Freeze Frame: Capturing the Profuse Aspects of Climate Change

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By TC Brown

Journalists drew closer the last day of the McCormick Climate Change Conference.

Collegiality? Perhaps. But 30-degree-below-zero temperatures in an ice core storage room probably was the most germane factor.

A busload of reporters, broadcasters and Web writers kicked off the conference’s closing day with a tour at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, an internationally recognized leader in polar and alpine research.

Barry Lyons, Byrd’s director, brought reporters through remote sensing and isotope laboratories. Researcher Ian Howat discussed the struggles of scientists to frame complicated subjects like climate change for the press.

“It’s frustrating to see something that took several pages to explain, boiled down to one paragraph,” Howat said. “Even longer stories don’t get the idea of complexity. Any (circumstance) change is either for or against climate change.”

Lonnie Thompson and his wife Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Ohio State paleoclimatology researchers, drew intense interest, and more than a few “oohs” and “wows,” when they laid out the mechanics for drilling, recovering and examining ice cores from remote mountain ranges around the planet.

The Thompsons described the operation of four, wall-mounted drills just prior to leading the group into the ice core work room, a relatively balmy 21 degrees compared to the eye-popping frigidity of the storage room about to be experienced.

For journalists, questions were radically limited as they shivered and huddled with arms crossed, surrounded by ceiling-high stacks of silver-tubed ice cores. No one lingered.

“It’s like a frozen library,” Lonnie Thompson quipped.

The group, moving to a more body-friendly environment, settled at the Nationwide and Farm Bureau 4-H Center for a panel discussion comparing the climate change policies of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.

William Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, opened the discussion, crediting both candidates as “getting it” on climate change.

Agreeing with other speakers over past days, Becker said state and local governments now are power centers for environmental issues. Part of the Action Project’s 100-day plan for a new president will include a recommendation to convene local leaders. The new administration needs to set its sights further, too.

“Energy independence is a myth. We are part of a world economy,” Becker said. “The president should go to China and negotiate a bilateral pact. Focus on aid and trade programs and carbon emissions.”

The panel -- Alexander Thompson, an OSU political science professor, Andy Keeler, an economist and public policy expert in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, and Cristine Russell, senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government -- weighed in on a host of subjects and fielded an assortment of questions.

Lively discussions ensued on the Kyoto Protocol, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, clean development mechanisms, nuclear power and radioactive waste, the presidency as a bully pulpit and the reality of increased energy prices.

Elliot Diringer, director of International Strategies for the Pew Center on Climate Change, presented a realistic, if not totally positive, keynote message on the likelihood of international accord on climate issues by the end of 2009, when the world convenes to address the matters.

“There is not a lot of time. Expectations are way too high,” Diringer said. “If the U.S. is not prepared to commit, other countries won’t be either.”

Nonetheless, a full ratified agreement could be reached by 2010 or 2011, Diringer said.

Sen. John Glenn closed out the three-day conference, advocating for improving electrical energy storage capacity. He also reflected on his time in space, where he came to understand that the atmospheric band around Earth is small, fragile and limited.

“We need more sensitivity to conservation,” Glenn told the crowd of journalists. “I hope you have been sufficiently inspired. Go home and inform.”