“You know nothing about the Earth” Wallace Broecker was told as a first year grad student, before he was whisked away for an all-expenses-paid three week trip to study some lakes. Little did his then supervisor realise that ‘Wally’, as he prefers to be known, would change the world of climate science forever. In 1975, Wally coined the phrase ‘global warming’.

On Friday 12th June, Wally will receive an honorary degree from Cambridge University and the following Monday will be celebrating 57 years of scientific research. With over 470 publications to his name and a host of books, it was a great pleasure for me to listen to Wally give the second Grantham Institute for Climate Change Annual Lecture of 2009 at Imperial College earlier this evening.

Professor Wallace Broecker giving his lecture at Imperial College

His talk was both enlightening and alarming – he believes that for many of us at the talk, the effects of global warming would be visible in our lifetimes. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it would be changes in rainfall pattern that would bring the most harm, rather than increases in temperature.

Wally has studied the changing rainfall throughout history by analysing lakes and their sediments and believes that the past can tell us a great deal about what is to come. However, with climate scientists currently unable to produce accurate models to describe the past, he is concerned. Feedback mechanisms make him fear that realistic models to predict the future are still a long way off.

One of the stunning landscapes that Wally has been investigating

What is clear, however, is that the changes in rainfall will far outweigh any changes we see in temperature. As global warming continues, he explained that the Northern Hemisphere would heat up more quickly than the Southern Hemisphere, because of the great abundance of landmass that has a lower specific heat capacity. This will cause a significant northward shift in the thermal equator, defined as the belt encircling the Earth where the highest mean annual temperatures are for each longitude.

Despite this, Wally doesn’t believe that convincing the richer nations to cut back on their carbon emissions is the way forward – he believes that this will only eclipse the larger problem of the developing countries that will continue to expand and industrialise. Instead, he has high hopes in what his colleague and friend is working on.

Professor Klaus Lackner is a geophysicist with a big idea – he believes he might just have the solution to storing carbon dioxide after 5 years of hard work. Lackner has developed a plastic, which upon exposure to air, can absorb carbon dioxide.

Wally explains that the ligands present in the plastic pick up the carbon dioxide preferentially over water vapour molecules. The plastic can then be placed inside an evacuated chamber, where they release the carbon dioxide. Although still heavily in the development phase, Lackner’s hope is that each unit of this plastic will be capable of removing one tonne of carbon dioxide from the air each day.

This idea might seem far-fetched, but with Professor Broecker and Prince Charles amongst Lackner’s fans, this piece of plastic might be one of the future solutions to prevent further global warming.