Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?

Laurence C. Smith

Like so many other cultural shifts, it gathered long, then broke quickly. At last the world--including a majority of people in the United States--has acknowledged that global warming is real.

Changing the public's opinion was not easy. It took the work of thousands of scientists, painstakingly accumulated over more than three decades. Their findings were then steadily communicated to the world through massive synthesis reports in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), displaying a level of organization unprecedented in science. These reports document the evidence, now overwhelming, of our new man-made climate.

Pivotal to the public opinion shift were ardent "Third Culture" scientists--among them James Hansen, at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Lonnie Thompson, at Ohio State University; Richard Alley, at Pennsylvania State University; and Mark Serreze, at the University of Colorado--with a talent for grasping the most significant discoveries and channeling them to the public through books, interviews, YouTube, and popular magazines like Rolling Stone. These efforts at

public outreach represented a significant shift in the culture of science. As a graduate student in the mid-1990s, I witnessed the widespread, if subtle, scorn directed at the remarkable astronomer and writer Carl Sagan by his professional colleagues for his efforts in publicizing his scientific work. But today, and especially in climate-change science, public outreach is part of the job and a cause for appreciation and emulation by scientific colleagues.

Other events, largely unforeseen, also f...