Chris Walcek Interview
Shane McFalls
Issue date: 5/5/07 Section: Climate change
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What first stimulated your interest and research in the field of global warming and climate change?
I started doing research on clouds, and how clouds process air pollutants. It turns out that what happens to clouds is a huge area of uncertainty, my particular area of expertise that I did my graduate research on is cloud physics and how clouds modify the climate. So, I started studying clouds and how clouds modulate the climate.
So clouds do have a big impact?
They have a huge impact, and we don't really understand that well how they are going to change the climate, and that is a huge area of uncertainty.
Why has there been so much of a debate between the skeptics and the believers over global warming truly existing in the past five years?
I'm skeptical personally, the climate courses that I took in graduate school, in the 70's and 80's were taught global warming due to human causes was kind of acknowledged. But, the whole area of climate science has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last 20 yeas. From 20 years ago climate was just a big unknown area, everybody knew that the climate changed frequently all the time. We've had a lot of natural flocculation in the climate that were not and still are not understood at all. And then this theory of global warming came out.
Co2 started being measured regularly about in the late 50's and 60's and after they got about 20 to 30 years of measurement showing the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere from year to year, that's probably what triggered the change in thinking.
So, this has been going on a lot longer than it has been active in the media?
In the 60's and 70's global temperatures were cooling actually, and there were a few predictions of ice ages coming. And we are over-due for an ice-age if you look at the geological records, we have had a period of not having a thousand feet of ice sitting here in Albany.