Climate Guru
Climate Guru Moves from Wedge Lake to Vanishing Lakes
UCLA climate researcher Glen MacDonald warns that we need to start planning now for devastating water shortages that could be triggered by global warming.
By Tom Nugent
A few hours spent hanging out with Glen MacDonald, MSc’80, will quickly lead you to discover that he is an upbeat optimist who pushes life to the max—whether he is piloting his surfboard across the waves at Malibu or zipping around Southern California in his bright orange 1973 Porsche.
But the normally cheerful scientist readily admits that his hopeful outlook can be difficult to maintain each day. Why? It’s simple: an award-winning UCLA climate researcher, he has spent the past 12 years doing his best to wake people up to the looming threat now posed by global warming.
“I’m not a doomsayer and I do have a lot of faith in the inventiveness and tenacity of human beings,” says the geographer, biologist and author of Space, Time and Life: The Science of Biogeography (winner of the 2004 Henry C. Cowles Award for Excellence). “At the same time, however, it’s extremely important to recognize that global warming is a real phenomenon, and that its effects are going to be with us for the foreseeable future.
“We’re not going to be able to dodge this bullet, and I think it’s absolutely imperative that we begin to plan now for the effects— such as widespread long-term drought—that will probably flow from global warming caused by greenhouse gases.”
About a decade ago MacDonald joined a group of American and Canadian colleagues studying tree rings, fossil pollen, lake sediments and ice cores, to confirm an average temperature increase of up to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit throughout much of the Arctic during the 20th century. More recent work, published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Science, shows that many Siberian lakes are vanishing as a result of melting permafrost.
MacDonald has recently shifted his research focus to droughts in the lower latitudes and is convinced that “the most important thing we can do right now to prepare for the effects of global warming is to begin planning our response to severe prolonged droughts that will probably occur in some areas of North America, such as parts of Alberta and the American Southwest.” His work on the last period of global warming, about 1,000 years ago, shows the development of extensive droughts in western North America at that time.
MacDonald was raised in the San Francisco area by two Canadian parents who wanted to enjoy living in a warmer climate. He studied geography at the University of California, Berkeley, before landing on the U of C campus to work on his master’s degree in geography.
“Calgary was a fantastic place to do the kind of research I was interested in,” says the climate guru. He describes spending many hours taking sediment cores from the bottom of Alberta lakes in order to study vegetative fossil remains as a way of pinpointing climate change and its effects in the distant past.
“I ‘cored’ and sampled a lot of lakes around Calgary, but the one I remember most was Wedge Lake,” he recalls with a chuckle. “After I sent the sediment samples I’d dug up there to a lab, the results showed that the materials I’d dredged up were more than 10,000 years old.
“That was a huge thrill for a grad student… just the sheer excitement of knowing that I’d been able to recover such an ancient record of the vegetation that had once existed in this area of the Kananaskis Valley.”
After earning his PhD in botany at the University of Toronto, MacDonald spent a dozen years teaching at McMaster University before signing on as a full professor (and later department chair) at UCLA.
Along with his wife Joanne (also a geographer) and their two college-age kids, MacDonald says he is enjoying “the California lifestyle” whenever he can—in spite of a jam-packed schedule that includes teaching, research and frequent consultation with California water resources managers.
“I’m a pretty hopeful guy,” he says, when you ask him to predict the future effects of global warming, “but I take my responsibility very seriously as a scientist who feels that planning for climate change is essential now. I think it’s now clear that an ounce of prevention is going to be worth a ton of cure 50 or 100 years from now!”