The Tide Turner

Few scientists know as much about how global warming is changing the world as Robert Corell. As chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Corell oversaw a five-year study by 300 scientists from fifteen countries who studied the effects of climate change in the Arctic. The conclusion: Greenhouse gases are causing the planet to heat up faster than anyone realizes. "We're talking about the sea level rising at a rate of about a meter every hundred years or so," says Corell -- enough water to swallow a chunk of Florida and more than forty percent of Bangladesh. Even if all climate-warming pollution ceased today, he adds, "the oceans would continue to warm, and the glaciers would continue to melt -- and those processes will take 1,500 years to stabilize."

The detailed findings -- laid out in a peer-reviewed, 1,200-page report published on October 21st -- provide the most advanced evidence yet of global warming's stark reality. But a year before the study was finished, the Bush administration stalled its progress, shutting down talks designed to come up with specific policy recommendations. "The United States took umbrage to the process, even though they had voted to create it," says Corell, a senior fellow with the American Meteorological Society. "They said the science was not complete." After a series of tense meetings in Greenland, Iceland and Denmark, the administration finally yielded -- endorsing the recommendations at 3 a.m. on the very last day of negotiations.

Corell, 70, became interested in climate change while studying oceanography. His plain-spoken authority has been instrumental in settling the debate over global warming. "He talks about climate change in terms that regular people can understand," says Sen. John McCain. "A lot of people who used to be skeptical about global warming have been persuaded by the overwhelming scientific evidence presented by studies like the ACIA."

Corell remains optimistic that those who doubt the reality of global warming -- those he calls "the Bush recalcitrants" -- will come around as industry finds ways to profit from cleaner forms of energy. "By 2100, the power plants of today are going to look like the steel mills did in Pittsburgh in 1975," he says. "They will be derelict, because they're no longer useful." Corell has turned his attention to hydrogen and other forms of renewable energy, looking for a way to stem the coming tide. "My grandchildren are pretty damned important to me," he says. "I can't sit here saying, 'Take action,' when I didn't take part in the action time. I don't want to leave a legacy that I didn't do my damnedest to try to slow this down as fast as we could."

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