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Eyeing the Rocky Mountains out his office window on the University of Colorado’s East Campus in Boulder, geochemist, climatologist and director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research Jim White describes his youth in East Tennessee. Then, the Smoky Mountains were his big backyard.
“They shaped my thinking,” he says of the ancient yet vibrant range. “From the first time my friends and I could drive, we went camping in the Smokies.”
The beauty of the Smokies stoked his passion for nature; that passion brought with it a zeal for understanding how the planet works. Over time, he channeled both into an expertise as a “stable isotope geochemist,” and CU Boulder was one of few places seeking just such an expert back in 1989. Since then, White has made the Front Range of the Rockies his adopted home.
But his path from the Smokies to the Rockies nearly took a different course. Researching a high school assignment on what he wanted to be in life, he discovered an oceanography book at the library. Fascinated, he later applied to universities where he thought he could study oceans. He was dismayed when he learned undergrads couldn’t major in oceanography, so he took relevant courses instead, eagerly attending intro chemistry at eight o’clock every morning as a freshman at Florida State University.
“And I’m not a morning person,” White says. “Ask my wife.”
But in those early morning classes, he learned he was drawn to chemistry — and physics too — because “they are at the heart of how things function,” not simply because he aimed to understand the oceans.
So White wasn’t heartbroken when in his first days of graduate school at Columbia University, his advisor diverted his professional course. Wally Broecker, an early climatologist, lined his students up in the hallway and assigned projects to each in alphabetical order. White got the last assignment — a stable isotopes project looking at tree rings in the forests of the eastern U.S. To this day, the student who stood just in front of him is an oceanographer. Smiling, White says, “I got that close.”
The tree ring study marked his first foray into climatology. Tree rings are used as proxies to help reconstruct climate history. They helped him learn how to measure stable isotopes in just about anything — how isotopes of elements like hydrogen, carbon and oxygen break down over time, and move through a system, he explains, shedding light on climate history.
White studied in the midst of scientists like Australian biophysicist Graham Farquhar, and renowned climatologists Jim Hansen and Stephen Schneider — who taught his climatology course — early pioneers of using stable isotopes to understand the climate. And he crossed paths with French climatologist Jean Jouzel — “one of the gods of science,” White says — on sabbatical at the nearby Goddard Institute for Space Studies, doing groundbreaking work with stable isotopes in climate models.
“He introduced me to French wine, and I introduced him to cheap American beer,” he says, and they bonded over isotopes.
Jouzel invited White to France to work under him at the French Atomic Energy Lab in Saclay, analyzing a new ice core from a place called Vostok, Antarctica, drilled by the Russians and being studied by the French.
“Clearly I’ve established that I had no filter when it comes to what I was going to do next,” White says; so he left for France.
The Vostok became the first ice core in which scientists co-measured temperature from stable isotopes and CO2 — “the canonical ice core,” White says, showing a fundamental relationship between CO2 and temperature. “It’s still one of the best paleoclimate records we’ve ever produced.”
As an American in Cold War times, White chuckles, his name was buried in the acknowledgments of the Vostok paper.
On weekends in Jouzel’s lab, White analyzed a Greenland ice core for Danish scientist Willi Dansgaard, another emerging paleoclimate goliath. Dansgaard would make his mark as the first to show that trace isotopes oxygen-18 and deuterium could be an indicator of past climate in glacier ice.
“That was the first time we had taken ice samples and chopped them up into year-by-year bits,” White says, to measure abrupt climate change as far as 13,000 years back. And that was the first time White knew he wanted to stick to paleoclimate study — at least for a while.
“I remember consciously making a decision that I was going to work on two problems in my career, initially,” he says. First: unlocking paleoclimate, using ice cores to understand climate dynamics. And second: understanding the carbon cycle, how carbon is exchanged (or “cycled”) through Earth’s ecosystem, oceans, atmosphere and geosphere, affecting climate.
He was certain he’d have to find new problems to work on by mid-career.
“As we have improved our understanding of how the climate functions, the evidence of human interaction in the climate system has just been getting stronger and stronger,” he says; but alas, it hasn’t led to actions to stem climate change that White had expected as a young scientist — like an effective global carbon reduction agreement, or wide-scale use of renewable energy. Instead, humans have now helped put 400 parts per million of CO2 into the atmosphere, something the planet hasn’t seen in three million years.
“It’s a fundamentally different climate,” he says.
And yet, he laments, policymakers and politicians think they can ignore physics, or portray climate change as a matter of “belief.” This has been the biggest surprise of his scientific career, but also a catalyst to stay his course.
“Why do we find ourselves in this ridiculous situation where politics determines whether or not people believe physics is real? How do we apply the word ‘belief’ to something as fundamental as the absorption of energy by greenhouse gases? It’s like saying you don’t believe in gravity,” he says. “You can’t just push a political button and say global warming exists or doesn’t exist.
“It’s physics,” he continues. “You can’t do a damn thing about the fact that CO2 is going to absorb the earth’s radiation — so will methane, so will water vapor — and we’re going to accumulate energy in the atmosphere. After that it becomes, OK, now what’s going to happen? What are the adult questions we’re going to ask?”
Such it is that more than 40 years later, White’s career still hinges on those same two problems. He’s now a renowned expert in paleoclimatology himself, a professor and a tireless advocate. His packed schedule of teaching and outreach — White is hard-pressed to share stories of his “free time” pursuits — focuses on helping the public understand humans as a major agent of climate change, and the implications of our major meddling with basic physics.
“We’ve spent 100,000 years trying to dominate the planet, and we can do it now,” he says. “We’ve not spent enough time figuring out how the planet works in order to do it rationally, in order to do that in a way that is sustainable.”
With a young granddaughter he calls “a vector of love and viruses,” and thousands of students passing in and out of his CU Boulder classrooms, White sees a reason to be hopeful, but also to assume responsibility for a warming world.
“My rhetoric in public has gotten harsher over the years,” he says. “Now I’ll say, ‘You say you love your kids, but do you show it? If you can’t deal with the issue of climate change, the issue of sustainability, then you’re handing off to your kids an uncertain world. And that’s not fair.’”
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