Finally The "Global Cooling" Cause Gets A  Champion!

Billionaire Opens Deep Pockets For Climate-Theory Research

In May, billionaire Gary Comer and four climate experts boarded his Cessna Caravan and took off in search of a catastrophe.

Flying low over southwestern Ontario, the group scanned the ground for boulders left behind by an ancient flood. The deluge, involving 2,000 cubic miles of fresh water from a prehistoric lake nearby, sent temperatures over the North Atlantic plummeting about 12,700 years ago, according to a theory advanced by scientists on the flight.

The cataclysm -- triggered by the melting of glaciers at the close of the last ice age -- poses an urgent question for the present: Could global warming also set off unexpected and extreme climate shifts, such as substantial regional drops in temperature or long droughts?

Some scientists think it's a possibility, and now their research is getting a major boost from Mr. Comer, 75 years old. The founder and former chairman of Lands' End Inc. sold the company to Sears, Roebuck & Co. last year, pocketing just over half the proceeds from the $1.9 billion cash deal. Since witnessing unusual ice conditions on an Arctic cruise, Mr. Comer has started handing out millions of dollars to researchers trying to document so-called abrupt climate change.

The idea is that the Earth's climate can sometimes behave more like a switch than a dial, jumping in a matter of years between dramatically different conditions. At the time of the big flood in Ontario, temperatures in Greenland dropped by 18 degrees Fahrenheit. The flood also probably upset ocean currents and changed rainfall patterns as far away as the Asian monsoon.

Abrupt climate change is a wild card in the divisive debate over the causes of global warming. For many, the chief culprits are so-called greenhouse gases formed by the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. These gases are thought to be insulating the planet like a blanket, causing temperatures to rise. A United Nations report predicts that average temperatures will increase 2.5 degrees to 10.4 degrees by 2100, throwing Arctic ecosystems into turmoil and threatening coastal communities with rising sea levels as glaciers melt and warming oceans expand. (Russia may hold the key¹ to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, the global-warming treaty, which the U.S. has abandoned.)

While there is broad consensus among scientists that global temperatures are rising because of fossil-fuel use, the extent and consequences of the warming remain uncertain. Such doubts now form the basis of the Bush administration's climate policy, which opposes costly reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

For some scientists concerned about the warming, abrupt climate change has become a rallying point. Not only does the theory offer worst-case scenarios, it co-opts one of the arguments favored by skeptics of global warming -- namely that scientists aren't certain about how the climate works.

"What concerns me and a lot of people is that we are provoking a system about which we lack a total understanding," says Wallace S. Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia University who was among the first to outline the abrupt-change theory, in the mid-1980s. A feisty 71-year-old with a reputation for big ideas and for challenging fellow scientists, Dr. Broecker has become Mr. Comer's closest adviser.

Wider Audience

The evidence for sudden climate swings is beginning to find a wider audience. Last January, Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on Cape Cod, told the World Economic Forum at its meeting in Davos, Switzerland, that abrupt change could have the perverse effect of lowering temperatures in industrialized parts of the globe. A Senate bill would allocate $60 million to research on ancient ice and mud, and the Bush administration plans to highlight abrupt change in a major new strategic plan for climate-change research, due out this month.

Archaeologists have linked the collapse of several civilizations to large climate changes. A long dry spell may have caused the decline of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia around 4,200 years ago. Researchers have unearthed a 180-kilometer-long wall built by a later kingdom to keep out refugees from newly arid regions.

Hollywood is also taking note. News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox is in post-production for "The Day After Tomorrow," a big-budget movie in which global warming sets off a new ice age and Dennis Quaid plays a paleoclimatologist who battles encroaching glaciers. A studio description says the film "revolves around an abrupt climate change that has cataclysmic consequences for the planet."

Critics of such notions -- and there are plenty -- say the yo-yoing of the climate over the millennia simply shows that man's influence may be grossly overestimated. They add that Mr. Comer isn't the first big donor to hand over money to scientists peddling an alarmist message.

"Anyone who studies weather knows that it is variable, but suddenly it is being treated as a boogeyman," says Richard Lindzen, an atmosphere expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He notes that the biggest shifts, such as the one that occurred 12,700 years ago, happened under ice-age conditions, when mile-thick ice sheets dominated climate processes.

Mr. Comer grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his father was a railroad conductor, and worked for a time as a copy writer at Young & Rubicam. After quitting to travel to Europe, he decided to turn his hobby of competitive sailing into a business and founded Lands' End. The small mail-order operation grew to employ more than 6,000 people, but battles with his board made the job increasingly unpleasant, Mr. Comer says. A down-to-earth man who drives a six-year-old Lincoln Towncar and plays down his wealth, Mr. Comer concedes that with the gas-guzzling auto, in addition to his fleet of airplanes and boats, his lifestyle is responsible for prodigious amounts of carbon-dioxide emissions. But he doesn't see personal change as the solution.

The former executive brings a degree of political independence to the climate debate. He says he made campaign donations to Bill Bradley and John McCain in the 2000 election, but couldn't bring himself to vote for either of the big-party candidates. He says that prior to his Arctic cruise, he had never given much thought to global warming.

When Mr. Comer steered his 150-foot yacht Turmoil toward the Northwest Passage two summers ago, the crew expected to be blocked by sea ice. Instead, the ship slipped easily through open waters. An experienced Arctic traveler on board said the ice conditions were the mildest he had ever seen. The Turmoil was just the 94th ship to make the transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Arctic islands of Canada since Roald Amundsen first did so in 1905.

"It's obvious something is happening. But no one is really interested in doing anything about it," Mr. Comer said recently over a diner breakfast of bacon and eggs.

After he returned from the Northwest Passage to his home outside Chicago, he typed "global warming" into the Google search engine. A fan of Tom Clancy and Joseph Conrad novels, he had read of 19th-century explorers who died in the passage, and he thought his own trip had been too easy. On the Internet, he found a debate between environmentalists and energy interests -- "one predicting the end of the world and the other saying nothing is happening," he says.

Mr. Comer initially considered launching a Web site of his own to counter the energy industry's arguments, but he decided it would get lost in the noise. Instead, he called the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

"I don't want to go out and tilt at windmills and waste my time, so I have focused on the scientists to help them do their job," he says.

Mr. Comer wanted a splashy news conference, but Woods Hole, the world's largest independent ocean-research center, was more interested in collecting data than in setting off political fireworks. A Woods Hole oceanographer named William Curry came to Chicago and explained to Mr. Comer that researchers weren't sure whether there was actually less ice or if it was being moved elsewhere by wind. Soon the conversation turned to speculation. If the polar ice melted, Dr. Curry said, it could cause abrupt climate change.

The scenario he laid out goes like this: Increasing rainfall and melting ice caused by global warming could lead to a buildup of fresh water in the North Atlantic. That influx could shut down circulating ocean currents that normally draw warm salty water from the tropics along with vast amounts of heat.

Stopping those currents might disrupt the redistribution of heat around the globe. In fact, there is evidence that Atlantic currents may already be under pressure. A few months after the Chicago meeting, British scientists writing in the journal Nature showed that salinity has dropped measurably in the North Atlantic during the past 40 years. The Woods Hole graphics department turned the data into an interactive program that Dr. Curry e-mailed to Mr. Comer.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Comer agreed to give Woods Hole $1 million to seed a program that would place buoys in the Atlantic to monitor changes in salinity, temperatures and ocean currents. According to an internal Woods Hole funding document, Mr. Comer's money came with the proviso that he wanted the research "kicked into high gear."

Paleoclimatic research has exploded in the past several years, thanks to data found in ice cores, tree rings, coral and ocean sediment. The abrupt changes are the most striking feature of that data, but the ocean-currents theory is just one explanation. The atmosphere plays a much bigger role in climate, and many scientists expect tropical air to contain the mechanisms of abrupt change.

Reaching Out

Mr. Comer had been reaching out to other top scientists. He had written to Dr. Broecker at Columbia University, saying he was looking for ways to "make a difference" where he felt the government wasn't. A friend also put Mr. Comer in touch with F. Sherwood Rowland, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, who had shared a Nobel Prize for showing that chlorofluorocarbon gases used in spray bottles and refrigerators could deplete the ozone layer, an important shield against solar radiation. The chemicals were later banned when a huge hole in the ozone layer was detected over the Antarctic.

In May 2002, Dr. Rowland and his wife, Joan, flew to Victoria, British Columbia, for a cruise on the Turmoil. Mr. Comer joined them after closing the sale of his company to Sears. Privately, scientists hope he will provide much more funding than he has. But Mr. Comer, who has also given $40 million for a new children's hospital in Chicago that will bear his name, sees his role as seeding research, not carrying it across the finish line. "The government has really got to step in," he says.

Dr. Rowland and Mr. Comer were chatting on the bridge when the billionaire asked, "If I wanted to put $1 million into climate-change research, what should I do?" Dr. Rowland says he had a quick answer: provide 10 two-year fellowships to newly minted Ph.D.s recruited into climate-change science. "One to work with me, and another nine to other scientists I could pick out."

The program soon rose to $6.9 million for 23 research groups, as Mr. Comer huddled several weeks later with Drs. Rowland and Broecker in New York. They gave $300,000 to an expert developing new ice-dating techniques, and an equal sum to Lonnie Thompson, an Ohio State University researcher known as the "Indiana Jones of paleoclimatology," who scales mountains in Latin America in search of rare tropical glaciers.

Last month, Maine Sen. Susan Collins introduced the Abrupt Climate Change Research Act of 2003, a bill that would give the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $60 million in additional funds to implement a major study of ancient climate records. Sen. Collins, a Republican, has parted ways with the Bush administration by calling for a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants to 1990 levels.

The administration has opposed mandating limits, arguing that the economic costs aren't justified by available science. The wait-and-see policy assumes that if warming occurs, it will do so gradually over the next century, leaving time to invent new energy sources or to simply adapt.

That assumption could be wrong. In a 2002 report titled "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises," the National Academy of Sciences in Washington concluded that sudden regional climate shifts could be triggered by human activities.

That possibility is starting to influence policy discussions, which have until now focused largely on the threat of steady warming. This month, the Bush administration is expected to release a major report outlining a new national research strategy for climate change. According to Mr. Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, abrupt climate change is identified as a "priority area" in the report, which he has seen. "It is clearly one of the things that needs to be looked at in the short term," says Dr. Marburger.

Before Mr. Comer set out on the expedition to Ontario in May, he had his Dassault Falcon jet collect Dr. Broecker and other members of the team at Chicago's Midway Airport. They gathered for a day of meetings at his Wisconsin home, and later watched the sunset from a five-story, glass-enclosed tower that soars above the estate.

During the three-day field trip, the group couldn't locate the path of the ancient flood. A chagrined University of Manitoba geologist named James Teller explained that he had predicted the flow using topographical maps, as he had never had enough funds or reason to rent a plane. Now Mr. Comer has sent out invitations for a new expedition in September. He thinks the water went north, into Hudson Bay.

Write to Antonio Regalado at antonio.regalado@wsj.com²

Updated July 17, 2003 12:00 a.m.