Hans Joachim Schellnhuber can speak eloquently and at length in English, German, French or Spanish about the perils of climate change. But the cold language of science in any of those languages briefly melts away when the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 59, makes a verbal detour to mention his 18-month-old son and the impact that global warming will have on the toddler’s life.
“I’ve got a young son,” Schellnhuber says, pictured at the right with the boy, his wife and Britain’s Prince Charles on a visit to Potsdam in April. “I hope this all turns out to be wrong. I would be delighted if it turns out that we haven’t understood the system as well as we think we do, and that we might get a 20- to 30-year ‘breathing period’ when global warming slows or is even halted,” Schellnhuber said in an interview with Reuters.
“I hope my son can live in a world where there won’t be massive conflicts because the sea level rises by a metre in his life time. I hope he’ll be able to have a happy life. But I’m growing increasingly worried.”
I’ve had the chance to listen to Schellnhuber on several occasions in recent weeks and his infant son regularly comes up.
It is, for me at least, the drop-dead argument about climate change: What will our children or grandchildren say in the year 2100 about our generation and what happens, or does not happen, to slow climate change in 2009? What will they say about us when the world’s median temperature is 2 to 6 degrees higher and problems abound because of what didn’t happen in 2009?
Schellnhuber asks: “Would you put your child on a bus if you knew someone had cut the brake cable and there’s an 80 percent chance the bus will crash? But what if I say there’s an 80 percent chance the planet will be flooded even if it’s not for 100 years? Would you change your habits? The threat is far away. It’s an indissoluble problem.”
Schellnhuber says he and fellow scientists have no choice but to warn about the perils of climate change. He says he gets zero pleasure over warning of the apocalypse and finds upsetting the hate mail he receives. “I didn’t pursue this issue – it found me,” he said. “But when you’re deep in your research, you can’t just say ‘this is all too much, it gets to me too much’. It does get to me.”
He says he is guardedly optimistic world leaders in Copenhagen will make progress on addressing climate change — but probably not enough progress. ”The potential is there that we’ll make some headway. But as as much as we need.”
Which brings Schellnhuber back to the bus he doesn’t want to let his son or anyone else’s children get on.
“We’re about to get into that bus and that’s why it’s so important that we continue to be an irritant. That’s the uncomfortable situation that we scientists are in. We’re screaming ‘Watch out! The brake cable has been cut!’ But at some point people don’t want to hear us anymore. We know that in the next 10 years we have a chance to get things in place that we don’t crash through the guard rail of an increase in temperatures of 2 degrees. We still have a choice. That’s what’s so important. That’s why we’re standing up and shouting ‘Stop!’”
PHOTO: Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed signs a declaration during the first underwater cabinet meeting in the Maldives, October 17, 2009. The Maldivian president and ministers held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting in a symbolic cry for help over rising sea levels that threaten the tropical archipelago’s existence.
