Dave understands and has sympathy for the brutal facts of climate change

Dave Schimel discusses the
carbon cycle at a UoM lecture.

Dave Schimel understands and has sympathy with the brutal facts of climate science.

But the chief advisor on carbon cycle science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is comfortably in the middle of the road in his approach to climate change.

The former director of National Ecological Observatory Network in America and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany stands at neither extreme of the spectrum in how people and governments should respond to climate change.

It was not allied to one or the other, rather both.

He told a University of Melbourne seminar yesterday that he is not comfortable with the suggestion of many that it matters not what the individual does for they will have no impact on broader carbon emissions.

Nor was he convinced that all the responsibility for a response to climate change should be heaped upon the world’s governments.

He believes the only response that will work is one in which active and broad participation from people is synergistic with active steps to mitigate and adapt to climate change by governments.

The U.S. scientist was at the university to talk about “Observing carbon-climate feedbacks from space”.