On recent trips to Europe, Wally Broecker was treated like a celebrity. From London to Rome, the 78-year-old Columbia University geochemist was mobbed by reporters who hailed him as the father of global warming. Today, on the 35th anniversary of the publication of his paper "Climate Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global warming" in Science magazine, Broecker is again fielding calls from members of the media. They want to interview the man who was credited for the now-iconic phrase "global warming." That’s not working out so well.
"I just got off the phone with Foreign Affairs magazine," he said Tuesday, "And Science magazine is doing something about it as well."
The scientist, who lives in Closter in Bergen County, has again become a foil for climate debate in light of his uncannily accurate temperature predictions in that paper, which was a side note for many years.
Unwilling to become a sideshow in the political battles around climate policy, Broecker distances himself from scientists who are climate-change activists, such as James Hansen of NASA. Instead he strives to do just what he did in the 1960s: untangle the mysteries of the Earth from clues left by the ice ages.
Broecker has worked his entire adult life in a lab perched on the Palisades in Rockland County, N.Y.
"I think Wally’s contribution is nothing less than reading the Rosetta stone — not of an ancient language, but the Rosetta stone of the Earth itself," said Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
The dozens of honors Broecker has received include the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, considered the Nobel Prize of earth science.
A professor at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Broecker was a leader in the generation of researchers who first studied the natural world using techniques like radio carbon dating and oxygen isotope analysis that were developed during World War II.
With these tools, he revolutionized the study of ice-age climate change and ocean chemistry, writing the definitive textbook on chemical oceanography and leading a massive assessment of ocean properties.
He is best known for describing abrupt climate changes at the end of ice ages, and for linking the movement of deep ocean currents to changing temperatures on land.
Fit and ruddy, he is a survivor of heart disease and cancer. His face still has a scar from the removal of a tumor on his neck.
His office at Lamont is a glass-enclosed atelier that juts over the front walk of the $40 million Gary C. Comer Geochemistry Laboratory like the bridge of a ship. His large, tidy desk, which overlooks the front path, is adorned by a simple yellow legal pad and pencil, no computer in sight.
UN-AMUSEMENT RIDE
Broecker, a Chicago native raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, came to New Jersey by accident. He was 19 when he boarded his first airplane, to be interviewed at Lamont Doherty in the winter of 1951.
Unsure how to direct his cabdriver from the airport, Broecker found himself alone on the curb in front of New Jersey’s Palisades Amusement Park instead of the geophysical research station about 10 miles away in Palisades, N.Y.
Luckily, he says, he was able to get another student, who had a car, to come rescue him.
"When we first drove up the stately long driveway to the lab with stone walls on either side, and the mansion house on the hill, I was so excited," Broecker recalled. "I was a boy from the flatlands of Chicago coming to work on this mountain."
Married as an undergraduate, he and his wife, Grace, lived the nomadic graduate-student life. They raised their six children in apartments in Dumont, Tappan and Alpine, N.J., before buying a house in Closter in 1960. His wife died of cancer three years ago,
Broecker has written 470 papers and 10 books, including "The Great Ocean Conveyor," published this year by the Princeton University Press. He is co-author of two books coming out next year. He also has mentored scores of scientists.
It was on a trip to Rome in September 2008 — to receive the Balzan Prize for outstanding achievement in science — that Broecker found out his obscure 1975 article on climate change had been rediscovered.
"It annoyed me at the time because at the press conference in Rome they kept asking me about this instead of more important things," said Broecker.
In the paper, he had accurately predicted the rate and amount of temperature increase, but the foundation of his analysis — glacial cycles seen in an ice core from Greenland — were never corroborated.
"If my prediction were based on something that turned out to be correct, I would be proud of it; instead I am embarrassed," says Broecker. "But it was the only record we had at the time."
This past spring semester, he offered his Columbia students a $250 reward if they could find an earlier reference to global warming, and last week, as Broecker was fielding more press calls before the 35th anniversary, a postgraduate student at Lamont, David McGee, found a 1957 mention of the possibility of "wide scale global warming" in an editorial of the Hammond Times of Indiana.
"I was happy when David found it, because people think that this is the only thing I did in my life," said Broecker.
FATEFUL FRIENDSHIP
The capstone of Broecker’s career was his four-year alliance with Gary Comer, the billionaire founder of catalog retailer Land’s End, who died in 2006. On a relatively ice-free voyage across the Northwest Passage during his retirement, Comer decided to devote himself and his money to fighting global warming.
Broecker had been recommended to Comer as a great climate scientist, so the Wisconsin-based adventurer flew his private jet to Teterboro Airport in 2002 to meet the shy academic.
Broecker recalls that Comer leapt up from his breakfast table in the Tenafly Inn, clutching his napkin in one hand while extending the other, when Broecker approached.
"What can I do for you?" he immediately asked the geochemist who would become his adviser and friend.
It was the start of a remarkable second act for both men that, in the space of four years, would move the study of climate change forward more than a decade. Similar in age and background, Broecker gave Comer access to the world’s leading climate scientists.
"The project with Gary definitely rejuvenated me," said Broecker, who is currently working on a climate change study in Nevada and a carbon dioxide disposal program in Iceland.
In the last four years of his life, Comer spent tens of millions of dollars funding projects by dozens of scientists, organizing conferences and field expeditions, and endowing his foundation to build the geochemistry lab at Lamont.
"Wally cherry-picked the best climate people," said Michael Bender, a geochemist at Princeton University who studied with Broecker. "He had previously been the intellectual leader of this superb community of researchers, but working with Comer, he became the leader in a more concrete way."
Most mornings, before settling down to work, Broecker takes a walk with his wife, Elizabeth Clark, a technician at Lamont whom he married last October. As they stroll down the same tree-lined road that captivated him on his arrival as a teenager, he thinks about how great his life at Lamont has been.
Looking forward for humankind, though, he has grave concerns.
"I’m an optimist, but I’m not very optimistic about this," Broecker said. "The world is going to experience global warming, and until we see its bad side I am afraid we are not going to do what we need to do."
Poster Comment:
Wally Broecker is the guy, not Al Gore .... just to correct some of you folks.