Experts Debate Effects of Global Warming

To many people, global warming can be a remote, perhaps even dubious concept. But when the idea is bolstered by firsthand tales of islands being swallowed up by rising seas, the concept can take on a disturbing reality.

This is what happened on Oct. 6, when the Harvard Extension Alumni Association presented a program titled "Boston Submerged? Global Warming in the 21st Century."

The program, which attracted a capacity audience to the Grossman Common Room at 51 Brattle St., coincided with the White House Conference on Climate Change, and with the Clinton administration's preparations for December meetings on global warming in Kyoto, Japan.

His Excellency Phillip Muller, minister of foreign affairs and trade of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, started off the proceedings with a grim description of his country's plight. Over the past 10 years, major coastal portions of the Marshalls, including several whole islands, have been swallowed up by the South Pacific.

The Extension School program also featured Timothy C. Weiskel, director of the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values at the Divinity School, and Peter Buck, senior lecturer on the history of science and Dean of Harvard Summer School.

Weiskel warned that the evidence for human contribution to global climate change, particularly global warming associated with accelerated consumption of fossil fuels and the "greenhouse effect," is now sufficient to warrant international action.

Coupled with the melting of the polar ice caps, glaciers, and permafrost in the Arctic Circle, coastal flooding and rising sea levels are seen by many scientists as a result of global warming patterns which will affect climate and weather for decades to come.

In a possible doomsday scenario, which concerns some scientists today, the melting of polar ice and permafrost could trigger the release of methane gas, which is 40 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat near Earth's surface.

In such circumstances, Weiskel concluded, "the fate of the Earth" would not be at stake, but rather the role, if any, that humans and other complex life forms would play in its future.

In his response, Buck said that predictions of "gloom and doom" in the past have seldom panned out, citing W. Stanley Jevons' 1865 prediction of Britain's imminent economic collapse as coal ran out. Questions about the future are always hard to answer, but those connected with climate and the weather are among the most complicated.

Buck distributed several graphs and tables which demonstrate greatly variable results in such things as successive trials of simple coin tossing, concluding that statistical summaries of past events are useful for forecasting the future only when it is already clear what the future in question holds.