
throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a
big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years
ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement
of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter
climate.
“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin
Energy Cooperative News.
In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical
proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite
direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming
that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be
part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the
conventional wisdom.
“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at
various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he
told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough
people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody
was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”
“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,”
Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the
early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming
out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon
dioxide into the air.”
Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after
they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm
Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very
likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial
activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy
evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores,
pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in
those times before instrumental temperature records existed.
We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff.
“Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence,
eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get
there? It’s all written down.”
Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse
mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in
Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there
from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the
United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions
changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference.
Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for
current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in
the Alps?”
We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and
agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging
from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of
years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.
“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were
going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow
never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just
getting back to normal.”
What Leads, What Follows?
What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that
qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even
though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it.
The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric
gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into
space.
We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and
where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the
atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is
what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is
absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is
absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…
A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one
percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go
outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models
researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios
50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the
computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the
effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’
long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do
you believe a five-day forecast?”
Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate
conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach
in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative
News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies,
published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006.
The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate
changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies
found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with
temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature,
rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving
up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a
few thousand years.
Renaissance Man, Marathon Man
When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the
ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate.
We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist,
about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s
now practiced for six decades.
“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of
Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last
several thousand years have affected human activity and human
cultures.”
This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in
archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology,
and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s
looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on
human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say
is a Renaissance person.”
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21
years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s
work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom
being outpaced by an octogenarian.
Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus
Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of
the science of modern climatology.”
“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as
the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to
see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”
Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran
became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early
’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.
With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a
book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers
with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote
a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t
fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the
remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”
Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply
enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do
and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This
was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps
showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.
“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.
“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says.
“He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer.
Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held
ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
Celibacy in healthy human beings is a form of
insanity. -- Captain Compassion
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
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