Jane Lubchenco on restoring science to U.S. climate policy

Marine biologist Jane Lubchenco now heads one of the U.S. government’s key agencies researching climate change — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Lubchenco discusses the central role her agency is playing in understanding the twin threats of global warming and ocean acidification.

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In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, Lubchenco spoke about the science of climate change, the complexities of communicating it to policy makers, and what she referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin,” ocean acidification.

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e360: Several years ago, you and I spoke about the issue of ocean acidification, which has always been a sort of stepbrother of global warming, although by some accounts equally serious.

Lubchenco: Yeah, I call it the equally evil twin.

e360: You’re a marine ecologist, this is really your world. Even if you don’t want to believe in global warming, there’s just no getting around the effects of CO2 on oceans. And yet we don’t hear a lot about this. Why can’t this penetrate?

If they gave mud to Gore, what’ll be fit for a prince?

That is the question haunting Tony Haymet, the director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Prince Albert II of Monaco will visit San Diego Oct. 23, his first official visit here, to accept Scripps’ Roger Revelle Prize for his environmental advocacy.

Former Vice President Al Gore received the first Revelle prize named for the late former director of Scripps, in March.

Gore was presented a jar of mud. But it wasn’t just any mud. It was part of Scripps’ research collection. The sediment was removed from the floor of the mid-Pacific Ocean during a 1950s expedition run by Revelle himself. When Revelle taught at Harvard, he mentored Gore, a student there, and stimulated Gore’s passion for the environment.

It is becoming tradition that the Revelle Prize shouldn’t be a another plaque or glass sculpture to put in an honoree’s trophy warehouse, Haymet says, but a meaningful item from Scripps’ research.

When Haymet met with the prince 18 months ago in Monaco, he gave him a small rock. Like the mud, it was a specimen from Scripps’ collection that holds a place in history. The rock came from the Tonga Trench, one of the deepest holes in the ocean floor. An oceanographer’s “smoking gun,” the rock helped validate the theory of plate tectonics, or movement of the Earth’s crust.