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As the effects of global climate change become ever more visible, whether in the melting polar ice caps or the intensifying tropical hurricanes, the issue remains a non-news story, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert told an overflow audience gathered in Andrews Hall for the final Mellon Environmental Series lecture of the semester in late March.

Kolbert, a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1999, has received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award for her series on global warming, “The Climate of Man.” Her stories have also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Mother Jones, and “The Best American Science and Nature Writing” and “The Best American Political Writing” anthologies. She is also author of a brand new book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

At William and Mary, she introduced her topic by flatly stating, “I’m not an expert on global warming. I’m not a physicist, a geologist, a meteorologist, a chemist, a biologist, or a climatologist. I’m not a scientist. But I do something that scientists don’t do—I tell stories.”

She spoke about the difficulties journalists face when trying to tell the story of global warming, explaining that journalism traditionally breaks down coverages into two categories: (1) news stories dealing with specific events at specific times and places, and (2) controversies in which both sides are given fairly equal coverage. “But global warming is not a news story, and it is not a controversy—even though it is often presented that way,” Kolbert said.

Photo: Kolbert is introduced to the William and Mary community by J. Timmons Roberts, director of environmental science studies. By Emily Fraser.

To support this statement, Kolbert jumped into a historical survey of research into global warming went back more than a century. Using a ratio spectrophotometer as early as the 1850s, John Tyndall discovered that CO2 and water vapor are partly opaque in the infrared spectrum, and he realized that the opacity of certain gases determined a great deal about the earth’s temperature, she said. Other scientists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries added to Tyndall’s research. Although there were certain misconceptions about the timeline in which climate change would be experienced, as well as the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon released through industrialization, the majority of their research was remarkably in line with findings by scientists today, Kolbert explained.

One of these findings was that temperature change would be fully evident by the year 2000, Kolbert stated. With the five warmest years on record since the 1890s occurring (in order of ascending heat) in 2004, 2003, 2002, 1998, and 2005, the premonitions of these earlier scientists seem validated.  And in 2003, the vast majority of the scientific community publicly announced that natural influences cannot explain the changes in temperature.

Kolbert went on to offer overwhelming evidence of the effects of global warming on the earth today, including ice recession in many of the Arctic areas she has visited over the course of her reporting. In the tiny coastal island of Shishmaref, Alaska, for example, residents recently voted to move their entire village to the mainland, she said. They are experiencing unprecedented levels of ice melt, which means they are no longer protected from the onslaught of pounding ocean waves.

Kolbert explained the phenomena of positive feedback loops in the global warming process. Because ice reflects 80 percent of sunlight, the loss of ice sheets in the Arctic is not only a symptom of global warming but also an exacerbating cause. Likewise, melting permafrost serves as both symptom and cause. Vegetation growing atop permafrost never decomposes entirely due to the cold, meaning there are at least 450 billion tons of stored carbon in permafrost. As permafrost melts due to global warming, greenhouse gases pour into the atmosphere, thereby expediting the process.

While the most noticeable impacts of global warming are currently felt in the Arctic, effects are being experienced all over the world, Kolbert said. In America, the effects perhaps most significantly are experienced through increased intensity of hurricanes. There are typically three-to-five category 5 hurricanes recorded throughout a 10-year period, Kolbert said. But in an astounding break of precedent, the eastern seaboard experienced three cateogory 5 storms in 2005 alone.

In light of all of this evidence, the public debate about global warming really had to change, Kolbert explained. “Instead of the old denial that global warming is taking place, people began to say that ‘yes, temperatures are rising, and yes, there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, but who really knows what the relationship is between the two?’ This statement flatly ignores 150 years of scientific research,” she said. “These people believe we should devote resources to the symptoms of the problem, and not to stopping ‘a climate change process that we don’t fully understand.’”

Kolbert’s voice rose as she said, “I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous this argument is. It mixes propositions that are true with propositions that sound like they could be true.”

Kolbert explained that even incremental changes in temperature make a huge difference in global climate, as the earth was only 10 degrees cooler during the last ice age than it is today.

“The basic physics—and I am not a physicist, but even I get this— have been understood for more than a century now. So why,” Kolbert asked, “haven’t we taken global warming more seriously?”

She concluded her lecture with a challenge to the audience: “Global warming is a technological problem, but it is also an ethical one. With knowledge comes responsibility. We know what is going on, so why aren’t we doing anything about it?”