LSP Environmental Studies Community Event Reports

By Melissa Aragon
For this report, I traveled about two thousand miles less than my first, and attended a lecture in the Environmental Studies building on campus. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, this building is located right next to a copy center. It’s an unmarked building whose lobby consists of a two by 3 foot area, a few stairs that wrap around the corner, and two elevators, that upon stepping in them seem about as reliable as the mineshaft they call an elevator at 10 Washington place. Running a little early, I pondered being safe and taking the stairs up, and possibly avoid yet another elevator disaster, which would have been my third of the week. Bad luck was following me, but I was adventurous. I pushed the “Up” button, the door opened, and I took a deep breath and stepped in and started my ascent.
I walked out of the elevator, thanked God that I made it and walked into the fat hallway they called the conference room, which was about 3 tables laid side-by-side, with a projected screen in the front, and a buffet in the back. As I always say, when there’s a lecture, vegetarian wraps and chocolate chip cookies better be involved. And they were. I would take the leap to say that this is the first time I have been to an event that offers only vegetarian selections. I happily yet awkwardly munched on my vegetable and cheese wrap while others around me were also ‘preparing’ themselves for the lecture. There were three other students in attendance, as well as what seemed like many of this professor’s colleagues, who happened to have offices along one side of the conference room as they traded out the hard chairs around the table with their own rolling and swiveling chairs.
After a man sitting a few people to my right introduced Professor Holland, he suggested we go around the table and introduce ourselves. There were about twenty people in attendance including myself and three other GSP students.
After our brief rendition of “Getting to Know You,” Professor Holland began what he had come there to do. We all sat quietly and attentively as we listened to this charismatic and well spoken professor first detail myths about global warming and its link to sea levels rising as well as the research he had done in Antarctica and Greenland.
His main ‘beef’ was with the media’s limited knowledge of the way in which climate change and global warming affect the rise of sea level. He is 90% convinced that warming is increasing due to green house gasses, but that only one third of ocean expansion should be blamed on heating.
An example he talked about, with the masses not fully aware of what is going on was when he talked about the Hockey Stick Controversy. While the sea level has risen 30 cm in the last 100 years, he still argues that this can not be seen as a trend but rather just a fact. From this fact, however, a government funded research group predicted that there is a potential for sea levels to quickly rise an average of 0.4 to 0.8 meters in the near future. When questioned about where these predictions came from, the researchers said they did not believe this prediction was correct, nor that a prediction can be made about the amount of rise sea level will have.
When asked why, in fact, they did make quantitative predictions about this topic; their response was that the government made them produce numbers, as it was some sort of policy.
He kept reiterating how with the science and technology now we can clearly make predictions as to what the Air temperature and air pressure will be 50 years from now, and there is worst case scenario and a best case which are included in these predictions, but predicting this cannot lead to the prediction of how high sea levels will rise as a result. There are too many variables that computer models cannot take into account, Holland states. It seems that the scientific community is split as to how global warming will affect the earth, and if we can ever predict and plan for the rise of the sea levels.
One way that Professor Holland investigated the water temperature during his research in Greenland was to drop a submarine probe into a hole of ice. This needed to be done from 500 meters above the drop site to ensure that it would work. The data gathered from this probe helped Holland and his team come to the conclusion that the Greenland shelf had a three degree C rise within the last six months, and that there was a deep quadratic dependence on temperature.
He went on some more, discussing his research in Antarctica, and what he found there, only went along with his discoveries in Greenland, and he ended his lecture with the final statement on his slide: “When and How much- not predictable. End of Story.”
This was an interesting lecture in the fact that I feel like I walked out of it knowing less about global warming and its effects. His lecture in one form or another said that the things you, as well as many other people read in articles of Time and Newsweek, and other publications that predict the rising of sea level in 2050 or any given date don’t know what they’re talking about. He debunked much of what society holds true and trusts as reliable fact.