Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Predicting the Future
u
.
Who Does It?
There are many sayings about the dif
culty of predicting
the future. My favorite is naturally Richter
'
is First Law;
“
Predicting the future is hard to do because it hasn
'
t
happened yet.
It is especially hard when you are trying
to predict what will happen
”
years from now and the
science behind the prediction is really only
years old.
It was the work of Keeling and Revelle in the
s
mentioned earlier that jump-started the science commu-
nity
is work on climate change and global warming. It is
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
that does the predictions today.
My own involvement in climate change research has
been more as an observer than as a participant. My
'
rst
exposure to the issue was in
when a group that I am
in, called the JASONs, took it up. The JASONs are a
collection of mainly academics that meet every summer
for about six weeks to work on problems of importance to
the US government. In
a subgroup of the JASONs
led by Gordon MacDonald, a distinguished geophysicist,
began a study of climate change for the US Department
of Energy. The JASONs always have many pots on the
stove and I was working on something else. However, we
all were fascinated by the climate issue, and nearly every-
one sat in on the sessions and critiqued the report.
