The testimony of Professor William H. Calvin at the EPA Endangerment Hearing in Seattle, May 22, 2009

I am William H. Calvin, a Seattle author, lecturer, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine now affiliated with our Program on Climate Change. In 1958 when I was an undergraduate physics major, I saw a short movie where the climate scientists of the day were predicting global warming (you can now find it on YouTube). The science was good enough for an endangerment ruling back in the EPA’s first year, 1971.

We have squandered the fifty-year lead time that early climate science provided us. We now have a climate problem so big that CO2 emission reductions, even to zero, won’t be a climate fix. If we were removing CO2 in a big way, countering ongoing emissions and drawing down the 38% excess CO2, then emission reductions would speed the day and reduce the needed sequestration capacity. But without a program to quickly clean up the CO2 excess, emission reductions will not even buy us some time before we reach the overwhelming levels of climate change-and because of abrupt climate shifts, that could happen well before mid-century.