With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

THE CAST
Richard Alley, Perm State University, Pennsylvania. A glaciologist and leading
analyst of Greenland ice cores, Alley is one of the most articulate interpreters
of climate science. He has revealed that huge global climate changes have
occurred over less than a decade in the past.
Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist. In the 1890s, he was the first to calculate
the likely climatic impact of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, and thus invented the notion of "global warming." Modern
supercomputers have barely improved on his original calculation.
Gerard Bond, formerly of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia
University, New York. A geologist, Bond was one of the first analysts of
deep-sea cores; until his death, in 2005, he was an advocate of the case that
regular pulses in solar activity drive cycles of climate change on Earth, such
as the little ice age and the medieval warm period.
Wally Broecker, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University. An
oceanographer and one of the most influential and controversial U.S. climate
scientists for half a century, Broecker discovered the ocean conveyor, a
thousand-year global circulation system that begins off Greenland and ends
in the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe warm.
Peter Cox, UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, Wareham. Cox is an
innovative young climate modeler of aerosols' likely role in keeping the
planet cool — and of the risks that land plants will turn from a "sink" for to a
"source" of carbon dioxide later in this century.