The Instrumental Temperature Record

Abstract

The thermometer, a device for measuring temperature, was developed in the seventeenth century but proper calibration and the development of systematic records did not occur until the nineteenth century. The World Meteorological Organization set up a system for collecting temperature measurements on a global scale early in the twentieth century. Data collection and homogenization have become ever more sophisticated. Records from single sites reflect the chaos of the weather, but when combined into regional analyses show distinct trends. North America appears to be a special case, showing a rise in the first half of the twentieth century, a plateau until about 1970, and a subsequent rise. The same patterns can be seen, but not so distinctly, in European records. It is thought that the rises reflect the increasing levels of atmospheric CO₂, and the plateau the industrial pollution of the middle of the century. Records from the tropics show the slowest upward trend, but higher latitude records show more pronounced upward trends.

Intermezzo XXVII. European Odyssey

Movement toward a European Union began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The European Economic Union of 1958, included Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and West Germany. In 1973 Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined; G 1981reece joined in, Portugal and Spain in 1986. In 1985, the Schengen (Luxembourg) Agreement paved the way for open borders without passport controls. Making frequent trips to Europe I had followed all this with great interest.

T 1989 he events ofchanged everything. Recognizing that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see wanted to see an epic event in history, I resolved to seek a faculty position there. I wrote letters to many contacts, and applied for more than one faculty position. An old friend, Jörn Thiede, made an immediate offer.

Jörn, who had been born in Berlin, had an illustrious academic career as a marine geologist. He had gotten his Ph.D. in Kiel under Eugen Seibold, the person I had contacted to jump-start the Ocean Drilling Program when its future was uncertain. Jörn and I had one thing in common, both of us had moved around a lot. Jörn had held academic appointments in Universities in Aarhus (Denmark), Bergen (Norway), Oregon (USA), and Oslo. He had returned to the University of Kiel as Professor in 1982, and in 1987had founded its new marine Geological Institute, GEOMAR. In 1988 Jörn had received a Leibnitz Prize from the German Science Foundation, an award of several million marks to foster research as he saw fit. He invited me to come to GEOMAR whenever I wanted on a flexible schedule. He also offered to fund Chris Wold’s Ph.D. studies in Kiel.

Chris and I arrived in Kiel in the summer of 1990 by a circuitous route, first attending a Symposium of the International Association of Mathematical Geology in Güstrow in the DDR. It was organized by Jan Harff. Jan had been lucky enough to be able to spend a year with the Mathematical Geology group at the University of Kansas a couple of years earlier. I had met him there and we had became good friends.

Chris and I flew into Munich June 10, and after visiting friends there, rented a car and drove to Berlin. After the Soviet’s 1948–1949 Blockade of Berlin, a few Autobahns had been opened for western travel to and from Berlin, but you could not leave the highway. There were very high guard towers along the entire route to ensure that no one did. When we left Berlin for Güstrow, which is about 125 miles to the north, we entered the territory of the DDR. The old border crossing facilities were formidable but the formalities were gone. The border the roadway spread into many lanes separated by booths for the border guards, and overhead was a forest of lights on tall poles. But the wall had fallen and now everyone was simply waved through. A year earlier we would have spent an hour or so getting through. After the meeting in Güstrow we went on to Kiel where Jörn welcomed us.

October 3, 1990 was ‘Reunification Day,’ when the border between East and West Germany disappeared. Chris and I wanted to see what it would be like, so we spent the night of October 2in a hotel in Ratzeburg, just on the west side of the border. The next morning we drove east. A few miles out of town we came to the border crossing site at Mustin. The cleared swath of land on the east side of the old border was all that was left of the complex of fences and guard posts. But there were warning signs that the minefield along the border had not yet been cleared. We drove into Schwerin, and mingled with the crowds of former East Germans, and curious visitors who had driven in from the west. With reunification, the former East Germany was now part of the European Union.

It didn’t take long for the West Germans to discover that East Germany was a massive expanse of deferred maintenance. It was a giant Potemkin Village. Off the main roads many houses were dilapidated and much in need of repair. To bring the east up to something resembling western living standards required an enormous investment from the west Germans. They did it largely by raising the tax on gasoline, and almost no one objected. They realized it would also reduce dependance on Middle Eastern oil. It took more than a decade.

I returned to the University of Colorado for the Spring semester of 1991and returned to GEOMAR the next fall as an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Scientist for the academic year 1991–1992. From then until 1998 I would spend most of the year in Europe but the spring semester in Colorado. It was rather like my Illinois–Miami arrangement of the late 1960’s early 1970’s, but came to involve several other Universities.

It turned out that my part-time move to Europe was very important in enabling me to continue my work toward understanding past ‘warm Earth’ conditions. The National Science Foundation had decided to emphasize research on the youngest part of geologic history, when the Earth was oscillating between glacial and interglacial states. There were no new funds for this, so it meant that there was much less funding available for research on older ‘warm Earth’ times. Only about 15 % of the proposals submitted to the NSF receive funding. In Germany, NSF’s equivalent, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) remained open to all topics, and new initiatives received extra funding. I am sure that Jörn expected me to turn my attention to the younger geologic past, and I always thought I would solve the Cretaceous climate problem with just a few more months work. I am still trying to understand it and all of its ramifications.

Jörn and I shared an interest in building bridges to the East. Jörn set up cooperative programs with scientific institutions in the USSR. I accepted a position as Visiting Professor in the Department of Marine Geology of the Institut für Ostseeforschung (Institute for Baltic Sea Research) for the summer of 1993. It is located in Warnemünde, a resort town on the Baltic coast just north of Rostock. On weekends I got to see a lot of the northern coastal area of the former East Germany. It had suffered very little damage during the war. The towns were small, but each had a huge church, made of a very solid stone base made of the ice-transported glacial erratics that once littered the landscape. This fortress-like Romanesque base is surmounted by soaring gothic architecture made of bricks All of these were built from the 11th to 13th centuries; large enough to house the entire local population in case of emergencies. The Vikings of northern Germany and Denmark had been (forcibly) converted to Christianity at the end the 10th century, but there were more heathens across the Baltic.

Spending the spring semesters in Boulder, and with GEOMAR as my European base, I spent some fall semesters at other Universities: 1983 at the University of Utrecht’s Institute of Earth Sciences, on its new campus at the Uithof, just outside city. It was a wonderful time, but I think I learned more from them than they did from me. It was the year when the geologists of the Dutch Universities were discussing banding together to pool resources. This innovative cooperative venture has become known as The Netherlands School of Sedimentary Geology (NSG) and I was put on its Advisory Board. The NSG revolutionized graduate study in this field. Instead of the usual semester-long courses, the NSG has intensive all-day-long short-courses lasting a few days to a week. In between the short courses the graduate students can pursue their research without interruption. It works very well, and over the years I have been privileged to teach a number of the short courses. The fall of 1995I was Visiting Professor in the magnificent new building of the Institut für Paläontologie, at the University of Vienna in Austria.

In the fall of 1996was Visiting Professor at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University, in Greifswald in the northwest corner of the new Germany, just west of the border with Poland. It was founded by Papal Decree in 1456. It is where my ‘geologic rates’ hero Sergei von Bubnoff taught. It was one of the most exciting groups of students I ever had. In geology much depends on your experience in the field. Seeing and sampling the rocks and looking at the geology of large areas is far more instructive than reading descriptions in the literature. Many of the students had started their studies before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their field excursions in the days of the DDR had been to places in the east as far away as Central Asia.

In addition to living in Kiel, Utrecht, Warnemünde, Vienna, and Greifswald, I was able to develop close cooperation with colleagues in Slovakia, Hungary, Russia, Switzerland, France, Italy, Great Britain, and finally China. There were annual meetings of European societies in Strasbourg and Nice, France, and I took my vacations in the surrounding countryside.

One thing that surprised me in Europe was the way the science funding system worked. In Germany, the major funding organization is the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’ (German Science Foundation). It belongs to the Universities and is funded through a block grant by the government. The means of achieving progress in science is left to the scientists to sort out. In the US, funding is inadequate to support many of the proposals submitted. The US National Science Foundation is a government agency. At first largely independent, it has become increasingly guided by political considerations to accommodate the uninformed lawyers who populate our congress. Its funding is no longer adequate to have a reasonable success rate for proposals, so scientists spend much of their time writing proposals that will be rejected. The informality of dealing with the DFG was a wonderful change from the US rat race.

Similarly, dealings with the multinational European Science Foundation were simple and straightforward. I expected trouble when it came to dealing with the European Funding Agency in Brussels, but that too proved to be much easier than I had imagined. There was a camaraderie between those handling funding and the scientists that was a real inspiration.

As I mentioned earlier, I though that when I left Washington my role in Scienctific Ocean Drilling was over. But in 1984I was appointed to the JOIDESAdvisory Panel on Sediment and Ocean History, serving until 1987. Then in 1982I was appointed to JOIDES’ Advisory Panel on Sedimentary Geochemistry and Physical Processes, serving as Chairman from 1994–1997. In 1996I was asked to Chair a Planning Group on Antarctic Ocean Drilling. My response was “I know nothing about the Antarctic.” The reply “That is why we want you to Chair this Committee. You don’t have any preconceived notions.” Over the next few years I learned a lot about the Antarctic, recognized it had a far more interesting history than the general science community thought, and we were able to work out a plan for adding to knowledge of its history.

In 1998I was being considered for Department Chair at the University of Colorado. But Jörn Thiede and Helmut Beiersdorf of the German Geological Survey had other plans for me. Helmut was the German representative on the JOIDES Executive Committee, and they wanted me to accept a full-time appoointment in GEOMAR and to serve as the German Representative on the JOIDES Scientific Committee (the ODP equivalent of the older JOIDES Planning Committee). The next year, 1999, the Chairmanships of the Executive and Science Committeees woould rotate to Germany, and it would be a critical time because the ODP was scheduled to end in 2004. Because lead times of 5 years are needed for such complex international projects, planing for a future program of scientific drilling in the ocean wold need to start in 1999.

So, in 1998I retired from the University of Colorado, and moved full time to GEOMAR. Jörn Thiede had just accepted the role of Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven. The Wegener Institute is devoted to polar research, one of Jörn’s first loves. I took over his Professorship in Kiel and finally retired in 2002.

I was very surprised to learn that no planning for the long term future had been started at JOI in Washington. Then in 2000we learned that someone in the US Government had been making plans. Japan had approached the US with a proposal for a joint Japanese–US Ocean Drilling Program using a huge new vessel the Japanese would construct. The other foreign partners would not be involved. Helmut Beiersdorf and I had just heard the news before attending a meeting of the European Consortium for Ocean Drilling to be held in Strasbourg, France. We were sitting in the railway car when we both had the same idea. Europe must go it alone on its own on a new program. When we arrived in Strasbourg we met the French representatives. Before dinner was over we had two European countries on board.

The next few of years involved many complex negotiations. Japan built its drilling vessel, equipped with a riser for return circulation of the drilling fluid, the Chikyū. The United States refurbished the JOIDES Resolution, but budget cuts have restricted its operations to only part of the year. The European Consortium for Ocean Drilling (ECOD) became the European Consortium for Research Ocean Drilling (ECORD), and uses ships of opportunity to carry out its program. In thus was it was able to achieve one of out long term goals, drilling in the Arctic Ocean. We now have an idea of the long term (50+ million year) history of the Arctic which is invaluable in understanding what is happening today. These three scientific drilling programs are loosely affiliated as the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).

For over 40 years I have been trying to understand how the climate system works on a warm Earth. I thought it was just a matter of a few small differences. But over the years it has become evident that it is not just a minor modification of the present system. Many things are wholly different. And out present perturbation has no analog in the past.

I can only express my gratitude to the many colleagues in these different institutions who have contributed to putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Since 2003I have made my home in Colorado, but return to Europe several times a year to teach short courses and attend scientific meetings.

Finally, I am grateful for the recent years I was able to spend in Europe. The German towns and cities in the east had been restored to much of their former beauty. Prague is no longer grey, but a vibrant colorful city. I had the opportunity to work with colleagues in Slovakia and Hungary, and had seen the great transformations there. The Euro had been introduced as a common currency. The borders within the European Union are now only on the maps; no border crossing formalities anymore. High-speed trains on all-new rail lines cut travel times sharply. Great new bridges now connect the Danish Islands and Denmark with Sweden.

The great cultural amalgamation of Europe that many anticipated has not occurred. For a while it was thought that Europe might become homogenized, with a single language and a uniform culture. The opposite has happened. Formerly suppressed languages and dialects are blossoming. One hears Catalan in northern Spain, Provençal in southeastern France, Slovak instead of Czech in Slovakia after the break with the Czech Republic, Ladin in South Tyrol, Romanic in Switzerland, along with a wealth of local dialects.

But when I returned to the US I found something very different. It seems as though time stopped in the 1980s. Deferred maintenance has become the rule. But more significantly, many of the small locally-owned stores of the town centers have been replaced by suburban shopping malls with chain stores and franchises. What Texas Governor Rick Perry calls ‘Vulture Capitalism’ has ruled since the turn of the century. The idea of long term planning seems to have been forgotten.

I have recently had the opportunity to work with Chinese colleagues and to teach short courses in China. When you return after being away for 2 years the country seems completely different. In Beijing many buildings are less than 20 years old. The broad streets that 15 years ago were filled with bicyclers and now filled with cars, mostly Buicks. If you want to see modern skyscraper architecture, go to Shanghai. And for breathtakingly spectacular bridges visit those along the Yangtze and others crossing gorges in China. All built in the last decade or so. You can use Google Earth for a tour.

The world is changing very rapidly. But climate change hangs over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. We’ll just have to see what the future brings.

As a final word, if you have read these Intermezzi you will have discovered that the academic life is not exactly the quiet cloistered life it is reputed to be. Serendipity makes for chance meetings opens opportunities if one chooses to take advantage of them. And there is nothing more fun than to have your favorite hobby be your profession.