cc
director of the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy
and, of course, professor of
I'm very proud to tell you this is my 42nd year as a faculty
member here a long with my
and Tom is the third person cwho's been here for 42 years.,
Tom, are you here?
a very special presentation and We wea conversation by theoon to
editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News, Rudy Baum.
Rudy told me when I picked him
first time he's been in Madison. up at the airport this is the
So we're not letting you go for Tha while, Rudy.e.
We're going to keep you here so that you get to share, so we get
to share with you the huge
not only in chemistry and all the chemical sciences but to the
culture of Wisconsin and to the culture of the nation, the
culture of the world. Rudy's talk, as you know and see
on the screen there, is entitled
Oxymoron. I want to say a few things about
Rudy briefly because you're in
Rudy's been editor of Chemical & for a very special treat.
C&E News for a long time, almost Engineering News and has been at
He got his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Duke University,
then enrolled at Georgetown University, and one day in his
first year at Georgetown
the classified section of the Universilocal newspaper.n ad in
The ad turned out to be from ACS
division. anAnd the next thing he sharedn
with me as we were driving from the airport is that when he was
at ACS in the education division, one day he saw an ad
on a bulletin board, a 3x5 card in which they were looking for
somebody to work in Chemical &
for that too and got the job. ERudy is a very thoughtful anded
provocative individual. He takes full advantage of the
platform that he has helped shape as editor-in-chief of
Chemical & Engineering News in
societal issues. addressing very important
related to the role of science, Iin our case the chemical
sciences, in society. He is a person who I am very
proud to be associated with him.
American Chemical Society and as As president-elect of the
member of ACS, I have thoroughly a long-time member, a 50-year
other parts of C&E News that he enjoyhas contributed to.nd the
I haven't always agreed with
significant role that Rudy him, but that is part of the
And Rudy is a very, very provides to all of us.
said already. We all know, here's last week's
issue of C&E News.
electronically because I still Most of us now look at it
carry it around and show it. like this one because I can
I can't show you this week's Here's last week's issue.
web so far. isSo I want to show you veryhe
briefly a couple of slides that relate to why Rudy is in town
here. He is, of course, to share with
us what his title deals with, but I want to show you very
briefly the theme that I have selected for the ACS during my
presidential year 2012. Advancing chemistry,
communicating chemistry.
through research, through Aeducation, through innovation.
And communicating chemistry we
In the scientific literature, we do in a variety of ways.
each other and relate to each do it so weother.we speak to
When it comes to communicating
long way to go. And it is essential for us toa
consider the awesome
members of a learned society, as responsibility that we have as
as members of an educational members of a scientific society,
science to everyone in society. Well, everyone means there are
different audiences that we have
And I'm very proud to tell you to deal with.
at UW Madison this semester, or very happy to tell you that
well-known science and along with Ron Seely, the
Chemical & Engineering, it was environmental reporter for
sorry, Ron, we're offering a for the Wisconsin State Journal,
postdocs that deal with the communication of science to the
general public. So you've had a chance to look
at this slide and I'm going to
before I do, I'd like to point change it very quickly, but
mission statement of ACS. To advance the broader chemistry
enterprise and its practitioners
people. forA very powerful statement.its
And its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people.
I'd like everyone to think about
In fact, my goal is that if I call you up at 3:00 in the
morning or somebody calls you at
you what is the mission of the 3:00 in the morning and says to
without having to look it up. We should feel it in our bones.
As we continue our journey in advancing our knowledge and
helping society appreciate what chemical sciences are all about.
I also want to mention to you that Rudy is a very important
member of the third initiative. I've appointed a working group
that aims to help the public
climate change, and Rudy, along with seven other people, is a
member of that working group. Actually, he's a consultant to
the working group.
cannot be a full member of the Because he's an ACS employee, he
being a full member. working, but he is as good as
the last thing I'd like to say So share this with you and then
graduate students in the before Rudy is to remind the
graduate students in the audience and the mentors of the
the Wisconsin Initiative for audience of the activity that
And it is to invite all PhD chemistry candidates to include
a chapter in your PhD thesis
discoveries that you made, explaining the hard work and the
to your grandfather, to a member explaining them to your mother,
officials, to the program ofofficers who supported thed
research that we do.
attention. So I call that to your
that if you do that, you get a I also call to your attention
It's not only to the first 10, $500 cash award.
So those of you in the audience who would like to take advantage
of that, please do so.
who would like to see what the And those of you in the audience
our website, scifun.org, chapters look like, just go to
listing of these chapters and yalready there.full
So what I'd like to do now is present to you Rudy.
So Rudy would you come up here
of mementos for you from your pleasevisit to Madison. couple
Here's a Science is Fun button
And because of the that I would like you to have.
service that you do to us, I thoughtfulness and the great
this replica of the famous would like to present you with
and winnowing plaque, and I'll University of Wisconsin sifting
It's a quotation. It goes like this,
"Whatever may be the
inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University
of Wisconsin should ever
fearless sifting and winnowing encourage that continual and
can be found." by which alone the truth
of our Bascom Hall, and it This is posted on the side wall
me, Rudy, what you do with really, those words exemplify to
what you do as a responsible Chemical & Engineering News and
Society. member of the American Chemical
Thank you very much. So this is for you, Rudy.
Rudy Baum. >> And ladies and gentlemen,
At the conclusion of the talk, you're all invited
to a reception in the atrium to visit with Rudy and further have
more conversation.
Rudy Baum: Thank you for that really lovely introduction.
Before I actually start my
mentioned that he doesn't always formal talk/comments, Bassam
that's fine. agree with what I write and
people don't agree with something that I've written in
an editorial in C&EN. One of the things that confounds
me, though, is when people write
shouldn't be anything in the letters saying that there
public policy or we shouldn't be magazine about policy issues or
of a controversial law or taking a posomething.a question
I find that just very astounding
many of the crucial issues that in this day and age when so
technology and have a huge facing us involve science and
technology. It's part of the reason why we
do not do as well as we should. And addressing them is the fact
that not enough scientists are
public about, I think, really communicating with the
is not really very good at scientific issues and the public
So it is kind of interesting to understame.ng them.
But one of those issues is the
Sustainable Growth is an topic of my talk tonight:
I want to discuss today sustainability from a number of
perspectives, especially in the context of the topic of climate
change that I think is going to affect our lives significantly
and dramatically in the coming
I don't have a lot of slides but years.
this book "Eaarth: Making Life as Bill McKibben observes in
many politicians and other on a Tough New Planet,"
change as something that's going policymakers talk about climate
They discuss global warming as to happen in the future.
future generations unless we do somesomething about it now.ffect
That's not really the case. Climate change is occurring
right now.
children and our grandchildren. ItIt's a problem for us.ur
I suspect that there are some people in this room that do not
think that climate change is the
humanity in the 21st century. And I suspect there are also
some people here who don't think
responsible for the climate change that, in fact, is
occurring.
doesn't think that climate I hope there isn't anyone who
Numerous studies indicate that change is happening.
fact, increased by about Earth's temperature has, in
Climate change skeptics have 1 degree C since 1950.
whole variety of grounds. chIt's interesting, Richard a
Muller, a physics professor at
climate change skeptic himself, UCfounded the Berkeley Earth a
Surface Temperature project to
And interestingly, when I was in assess those questions.
connection to Madison, I got an email from one of my assistant
managing editors and Muller is
testifying before a hearing in actually presenting, he's not
presenting it at a briefing Cbecause the democrats don'tly
control the house, of course, so
not a hearing, but he's actually he can only be at a briefing,
BEST, it's the Berkeley Earth pSurface Temperature project,
acronym is BEST, presenting it
He has four papers that are now out for peer review, but the
conclusion of their work, and they analyzed data from 39,000
unique stations around the
that all the previous studies wthat do show that 1 degree Cs
increase in Earth's surface temperature are, in fact,
accurate and that the variety of
effect and the poor placement of criticisms like the heat island
fact, are not valid criticism, the temperature stations, in
In fact, the terms climate that temperature change is real.
somewhat misleading. change and global warming may be
collaboration in science and At a forum on international
President Obama's science advisor, said global warming iss
a dangerous misnomer. It suggests that the changes are
uniform, primarily about
gradual and likely benign. temperature, global, excuse me,
What we should be calling the phenomenon, he told that forum,
is global climate disruption.
The fact is most people know
climate. that we're disrupting the
Trudeau is incomparable at As is so often the case, Garry
on. And this, by the way, you read,
it's a little screwy, it's down the left side and then down the
right side. In this cartoon from a few weeks
ago, NPR's All Things Being Equal host Mark Slackmeyer
is introducing an honest
Here, he's saying--
Well, you can see what he's saying.
The scientific case for global
grows daily. warming is overwhelming and it
He opposes good policies because Only a moron would deny it.
short-term economic interests than the future of the damn
planet. Hello.
The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran an op-ed piece
a person named Robert Bryce entitled "Five Truths About
Climate Change."
Manhattan Institute which Brydescribes itself, and I'mthe
quoting here from its website,
that foster greater economic "As working to develop new ideas
responsibility." choice and individual
that into right-wing think tank. I think it's fair to translate
here. I'He concludes his essay: It'ss
time to move the debate past the
dioxide is evil and twirl it dogmatic view that carbon
the need for energy that is tcheap, abundant and reliable.ts
As I wrote in an editorial in C&EN recently, this isn't
climate denial, it's climate
This is the illustration that accompanied Bryce's op-ed piece.
There is something deeply and disturbingly revealing about the
attitude of Bryce, the Manhattan
Institute and the Wall Street
Journal's editorial page
toward the Earth in this illustration.
The Earth is depicted here not
it is instead a wailing baby as the planet that sustains us,
and coal to feed the smokestacks crying out for its bottle of oil
hapless parents try to placate that sprout from its head while
The arrogance behind this itillustration is almosts.
incomprehensible to me. I'm sure many of you are
familiar with this plot of the
at 3,000 meters on Mauna Loa. cIt's called the Keeling CurveO2
after Charles David Keeling, the
measurements on here. mHe received his PhD ine
geochemistry in the early 1950s from Northwestern University.
He began measuring CO2 in the mid-50s as a postdoc at Cal Tech
in places like Big Sur and
He took a job at the Scripps Pasadena.
1956 and started measuring CO2 Institution of Oceanography in
of other places including on MauAntarctica in 1958. number
He ran out of funding, actually,
than Mauna Loa, but he was in the '60s for the places other
funding throughout his lifetime. actually able to keep the
This is a truly remarkable data He died a couset.of years ago.
To me it is the antidote to the arrogance of the illustration I
just showed you from
The Keeling Curve shows that the the Wall Street Journal.
is rising. concentration of atmospheric CO2
shouldn't have been at the time, This isn't, and it really
No one had measured it before. surprising.
fuel that was being burned, a Bsimple mass balance analysisl
guarantees the observed increase
The only thing in doubt, over time.
line because they didn't actually, is the slope of the
don't have a perfect understand then, and we still
oceans in absorbing the carbon understanding of the role of the
the atmosphere. dWhat's truly remarkable abouto
this plot, to me, is it shows that the Earth breathes
one breath per year.
inhalation. Each increase, an exhalation.
Keeling understood what he was
Because the majority of the Earth's land mass is in the
northern hemisphere, there are
hemisphere than in the southern more plahemisphere.northern
In the spring and summer, these plants are absorbing CO2 as they
grow and produce leaves and get bigger.
In the fall and winter, the leaves fall and decompose.
So we have inhale, exhale,
One of the most unnerving aspects of global climate change
for the human psyche to absorb
absolute finality that the Earth is that it drives home with
I know that sounds obvious, but people have never behaved as if
the Earth was finite. They have behaved as if Earth
and its resources, the
infinite and that human activity environment itself, were
on it. could have no discernible impact
demonstrate that climate is The Keelchanging. doesn't
It simply provides the evidence that supports the most obvious
mechanism to account for the
occurred. It does show, in two very
concrete ways, that Earth's atmosphere is finite and can be
impacted by the biosphere.
plants account for this Humans accperiodicity. increase,
And by the way, there is no question that the increase is
due to burning fossil fuels.
CO2 proves that definitively. TIf Earth is finite, then bye
definition so is our capacity to
Yet we live within a produce and consume.
predicated on endless growth. socThe rate of growth, in is
population and economic activity, went exponential about
200 years ago with the advent of
We call it the Industrial Revolution but it was really a
revolution based on the extraction of fossil fuels from
Earth and their use to power
electricity. machines and eventually generate
depends entirely on burning fossilized sunshine cheaply.
Because that's what fossil fuels
They're the fossils of dead plants and dinosaurs but those
flora and fauna were just the machines that converted hundreds
of millions of years of sunshine
Earth waiting for us to extract into compouthem.uried in the
We burned the fossil fuels on the cheap because we treated the
atmosphere as a free dumping
combustion, primarily CO2. ground for the waste products of
fact, as an open sewer, the same We treated the atmosphere, in
treated our waterways. way for a very long time we
that it doesn't stink or make us The insidious thing about CO2 is
other forms of air pollution do. sick the way water pollution and
to hit a wall, a wall that told Evus that a system based oning
endless growth was not
What seemed obvious was that at some point we were going to use
up the Earth's reserves of
In the case of petroleum, some fossil fuels.
already reached what's called peak oil, the point at which
we've extracted half of all the petroleum on Earth and that
supplies are inevitably going to
Whether or not we've actually reached peak oil or not, we've
certainly reach the peak oil
extract from the Earth. If that weren't the case, why
are we drilling in 5,000 feet of
of rock as we were in the Gulf water through 13,000 more feet
that resulted in the BP oil well of Mexico in the Macondo Field
If we haven't, why are we contemplating drilling in the
Arctic Ocean with all the incredible risks that go along
with that?
miles of water through 15,000 Orfeet of rock off the cost ofwo
Brazil. Why are we contemplating
building a pipeline from Alberta
States to bring heavy, sour, to the Gulf Coast of the United
Coast refineries. crIt turns out that it doesn'tf
look the availability of fossil fuels is going to be the wall
that puts a limit to growth on a
Climate change, global warming, global climate disruption, call
it what you will, is going to be
wall. thThere are enough fossil fuelat
resources left on Earth for us
that have powered 200 years of to keep the economic engines
another 100 to 200 years, but the climate isn't going to let
us do that. But an aside.
There's enough fossil fuels for us to continue in business as
usual mode for some time. But at what cost?
Even leaving climate change aside.
We have no idea what the
of the BP oil spill is. We're blasting the tops off of
mountains in West Virginia to get at the coal that's buried
under them, and in the process
pristine streams and despoiling hundreds of square miles ofs
landscape essentially forever.
we willing to degrade to satisfy How much of our environment are
The fact is that eventually we're going to have to learn how
to live off the sun in real time.
And that's not going to be easy.
fossilized sunshine, they're Fossil fuels aren't just
sunshine. McKibben claims in "Eaarth."
that one barrel of oil, and I think this is right,
yields as much energy as 25,000 hours of human manual labor.
More than a decade of human labor per barrel.
The average American uses 25
writes, is like finding 300 years of free labor annually.
To live off the sun in real time
changes. we're going to have to make some
down, and we're going to have to We're going to have to slow
Slowing down will involve making get a lot smarter.
economic system that is not the predicated on growth.to an
I don't know what that system looks like.
In my mind, it's something that I call a high tech subsistence
economy in which consumption is no longer the sine qua non of
success.
the transition to living off the And we're going to have to make
going to make that transition a year or two or even a decade or
two.
have to go through a transition where we still burn fossil fuels
but hopefully burn them more
probably build more nuclear power plants and learn how toe
deal with the waste that's
which time we adapt to a changed leftover afterward and during
As Holdren pointed out at that and disrupted climate.
options in the face of climate policy forum, humanity has three
and suffering. change: mitigation, adaptation
each, he said, what's up for We're already doing some of
three. grabs is the ultimate mix of the
because the climate is already Mitigation can't work alone
continue to change regardless of changing and is going to
We will have to adapt to an what wealtered climate.orrow.
We are already adapting whether we acknowledge it or not.
The new flood walls surrounding New Orleans are, in fact, an
adaptation to climate change. And unless humans are able to
limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees C on average,
which at this point is very much
humanity faces is going to be in question,severe.ffering that
What roll does chemistry and the
this? We don't call it the central
science without good reason.
disrupted climate and an And in the world of a changing
chemistry will take on an even evolving economic system,
in today's society and economy. morGreen chemistry and greenhas
engineering will obviously play an important role in creating
more sustainable manufacturing
It's already having an impact. practices.
Anastas who is the deputy administrator at EPA for the
Office of R&D, and he is also one of the fathers of green
chemistry and engineering.
the future of the Office of R&D includes a recognition that ther
goal of sustainability is our true north, that scientific and
technological innovation is essential to the success of our
mission, that we need to couple our excellence and problem
assessment with an equal
and that we must act with a excellesense of urgency.oblems,
In our interview, however, Paul also referred to a speech that
administrator Lisa Jackson had
time to put to rest the notion given in which she said it's
environmental protection are that economic growth and
It's time to finally dismiss incompatible.
That's a comforting notion. But it's really not one that's
any longer true.
in the title of my talk, is an Sustainable economic growth, as
We live on a finite planet. We have to learn how to have a
healthy economy that doesn't
And it should go without saying that a critical component of
such a society is one with a
Of course, green chemistry and stable global population.
energy challenge that is at the engheart of climate change.he
Learning to live off the sun in real time is a challenge that
must be addressed by chemistry
We're doing it now but not and the chemistry enterprise.
it's not being done with the nearly enough is being done and
required. We need to develop, over the
next few decades, mechanisms for
sunlight into electricity and liquid fuels needed to power our
society.
technologies to store massive Weamounts of electrical energyw
generated by variable sources such as solar and wind power.
These are all challenges that fall under the category of
mitigation of climate change. They are mechanisms to head off
the worst aspects of the worst
change. caChemistry and relatedte
disciplines will also be called on to contribute to the
inevitable adaptation that
face of a changing climate. We will need crops that tolerate
higher temperatures and survive on less water.
We will need new herbicides and insecticides to deal with pests
that are migrating in a changing
We will need new climate.
Chemistry, in fact, is the pharmaceuticals.
to preserve really any semblance science that will be called on
we've come to depend on and of thaccept as our due.that
Are we up to this task? Certainly chemists around the
world are making important
fronts. cAs the editor of C&EN, I'vee
visited chemistry departments and I'm continually impressed,
sometimes amazed, with the vigor
you are bringing to their work. anI have talked for many yearse
about chemistry both as a core
science. discipline and as an enabling
that chemistry is going to be Acalled on to contribute to thee
mitigation and adaptation of
be happening in the coming climate change that's going to
I see chemists working years.
multidisciplinary teams with increasingly in
scientists, physicians, engineers and others in focusedl
research that is leading to new drugs, new materials, new
catalysts and new processes to
truly sustainable economy. meet the ultimate goal of a
scientists like Jim Hansen and On the other hand, climate
warning about the growing threat Stephen Schneider have been
25 years. And to tell you the truth, we've
done almost nothing to change the disastrous course we're on
in terms of the use of fossil fuels.
Chemical scientists are optimistic about what they can
invent and create to help with
to climate change, but not the mitigation of and adaptation
There is no political will to solve this problem, in this.
country especially because
and almost no one, especially here in the United States, is
willing to ask humans to
This is the cover of a book, a sacrifice.
that I learned of by reading novel, by James Howard Kunstler
It's a dystopian fable of a world some number of years from
now, a world that has drastically changed climate and
a complete breakdown in the social order.
It is a world in which the
forms of energy are once again machine age has ended and major
It is, literally, hum"A World Made By Hand."wer.
Is this a likely scenario for our future?
Probably not. But it's not out of the
question. James Lovelock, the originator
of the Gaia hypothesis, has a much more dire view of where
Earth is headed in the face of
Kunstler has. cLovelock predicted some two ort
three years ago that by 2100
people on Earth. there would be 500 million
7 billion, we just crossed that threshold a couple of weeks ago,
and that would be a cataclysm of
and yet Lovelock has been right juabout a number of things.ns,
And if you've read Jared
shows very clearly how complex Diamond's book "Collapse," he
overnight, especially in the societies can implode almost
face of rachanges.ronmental
I'm not as pessimistic about
Humans are amazingly adaptable humanity's future as Kunstler.
But cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels burned without any
concern for their impact on climate has allowed humans, and
let's be frank about this,
about the way we've developed allowour civilization.tupid
We have no choice but to get
And we have to do it very quickly.
I think it's up to scientists to
in two ways. lead this charge and to lead it
they do by making the kinds of One, by doing the science that
address this incredibly advancimportant question.eeds to
But at least as importantly as
path that we're on. vocNot enough people with thethe
creditability for scientists
the passion it deserves. have taken up this cause with
of the Earth, and because Wescientists know that thisure
problem is real and serious and can explain that the arguments
of those who deny that it is
We haven't always been known as real and scientists. specious.
I learned one day driving home
Friday that scientist is a word listwith a definite origin.ence
It was coined in 1834 by
and philosopher William Yule. CaThe older term for peopleian
pursuing scientific activities
Yule's view that term was too was nawide and too lofty.and in
Perhaps natural philosopher is
describe people who do science. toHowever, I think we may haveto
given up something when we
scientist. abandon natural philosopher for
allowed us to retreat into It isolated us to some extent,
its own sake and in doing so, cuts science off from humanities
and scientists off, to some extent, from their
responsibilities as citizens. I don't know whether anything we
do can change the course that we're on, but I think we have to
try.
know that global climate change will be a human tragedy of yet
undefined proportions and we do nothing about it, what does that
say about us? And why should society continue
to support us?
the scientist citizen? What, in fact, is the role of
answer that, but it's something that I hope all of you will give
some thought to.
back to calling ourselves I'm nnatural philosophers.uld go
I am saying that scientists,
among the most practical of scientists, must become much
more involved in this most
facing us today. important challenge and issue
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