Earth & Sky

‘Keep the science as science’ on climate change

Susan Solomon is a senior scientist with NOAA and a leader of the working group on climate trends for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At a recent science meeting, Earth & Sky asked Solomon when leading world governments might begin to heed the IPCC reports and take major action to reduce greenhouse gases.

Susan Solomon: Well I think it’s important to recognize that science can only go so far. It’s very difficult to decide on a scientific basis how much risk is acceptable. People who enjoy sky diving have a different view of risk than I do, but I can’t tell them they’re wrong and I’m right. I think the key point though is that in this issue, as in all issues, science is an input, it’s a very important input.

Solomon added, though, that governments are listening to scientists on climate change.

Susan Solomon: Also, there’s some real political issues. And they involve such things as whether the developed and developing countries both participate in reducing emissions, whether the developed world pays for the developing world to develop. This obviously now raises a whole host of political issues that go way beyond the science. So, I would prefer to keep the science as science, and for everyone to recognize that there are other issues involved in this. We have a societal choice to make here, as a planet, and science will do the best it can. But we also have to participate as citizens and as governments.

Thousands of scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Solomon was one of 25 scientists who represented the IPCC at the Nobel award ceremony in Oslo, Norway in late 2007. Earth & Sky asked Solomon about the IPCC’s most important messages to the world.

Susan Solomon: I think the key messages that have been broadly reported already, namely that it’s very clear that our planet is warming. ‘Warming is unequivocal’, were the words that we used. And we chose them very carefully. There’s no question that the planet is warming up. And the evidence is very strong that most of the warming is very likely, with odds of nine out of ten based on a very careful assessment, most of the warming is very likely from increasing greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are coming mainly from fossil fuel burning.

What effects does she think this warming might have?

Susan Solomon: I think the next several years will see an increased rate of evidence that it isn’t just temperature that’s changing, that rainfall is also being affected would be a very important conclusion. Because a few degrees of temperature, of course, is a serious issue. A 10 or 20 percent change in rainfall is life or death for agriculture. So particularly in very dry areas, places like Africa where there isn’t much in the way of irrigation, it’s basically rain-fed or it doesn’t happen. Changes in rainfall will have potentially a very, very large impact. So those are the sorts of things that are being looked at very carefully and are clearly matters for concern.