For his groundbreaking work on climate change, geochemistry professor and researcher Wallace Broecker, CC ’53, won the prestigious Balzan Award for science achievement last week.
The $885,000 award, one of the world’s largest monetary prizes, comes with a requirement that half of the money be donated to science work. Broecker, who works at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, plans to put most of his share into supporting the sciences rather than keeping it for personal use. Having been nominated for the same award five years ago, he was entirely surprised by the news that he had won.
The award is a testament to Broecker’s decades of work on natural climate change and mankind’s impact on the environment.
“Early on I had been worried about global warming caused by CO2 [carbon dioxide emissions],” said Broecker, who has done large amounts of research on paleo-CO2 records. “The climate is super sensitive, and its response is very large. We are poised to give the climate a very large jolt with [our emissions of] CO2, and the consequences will be serious.”
He cited the Earth’s drylands as an immediate example. Home to more than a billion people, they are already growing more arid.
“The average person doesn’t realize the immensity of the problem,” Broecker said. “Every time you drive a Toyota, like I do, one pound of CO2 per mile is released. We need to cut CO2 emissions at least 20 percent across the world, which we can do. The big question is, do we have the political will to do this?”
Broecker is hopeful that the next presidential administration will give climate change more attention. “[President] Bush is one to bury it,” he said, “because it would cost industries money, but we could have done things that wouldn’t have affected business very much. We damn well better do something about it.”
Broecker has seen reason for optimism, especially in other countries. His book Fixing Climate received a lot more publicity and interest in Europe than in the United States. He appeared on BBC radio and television nine times.
Global warming has risen in the public consciousness recently, due largely to such pop-culture forces as Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The film, Broecker said, “had an enormous impact ... The subject was really emerging, and the movie hit at the right time.”
Broecker transferred from Wheaton College to Columbia in 1952 for his senior year, and began working at LDEO. He is famous for coining what many consider the first use of the phrase “global warming” in a 1975 article. He also published seminal works on ocean currents and the atmosphere.
The three other recipients of the 2008 Balzan Award, which are given to those making strides in the advancement of world peace, science, and culture, included researchers in visual arts, moral philosophy, and preventative medicine.
sandeep.soman@columbiaspectator.com