2 SCIENCE NEWS | March 12, 2022Over the last 170 years, climate science has evolved from
a collection of observations and hypotheses to as close as
we’ve got to a crystal ball, revealing what lies ahead for
Earth and those who dwell here.
In this issue’s cover story, contributing correspondent
Alexandra Witze details the remarkable story of scientists’ efforts to learn how
increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere might affect
our planet (Page 16). It’s a saga that starts back in the 1850s, when Eunice
Newton Foote, a women’s rights activist and amateur scientist, devised an
experiment showing that carbon dioxide heats up more quickly than regular
air. As so often happens in science, other people were asking similar questions
about the planet, climate and heat. But since our planet’s climate systems are
astonishingly intricate, these have not been easy questions to answer. It wasn’t
until 1938 that the burning of fossil fuels was linked to rising temperatures
worldwide, and not until the late 1950s that scientists showed that atmospheric
carbon dioxide is increasing, and that human activities, including fossil fuel
burning and land use changes, are to blame.
Now the relatively new field of attribution science is showing us how climate
change is fueling extreme weather, including the 2021 extreme heat wave in
western North America. But as Witze notes, leaders in government and business
worldwide have largely failed to act to prevent even more extreme consequences.
There’s good reason to be furious at the fossil fuel companies and politicians
who have invested vast effort into denying the legitimacy of climate science,
thus delaying the coordinated efforts required to safeguard our future on Earth.
But few of us are blameless.
My life is entwined with fossil fuels, from the gas stove I just used to make a
cup of tea to the airplane I’ll take to visit my dad next week. His life, I realize,
mirrors a century of change. As a child in a Pennsylvania coal town, he trav-
eled by horse and wagon and read by kerosene lamps. He took a bus to college,
shipped off to the South Pacific in World War II and later flew worldwide for
business and pleasure. Now retired in Oregon, he has had to evacuate due to
wildfires, and he suffered through last summer’s 115° Fahrenheit “heat dome.”
Humans have been ingeniously adapting fossil fuels for millennia. The bricks
in Mesopotamian ziggurats were set with bitumen from oil seeps, and people
in China were drilling oil wells in the fourth century. It’s time to apply the same
ingenuity, industriousness and attention to inventing a world where we can
flourish without having to rely on burning fossil fuels.
Last month we got a letter from 14-year-old Nico Santin. He had read an
article in Science News on how seabirds are threatened by ocean heat waves
(SN: 2/26/22, p. 15). Nico lives in Hawaii, and he writes eloquently on how essen-
tial seabirds are to his island home. “Most of Hawaii’s native plants would not
have been there without the help of birds,” he writes. “It would be devastating if
seabirds native to Hawaii would starve and possibly go extinct because of rising
temperatures.” It’s time for us all, he says, to take practical steps to make sure
that doesn’t happen. I’m with Nico. — Nancy Shute, Editor in ChiefEDITOR’S NOTEWhy aren’t we listening to
what science is telling us?
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