I’ve just returned from a two-week vacation in England and Wales. The picture shows one of the first places that my wife and I visited: Stokesay Castle, which, according to its official website, “is quite simply the finest and best preserved fortified medieval manor house in England.”

I took the picture using my mobile phone. You can probably tell what that late September day was like: cool and damp. By the end of the vacation, the weather over England and Wales had changed significantly—for the better. The last full day, Saturday, 1 October, was the hottest October day ever recorded in Britain. In Gravesend, a town on the Thames Estuary, the temperature reached 29.9 °C (85.8 °F).

The unusually warm weather brought to mind a news story I’d read recently on the BBC’s website. Writing for the website’s Food and Drink department, Suemedha Sood reported on evidence that climate change is affecting the world’s wine-growing regions.

Winemakers grow grape varieties that suit the local soil and climate, what the French call the terroir. Through centuries of trial and error, wine makers in Italy’s Piedmont region, for example, have discovered where best to cultivate Nebbiolo grapes for Barolo wine, one of my favorites. In making their decisions about what to plant and where, winemakers in the New World make use of both Europe’s accumulated knowledge and the research conducted by enologists and viniculturalists.

But however you match grape to terroir, the best wines come from narrowly defined regions. And when the climate changes, those regions change too. In her BBC story, Sood mentioned research that warned of a shift in the location and size of America’s premium wine-producing regions.

Climate change has already affected winemaking in Britain. When William Shakespeare wrote Henry V around 1599, Europe had already spent 50 years in a period of lower-than-normal temperatures known as the Little Ice Age. To Shakespeare, the possibility that grapes might thrive in English soil must have seemed remote. One of the characters in Henry V, the French constable, contrasts the English and the French by comparing the climate and habitual beverages of their native lands:

Dieu de batailles! where have they this mettle?
Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,
On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,
Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-rein’d jades, their barley-broth,
Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?
And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine,
Seem frosty? O, for honour of our land,
Let us not hang like roping icicles
Upon our houses’ thatch, whiles a more frosty people
Sweat drops of gallant youth in our rich fields!
Poor we may call them in their native lords.

Whether climate change will continue to benefit winemaking in Britain isn’t clear. If its only effect were higher temperatures, the answer is likely to be yes. Britain lies just within the northern limit of viniculture in Europe. Higher temperatures would extend both the growing area of wine-worthy grapes and their variety.

But climate change could also bring more rain. A climate foggy and dull, even one that’s warm not raw, is not good for fine wine.

Charles Day

Swiss Re is the world’s second largest company in the reinsurance business, the business of insuring insurance companies. In 1990, when the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out, Swiss Re decided that sea-level rise, desertification, and other risks of climate change are real. If the company failed to take them into account, it risked losing money.

Now, Swiss Re is in the vanguard of companies and organizations that are raising the alarm about climate change. Last year, it released a detailed scientific rebuttal of the arguments climate skeptics make against anthropogenic warming.

Swiss Re’s pragmatic position popped into my mind last week when I read a BBC news story about a scam. Swindlers are inviting climate scientists to attend fake conferences in London. To fool the scientists, swindlers created a conference website and pretended the meeting would take place in a real hotel, the Crowne Plaza on Buckingham Gate (shown here). To entice the scientists, the swindlers offered to cover all travel expenses—provided the scientists paid an upfront reservation fee.

The title of the BBC story was “Climate Scientists Targeted for Fraud.” When I spotted it on the BBC homepage, my first thought was that rogue climate-change deniers were creating mischief. It came as an odd relief to learn that the swindlers’ motives were purely and grubbily criminal.

It’s also oddly reassuring that for two classes of professional, insurers and criminals, climate change is a matter not of contentious politics or disputed science, but of cold cash. In this second decade of the 21st century, the cost of mitigating climate change seems to many people more real than the cost of doing nothing. But as the mean global temperature inexorably rises, doing nothing will clearly become more costly.

Charles Day

Today’s issue of Science includes the results of an online poll that the magazine conducted last December. The poll was prompted by a letter to Science from the University of Wyoming’s Ingrid Burke.

Burke’s letter urged readers to consider the environmental consequences of their travel. The poll asked readers: Would you participate in an annual meeting remotely (via video teleconferencing or other technology)? Respondents were given four answers to choose from:

1. Yes: Participating remotely would be about as valuable as attending in person.
   
2. Yes: It would lose some value, but the trade-off would be acceptable given the environmental benefits.
   
3. No: It would lose some value, and the trade-off would be unacceptable despite the environmental benefits.
   
4. No: Participating remotely would be about as valuable as not attending at all.

The results revealed rough parity between the combined yeses (52%) and the combined nos (48%). The most popular answer by far was 2. Forty-four percent of respondents would forego the full experience of attending a conference in person to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases.

Later this month I’ll fly to San Francisco to attend Photonics West. In March I’ll fly to Dallas to attend the American Physical Society’s March meeting. My mission at both conferences is to meet people and learn about what they’re working on. Attending virtually isn’t a good option. Still, not wanting to deprive polar bears of their habitat, submerge the Maldives, or turn Spain into a desert, I tried to find out how much carbon dioxide my trips would generate per capita.

The answers I got from the Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator were equivocal. My share of the CO2 emitted by a jetliner on a “long” return flight is 2.2 tons. For a “short” flight, it’s 0.4 tons. But my gasoline-sipping 18-year-old Honda Civic emits about 6 tons of CO2 per year. In my case, giving up attending a few meetings each year wouldn’t reduce my personal carbon footprint dramatically.

One of the respondents to the Science poll, John Burke Burnett, left this comment on the poll’s website:

Until we come up with holographic teleconferencing with the ability to eat virtual lunch together in smaller groups, there will always be a need for large gatherings from time to time.

There might be a hint of sarcasm in Burnett’s comment, but I prefer to recast it as a challenge to software and hardware engineers: Create a virtual conference on a Star Trek Holodeck, and I’ll stay at home.

Charles Day

Sometimes, when I’m working out at my gym, I wear my Capital Rowing Club baseball cap. The club’s logo identifies me as a rower, which, as I found out last week, isn’t a bad thing.

Lifting weights alongside me was a newcomer to Washington. He saw my hat and we chatted about rowing. I told him about the club and encouraged him to join.

I don’t habitually wear anything that identifies me as an astronomer (my former research area), a physicist (my current field of operations), or an editor (my current job). Still, when I encounter members of the general public, I’m aware that in a modest, indirect way, I represent the physics community.

For the most part, the questions I get from the general public at parties, on airplanes, or at other social encounters spring from pure curiosity. To answer “What’s new in physics?” I might reply about advances in medical physics, particle physics, or other areas that I suspect my interlocutor might not have heard of.

Occasionally, however, I’m asked about climate change by people who are skeptical of its manmade component. Not being a climatologist, I don’t attempt to refute their views. Rather, I point out that the evidence that Earth’s troposphere has warmed is undeniable. Spacecraft have reliably measured the mean global sea-level rise (about 2 mm/y). Spring, as measured by the greening of remotely sensed vegetation, is arriving a week earlier in the Northern Hemisphere than it used to. The controversy, I say, is about what will happen in the future and what we should do about it.

My conciliatory approach is aimed not just at avoiding a dispute that I doubt I could win. I lack the specialist knowledge to make a compelling case for anthropogenic climate change. Rather, I’d like to leave my climate-skeptic interlocutors with the idea that experiment is the final arbiter in climatology and other sciences.

That said, I can’t bring myself to say anything conciliatory about astrology.

Charles Day

Hal Lewis is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Upset about how the American Physical Society (APS) has dealt with climate change, he resigned from the society last week—very publicly.

In a widely circulated open letter to Curtis Callan, the APS president, Lewis referred to anthropogenic climate change as “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”

I am not a climatologist, nor is Lewis, but we’re both scientists. Even though I disagree with his characterization of the science behind climate change, I respect both his skepticism and his dissent. But what of the skepticism of nonscientists, such as Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Virginia’s attorney general Ken Cuccinelli , or my sister’s friend Kate whom I met two years ago in the Castle Hotel in my hometown of Conwy?

I don’t summarily discount the views of Jim, Ken, and Kate because they’re not scientists. But the answer to the question, Are humans warming Earth?, is a scientific one with a scientific answer. If their skepticism doesn’t spring from science, where does it come from?

Religion is not likely to be the source. Unlike evolution or Big Bang cosmology, anthropogenic climate change doesn’t challenge the dogmas of mainstream religions. Indeed, John Houghton, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been successful in persuading his fellow evangelicals that climate stewardship is a Christian priority.

My guess—and that’s what it is—is that nonscientists don’t believe humans are warming the planet for the same reason that some sedentary people won’t eat more vegetables or exercise more to avert an untimely death: Those remedies are so unpalatable and onerous that people deny they’re needed.

But Earth’s climate or a human’s arteries don’t care what we think. Doing nothing is the risk.

Charles Day

François Villon ended each stanza of a particular poem with “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”) The plaintive line has proven so resonant that its fame exceeds the poem’s.

Knowing only the famous refrain, I’d always presumed that the poem was about past winters. I’d also wondered whether Villon lived during the Medieval Warm Period, a three-century span of elevated temperatures in Europe that began in 950 AD.

In fact, the poem, which bears the title “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past”), laments past women, real and mythological. Their finite, virtuous lives had long ended but remained in Villon’s mind like a long-remembered snowfall.

Villon himself was born in Paris around 1431, the year when one of his “snows,” Joan of Arc, was executed in Rouen. The photo shows actor Ronald Colman, on the right, as Villon in the 1938 movie, If I Were King.

By 1431 a period of lower than normal temperatures had Europe in the grip of what has been called the Little Ice Age. If Villon had chosen to write literally, not metaphorically, about past winters, he would likely have lamented their lost mildness, not their lost snowfalls.

Villon’s poem—or rather my erroneous extrapolation it—had me thinking about how I and other people perceive the effects of climate change. I was born in 1962, four years after Charles Keeling began monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide from the summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. In 1958 the concentration was 315 parts per million by volume. Now, it’s 385 ppmv.

My longest string of memories tied to one place corresponds to my 20 years in Washington, DC. In that time, the summers have seemed to become hotter and the winters have seemed to become milder. Indeed, this past summer was the hottest on record, but the winter that preceded it was the snowiest.

My strongest personal perception of climate change concerns fireflies. They now start to appear in the city’s residential streets in late May, a month earlier than I seem to recall when I first arrived in DC in 1990. Maybe I should write a poem.

Poetry aside, such personal perceptions matter. Mitigating the effects of climate change will require people to use fossil fuels far more sparingly. They might be more willing to pay for those mitigations if they knew, from their personal experience, that Earth is getting worryingly warmer.

Charles Day