Jane Lubchenco on restoring science to U.S. climate policy
13 July 2009 by Anne-Marin Nisumaa
Marine biologist Jane Lubchenco now heads one of the U.S. government's key agencies researching climate change - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Lubchenco discusses the central role her agency is playing in understanding the twin threats of global warming and ocean acidification.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, Lubchenco spoke about the science of climate change, the complexities of communicating it to policy makers, and what she referred to as global warming's "equally evil twin," ocean acidification.
e360: Several years ago, you and I spoke about the issue of ocean acidification, which has always been a sort of stepbrother of global warming, although by some accounts equally serious.
Lubchenco: Yeah, I call it the equally evil twin.
e360: You're a marine ecologist, this is really your world. Even if you don't want to believe in global warming, there's just no getting around the effects of CO2 on oceans. And yet we don't hear a lot about this. Why can't this penetrate?
