Alumnus leads White House-requested climate-change study

In May 2001, the Bush administration sent an official request to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for an appraisal of current scientific knowledge regarding climate change. The turn-around time for this was less than a month. The Academy quickly assembled a committee to look into the current state of knowledge in this area and to provide the information requested by the White House.

In seeking an individual to chair the Committee on the Science of Climate Change, the Academy contacted Ralph Cicerone (MSEE ’67, PhD ’70), the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and one of the leading atmospheric scientists in the United States.

“When I was asked, there was no hesitation on my part,” said Cicerone. “When the White House asks, the scientific community should try to respond.”

Because of the brief time available to work on this report, the committee decided to avoid any potentially political interpretations of the data. Instead, the committee focused on answering the 14 specific questions asked by the White House. As Cicerone explained, “We did not get into whether we felt the U.S. should stay in the Kyoto Protocol” or other such political ramifications.

The 12 committee members had time for only one group meeting. At this meeting they sequestered themselves for two days while they struggled to come to some initial consensus. After that, they spent two weeks drafting, revising, and communicating by e-mail. The draft then underwent an outside anonymous review process that was also done primarily by e-mail.

The report was released June 6, 2001. “We were still printing the document an hour before I took it to the White House,” said Cicerone. The report presents an overview of the current knowledge of climate change, noting that measurements show that temperatures at the Earth’s surface rose by about 1 °F (about 0.6 °C) during the 20th century. This warming process has intensified in the past 20 years. Cicerone said, “The accumulating evidence indicates this is a human-caused phenomenon.”

There has been strong congressional interest in this report. Between June and August 2001, a number of committee hearings in Congress dealt with issues of global warming, and members of the Committee on the Science of Climate Change testified before these committees. “Some congressional leaders became more convinced of the impact of greenhouse gases as a result of the report,” said Cicerone. It is likely that more congressional action would have taken place as a result of this report were it not for the terrorist attacks on September 11.

HTML, PDF, and print versions of the NAS report “Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions” are available through the National Academy Press Web site at www.nap.edu/catalog/10139.html.