Plan B for Climate Change
Wallace Broecker has worked as a climate scientist for more than five decades, for most of that time at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory. In 1975, he published his first warning about the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the journal Science, coining the term global warming. His research focus has been on the role of the ocean in fixing carbon dioxide and as a heat engine that helps keep the planet as warm as it is. Most recently, he has turned his attention to fixing the problem of anthropogenic climate change, but he says it's no longer enough to just reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. In Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat - and How to Counter It, he and science writer Robert Kunzig explain why Broecker believes humans will not stop burning fossil fuels in time to prevent major climate change impacts. He has embraced controversial proposals to capture and sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere.