New climate centre launches at Columbia
Guest contribution by Bill Hewitt
Yesterday saw the launch of a new climate research center in New York City. The Columbia Climate Center is the offspring of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, itself the brainchild of its founder and director, the influential and prolific economist, Jeffrey Sachs. The CCC has defined an ambitious mission for itself: to integrate the work of various world-class centers and institutes at Columbia, to develop strategies for mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change, and to communicate the science and best policy thinking to the public and decision makers. The affiliates of the CCC include such leaders in climate science as NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), led by Jim Hansen, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO).
Jeffrey Sachs is something of a force of nature. He led the task force that recommended the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and is now President of Millennium Promise. He is ubiquitous in the op-ed pages of publications like the FT and at blogs like the HuffPo. His latest book, among several, is Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.
Speaking at the launch yesterday, Sachs said that climate change activists “wouldn’t know what we were doing without the brilliant and painstaking work of scientists.” He noted, for example, the “foresight and prescience” of Wally Broecker, one of the pioneers of climate science and a mainstay at LDEO for nearly 50 years. (Broecker spoke later, recounting six decades of climate research.) Sachs said that scientists have been “not only correct, but correct in their worries” and that, at this point, the “uncertainties of science are only of the depth of the risk” we are facing.
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