Richard Alley

Richard Alley is a professor at Penn State. He works in teaching, science, and public outreach. He studies ice sheets and analyzed ice cores to show climate change occurs. He is also an author The Two Mile Time Machine and hosts a PBS show “Earth, the Operator's Manual”.

After watching him in a talk at the Seattle Science Festival in 2013 (Click here to watch!) I really enjoyed how he described how science changes when new things are discovered and the world changes but sometimes “zombie” ideas come back and dominate. Those zombies could be hundreds of years old, ideas that have since become irrelevant but people “wake them up”. I thought his analogy and description of that process of people bringing up old scientific ideas and them having to work so hard to “put them back to sleep” was really clear and understandable.

Another thing I took away from this talk is how he analyzed the graph that shows how the world has warmed. He broke down his life to show how that could look as if we are in global cooling. His direct attack on those kind of interpretations is not only eye opening but makes you think about what other kinds of statistics and graphs have been cut down by the media and the government to show what they want to show.

Something that I thought was really powerful was his quote, “If we burn before we learn, we leave our grandchildren without a safety net”. He continues on to say that “if we burn while we learn” we can make the world a better place, we can give the next generations a safety net. He reiterates that the resources are there, even Lincoln saw that we have forces to be tamed (wind). We just have to take advantage now.

If I could ask him one question I think it would be:

What can I, one person, do to help Global Warming, to help the world “learn before we burn”?