Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It

The product of a unique collaboration between a pioneering earth scientist and an award-winning science writer, Fixing Climate takes an unconventional approach to the problem of global warming―and offers a possible solution. Hailed by his colleagues as "one of the our greatest living geoscientists," Wallace S. Broecker, a longtime researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, warned about the possible consequences of global warming decades before it became a compelling public issue. Hooked on climate studies since his student days, he has learned, largely through his own findings, that climate does change―naturally, dramatically, and rarely benignly. He also knows from experience that when mankind pushes nature as we are currently doing by dumping some sixty to seventy million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, climate will change even more dramatically and less benignly. As Broecker points out, if a well-meaning fairy godmother were to turn us all into energy-saving paragons at the stroke of midnight tonight, the resulting reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide might lessen but could not turn aside the great warming tide now headed our way. There is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope in the development of new technologies that are directed not only at the reduction of carbon dioxide output but also at its harmless disposal.

Wallace S. Broecker (1931-2019) was a geologist whose landmark 1975 scientific paper “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” popularized the phrase, and whose predictions about the dangers of increasing carbon monoxide levels in the atmosphere brought national attention to environmental crises.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University, joining its faculty to become the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Wallace received many science awards for his work, including the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1996 and Sweden’s Crafoord Prize in Geosciences in 2006.

Known as the “Grandfather of Climate Science” or the “Father of Global Warming,”―who also coined the term “the global conveyor” for the ocean currents that circulate warm water around the planet―Wallace wrote several books including Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat―And How to Counter It (with Robert Kunzig).