Global warming gurus and Princeton professors Rob Socolow and Stephen Pacala are often in the news but this month they seem to be more in the news than usual.
In the July 13 issue of the journal Science, Rep. Rush Holt D-N.J. writes an essay on Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth and the movie of the same name. Holt, a Ph.D. physicist (one of the few scientists in Congress) says he finds Gore’s science solid, noting Gore’s endorsement of the “wedge model” of carbon reduction propounded by Socolow and Pacala.
Steven Mufson, writing in the Washington Post, describes the Socolow-Pacala wedge solution in great detail. “The impact of the wedges has been huge,” writes Mufson. Since the duo introduced the concept in 2004, he notes, each has “given about 100 talks, prodding scientists, policymakers and companies to attack global warming in concrete ways.”
The problem of climate change is daunting, Mufson acknowledges. But, Socolow tells him, “We’ve gone from a problem people scarcely recognized, to one that seemed impossible to address, to a serious determination to address it.”
Socolow also appears in a blog post by Andrew Revkin in New York Times this month, offering less sanguine words about whether solar panels might contribute much to the wedge approach in the near-term.
While Socolow and Pacala’s fan club grows larger by the minute, they have their critics. Among them is Warren Meyer, a small-business owner in Phoenix, Arizona, who received his undergraduate degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton in 1984. Earlier this month Meyer posted on his contrarian Coyote blog a draft of his book A Layman’s Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming.
“Despite good evidence that global temperatures are rising and that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth,” writes Meyer, “we are a long way from attributing all or much of current warming to man-made CO2. We are even further away from being able to accurately project man’s impact on future climate.”
In other news, Rep. Holt (who wrote the Science essay mentioned above) has given no indication that he plans to leave his House seat in order to run for the Senate. Even so, PoliticsNJ.com is running a poll to see who would be likely to win the Democratic nomination for his House seat in such a scenario. The front runner? Juan Melli, a Princeton graduate student in mechanical and aerospace and founder of the liberal Blue Jersey blog, which has quickly become a must-read in New Jersey politics.
