From Columbia University Earth Institute
Wallace Broecker, a geochemist who initiated key research into the history of earth’s climate and humans’ influence upon it, died Feb. 18 in New York. He was 87. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his family. His death was confirmed by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where he spent a career that spanned nearly 67 years.
One of the first scientists to predict an imminent rise in earth’s temperature due to human output of carbon dioxide, Broecker was credited with introducing the phrase “global warming” into the scientific lexicon in the 1970s. Much of his work focused on the oceans. Among other things, his studies of marine chemistry helped lay out the map of global ocean circulation, and its powerful effects on climate. His studies also helped lay the basis for many other scientists’ work in a variety of fields. Not content to just do research, he made friends with and extended his influence to powerful figures in government and business.
Wallace Broecker, circa 2010 (Bruce Gilbert. Courtesy Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
Broecker—universally known as Wally—at first made an unlikely scientist. Born Nov. 29, 1931, the second of five children, he grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. His father, also named Wallace, ran a gas station. His mother was the former Edith Smith. Both parents were evangelical Christians who rejected modern geologic theory for the literal Biblical interpretation that the earth is just a few thousand years old. They also forbade drinking, dancing and movies. Broecker attended Illinois’ fundamentalist Christian Wheaton College, then the recent alma mater of preacher Billy Graham. While still a student, he married the former Grace Carder, and spoke of becoming an insurance actuary.
Broecker got sidetracked after an older Wheaton student helped him arrange a summer 1952 lab internship at what was then called Lamont Geological Observatory, in Palisades, N.Y. The student was Paul Gast, who later went on to head NASA’s moon-rock program. At Lamont, Broecker worked with J. Laurence Kulp, a geochemist doing pioneering work on radiocarbon dating, a then revolutionary new method that allowed researchers to tell the ages of materials as far back as 40,000 years.
By his own account, Broecker had fun tinkering with the lab equipment, and he was excited by the newly wide-open chance to make discoveries about nature using carbon dating. He transferred to Columbia that fall and kept working with Kulp. The move suggested he had rejected at least some of his family’s religious beliefs; however, some other students made fun of his background, calling him a “theo-chemist.” While other students were sent on ocean research cruises, he was left off the list for his first eight years. Nevertheless, he earned a PhD. in geology in 1958 and stayed around, gradually rising to the first rank of prominence. In a 2016 memoir he called Lamont “my Garden of Eden.”
“My great joy in life comes in figuring something out,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “I figure something out about every six months or so, and I write about it and encourage research on it, and that’s the joy of my life.”
One of Broecker’s first achievements was a series of papers demolishing the stock idea that it took tens of thousands of years for water to circulate between shallow and deep regions of the world’s oceans. His analyses of carbon isotopes collected by Lamont ships from around the world showed that water could make the switch in just centuries—a discovery showed that the oceans are far more dynamic than previously thought. This in turn implied that the oceans could potentially affect the composition of the atmosphere, or vice-versa.
Using chemical tracers and other data, Broecker laid out the picture of global ocean circulation, and its implications for climate. (Courtesy Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
Starting in 1960, Broecker sailed on many of the world’s oceans and seas. In addition to sampling water, he maintained instruments, helped winch seafloor sediment cores to the surface, and threw dynamite overboard to produce explosions whose echoes were read to chart the bottom. In the 1970s, he co-led a global program funded by the U.S. government to use a wide variety of trace metals, nutrients and isotopes of radioactive elements to map the circulation of the deep ocean, the exchange of gases with the atmosphere, and other marine processes. This collective work provided the underpinnings for virtually all later studies of marine chemistry, and the oceans’ relationship to climate. It was Broecker who provided a running commentary for a documentary film on the project while on a cruise from Tahiti to San Diego. He used related geochemical methods to study lake waters, sediments and rocks in Canada and the American West for clues about climates of the past, with a special interest in the comings and goings of ice ages.
Early on, Broecker became interested in how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air, and what effects this might have on climate. The history and behavior of atmospheric carbon dioxide were poorly known when he started out, but by the early 1970s, other researchers had analyzed ice cores from the Greenland ice and shown that they could track levels of atmospheric CO2 through the distant past. Work by others suggested that higher CO2 levels could be correlated with periods of warming. And scientists had speculated since the 19th century that rising output of human-produced CO2 could potentially warm the planet; some of Broecker’s contemporaries, including Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, were already tracking CO2 levels in real time and considering the effects.
In August 1975, Broecker synthesized his and others’ related research in the journal Science in a piece called “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” It was later said to be the first time the phrase was used in a scientific paper. In it, he argued that humans were changing the climate by emitting CO2; it just wasn’t evident yet, because the world was experiencing what he believed was a natural 40-year cooling cycle that was masking the effects. He predicted that the cycle would soon reverse, and then the manmade warming on top of that would become dramatically visible. It later turned out that he had misinterpreted some of the ice-core data, but had the overall picture right. Right on cue in 1976, temperatures started ascending, and have continued since then pretty much along the trajectory Broecker laid out.
Receiving the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton, 1996 (Courtesy Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
“Global warming” was quickly adopted by the science world, including in the first large-scale report on the subject, published in 1979 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Decades later, when some credited Broecker with coining the phrase, he shrugged it off as “dumb luck.” He warned that he would turn over in his grave if someone put “global warming” on his tombstone. He once offered $200 to any student who could find an earlier citation for the phrase. (One postgrad did find it in a 1958 editorial in the Hammond Times of Indiana. It apparently didn’t catch on at that time.)
Broecker and a handful of other scientists began briefing government leaders on climate change in the 1980s. He testified at the first congressional hearings dealing with the subject, led in 1984 by then Tennessee Representative Al Gore. Over succeeding years, as the science advanced, Gore and other politicians repeatedly met with and consulted Broecker to have him explain.
In the mid-1980s Broecker synthesized a grand picture of world ocean circulation, based on his and others’ studies. He dubbed it “The Great Ocean Conveyor.” In simplest terms, it is a vast river of warm, shallow water flowing from the south Pacific into the Indian Ocean, rounding Africa and then heading north through the Atlantic. Once it hits cold water from the Arctic, the water then cools and sinks near northern Europe. From there, it loops through the abyss back to the Pacific to warm, rise and begin the cycle again. The flow is so huge, Broecker asserted, that it must help regulate global climate by moving around vast amounts of heat from one place to another. This idea soon became general consensus.
College graduation (Courtesy Columbia University)
Broecker then put forth the idea that the conveyor could suddenly switch on and off, leading to drastic climate shifts–not over millennia, as many had come to think, but perhaps just decades. He pointed to an apparently rapid cooling some 12,000 years ago that threw Europe and other regions into a temporary deep freeze. Paradoxically, he argued, the cause might have been a then-warming climate and the collapse of northern ice sheets, which introduced a pulse of freshwater that pushed back on the conveyor. He warned that “the uncontrolled experiment” of modern human-induced warming might bring similar rapid changes. He was fond of saying, “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”
Climatologists are still debating whether and how rapid climate swings might take place today. That notwithstanding, Broecker’s ideas were taken up and wildly exaggerated in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, which featured a climate-change-powered tsunami engulfing Manhattan and then freezing into an ice sheet–all in the same day. They were more credibly explained in possibly the only pop song about physical oceanography, “Uncle Wally’s Tale,” by the singer Tom Chapin. (Chapin was Broecker’s brother-in-law, married to Broecker’s younger sister, Bonnie.)
Much more at the full obituary here
I was truly expecting the blame for his demise to ba placed squarely on Global Warming.
May he rest…
The only thing I see of value from this guy is he sailed the oceans chucking dynamite overboard. I’m not sure that’s the best way to save the whales or dolphins but it sounds like fun. I did the same thing with M-80s on spring break in Cozumel. I told the Police I was mapping the bottom of the bay then one of them took out his night stick and whacked me.
Good way to go fishing
My first thought exactly. Stay tuned the story just broke. I am sure there are journalist diligently working the narrative. They might possibly have this pinned on Global Warming before Wallace is laid to rest or sprinkled over the “warm shallow waters”
Me too, thought he might have froze to death
I refuse to be a jerk.
The Church of perpetual warming may stoop that low, but I won’t.
Kudos to an accomplished guy.
Too bad others took his work and speculated about significant water vapor feedback accelerating global warming.
My thought exactly. How can this guy be a hero of the current global warming crowd when the mechanism he proposed for run-away global warming was completely different from what the IPCC now claims? Ocean current changes are not water vapor feedbacks – but any conjecture will do as long as the conclusion is the same….
RIP Dr. Broecker.
Gee Wally, global warming’s pretty hard on the Beavers isn’t it?
“In August 1975, Broecker synthesized his and others’ related research in the journal Science in a piece called “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” It was later said to be the first time the phrase was used in a scientific paper. In it, he argued that humans were changing the climate by emitting CO2; it just wasn’t evident yet, because the world was experiencing what he believed was a natural 40-year cooling cycle that was masking the effects. He predicted that the cycle would soon reverse, and then the manmade warming on top of that would become dramatically visible. It later turned out that he had misinterpreted some of the ice-core data, but had the overall picture right. Right on cue in 1976, temperatures started ascending, and have continued since then pretty much along the trajectory Broecker laid out.
The IPCC AR’s have consistently tried to pin most of the 1979-2016 warming on increasing CO2 forcing with models that cannot adequately represent that internal cycle. But in reality, the IPCC and modeller community have not a clue what are the relative contributions between natural cycle and increased GHG concentrations. We are about to find out in the coming decade. The experiment is about to yield some relevant data points, and I doubt the climateers are not going to like what nature gives them.
The window of opportunity the climate charlatans were banking on has now closed on the CO2-climate hustle.
“Science advances one funeral at a time.”
― Max Planck
The UN IPCC climate modelers introduced aerosol to keep their models from ‘overshooting’ warming during Wally’s global cooling period. And the correct position is …?
Didn’t you hear? China and India are bringing back aerosols, just in time for the coming natural cooling to be explained as man-made.
Since the UN IPCC climate models can’t duplicate the early 20th Century warming, I won’t believe any of their excuses for cooling the near future, if it happens.
Have no fear. Whatever happens will be blamed on burning fossil fuel. And capitalism. And the urgent need to eliminate same.
Every change will be a portent of impending doom. If you think that four decades of moderating, improving weather and increasing crop yields has been an unmitigated disaster, what will four decades of cooling be?
Their voodoo religion is not amenable to falsification.
Rich Davis,
Sulfur aerosols indeed are the main cooling antagonists against the warming of CO2 and other GHGs. They are the main “control knob” to get the pas more or less retrofitted, with a range of 1:3 for the future warming. There are many other control knobs in climate models (like clouds), but the cooling aerosols and warming CO2 are the main ones:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html
It’s been said that the greatness of any scientist can be measured by how much they held back the advancement of their field. So I think Dr. Broeker definitely qualifies as great. Not as great as Aristotle, but a giant among his generation.
…. and he was already pre-named Wally
(NOTE: You may have to be from the UK to understand that).
theory of global warming: increased co2 causes warming
theory of climate change: fossil fuel is destroying the earth
Anything that reduces CO2 will solve global warming, but we can only solve climate change by eliminating all fossil fuels.
Their target is carbon, not limited to CO2 and hydrocarbon fuels. They also have a wicked solution, to an albeit hard [social] problem, that cannibalizes and sequesters undesirable carbon-based lifeforms, notably human.
Global warming, or rather, local and, perhaps, regional effects, as in a natural phenomenon, yes. But not Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, a statistical quantity, that is correlated with models, and divergent from reality.
There’s a huge difference in being wrong, scientifically, and being dishonest. He was simply wrong, at least about CO2, not the oceans. But Warmism became an ideology, and an industry, rife with dishonesty, and only concerned with self-perpetuation.
Interesting man. I was vaguely familiar with his work when WUWT would post articles on the ‘conveyor belt’, or possibilities of rapid climate changes. He was mentioned in those regards.
That’s a nice outline of his life and career. It’s a shame such a nice write-up happened to be his obituary, but we all have to leave sometime and 87 years old isn’t exactly an early exit.
Dr. Broecker’s “… possibilities of rapid climate changes.” was based on assessment of the effects of massive influxes of cold, pure water released over a relatively short period through melting of the massive Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, disrupting then-extant ocean circulations. What are the odds of that happening with current ice volumes?
Dave Fair,
The possibility of a huge influx of fresh water is practically non-existent. It happened a few times in the past at the end of a glacial period, when a lot of ice was melted, but still hold in a huge lake (Lake Agasiz) after an ice dam. When that dam broke, enormous quantities of fresh water were shed into the North Atlantic in less than a few years, interrupting the Great Conveyor Belt for about 1000 years. That may be the cause of the Younger Dryas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
and the 8.2 kyear event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2_kiloyear_event
As there are no such huge ice sheets present anymore, the possibility of a similar event today is non-existent. Even the summer melt of sea-ice doesn’t stop the Gulf Stream, only gives a seasonal variability:
https://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/atlantic/gulf-stream.html
I will take this moment to point out how long we’ve all been arguing about this subject.
And the world’s still here.
I honestly hope to see this issue put to bed, before I myself follow Mr. Broecker – but I’m beginning to have my doubts – I think I’m running out of time faster than the Earth is.
Tough material to work with but that song is no 30,000 Pounds of Bananas. And no I won’t give you a brake.
RIP
Dr. Broecker was clearly a trailblazing scientist. The bloke from Columbia’s Earth Science Institute – not so much. Apparently he slept through the recent “pause”.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, George. Dr. Broecker’s cyclic cooling could have influenced the Pause. Then again, the UN IPCC climate models may just need tuning adjustments to curve-follow the past (our present) in future runs. Who knows? Got a Trillion dollars to bet on it?
Dave, we are on the same wavelength.
My standard answer to those who challenge me for being skeptical of those certain about CAGW, and who want to know my position on future temperatures, or what causes “Climate Change” my response is “We just don’t know.”
I am amazed at how many people are incapable of accepting that answer!
My point in the above comment centered on observable data of past events and feel comfortable chastising the ESI author.
What a concatenation of weasel words. He had bad data, but the ‘overall picture’ correct. Temperatures are ‘pretty much’ what he predicted, except they aren’t. They just yaddah-yaddahed the whole part of what was wrong in his global warming theory. They continue to whistle past the graveyard, not daring to look the truth in the face.
I agree with Mumbles
It says “pretty much” meaning, “for 20 years and then not at all”. Now we are more than 20 years after the pause started. That means “more wrong than right but a reasonable guess given the information available at the time.”
To Dr. Broecker’s credit, he authored a chapter in AAPG’s Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change…
http://dpa.aapg.org/gcc/
He closed his chapter with a reference to Gerard Bond’s work on Holocene climate cycles and acknowledged that the threat of a “Thermohaline Catastrophe” might be far less than he originally thought it was.
“Much of his work focused on the oceans. Among other things, his studies of marine chemistry helped lay out the map of global ocean circulation, and its powerful effects on climate.”
Okay…..
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20SST-NorthAtlantic%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
OK, ResourceGuy; the extra heat is hiding below the North Atlantic surface? Lets ask Trenberth.
Let’s look and see for ourselves…..
http://climate4you.com/images/ArgoTimeSeriesAt59N.gif
Through 2014 and 2018 the oceans lost a lot of heat, partially due to the Pacific Warm Blob and the Super El Nino.
Wally was the creator of the legend that an interruption to the North Atlantic Drift current (aka Gulf Stream) was part of the solution to what caused the Younger Dryas abrupt cooling (12,900 years BP), at which time the planet when from interglacial warm to glacial cold, when solar insolation at 65N was at its maximum, for 1200 years (Ice sheets returned to UK).
Later it was found the pulse of fresh water occurred 1000 years after the YD event. No correlation, no cause.
Later it was found that there is no discrete deep water current to interrupt.
Later someone ran a model and wrote papers stating that the majority of the winter warming of Europe is due to the Westerly winds and the heat retained in the North Atlantic ocean from summer heating.
The UK and the east coast of Europe are warm in the winter for the same reason that the west coast of the US is roughly 10 C warmer in the winter than the east coast of the US. An interruption to the North Atlantic drift current would therefore would only result in winter cooling on the east coast of Europe of roughly 2C.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130942.htm
There is no worldwide discrete thermal thermohaline conveyer that tightly connects the Southern hemisphere with the Northern hemisphere. Wally stated later that there is no data to support the thermal conveyer diagram he drew and later stated that his drawing of a discrete worldwide conveyor was only to illustrate a ‘concept’, the concept being it is possible to make up stuff and if the stuff is repeated a sufficient number of time it becomes a sort of belief, a urban legend.
This is Wally’s Conveyor Urban legend paper, complete with the elementary school picture drawing that illustrates the deep climatology concept (urban legend no logic to justify the statement) that ‘climate’ is an angry beast.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/POPP/Broecker%201999%20GSA%20Today.pdf
The following are two papers that show Wally’s Gulf stream/North Atlantic drift current changes/shutdown is an urban legend, that is repeated ad infinitum by the media and the CAGW cult.
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/eemartin/GLY5736F07/literature/Seager_AmSci_2006.pdf
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Gulf.pdf
He didn’t think much of mann.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/hockey-stick-michael-mann-steve-mcintyre
+10
Thank you.
h/t to Tom Nelson
https://twitter.com/tan123/status/1097611152799006720
That also explains Penn State. It’s a perfect fit for him.
In retrospect it was apparent in 1975 that “humans were changing the climate by emitting CO2”:
Back then it would have been more reasonable to argue — and was argued — that human emissions were cooling the climate.
That is if you were determined to infer from the available data any human agency at all.
That illustrates the value of using ‘in retrospect’ when trying to sell your expertise, Chris.
My “expertise”? 😂
I believe Dave was referring to “Wally”.
I should have used ‘one’ instead of ‘your,’ Chris.
Over all a good scientist. There was confusion as to just what the Vosstok ice core said. Al Gore took the initial readings which appeared to link temperature to CO2, as in his film, but we now know that its the reverse, first there is a rise in temperature, then the vast Oceans out gas the stored CO2.
MJE
A good scientist, and a good oceanographer. However most of his important hypotheses are wrong. The salt-oscillator hypothesis is wrong. The AMOC shutdown is wrong.
His hypotheses were behind the movie “The day after tomorrow.” A laughable attempt at scary anthropogenic climate change.
Rest in peace, but his scientific stature will likely diminish over time.
His scientific stature will never diminish, Javier. The body of his empirical work will live on, as is his due as a pioneering scientist.
He is being labeled as the father of global warming by the press. He is tied in destiny with the global warming scare. And as I have said many of his theories are clearly wrong.
For example:
“CONCLUSIONS
The fact that we are unable to provide satisfactory estimates of the probability that a conveyor shutdown will occur or of its consequences is certainly reason to be extremely prudent with regard to CO2 emissions. The record of events that transpired during the last glacial period sends us the clear warning that by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we are poking an angry beast (Fig. 5).”
https://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/teaching/Broecker99.html
What a silly notion. It is almost infantile. As infantile as the drawing in figure 5 at the link.
Really, Dr. Broecker?
For all his faults, he was the best scientist the warmists had. Compared to those he left behind: Mann, Schmidt, Hansen, Holdren, Oreskes, Rahmstorf, etc. Clowns Hall of Shame
Plenty of good scientists among believers. 6 out of 10 scientists are convinced of the dangers of global warming. Thinking that good scientists are skeptics and bad scientists are believers is incorrect thinking, obviously.
Broecker was a good scientist, but if your main theories are bonkers, you can’t be a great scientist.
Rest in peace.
So he started going gung-ho on the global-warming theme in the 1970’s, and then came up with some theories about how the world’s ocean currents move in the 1980’s.
Horse-Cart. Cart-Horse.
He put together a lot of data and came to the conclusion that the Younger Dryas was caused by a big slug of meltwater from Lake Agassiz shutting down the surface layer of the “ocean conveyor” in the North Atlantic. I read some of his stuff at the time and it was obvious that the “sudden climate change” he spoke about was local and specific to western Europe only. The “sudden” onset of the YD took about 50 years (not 3 weeks like in the silly movie) and the recovery was equally sudden.
He made the point that the deeper part of the ocean circulation continued during the YD and that the rest of the world didn’t get to experience a thousand years of cold. He hypothesized that when the “ocean conveyor” really stopped, we would see the start of the next glacial period. IIRC he theorized that the “ocean conveyor” was transporting CO2 to the deep ocean where it would get sequestered, and falling levels of atmospheric CO2 would bring on the big-time cooling.
He almost certainly got the CO2 part wrong, but it wasn’t a bad idea at the time.
The timing of the YD and Lake Agassiz draining almost certainly don’t match, but the sudden breaching of an ice dam that allowed the level of Lake Superior to drop more than 100 metres, to more or less its present level, in a few years might be a better choice for the onset of the YD.
Wally Broecker, good scientist, collected data, generated theories, didn’t get carried away by silly ideas about the end of the world.
Many “coined phrases” have been warped by those who came after.
I don’t know if he would endorsed what how his phrase has been used or if he’d be “rolling in his grave”.
Either way, condolences to his family and his friends.
Probably because every coined phrase has someone else’s two cents worth added in
Saw him at a Columbia Earth Institute event, an IPCC working group meeting. He was definitely not comfortable with the way he was being “used” by the climate change band wagon.
It was German researcher Hermann Flohn (1912-97) who gave us Global Warming. The 1930’s were a warm period before Global Cooling began in the 40’s. Germany as a nation was very into sustainable development and preserving resources due to shortages. The first Green Economy
Flohn published an article on global warming titled, “The Activity of Man as a Climate Factor” before the War.
Flohn was the Luftwaffe’s chief meteorologist . After the war, Flohn continued with the CO2 global warming scare claiming it as more dangerous than nuclear energy. Operation Paperclip, when the Green SS and scientists were imported into the United States to help compete in the Cold War likely imported these ideas, among others
Walter Munk died a couple of weeks ago too.
https://www.oceannews.com/news/science-technology/legendary-scripps-oceanographer-walter-munk-dies-at-age-101
A good scientist, who got some stuff wrong as it turns out. Thanks ‘William Astley” for your post clearing up some of this.
“The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth”
For example here is Richard Lindzen correcting Bill Nye on this misconception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nh-tXGu-sM
Broecker’s role in the global warming scare is indeed underrated these days. He was not alone in forecasting possible warming during the 1970s cooling scare – other scientists did so to effect moderation of that scare (eg J Murray Mitchell). Rather, his was a lonely voice at the tail end of the cooling scare (around 1980) in warning of a catastrophe due to CO2 warming. He pushed the idea that the climate system is inherently unstable, that it is in a fragile balance easily tipped by our prodding. And when it did fall over, it could go any way–warming, cooling or chaotic. Thus, he was an early promoter of the movement for “climate conservation” and the durable (because unfalsifiable) scare over “climate disruption” — which has outlived the scare over warming per sue. He exemplified the possibility of instability on speculation about his ‘conveyor belt’ and the Younger Dryas cooling. This speculation ushered in the complete corruption of climate science discourse in all its emotion-ladened enthusiasm, when in 1999 we find a scientific expert suggesting that the climate system could react emotionally to our provocation, like some beastly god of the skies:
GSA Today; 9(1): 2–5
Without doubt a brilliant and respected scientist passed away. However, it just needs to be said, that the phrase “global warming” and the earliest warnings of potential doom came from a creationist “theo-chemist”, assuming he kept to his early beliefs to some degree. And that might be not entirely coincidence.
One can only love Broecker’s expression: “the climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks” not only because of the image of a hockey sticks poking but the idea of the climate as a high energy, volatile beast, in other words unpredictable, changing, unreliable and dangerous in various ways when it crosses your path. And climate theories are attempt to control and predict this beast, refusing to believe it might hold more secrets?
It matters not in the end if a climate scientist was a Christian or not. What does matter or would help our understanding, is the realization that our Western society is definitely raised on very strong, fundamental beliefs about the End Times, the Millennium, various disasters arranged by God or Devil and even witchcraft. And I think, no matter what one personally believes or not, modern scientists would still have a subtle but powerful group bias of projecting doom and gloom into the future especially when we can link it to your own actions or at least actions of others, of sin.
How apt his Christian name – what a “Wally” !! Apologies to the dead.
His carbon footprint has been reduced significantly.
Wally Broeker was one of my scientific heroes before I left Academia for good. His hypothesis about the global deep water conveyor was one of the few good candidates for the pacemaker of ice ages. I still feel the North Atlantic is the crux of the issue and that the conveyor plays an important role, though I now suspect cloud dynamics may be as or even more important than the conveyor (or perhaps I should say another link in the chain). I always regretted that the politics of “Global Climate Change” and its CO2 obsession moved the scientific inquiry and the funding that steers said inquiry away from things like the conveyor and towards trying to bolster modern climate change theories. I felt we were on the brink of an understanding of the climate dynamics of ice ages around 1994 and we just let it slip away . . .