Technology Day 2002—"When Worlds Collide: Science, Politics and Power in the 21st Century"

HECHT: That was just a test, and you all failed. One of my faculty colleagues reminds me that when he walks into a class, he can tell by the reaction to the words "good morning" whether he's teaching undergraduates, graduate students, or industrial people.

If he walks into the class, and there's no response except a little murmuring, he's in an undergraduate class because no one is awake yet. If he teaches an industrial class when he says "good morning," everyone, in proper corporate fashion, says "good morning" back. If he walks into a graduate class, and he says "good morning," everyone writes it down.

Welcome back to Saturday Classes. For the two or three of you in the audience who don't know me, I'm Bill Hecht. I'm your senior employee. Member of the class of '61, proud parent of a graduate alumna from '95. For the last 22 years, I've run your Alumni Association with the help of about 7,000 or 8,000 quiet, shy, retiring MIT volunteers. Those of you who are married to MIT alumni, cards of sympathy will be accepted.

My only duty in the morning is to get you here and to spend a minute or two while people mill around and get seated in order to-- ah, the freshman are getting younger and younger. And also to introduce one of my favorite people on this campus, an honorary member of the Alumni Association, Chuck Vest.

Now MIT does not give honorary degrees. But a number of years ago, many years ago, the Alumni Association was allowed to grant the privilege of honorary membership in the association to a handful of distinguished people. Of course, one of the things that's clear about MIT is the only way you get a degree-- since there are no honorary degrees-- you have to work like the very [? ned ?] to get one.

And I can remember when Chuck said goodbye to his freshman class, the students who entered when he first became president. And if I recall the remarks correctly, he said something to the effect of, well, you came here when I came here, and you're now graduating and leaving, and I still have to stay, so I guess I haven't made it yet. But we surprised him that year by making him an honorary member. And let me introduce Chuck Vest, President of MIT, honorary member of the association.

[APPLAUSE]

VEST: Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everybody. You may not know it, but I'm facing the curse of people who walk in to give speeches from podiums with paper. There's a PC sitting here, and there's no place to put your paper. So that's okay, because I sat down at breakfast and read what was on the paper, and decided it wasn't what I wanted to say anyway. So I'm going to freeform it a little bit.

I think this morning should be a really extraordinarily exciting and interesting discussion. The topic sounds a bit formidable-- science, politics, and power. But this is a particularly timely topic in my view because the way we think about those matters and indeed, even who the players are, so to speak, seem to me, have changed enormously over the last decade or so.

Larry Summers at Harvard and before him, Neil Rudenstein and I, have had a habit of getting together two or three times each term for lunch or breakfast, bouncing back and forth between MIT and Harvard. And every time I go over to Harvard, in the room we normally use in the Faculty Club, there's a lot of pictures of Harvard people.

And every time I walk in, and I look at this one little picture of President Conant, standing in his chemistry laboratory with a beaker and a test tube, mixing these two liquids together and standing in a white coat. And every time I look at it, I wonder to myself, what are the forces of history that took a person from mixing two chemicals together in that beaker to the role that he played together with the great Vannevar Bush from MIT and others in shaping the entire world of science and technology for the military during World War II?

This year, by the way, was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which I'm proud to say, today, remains the absolutely unquestioned best Defense Department laboratory in the nation and one that we still are very proud to operate. And we had an extraordinary dinner at the Gray House, the president's home here at MIT, with a lot of leaders of Lincoln Lab over the years and just about all of the living members of their advisory boards from year to year.

It was truly an astounding evening just to sit there and realize the influence that these people had had, the extraordinary commitment that they had exhibited and things that they had accomplished to keep our nation secure in the ways that we typically think about it-- radar, and sensing systems, and anti-ballistic missile technologies, and so forth and so on.

But I have to tell you, if you go out to Lincoln today, you're just as likely to find people working on biology, things that were absolutely unthought of at the time that the laboratory began or even throughout much of its history. So as we face these new kinds of challenges from terrorism, and biological warfare, and so forth, the kinds of science that are involved, the kinds of power that are involved, and perhaps to some extent, the kind of politics that are involved, are changing, in my view, very dramatically.

For a long period of time, we had a Research in Higher Education establishment in science and engineering in the United States, the envy of the entire world. And it really stood on two pillars. One was military security, which primarily funded the physical sciences and engineering. And the other was health, which of course, funded the basic research and continues to in the life sciences.

Today, those pillars are neither as strong as they once were, nor are they the only things that feed into this. The state of the economy has become a very important driver of why people in the federal government and elsewhere are willing to support advanced education, and research, and science, and technology. And we no longer can think about anything just in terms of a simple model of the federal government comes and supports things, and graduates go out to industry.

Today, we depend for the financing of MIT, for example, in almost equal measure on the federal government, on corporations who sponsor work here, on our interactions with the entrepreneurial community, and with plain philanthropy. If you look across the United States today, much of the powerful biology and life science work is, in fact, funded by wealthy individuals or foundations. So who the players are, what their roles are, I believe, are very much in flux.

And we no longer just think about military problems. We think about the environment. How is it going to be possible to keep a healthy environment for the world and simultaneously allow people to climb up the ladder of development, and strengthening of their economy, and quality of life?

We'll hear today about one of the really interesting challenges we all face, which is the application of modern biotechnology to the food we grow and eat. What's the meaning of that? What's the role of corporations as well as governments, and laws, and so forth in all of this?

Who is responsible for creating the human capital? MIT has played, in recent years, a somewhat catalytic role in helping ourselves and our colleagues to rethink a little bit. Why is it that we don't have the kinds of numbers of women in our faculties and underrepresented minorities in our faculty that we really ought to have if we're going to use the human capital of the nation well?

And of course, nothing has sparked some weird combination of politics, and emotion, and science, and just about everything else, as the topic Ron Prinn will talk about-- global change and global warming. What do we really know? Is humankind responsible for it? Is it a natural phenomenon? Are things getting better or worse? And these things have gotten mixed up-- stem cell discussions. All these things have posed for us enormously interesting and enormously important problems of this balance of science, politics, and power.

And so we hope this morning will be a very valuable opportunity for all of us to hear from four extremely knowledgeable people in four different areas which are important to these various debates and discussions. We're very pleased to have them with us. Our four outstanding speakers, we will hear from one after the other, and then there will be some open Q&A with the audience a little bit later.

We will first hear from Ron Prinn. He will be followed by Shirley Malcolm. We will then take a brief break. I got an email, said we're taking a 15 minute break at that point. I don't know if there is such a thing as a 15 minute break with 1,200 people, but we're going to try. And following that break, John Deutch and Dan Charles will speak with us. Following those remarks, as I say, we'll take some time for Q&A and dialogue back and forth among the panelists and with the audience.

At that time, and please listen, we will ask you to write your questions down on cards, which will be distributed throughout the auditorium. And we'll ask you to do that when you return from the break in the middle of the morning. There will be staff passing out program evaluation forms as well, which can be turned in to staff members after the program or dropped off in the lobby here at Kresge.

Now let me introduce our first two speakers. I will just do this all at once, and then they will simply follow each other to the stage. My colleague Ron Prinn is TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at MIT and is the head of our Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Ron's research focuses on chemistry, dynamics, and physics, the atmospheres of the Earth and of other planets.

He is particularly interested in the science and policy of climate change. He works closely with social scientists on these issues and serves as director of our Center for Global Change Science. This morning, Ron will be talking about how science and policy have interacted in this, as I said earlier, often acrimonious and complicated debate about global warming and more generally, global change. Issues such as climate change underscore the importance of scientific literacy.

Our second speaker this morning is terrifically well positioned to offer us thoughts on what and how our young people should be learning about science. Shirley Malcolm is the director of Education and Human Resources Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

An ecologist by training, at the AAAS, she oversees a broad range of programs aimed at advancing education and science, mathematics and technology, and at expanding the talent pool available for these fields. Dr. Malcolm was played an especially important role in advancing science education for groups who have traditionally been underrepresented in science-based careers.

I'm also particularly pleased to tell you two things. One, she's a really good friend of mine. She's a wonderful person. But even more important, her daughter Lindsey received her bachelor's degree in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences from MIT just this last year. Let me begin by asking Professor Ron Prinn to come to the stage. Ron.

[APPLAUSE]

PRINN: Yeah, I'm going to use this. Ah. Good. Well, good morning to you all. I'm delighted to see a significant crowd here. Chuck was rather kind to me in the introduction. My job is merely to warm you up to the subsequent speakers with this topic. They had to find something.

I'm going to address the issue of global warming. And I'll make the point that the science is complex. There's a lot of uncertainty, and along with that uncertainty, there's a lot of contentiousness in the policy arena. And there are some sound reasons for contention, and there are some, of course, that are not so sound.

So the first point I want to make so that you have no doubt about my position on this is that climate has changed significantly in the past, and it has definitely changed in recent decades. And I'll just show you something briefly here, a few graphs that will provide some of the evidence for this.

I don't think this is projecting as well as it should, but this is a very interesting record of climate change going back over time. And over here, we have close to 450,000 years ago. And here is the present time.

There are three curves that you see here. The middle curve is a reconstruction of temperature from the Vostok ice core in Antarctica. And then because you can also analyze the gases trapped in the ice, you can analyze what the composition of the air was back over time.

And so the upper curve here is carbon dioxide trapped in the ice structure. And the lower curve is methane. Carbon dioxide and methane are well-known greenhouse gases. They ought to contribute to warming the Earth when they have high levels and to cooling the Earth when they have low levels.

I think you can see, even without looking at the details here, that there is a remarkable correlation between the concentrations of these greenhouse gases and the temperature. That doesn't prove cause and effect, but it certainly shows that there's at least a positive feedback between levels of greenhouse gases and the response of the system in terms of temperature.

Some of these temperature changes, to just give you a calibration, from the depths of the ice age up to the present time, are well over 10 degrees centigrade. And so there have been very, very great climate changes in the past, and most of you are familiar with them as the ice ages. We are presently not quite as warm as we were 130,000 years ago in the polar regions. That period known as the Eemian is this big peak over here, and it's one of the so-called warm interglacials.

So there's very good evidence that climate has changed in the deep past. If I now focus a little bit more onto the current time, let's look at the past 140 years. And this record here, unlike the one I was just showing you, is derived from actual thermometer measurements around the world with a lot of corrections. So this is from ships and from surface observing stations.

And you see, going back to the year 1860, where the curve begins, through to the present time, the year 2001 over here, that temperatures remain sort of bouncing around. Then they increase substantially as we went into the 1900s. Then from 1940 to about 1965, temperatures were lowered a little bit. But since then, the temperatures have been increasing very substantially. So there's pretty good agreement among scientists that this is, in general, what has occurred over the past 140 years.

If you look back 1,000 years in time-- I won't go through the details of how you can reconstruct temperature, but you can use tree rings, corals, as well as ice cores to do this-- and you get this pattern. So this is the year 1000 here. Apparently, if you believe this reconstruction, there was a steady cooling. This was known here as the medieval warm period, a steady cooling to the so-called Little Ice Age.

But certainly, in the time beginning where we began to burn fossil fuels in large amounts, we see a very significant warming period. And we are up here now. The overall temperature change over the last 140 years has been of the order of 0.8 degrees centigrade. And so it has been substantial. So the world is warming.

Although I won't have time to discuss the issue of attribution, who's to blame here, recent studies, particularly in the last three or four years, make it pretty clear that human influence on climate is substantial. And the debate has switched among scientists not from whether humans are influencing climate or not, but rather how much are they influencing climate?

I won't go into that debate because I want to focus more on the future. But I give this as a prelude to impress upon you the fact that climate has changed in the past, it is changing now, and we think, certainly, for the last 100 years at least, that a lot of this change is driven by human influences.

So the science-- and I'll go over some of the issues in the science-- the science is very complex. There's no doubt that the understanding is incomplete, and we have a lot more work to do as scientists. But the question I want to ask is, what is involved in determining future climate? Can I do that just simply as a natural scientist?

I think all of you would realize immediately that if there's human influence on the climate system, the answer to my question is no. We must include knowledge of how the world will develop going into the future. How will we obtain our energy, resources that are needed? And how will we obtain the food we eat? Because both of these human activities, for example, are sources of greenhouse gases.

If we were to develop a capability to determine future climate within some probability range, can we use that to evaluate future policy effectiveness? Which is another very important issue that has to be addressed. Because, as I'll talk about, enacting policies is not a fiscally neutral thing to do. It will probably cost money. And if it's going to cost money, let's work out the way where we'll do what we need to do at the least cost.

So what would I need if I wanted to determine future climate? Obviously, I'd need to bring together knowledge of economics and technology along with natural sciences to achieve this. And for the last 11 years at MIT, we have been constructing a model that we call the MIT Integrated Global System Model.

To do this, we have formed a coalition of not just the natural scientists that are involved in understanding the climate machine, but also economists, and political scientists, and people interested in energy technology. Putting all those things together and saying, could we, in fact, construct a model that would help us think about the climate issue in a more objective way than just simply debating it with words?

So the fundamental elements of the model-- this is really a cartoon. The model runs on a very large cluster, multiple processor cluster. But one of the modules is one that looks at human activity. It is basically an economics model that does all of the usual things, resolving energy activity, agricultural activity, et cetera, within individual countries and groupings of countries.

But unusual among economic models, it projects the emissions of all of the climate-relevant gases. And there is a large list of them here. I will just name a few of them here. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. I've got gases here, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, which you think of as air pollutants, but they influence the climate machine.

Volatile organic carbons coming, a lot of them, from the evaporation of gasoline. Sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid coming from the burning of coal, largely. Carbon monoxide. The chlorofluorocarbons that are involved in ozone depletion are very strong greenhouse gases. Hydrofluorocarbons that, some of them, for example, used as refrigerants to replace the chlorofluorocarbons.

Perfluorocarbons, which a good example is carbon tetrafluoride produced in the aluminum industry and sulfur hexafluoride that is used as an ideal insulator in transformers and in many other applications in the distribution of electric power around the world. They're all powerful greenhouse gases or influence the chemistry of greenhouse gases.

The most time-demanding piece of the big computer model is a coupled model of atmospheric chemistry and climate processes that couples the ocean, the atmosphere, and land processes. It handles things like the big sink for carbon. One of the big sinks for carbon dioxide is the absorption of CO2 in the ocean waters and the sinking of that water to depth.

That is calculated in this model. And then that model is coupled to and drives a model down here at the bottom of ecosystems around the world. And that ecosystem model, combined with climate, drives a model of the natural emissions of gases.

I showed you data from the ice cores of the changes of methane that occurred naturally back over the past 450,000 years. Those are natural processes which you must simulate in a model of this type. Bottom line is it's a very complex model, and every one of these models has significant uncertainties associated with them.

That didn't stop us from putting it together. The good thing about being at a university and particularly being at MIT is that first, you've got to think you're pretty smart in doing something like that, and you've also got to be somewhat arrogant. And we have that mix on our team. I'm the arrogance. Everyone else is the smart part of the team.

Let me just show you some projections from this modeling effort. And I'm going to be referring to the Kyoto Protocol. I think that some of you have heard about this protocol and the fact that the United States is not signing it, but many other countries are signing it right now. More on that later.

The red line that you see up here, I'm showing polar warming in the uppermost graph, and that refers to the left axis. If we don't do any policy, the pole temperature would rise to about 4 and 1/2 degrees centigrade in this projection. If we do something with the Kyoto Protocol, and only the countries involved in that do something, you lower the temperatures of the polar regions, the warming from 1990 to 2100, only to a little bit below 4 degrees centigrade.

So you don't achieve a great deal. To achieve a great deal, you've got to go to these green lines here. They are not, obviously, very visible to you in the audience. But they then achieve a level of warming which now would seem to be comfortable. But to do that, you need an ambitious all-countries policy to achieve it.

The global warming is down in the lower set of curves here, and the same story is true here. The important thing is that the Kyoto Protocol by itself and extended into the future simply involving those rich countries does not achieve a stabilizing of the climate system, whereas a much more ambitious policy does achieve this.

Now I've put these graphs up. You can't see all of the details as though you should believe these individual forecasts. In fact, you shouldn't, because a big issue, of course, in the science itself is the great amount of uncertainty in all of these models.

Maybe some of you are economists in the audience, and you know how good economists are at predicting even maybe a month into the future. That was a good thing in forming this alliance between economic modelers and climate modelers, is us climate modelers finally met some people that were even more uncertain in their forecasts, I think, than we were in ours. Jake Jacoby will talk later in the program in the afternoon, and he will give you the opposite opinion. He's the co-director with me of this modeling effort.

What we've done recently is something that no other complex model system like this has achieved, and that is we've run 250 forecasts of this model to get a sense of uncertainty. Those 250 runs contain a lot of different assumptions within the economics, the climate model, and the ecosystem model. And for those of you who think about statistics, we used what's called Latin hypercube sampling, which is a Monte Carlo-based system, to achieve this.

And I'm going to show you some results of temperature and sea level changes. And this time, it's not going to be a single forecast, of course. It's going to be a probability distribution of the amount of warming between 1990 and 2100, and the amount of sea level rise. And then I'll also show you some probability distributions for another 250 forecasts that assume that the policy that I showed, that all-countries ambitious policy, is put forward, but adding to the fact there are all the uncertainties in projecting into the future.

So this will help us look at the climate issue in a somewhat different way. And that is what I'm going to try to do with a policy is lower the probability of extreme happenings, because that's what we're really worried about.

So here is the global mean surface temperature change from 1990 through to the year 2100. And the scale here is 0 degrees centigrade up to 7 degrees centigrade over on the right-hand side. The red curve is a probability distribution if we decided to ignore this problem through the next 100 years and just merrily went on our way. The median temperature rise, you see here, is around 2 degrees centigrade.

To give you a sense, there's a probability, according to this, if we enacted no policies, there's a probability of about 1 in 20 that we will get global warming exceeding, equaling or exceeding 4 and 1/2 degrees centigrade or 8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now I'll point out in a couple more view graphs that the polar regions warm up a lot more than the Equatorial regions. So you'll see that this 4 and 1/2 degrees centigrade corresponds to a polar warming of about 10 degrees centigrade.

If this is the right forecast, chance in 20 is what we're saying, then we're in trouble. The tundra systems, the permafrost, the stability of the deep ocean circulation which is so important for the carbon and heat sink in the ocean, these systems along with the great glaciers that sit in Greenland and Antarctica, you have to be seriously worried about their stability. So this is worrisome, at least in my mind, a chance in 20 that the only planet we have to live on may warm more than 4 and 1/2 degrees centigrade or more.

Now the policy I talked about which was an ambitious one, you see, lowers the median, well, a little bit, down to about 1 degree centigrade. But the big thing that it does is it lowers the probability of the extremes that I was just talking about. Almost negligible probability of getting more than 4 and 1/2 degrees centigrade or more. So we think a better way to talk about the climate issue is to say we want to enact policies, we understand it's uncertain. So let's lower the probability of extreme events.

Let's look at sea level rise, very quickly, that accompanies these two. Here's the no policy. The sea level rise around 40 centimeters or so median. But you see significant probability for 70, 80 centimeters over here. Again, that's a lot of sea level rise, and a lot of low-lying areas around the world would be in jeopardy. Again, the policy, by enacting it, lowers the probability of these extremes in sea level rise.

Because the science is uncertain, of course, we can't say anything more than lowering odds. But again, I impress upon you the usefulness of doing that. Here's the median no policy and policy curves. And this emphasizes the point I made earlier that the polar regions in all climate models, credible ones, warm up a lot faster than the Equatorial regions. So certainly, the most vulnerable systems are likely to be those in the polar regions.

And regrettably, as you see in the median forecast, even in the median forecast, 4 and 1/2 degrees centigrade or so warming in the polar regions is the median in these projections. Bottom line, we all ought to be concerned about this problem. So if we're concerned about it, and we want to enact policies, what will it cost to lower greenhouse gas emissions?

The Kyoto Protocol is, I think, well known to many of you. Very quickly, it involves the rich countries of the world. Globally, we want to lower the greenhouse gas emissions by these rich countries, known as the Annex B, to be 5% below 1990 levels by the year 2010, with that range around it.

There are different national targets. The US is supposed to lower by 7%. The European Union, 8%. But Australia can expand by 8%. I won't tell you the politics that went into Australia doing that. I'm not an Australian, by the way. Emissions trading, that enables you to trade with other nations, the reductions, so that you can meet your target at lower cost.

Hot air is the Russians. The Russians are part of the Annex B. And curiously, their current levels of greenhouse gas emissions are lower than their 1990 levels because their economy is in deep trouble. And so they can sell the so-called hot air to other countries because they're already below their target.

You're allowed to have carbon sinks included with limitations, that means forests. If you can sequester carbon in various ways, then you can use that. You can work with other countries, non-Annex B countries, developing countries, and get some credit for activities that you do in those countries to lower emissions.

And it involves the use of global warming potentials because you've got to relate the greenhouse gases to one another and say, well, does 1 ton of carbon dioxide reduction equal 1 ton of methane? No. It's 20 tons of carbon dioxide equals 1 ton of methane, because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas. Won't go into the details of that.

What are the costs of the Kyoto Protocol? You're not going to be able to resolve all of this, but anything that's hanging downwards is a loss of consumption. And the scale here is 0 down to 4% here in the upper set of curves. And anything above the 0 here is a gain in consumption. And you can think of this as either a positive or negative aspect of costs for the various countries.

The set of curves at the top is rather interesting. It is the non-Annex B countries. And you see that some of them, for example, this set of curves here, that they, in fact, lose substantially. And the ones that lose substantially are the energy exporting developing countries, particularly those in the Gulf Region. Why?

Simply put, the value of oil goes down because of the policy, because of the restrictions, and the value of their imports, particularly of energy intensive goods, goes up. And so they lose on both fronts. And so some of the biggest cost will be, in fact, borne by non-Annex B countries, the big oil and gas exporting countries.

Down here are the Annex B countries. You can't see all of the curves. But for the United States, it's going to be of the order of maybe 1/2% to 1% type of effect on total consumption, which you can think of as some measure of the costs. There are two sets of bars that you see here. One set of bars, that's the purple ones, generally shows lesser costs than the one that is beside it. That just is determined by whether you trade emissions among countries.

Put it in a simple way, a country like Japan that already has very great energy efficiency, if it can get credit for building power plants in China that are highly efficient, and it's cheaper for Japan to invest in that way than in their own utility system, then it saves them money, and they achieve their target.

That's known as trading. It benefits almost all of the countries. It particularly benefits Russia, because I mentioned before, it has this hot air to trade. And you see that they are doing wonderfully. This big bar here is Russia, trading with the rest of the world.

This all assumes that everyone signs the Kyoto Protocol. Now we know that that's not happening. We know that the White House, last year, put forward what I've called here the Bush Protocol. Sorry, just at the beginning of this year, the Bush Protocol. The idea here was to look at intensity, which is tons of greenhouse gases per million dollars of GDP. It was voluntary. It suggested more research funding. I certainly love that suggestion.

There are a lot of domestic initiatives, tax incentives, transportation efficiency, sequestration, that's another name for bearing carbon in one place or another, international initiatives, assist developing countries, bilateral agreements. And most recently, just in the last week, adaptation to inevitable climate change. This got a lot of discussion in the news over the past week. And perhaps in discussion time, some questions will come up about that.

What is the bottom line in the Bush Protocol? The US is already 12% above its 1990 emissions right now around the present time. And if the US economy grows the same in the next 10 years it did in the past 10 years, then the bottom line is that this protocol will lead to an additional 8% increase in greenhouse gas emissions. So we'll be 20% above 1990 levels. Our target was minus 7%. So we're 27% below Kyoto targets. So this is nowhere anything like the Kyoto Protocol for the United States.

So where do we go from here? Will we have a continued impasse? Will the Kyoto and the Bush proposals be harmonized some way? Will the Kyoto Protocol be softened? Will the Bush Protocol be hardened? It could be hardened by making its goal of lowering emissions intensity by 18% to be significantly more than 18%. We don't have an answer to that question.

I've emphasized the fact that this is a long-term global problem. And we're going to be looking at sequential decisions under uncertainty. We're not going to decide now what to do, and then follow blindly that policy going into the future. So that says, let's move forward and make those first steps now even if they're relatively modest. As you all know, we have yet to make those relatively modest first steps.

We should be putting all of the technology options on the table, considering every one of them-- nuclear, renewables, the use of coal but extracting the hydrogen out of it only and sequestering the carbon. Many, many possibilities exist. They all have got to be put on the table to help us here.

We're going to have to prepare for inevitable climate change. I didn't mention the fact that because the ocean takes up heat, it's delaying the ultimate warming. And we're getting fooled as to the size of the ultimate warming for a given level of greenhouse gases because the ocean is slowing down the warming. But once the ocean warms up, we will see a much higher temperature change than the ones in the graphs that I showed you. So adaptation is going to have to be part of our thinking.

And finally, I say, will nature help? It would be nice if nature gave us some mild surprises right now. Think of the ozone depletion problem where the Antarctic ozone hole conveniently appeared in 1984, was discovered, and it really was an impetus to drive us towards policy because the Antarctic ozone hole wasn't even in the models. The problem was worse than the models were showing. Of course, we don't want nature to punish us with having too big a surprise.

So my final slide suggests one way in which if nature is kind to us, it could do something. This is a picture of big icebergs breaking off the Ross and Ronne ice shelves in Antarctica. This is just one of those events. This is 11 September, 2000, 4 November, 2001, and 12 November, 2001. So six days later, you see, here it is. Here's a big iceberg breaking off.

It's the size of the island of Dominica. What we need is something maybe 10 times the size of the island of Dominica maybe to get people's attention, and to say maybe things are going on that we should be driven a lot quicker and with a lot more careful thought into having a global policy to address this issue. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

MALCOLM: Good morning.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

MALCOLM: Am I on?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

MALCOLM: I'm on. Okay. I'm pleased to be here for Technology Day. This is my first Technology Day. And maybe I should begin by answering the question, at least the first part of this question, that way, you won't have to wait for the punchline.

Perhaps Ronald Prinn answered the question, what does the next generation-- what do they really need to know? One of the answers is they're going to have to know how to deal with complexity and uncertainty, and accelerating advance of knowledge. And I guess that's where we come in. And then how, in fact, can we get them there?

What young people have to know has really changed over time. It used to be the case that people were considered literate if they could write their name and read from the Bible. My grandmother, who was born in 1886, finished the 8th grade, and she was considered literate. She was a very wise woman. She had a lot of practical knowledge, large part of knowledge of nature. And she could cipher. She was very good at ciphering, so she had an understanding about how to manipulate numbers and ideas.

We have changed our mind from time to time about who needs what kind of education. There were very few people who were thought of as needing academic knowledge or book knowledge, but a lot more people who were thought of as needing technical or vocational knowledge, or craft knowledge.

It is interesting that we have changed our minds over time about how much of all of this we actually need. I took algebra when I was in the 10th grade in high school. On the other hand, my kids took algebra when they were in the 7th grade. Now I don't think they were that much smarter than I was. Or maybe they were-- we do have at MIT grad among them. But I think the major issue is that we have changed our mind over time about how much young people have to know and what they're going to be able to do.

We've also changed our mind about who does what. When I was in elementary school, I took sewing and boys took shop. When my children were in middle school around the same grades, boys and girls took sewing and shop.

Now let me just begin by saying that I am part of the post-Sputnik baby boom generation. I am one of the 50-somethings that emerged from that whole effort and from the needs of our country for more scientists and engineers. Science was emphasized a lot more. We had a lot more things that were going on.

So it isn't just a matter of having our beliefs from society affecting what we think students need to know and be able to do, it is also these external issues, such as the Soviet launch of a satellite into space.

We identified the need for more scientists and engineers. We invested in teacher institutes in science, mathematics, and foreign languages. We provided support for laboratories and other infrastructures within our high schools. And we undertook a massive effort of curriculum reform in science and mathematics.

And then President Kennedy upped the ante. Our goals had been fairly modest at first, basically, catch up. But it seemed like we were never really catching up. They launched a satellite, we'd launch a satellite. They'd send an animal into space, we'd send an animal into space. They send a man, we send a man.

But we were always behind. And all of a sudden, we had this larger goal that ran ahead of what was already on the table. So then the question is, how did we accomplish that? How do we land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth? And in that case, they actually meant a man.

The issue was how to make it happen. And I think that these things are a large part of what it took in order to make it happen. A strong industrial and university base-- the ideas had to come from someplace. Targeted infrastructure-- we really did have to create an agency and assign responsibility to somebody to actually make this happen.

Funding that was commensurate to the task. And one of the things, if you actually look at the funding for research and development over the past 50 years, one of the things that you will notice is that our priorities in funding have changed over time. And when we decided that we were going to take on this goal of landing a man on the moon, we poured a whole lot of money into space science and into the effort to actually get them there.

Putting the best people on the job. We had some dedicated, hardworking, and very smart people that were identified to undertake this task. And we had brought political and public support for the effort, and for however much money that needed to be spent, and for however many lives were lost in the interim. People understood what the goals were.

Now the question is, what were the results? As I said, many of us are the results of this-- the 50-something scientists and engineers who were a product of the post-Sputnik push. There was a lot more attention to science and technology. There was a lot more science being taught. There was a reinvigoration of the teaching corps, the development of new curriculum.

And there were lots of technological spin offs. The whole process of trying to accomplish this meant that we had to discover a lot of things, how to miniaturize things, how to protect things from extremes in temperature. And so it, in fact, fueled a whole technological revolution.

So we landed the man on the moon. And then we landed more men on the moon. And we went that way for a while. And then all of a sudden, we woke up in the early 1980s and declared that we were a nation at risk.

So the question is, what happened? One of the things that I think we've come to realize is that problems that get fixed don't stay fixed. Things happen. The world moves ahead. If we look at this point in time, what led up to that point in time, there were lots of other things besides concerns about science education that were on people's minds.

The '60s and '70s were a period of unrest and of social movement that had to take place, be they civil rights, or women's rights, or Vietnam, or whatever it is, Watergate. There were lots of other things that were going on. So you could lose attention to the whole question about what was the quality of education and what it is that ought to be taught.

There were lots of things that were going on about arguments about the federal role in education. One of the first things that happened in the Reagan administration was the closing of the shop of science education at the National Science Foundation. And so that sends a real signal about the emphasis that is being put on education. Because the belief was that education was a local issue, and that it needed to be dealt with locally, and that it was not this question of a federal role.

But there were new threats. There were new threats in terms of a buildup of arms, in terms of economic weaknesses that were beginning to appear, in terms of environmental concerns. It was already clear that the economy was shifting to one that was knowledge-based.

And so one of the things that happened was when the National Commission on Excellence in Education began its work, it essentially declared that if someone else had visited on us what we had done to ourselves, that we would consider it an act of war. By that in fact, our loss of attention and our loss of resolve had put us someplace that put our nation at risk.

So then the question is, what is the response to that? Interestingly, one of the major responses to the Nation at Risk report was to increase the amount of science and mathematics course taking. But in order to do that, every state had to essentially declare that students had to take more math and more science, or they had to take courses that had something to do with technology, more that had to do with computer literacy.

And so if you look over time, what you see is, in essence, a real buildup in the percentage of students who ended up taking the courses in mathematics and science. In 1982, less than 50% of our students took-- high school students-- took geometry. By 1998, it was over 75%. Now I think that that is an amazing increase in terms of a focus on science and mathematics for that time. And you can begin to look at some of the other trends as well in terms of mathematics and science course taking.

And of course, one of the things that that does is that when more and more students take the fundamental courses in mathematics and science, more of them are able to choose college majors and college courses that involve science and mathematics as well. So we saw a tremendous buildup in the numbers of degrees that were being awarded.

Now of course, part of this is the change in the numbers of students who were going to college. Some of it from the post-- what is it? The baby boom echo. But a lot of it had to do with the fact that a lot more students could, in fact, undertake these majors and that there were increasing economic opportunities that were presenting themselves for being able to take courses in these fields.

One of the things that I think that you will notice is that one of the largest social trends that are present in these numbers is actually the increase in the percentage of women who have been getting degrees in these fields. If you would look at the year 2000, which I put down there because the rest of them are expressed in decades, but if you just look at the 2000 numbers where women received over 50% of the science and engineering degrees, bachelor's degrees, 43% of the master's degrees, and 36% of the PhD degrees in science and engineering.

In 1989, President Bush, Sr., and Governor Clinton joined together at the Charlottesville Education Summit. This convening of the nation's governors and the President was unprecedented. What they wanted to talk about at that time were fundamental goals for education that everyone, in fact, needed to embrace.