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TODAY Monday 12 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Superbowl, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Future of Al Gore

This morning I only wanted to read dozens of articles deconstructing the two big football games played yesterday. No member of my immediate circle shares this interest -- to them, Ted Kaczynski is a more compelling figure than John Elway, and neither of them holds a candle to Puff Daddy -- and so I have to indulge this Middle American passion off on my own, like a Victorian aunt slugging down laudanum in the back parlor. Nothing matters quite so much as a good football game played for high stakes unless it's a walk on a rocky ridgetop on a sunny cold afternoon followed by listening to the game on the radio.

The big advantage of being alternatively an outdoors nut and a football nut is that you're neurally acquainted with the fact that a huge fraction of the American voting population does not care to invest its passion for minutiae in questions of public policy. Your brain is happier processing endless data streams on third-down efficiencies and success rates within the red zone (or on the plots of sitcoms or on song lyrics or whatever) than it is dealing with the complexities of a scientific issue with vast implications for the future. And when someone makes you pay attention to those complexities, sometimes you resent it.

So this morning, when all I wanted to do was read about the upcoming dream match between Denver and Green Bay, between Elway and Favre, between 1960s insignias and 1990s insignias, I had to turn my attention to an annoyingly thought-provoking article on climate change. The article is by William H. Calvin of the University of Washington, its title is "The Great Climate Flip-flop", and it appears in the January issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Here's Calvin's lead: "One of the most shocking scientific realizations of all time has slowly been dawning on us: the earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, and with breathtaking speed. We could go back to ice-age temperatures within a decade -- and judging from recent discoveries, an abrupt cooling could be triggered by our current global-warming trend. Europe's climate could become more like Siberia's. Because such a cooling would occur too quickly for us to make readjustments in agricultural productivity and supply, it would be a potentially civilization-shattering affair, likely to cause an unprecedented population crash."

Global warming could trigger global chilling -- or maybe not -- largely because melting Greenland's ice cap and/or inducing more precipitation at high latitudes would screw up the global "conveyor" system of ocean currents, as described by Wallace Broecker of Columbia in the 28 November issue of Science (and noted in our "Big News on the Margins"). Bye-bye Gulfstream; don't forget that Rome is as close to the North Pole as Chicago; they'll be herding reindeer in the South of France, etc.

I'm of two minds about all this. One, I love it, because I love all natural cataclysm stories and all stories where God throws a curve ball. Two, I resent it, because it means explaining the challenge of climate change to fellow citizens without lapsing into misleading oversimplifications becomes all the harder.

Thus to Al Gore, the great would-be explainer. Al Gore's chances of being elected president rely first, second, and third on a steady increase in aggregate domestic purchasing power. But the environment will matter, too, and 1997 was the year when global warming became an important part of what is meant by "the environment." Which helps him more politically: The already-inculcated peril of rising temperatures, stormier storms, and floodier floods? Or the new and even more menacing contingency of flip-flops and unpredictability? Will the nation resent the "new" complexity, throw up its hands, and agree with Gore's rival when he or she argues that much more study is needed? (And so back to the sports pages). Or will voters decide that such dire complications strengthen the case of candidate Gore running as everyone's high school class valedictorian? I'd say keep it as simple as intellectual honesty will allow, and then simplify it a little more.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

When was the last time you looked into the Earth Mirror? Fred Hapgood has assembled in one cyber-place all of the coolest places on the Web that scan, record, measure, and photograph the Earth and its ecosystems. A molecule doesn't migrate over San Francisco Bay without its being tracked through 19 planes of analysis.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

1/9: Goodbye, Delaware
1/8: Leaf Blowers, Old Cars, Class Conflict
1/7: The Great Improvement That Didn't
1/6: Proactive, Shmoactive
1/5: Mediocre Landscapes and Hope for the Planet
1/2: The Greatest Environmental Cause of the Year
12/31: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997
12/30: Bad Eating and Not Eating
12/29: Owning the Public Health Issue
12/23: Good Year for Vintage Climate
12/22: Save the Reefs
12/19: Mousemobile
12/18: Year of Fire
12/17: Ramblin' Man (Ramblin' Woman)
12/16: Big News on the Margins
12/15: The Hybrid As Savior
12/12: Good Week for the Dragon
12/11: Help Wanted: Unreasonable Extremists
12/10: Oh Boy! A Fight!
12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

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