Interview about Global Warming
with Jim White

University of Colorado at Boulder, -Director of Environmental Studies Program

Jon Lebkowsky: This is a point someone brought up the other day, that we really hadn't seen accelerated warming or climate change for sufficient duration to say that it's a result of human impact. We would have to wait a lot longer before we were really certain. How do you respond to people when they make that point? Do you think that it's valid?

James White: No. I think that, if you look at the simple physics around how greenhouse gases work, if you look at the fact that greenhouse gases are on the increase, we know we're having an impact on climate. I choose that word carefully; the debate is really How does that impact express itself? Is it heat? Is it storms? What's the climatic expression of that energy. And there, certainly, we have a ways to go before we can give the kind of detailed forecasts that people of Colorado vs people of Nebraska vs people in Miami are going to get their own forecast. So from a simple physics point of view, the science is there. Climate change is happening. It's going to happen.

I think there are a couple of other aspects to this. One is the insurance argument I brought up... we hedge our bets all the time. We build dams... I think this is something that people here in the west can understand intimately. There's not enough water in the snowpack every year to satisfy our Front Range needs, so we build reservoirs. To me that's a direct expression of uncertainty in the climate system. And how do you deal with the uncertainty in the climate system? In that case, with water, you build dams. I see we can take exactly the same kind of insurance-like prophylactic steps in dealing with climate change, as well. I think we ought to be thinking seriously about new crop species, I think we ought to be seriously looking at water shortages, I think we ought to be looking seriously at a variety of adaptive measures while at the same time trying to limit the impact itself.

My own research tells me that climate change is not this give and take, push and shove kind of linear system where if we increase CO2 by X, we get X climate change; if we increase it by 2X, we get 2X climate change. And that is really what the models give us back, because the models don't have mode changes, the models don't have... if North Atlantic deep water fails, a sophisticated model that can handle that. But if you look at the way climate has changed historically, going back over the history of the earth, it's not a little bit here, a little bit there. It's more like my little brother, when we were kids. I would pester him, and he didn't respond, and I would pester him more, and he would blow up, and yell and scream at me. When Mom asked me what I did, I said "All I did was poke him once, Mom." Not talking about all that energy I built up in my little brother with all those other tormenting little pokes. And it's that kind of nonlinear behavior that makes waiting for the shoe to drop a rather dangerous activity. You really want to wait until you get a big climate change before you do something.

Jon Lebkowsky: We don't know what all the factors are, correct?

James White: I think the sad reality is that we may, before all is said and done, get a big climate change, and that may be the mobilizing factor. Some people have argued that we'll need that. We'll need the big change, the grizzly bear set free in the house before we deal with the bears in the yard.

Jon Lebkowsky: Won't it be too late?

James White: It'll be too late to handle that climate change. It won't be too late to adapt. I find it very difficult to support the notion of Armageddon. We may be heading for rough times in terms of growing the food we need. We may be headed for tough times particularly in terms of the first world/third world relationship. But we're already on rough times now. For crying out loud, the net flow of wealth in this world is from poor nations to rich nations.

Jon Lebkowsky: One point that John Firor makes is that with six billion people on earth, if everyone had the same standard of living that we [Americans] have, there's no way that we could sustain.

James White: Yes, that's very clear. I teach a course on energy. That's just one of the resources that you'd need, and if you do the calculations, we use thirty times the energy the average African does. We use ten to fifteen times the average energy that people do in general developing countries overall. We're 250 million, they're 6 billion people. You bring them all up to our standard of living, and the multiplication factor for energy, for aluminum, tin, lead, all the other resources we need is just enormous. It's probably on the order of a hundred, or something like that - I've never done the calculation. But there's no way that I could see that we could support six billion consumers of the American type, or even six billion consumers of the Western European type, and they use half the resources we do.

Jon Lebkowsky: This reminds me of Buckminster Fuller's analogy, "spaceship earth," except this is a spaceship where there is an unequal division of resources.

James White: This gets into ethical issues. One of the lessons I would like to see people grasp is that, if indeed you have some sympathy for your fellow person out there, say you want people in Africa, India, or China to have the same sort of lifestyle that you have, then by necessity you have to buy into population control. Because you can't get one without theother. You can't see these people increase their lifestyles without addressing the fundamental problem, that there's way too many of us.

Jon Lebkowsky: Aren't we pretty much there, in the United States, as far as having our population under control? Is this something that only the developing nations have to consider?

James White: Yes and no... we're there in our own country. We have a little population momentum in our system; we're going to continue to go up. But we are in a leadership position. Where is our responsibility to the rest of humankind? Can we actually be a better leader on this planet? I would think yes?

Jon Lebkowsky: This is where Bush's decision not to be involved with the Kyoto accords is significant. It's not so much that we have to clean up our act, but that we should be leading.

James White: Yes. I view it as an academic would. I see carbon dioxide and climate change as merely step one in many steps, many problems that are going to happen in the future. We're going to have to have global cooperation to deal with. And, you know, population may even turn out to be one of those. So yeah, we need to take that first step. Maybe we're not going to get the best treaty we possibly can, maybe it's going to have a little more economic impact than we could potentially negotiate. But let's take the step. We're going to have to get to some point of global cooperation in the future. We're certainly not going to get there if we take all of our toys and step back from the table, and say no, we're not going along.

Jon Lebkowsky: In terms of putting your money where your mouth is, it sounds to me like you guys are developing a program that is a micro of that kind of work, where you try to actually come up with concrete recommendations for mitigation.

James White: There's really two things going on. One is a National Science Foundation-sponsored graduate training program. Ours is called Carbon, Climate, and Society. The idea there is for graduate students from the natural sciences - specifically biology, geological sciences, chemistry, etc. - to be co-educated with students from economics, political science, and in particular journalism. The idea there is, at an early stage in a graduate career, to have them learn those team-building skills that are going to be essential for them to address environmental issues. There's just no way that any person going through any one discipline can really grasp the full breadth of environmental problems, because it involves humans and the natural environment. So the idea is that they will learn first how to trust their colleagues in political science, econ, geological sciences, etc. Also, we want them to learn how to communicate with the media, and particularly communicate with the public, because it is the media by which we communicate with the public. It's interesting: my colleagues at the school of journalism are uncomfortable with me saying that it's the media that stands between the public and the scientists, because they don't see themselves as necessarily buying into that role. They're certainly not comfortable interpreting what we have to say. I guess they don't mind simply reporting what we say. But they don't want to be cast in the role of the Sierra Club or someone like that, who is really in an interpretive mode, taking what scientists have to say and presenting it to the public in a way that advances one side of the cause or one aspect of the cause.

Jon Lebkowsky: This is compelling, because one thing that has concerned me is, how do you get this kind of communication going, and how do you get the kind of teamwork together to actively address issues locally or globally?

James White: I've seen more and more interdisciplinary thinking coming out of faculty. They look around and think, "My field is important, and I'm doing really well in my field, but it doesn't answer the full question." But it's really the young people, the graduate students and the new assistant professors, who appreciate more than any of us just how important it is to be able to pull in all aspects of all disciplines in order to address environmental problems. They see it, they've grown up with it. We were talking the other night about the threshold we've hit as a species, in our ability to really have global dominance. And these are people who have grown up with that. To them this is not something new, this is a role that they were born into, whereas you and I were not born into that role. We've watched this happen, and I think it probably makes us very uncomfortable. I think they have less of a comfort issue than they feel that have a responsibility.

Jon Lebkowsky: Do you think that students today, then, are feeling a lot of responsibility for the environment.

James White: Absolutely. I've watched this change over the last ten years, as I've taught courses at Colorado University. We went through a period where students were really depressed about environmental problems. They saw all these things and wondered, what can we do about it. They had a kind of throw up their hands and get out kind of philosophy. Now I see much more of a take-charge attitude. I'm no sociologist, but my guess is that it has to do with the fact that these people have been taught about these problems, and have thought about these problems, from the time that they first went to school. To them, this is simply part of their generation's challenge, and how they're going to meet that challenge. Our parents had to deal with fascism... our children are going to have to deal with global-scale environmental problems. I don't think I've ever compared fascism to global-scale environmental problems, either directly or indirectly, but I just realized that it fits. They're both large, global-scale problems that a generation had to take on and deal with. If that generation didn't take it on and deal with it, generations after that are going to have to suffer. What I see among the kids in class today is this attitude of "Okay, let's deal with it." It's a very matter-of-fact, we've-got-to-deal with it approach.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mentioned there were two things going on.

James White: At the University of Colorado we have the Environmental Studies Program, an interdisciplinary program that's built much the same way as the NSF grad program, in that we have social scientists, natural scientists, journalists, engineers, lawyers, people from the medical school - a broad interdisciplinary group - whose common thread is environmental causes. It's undergraduate now, and will soon be graduate as well. We currently have 550 undergraduate majors in environmental studies at C.U., which makes it one of the largest majors in the College of Arts and Sciences. Beginning in fall 2001, we'll begin to take applications for graduate students in the program. Just this last November, CCHE approved our Master's and PhD. in Environmental Studies. Those degrees will be very similar to the NSF program, where there's going to be introductory courses that take students through a variety of backgrounds and brings them up to speed in anything ranging from the natural sciences to how policy is made to the ethical issues. We're in the process of hiring an environmental ethicist right now for the Department of Philosophy. This year, jointly with Political Science, we hired a person who does Environmental Policy, a brand new PhD out of Berkeley, and we're finishing up a search for a senior person in Environmental Studies.

Jon Lebkowsky: Is anybody else doing this?

James White: Everybody else is trying this. One of the hardest things I can imagine doing is putting faculty outside of their comfort zone, outside their departmental silo, if you will. The University of Colorado has historically hired interdisciplinary researchers, and I give a lot of the credit for that to the research institutes on campus. They've had a hand in hiring faculty, and they've gone after those people who work at the edges of disciplines, they work between disciplines. You won't find that true across the U.S. Interdisciplinary research is definitely more and more valued, but not too many people were actually doing what C.U. is doing, and that is collecting these people who can cross over the lines. Whether we did that consciously or not, the reality is that here we are in 2000, we'd like to put together an interdisciplinary faculty to work on environmental problems, and lo and behold, they're here, already on campus, and there's not too many holes that we have to fill. So it's a campus-wide program. We have people from Engineering, as I was saying, we have good colleagues in Law, we have faculty from Journalism, plus all the natural and social sciences. So if I'm doing this at Harvard, I'm struggling to get faculty talking to each other. I may have the pieces, but they didn't start out in an interdisciplinary mode, whereas here at CU, it seems as though the walls between disciplines are a lot lower, and in some cases hard to notice at all. And The University of Colorado is a wonderful place to do this. We have very strong environmental interest among undergraduates, among graduates, among faculty, and we're sitting in one of the most beautiful places you could find. We see environmental change first-hand. This is one of the most research-active universities in the United States, and a lot of that is environmental research. When we calculated the numbers for how the faculty of Environmental Studies was doing research-wise, we were way up on the high end of the curve.

Jon Lebkowsky: Is it helpful having NCAR and NOAA nearby.

James White: Absolutely. Just to give you an example, on this NSF-sponsored grant, we have two or three researchers from NCAR as principle investigators on this proposal, and two from NOAA. We have the head of the Carbon Cycle Group at NOAA that measures all of these greenhouse gases, the famous Mauna Loa Curve, Pieter Tans. Dave Schimel, who does a lot of the terrestrial modeling of carbon uptake recently published and co-authored a paper with a group on big carbon sinks in the United States. Scott Doney, oceanographer up at NCAR. We also have Katy Human, who's the environmental reporter for the Daily Camera. This is easily the first time I've ever written a proposal that had a newspaper reporter as a principal.