[✔️] March 19, 2024 Global Warming News | Tipping points, mapping change, limits of wet bulb temps, King Canute, Beach lost in days, 1996 Walter Sullivan obit

[Richard Pauli]

/*March*//*19, 2024*/

/[ reconsidering the tipping point  ]/
*Will Earth hit a climate "tipping point?" Here's why experts say this 
framework is problematic*
We can still stop some environmental damage before it gets worse and 
slowly reverse the trend of global heating
By MATTHEW ROZSA, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED MARCH 18, 2024
People who follow climate change are often told there is a "tipping 
point," a single moment after which it will be too late to reverse the 
damage caused by our excessive use of fossil fuels. Yet experts say this 
concept is misleading, with one scientist — James Hansen, who played a 
key early role in raising climate change awareness — describing the 
phrase as "greatly overused and misused."
Powerful institutions seemingly disagree. The World Economic Forum uses 
the phrase "tipping point" when describing the various environmental 
consequences that will ensue once Earth warms more than 1.5º Celsius 
above pre-industrial levels. The European Space Agency declares that 
"climate tipping points are elements of the Earth system in which small 
changes can kick off reinforcing loops that ‘tip’ a system from one 
stable state into a profoundly different state."
In 2021, the authors of a study published in the journal Nature wrote 
that "small changes in forcing cause substantial and irreversible 
alteration to Earth system components called tipping elements." A 2023 
survey published in Sage Journals found members of the British public to 
be widely demoralized about society's ability to cope with any impending 
climate change "tipping points." The phrase even appears in the kids' 
scientific magazine Frontiers for Young Minds, appearing in a 2021 
article titled "Tipping Points: Climate Surprises."
Yet many scientists do not like the term because they feel it 
oversimplifies the science or because it cultivates a fatalistic 
outlook. Hansen is among those scientists. The Columbia University 
climatologist is renowned for writing about fossil fuel consumption and 
climate change as far back as the 1980s, when few other public figures 
had done so. Hansen's 1988 testimony before the Senate is widely 
considered to be a landmark event in the history of spreading public 
knowledge about Earth's rising temperatures. How we frame that issue is 
important to how we effectively spread that message.
"The tipping point concept is greatly overused and misused," Hansen 
wrote to Salon. "The phrase is mighty popular among scientists and the 
public, used for many different climate processes. In fact, most of 
those processes are better described as amplifying, reversible, 
feedbacks." Although climate change is going to have very significant 
consequences for humanity, "it is not a runaway process."

Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research who has published more than 600 articles on 
climatology agrees, explaining in an email to Salon that "there are no 
real tipping points. There are times when the rates of change may 
increase substantially because of feedbacks, but it is not like a pencil 
balancing on its end that when touched topples over."

Unfortunately, for fans of scientific accuracy, that is precisely how 
climate change is depicted in famous sci-fi representations of climate 
change like the 2004 blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow." Then again, 
it is difficult to blame popular entertainers for reinforcing that 
particular misconception. People who learn about how humanity has 
negatively altered our natural environment can respond with a wide range 
of negative emotions, including hopelessness and anxiety, and people 
experiencing those emotions are more likely to believe there is a 
"tipping point," after which humanity is utterly doomed.
Yet that notion is mistaken. Walt Meier, a senior scientist at the 
University of Colorado Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center, 
similarly told Salon he does not believe it is scientifically accurate 
to say "that there is a tipping point toward 'genuine civilization 
collapse,'" although there are individual irreversible thresholds that 
humans could pass.

Meier's colleague Julienne C. Stroeve, also a senior scientist at the 
University of Colorado Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center, 
wrote to Salon that she thinks of a tipping point "as a threshold [that] 
when crossed causes a system to change its behavior." This is distinct 
from how the term is often used, namely with the idea that it involves 
on a global scale "irreversibility, which has to do with the 
impossibility of returning to its previous state."

For example, Stroeve said "the loss of Arctic sea ice in summer would be 
a tipping point, but it’s not irreversible." Losing the winter cover 
ice, by contrast, would be irreversible, but defining such an event 
depends on the timescale. "On a geological timescale ice sheets have 
come and gone, but on a human timescale if we lose them we can basically 
consider them gone forever." The term "forever" means one thing for 
geologists and glaciologists studying epochs, and quite another to a 
person who wants to gaze upon ice sheets with their own eyes.
Hansen pointed to melting permafrost as an example for why the framing 
implied in the phrase "tipping point" is misleading.
"There is a tremendous store of carbon in permafrost, which, if all 
released to the atmosphere, would have a devastating climate impact," 
Hansen said. He explained how the carbon dioxide that is released by 
melting permafrost amplifies the global warming caused by human-made 
greenhouse gases, but that would not happen all at once. "It is rather 
slow and can be cut off if we begin to cool the planet. That's no small 
task, of course!"
When these scientists question the usefulness of "tipping point" 
terminology, they are not discounting the genuine threat posed to 
humanity by global heating. They all agree that climate change is 
changing the planet in ways that will harm hundreds of millions of 
people. Yet how we frame these issues is critical to how we start to 
address them and experts argue that the idea of a single occasion in 
which humans cross a barrier from "climate change can be fixed" to 
"climate change is unfixable" is inaccurate. The Earth's climate is far 
more complicated than such framing suggests. Instead of seeking a single 
moment when a figurative switch is flipped, people should look for a 
constellation of warning signs. There are already many signs that the 
planet's rising temperature is leading to ecological devastation.

"The way we are going we are already on a dangerous course," Trenberth 
said. "Only in retrospect will we likely say 'Oh, this was a sort of 
tipping point.'" He listed off variables that could be viewed by future 
historians as tipping points, but which may not be recognized as such by 
contemporaries living through them.
People who live near coasts may in retrospect view rapid sea level rise 
as a tipping point, since they will endure massive floods and coastal 
erosion. Those who inhabit flat areas like plains will also experience 
worsened flooding due to climate change, and people in regions all over 
the planet will be susceptible to the droughts caused by heat waves.

"There is a big chance (natural variability) component to when and where 
these threats are realized," Trenberth said.

Stroeve said that potential red flags for Earth entering a severe state 
of crisis would include irreversible loss of ice for the Greenland and 
West Antarctic ice sheets, which could between 1-3º C and 1-6º C 
respectively, although Stroeve added "there are lots of uncertainties 
here." Similarly, Stroeve speculated that there could be a tipping 
point-like event in the Amazon rainforest if its area shrinks so much 
that it cannot generate enough water vapor to support itself. Stroeve 
said she isn't "sure if that would be irreversible, though."
Meier confirmed Stroeve's observation about the potentially catastrophic 
consequences of rapid loss to those ice sheets.

"The ice sheets won’t suddenly lose all of their ice — it is something 
that will happen over hundreds and even thousands of years," Meier said. 
"As climate changes, there will definitely be costs — in money [such as] 
infrastructure and human lives as we try to mitigate and adapt to 
climate change. We will have to live with — and already are living with 
— sea level rise, more extreme weather, more wildfires, ecosystem 
changes, etc."

That said, it will not lead to a global civilization collapse all at 
once. Hansen likewise mentioned the possible collapse of the Greenland 
and West Antarctic ice sheets as events that would signal, if not a 
"tipping point," at the very least some level of long-term damage to the 
planet. He also speculated that this could happen if a system of ocean 
currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) 
completely collapses.

"It would take centuries for AMOC to recover. This will not cause 
civilization to collapse per se, but it could happen as early as 
mid-century and in doing so speed the collapse of the West Antarctic ice 
sheet. [This is] because shutting down AMOC reduces the transport of 
Southern Hemisphere heat to the tropics and into the Northern 
Hemisphere," Hansen explained. "It is rapid sea level rise and the 
accompanying shifting of climate zones that create a potential 
existential threat to humanity, as they would drive emigration pressures 
that could make the planet ungovernable."
Hansen added that mass extinctions are certainly irreversible, although 
they may not count as "tipping points" exactly. "Extermination of 
species is practically irreversible and some ecosystems can collapse if 
key species go extinct, and we are in the midst of a mass extinction 
event," Hansen said.
As he summed it up, the underlying problem in communicating climate 
change is that events that may seem to unfold slowly to other people are 
actually happening rapidly in terms of the larger history of Earth.

"The delayed response of the climate system to human-made climate 
forcing is what makes these issues so difficult to communicate with the 
public," Hansen said. "The time scales are very slow as seen by the 
public, even though human-forced climate change is occurring very 
rapidly compared with geological time scales."
This is why it's misleading to frame the climate change crisis in terms 
of a climax or tipping point — it establishes false expectations about 
how exactly global warming is harming everyone's lives. It is instead 
more useful to view climate change as a multifaceted dilemma that will 
require an equally multifaceted response. As Meier noted, this still 
emphasizes that the issue is very difficult to beat — but also 
established that is not an impossible dilemma.

"I worry about talking about climate change leading to 'civilization 
collapse' or even human extinction will actually lead to fatalism and 
the thought that there is nothing society can do, so let’s not worry 
about it," Meier said. "Climate change is a big challenge, but a 
solvable one."
https://www.salon.com/2024/03/18/will-earth-hit-a-climate-tipping-point-heres-why-experts-say-this-framework-is-problematic/



/[ Climate Migration Modeling and impacts of Catastrophe ]/
*Day 1 - Climate Change and Human Migration: An Earth Systems Science 
Perspective*
National Academies - Earth and Life Studies
3-18-24
Climate change and associated impacts (e.g., sustained droughts, 
repeated and severe flooding, increased frequency and intensity of 
hurricanes and cyclones, saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers, 
increased risks of wildfire), affect people, and these impacts 
potentially lead to temporary or permanent displacement within regions. 
This workshop will consider how an Earth systems science approach could 
be used to address climate change impacts, as discussed in the 2021 
National Academies’ report, Next Generation Earth Systems Science at the 
National Science Foundation, and their influence on human migration.

National Academies - Earth and Life Studies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0J8WKe2wwI



/[ advisors plot to visualize changes  ]/
*Cool News: Migration Map Project*
American Resiliency
Mar 18, 2024
I wanted to share some important news on a big behind-the-scenes project 
for AR, as well as some info I put together for our board meeting.  
We're in the last six months of our planned runway period, and it looks 
like it's time for us to figure out where to go next. We've got time to 
make a good plan- let's start thinking about years 4-5.

If you want to check out Professor Koylu's work, here's a video that 
could help you use his beautiful approach: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaeT8UkM7E0&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM3Pnwv_2y8



/[  Heat danger and wet bulb temps ]/
*Peter Brannen on Adaptable Limits of Wet Bulb Temperatures*
Nate Hagens
Mar 18, 2024  #103 #thegreatsimplification #natehagens
Excerpted from The Great Simplification Episode #103 aired on January 
3rd, 2024
Full Episode: https://youtu.be/3l81C_11D7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsObspMUXDg/
/

/- -/

/[ more full discussion  ]
/ *Peter Brannen: "Deep Time, Mass Extinctions, and Today" | The Great 
Simplification #103*
Nate Hagens
Jan 3, 2024  The Great Simplification - with Nate Hagens
On this episode, Nate is joined by Peter Brannen, science journalist and 
author specializing in Earth’s prior mass extinctions, to unpack our 
planet’s geologic history and what it can tell us about our current 
climate situation. Humans have become very good at uncovering the 
history of our planetary home - revealing distinct periods during 
billions of years of deep time that have disturbing similarities to our 
own present time. How is the carbon cycle the foundation of our 
biosphere - and how have changes to it in the past impacted life’s 
ability to thrive? On the scales of geologic time, how do humans compare 
to the other species who have inhabited this planet - 99% of which have 
gone extinct - and will we end up being just a blip in the fossil 
record? How can an understanding of geologic and climate science prepare 
us for the environmental challenges we’ll face in the coming decades?

About Peter Brannen:

    Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and
    contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in
    The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston
    Globe, Slate and The Guardian among other publications. His 2017
    book, The Ends of the World covers the five major mass extinctions
    in Earth's history. Peter is currently a visiting scholar at the
    Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and an affiliate at the
    Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of
    Colorado-Boulder. He was formerly a 2018 Scripps Fellow at
    CU-Boulder, a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the National
    Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University, and a 2011 Ocean
    Science Journalism Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
    Institution in Woods Hole, MA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l81C_11D7A&t=0s



/[ a thousand years ago King Canute tried to hold back the seas  ]/
*King Canute and the tide*
The story of King Canute and the tide is an apocryphal anecdote 
illustrating the piety or humility of King Canute the Great, recorded in 
the 12th century by Henry of Huntingdon.

In the story, Canute demonstrates to his flattering courtiers that he 
has no control over the elements (the incoming tide), explaining that 
secular power is vain compared to the supreme power of God. The episode 
is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of "trying to 
stop the tide" of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually 
misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when 
Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite...
- -
In Huntingdon's account, Canute set his throne by the sea shore and 
commanded the incoming tide to halt and not to wet his feet and robes. 
Yet "continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and 
legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, 
saying: 'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, 
for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea 
obey by eternal laws.'" He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and 
never wore it again "to the honour of God the almighty King".[2]

Later historians repeated the story, with most of them adjusting it to 
have Canute more clearly aware that the tides would not obey him and 
staging the scene to rebuke the flattery of his courtiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide
- -
/[ "Lessons not learned will be repeated" as 150 people fail to hold 
back the seas ]*
*/*They spent $600K on a proposed climate change solution. Their failure 
is a warning.*
No matter how wealthy the individuals, they can’t by themselves 
effectively hold back a rising sea.
March 17, 2024,
By Jarvis DeBerry, MSNBC Opinion Editor
To protect their properties from an ever-encroaching Atlantic Ocean, 
about 150 homeowners in Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts, funded a 
$600,000 sand dune project whose construction was completed last 
Thursday, March 7. Three days later, though, a storm washed away half of 
their 15,000 tons of sand.

Ad hoc efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change are poor 
substitutes for a more global approach.

That instantaneous erosion is a costly illustration that ad hoc efforts 
to mitigate the effects of climate change are poor substitutes for a 
more global approach. No matter how wealthy the individuals, no matter 
how wealthy the neighborhoods, they can’t by themselves effectively hold 
back a rising sea. Or chip in to create a dry spot for themselves.

“No man is an island,” English poet John Donne famously wrote. That’s 
especially true during this season of accelerated climate change. “If a 
clod be washed away by the sea” near your home, then chances diminish 
that I’ll be able to save all the clods near mine.

If any of that sounds like a criticism of the beachfront property 
owners, that’s not the intent. Having spent most of my life in Louisiana 
— which lost more than 2,000 square miles of land from 1932 to 2016 and 
could lose 75% of its wetlands within the next 50 years — I sympathize 
with the Massachusetts property owners. How many times have I seen 
homeowners hastily filling bags of sand to place around their doorways 
before an expected heavy rain event? Hanging over such preparations is 
the fear that it will never be enough.

The Salisbury Beach homeowners aren’t wrong for taking matters into 
their own hands.  But their hands — our hands — are never going to be 
big enough to counteract the problem that confronts us. We can 
extrapolate even further, though. Slowing the rate of climate change and 
mitigating against its effects isn’t even something that individual 
states or countries can effectively tackle alone. At the same time, 
sitting back and doing nothing isn’t an option.

The National Weather Service didn’t record the conditions at Salisbury 
Beach on March 10, but a spokesperson for the service told The Boston 
Globe that those conditions would have been “very similar” to what 
happened at a nearby beach where strong winds at high tide pushed ashore 
storm surges of two and a half feet and where water levels reached 12.34 
feet.

Tom Saab, the president of Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, the 
group that oversaw the construction of the dune, told The Boston Globe 
that “Sunday, March 10 was a nightmare” because “$300,000 of people’s 
hard-earned personal funds washed into the Atlantic.”

Similar nightmares preceded that one. Sunday’s storm was the fourth 
significant flooding event since December for the 
Maine-Massachusetts-New Hampshire tri-state region. Included in that 
were back-to-back storms on Jan. 7 and Jan. 10, during which Salisbury 
Beach homeowners, Saab said, lost “decks, patios, and stairways,” 
prompting homeowners to take action. They quickly built a dune to 
replicate a previous barrier. And then the ocean quickly washed it away.

It was “the worst I’ve seen in over 50 years of living here at the 
beach,” Ron Guilmette told Boston’s WCVB-TV. “The right word is 
catastrophic.”

They quickly built a dune to replicate a previous barrier. And then the 
ocean quickly washed it away.

That’s the right word for the effect the changing climate is having in 
so many places. Long ago, Guilmette told the television station, the 
ocean claimed a tennis court on his beachfront property. On the other 
hand, the Gulf of Mexico, over a 25-year span, claimed an average of a 
football-field amount of land from Louisiana every hour.

But more often than not, our efforts to address these changes are as 
piecemeal and ineffective as that short-lived dune. And, far too often, 
politicians and government officials lack the urgency to address the 
problem.

We haven’t heard nearly as much about climate policy so far in this 
presidential election cycle as we heard in the last one, and the 
policies that Biden has put forward to address rising temperatures and 
rising seas have been fought tooth and nail by Republicans doing the 
bidding of corporations and Big Oil.

After a 2022 nor’easter, Saab said beach property owners unsuccessfully 
“begged” their state government for help. “We pulled off a minor 
miracle,” he said of the dune they built. “It should have been a huge 
undertaking by the state or federal government, but it was a little 
not-for-profit organization.”

When speaking to The Boston Globe, Massachusetts State Rep. Bruce E. 
Tarr, a Republican, gave the property owners credit for their quick 
work, but then said rather unhelpfully, “If the state had paid for the 
project, it would have been equally sacrificial.”

Flood mitigation is a government’s task, and it should be a government 
expenditure.

That’s not true. Spreading $600,000 over 150 homeowners averages out to 
$4,000 per household. Spreading the same amount over 5.66 million 
Massachusetts adults comes to 11 cents. That said, flood mitigation is a 
government’s task, and it should be a government expenditure. It’s not 
something individual neighborhoods should be funding themselves.

Given the relative wealth of the people at Salisbury Beach and their 
failure to build a dune that lasted, there may be some folks harboring a 
feeling of schadenfreude. Please don’t. That climate change bell we hear 
tolling? It tolls for all of us.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/salisbury-beach-sand-dune-climate-change-rcna143201


/[The news archive -  ]/
/*March 19, 1996 */
March 19, 1996: New York Times science reporter Walter Sullivan, who 
covered the issue of human-caused climate change for the paper in the 
1970s and 1980s, passes away at 78.

    *Walter Sullivan, 78, Dies; Showed Science at Its Most Daring*
    By John Noble Wilford
    March 20, 1996
    Walter Sullivan, a science reporter and editor for The New York
    Times whose articles took him from pole to pole and ranged from the
    seabed to the shifting continents, and from the nuclear to the
    cosmic, died yesterday at his home in Riverside, Conn. He was 78.

    The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said.

    In a career spanning half a century of prodigious scientific
    endeavor and discovery, Mr. Sullivan expanded the intellectual and
    geographic boundaries of science journalism. He set the pace for
    colleagues and competitors with inexhaustible energy, enthusiasm and
    a keen sense of what was important and interesting. He won nearly
    every prize offered in science journalism.

    His reports stretched the minds of newspaper readers, as he told of
    the marvels of the restless earth and violent universe and the
    audacity of the people trying to understand them. He wrote swiftly,
    hurrying to be off on the next article, but the authority of his
    articles impressed scientists. On at least one occasion, physicists
    said they did not fully appreciate the significance of their
    discovery until they read about it in Mr. Sullivan's article the
    next day.

    His bags always seemed to be packed, keeping him ready for the call
    of Antarctic expeditions, explorations of tunnels deep under
    Greenland's Arctic icecap, round-the-world experiments of the
    International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, rocket launchings at Cape
    Canaveral or the early searches for extraterrestrial intelligence.
    Through his charm and intelligence, Mr. Sullivan cultivated many of
    the world's leading scientists as friends and sources, and the
    result was uncounted "scoops," which he relished. Once, tipped off
    that an unexpected subatomic particle had been detected, he spent
    the first half of a football game in the press box at the Yale Bowl
    talking by telephone with scientists, then left to write the article
    for the front page.

    Before turning to science, Mr. Sullivan was a foreign correspondent
    for The Times in China, Korea and Berlin. He became science news
    editor in 1962 and, in 1964, succeeded William L. Laurence as
    science editor. In that position, he worked fervently to expand the
    paper's science coverage and staff.

    Mr. Sullivan held the title of science editor until his official
    retirement in 1987. He continued to come into the office and write
    occasional articles until the last two months of his life, and his
    commitment to science writing never flagged.

    "The discovery that there is order and logic in the seeming
    randomness of nature can be a quasi-religious experience," Mr.
    Sullivan once said. "There is great beauty to be found there, and
    the successful teachers and writers are those who, having glimpsed
    it, are driven to share it with others."

    Walter Seager Sullivan Jr. was born on Jan. 18, 1918, in New York
    City. His father was an insurance executive who had been advertising
    manager of The Times. His mother, Jeanet Loomis, was a pianist and
    composer, from whom he inherited an enduring love of music. Even
    late in life, Mr. Sullivan would gather friends on weekends for a
    string quartet, taking his place with a cherished 18th-century cello.
    As a young man, in fact, Mr. Sullivan had visions of becoming a
    music critic. After school at Groton, he majored in English history
    at Yale University and also studied music. Upon graduation in 1940,
    he joined The Times as a copy boy but had to shelve his original
    aspirations with the outbreak of World War II.

    Because of his newspaper background, Mr. Sullivan was first assigned
    to public relations work in New York. One of his first assignments
    was to oversee a news conference by a Norwegian whaling ship captain
    who had chased a German submarine off the coast.

    Mr. Sullivan had no clear guidance from the military on what was
    off-limits for the journalists to publish, so he advised them to be
    vague about the ship's speed. One of the journalists so advised was
    George Horne, a veteran Times reporter who had been accustomed to
    dealing with Mr. Sullivan as a copy boy, carrying articles across
    the newsroom. The New York Post carried an article the next day
    about the former copy boy censoring the news, with the headline:
    "BOY! I mean Sir."

    As an officer in the Navy, Mr. Sullivan served on destroyers in the
    invasions of a dozen Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. One of
    his last articles, published last year in The New York Times
    Magazine, was an extract of the memoirs he was writing. He gave a
    stirring account of a pivotal sea battle he was in off Guadalcanal
    in 1942. At the end of the war, he was a lieutenant commander at the
    helm of the U.S.S. Overton.

    Back at The Times, and perhaps too restless to settle into music
    criticism, Mr. Sullivan jumped at the chance to try science
    reporting with Operation Highjump, a Navy expedition to Antarctica
    under Rear Adm. Richard E. Byrd.
    In the postwar years, Mr. Sullivan covered early meetings of the
    United Nations, then got himself assigned to tour the island scenes
    of recent combat in the Pacific. The B-17 bomber he was in ran out
    of fuel and ditched in a lagoon off the Philippines. As soon as he
    recovered from his injuries, Mr. Sullivan received instructions to
    proceed to China to help cover the outbreak of civil war.

    Lynn Landman remembers his arrival in Shanghai, where her husband,
    Amos, was the NBC correspondent, and she was a freelance journalist.
    One day at the correspondents' club, she saw something familiar
    about the clothes on a tall, slim man in front of her.

    "These clothes should be familiar," Mr. Sullivan said, when she
    inquired. "They're your husband's. My plane ditched, I lost all my
    luggage, and a man at the club told me to ask Amos for a change of
    clothes."

    The Landmans figured even more prominently in Mr. Sullivan's life
    when they introduced him to Mary Barrett, a journalist from Spokane,
    Wash. The two married in 1950.

    Though he had oscillated between the coverage of world politics and
    the world of science, Mr. Sullivan definitively shifted to science
    writing with his comprehensive reporting on the International
    Geophysical Year, which involved most of the world's nations in
    coordinated studies of Earth's interior, atmosphere and, as it
    turned out, the space above. The Soviet Union's most startling
    contribution to the effort was the launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957.
    On that evening, Mr. Sullivan was at the Soviet Embassy in
    Washington for a reception for international geophysical scientists.
    He was interrupted by a telephone call from The Times with the bare
    details about Sputnik. Mr. Sullivan took delight in returning to the
    reception and announcing the news to all gathered, the Russians
    included.

    In 1958, Mr. Sullivan had a big article and, for once, did not rush
    into print. Hanson W. Baldwin, then The Times's military-affairs
    editor, and Mr. Sullivan uncovered secret plans by the Defense
    Department to explode atomic bombs in the atmosphere to create an
    artificial radiation belt around Earth, a phenomenon that could be
    used to disguise a nuclear attack.

    Mr. Sullivan learned many details of the plan, called Project Argus,
    from scientists. But the two writers, in consultation with editors,
    made a decision that typified the press's notion of its duty in that
    cold war era. They decided to hold off publication for months, until
    the experiment was actually conducted.

    In "Without Fear or Favor," Harrison E. Salisbury, a former foreign
    correspondent and assistant managing editor at The Times, wrote of
    this as an example of journalistic responsibility. "The story," he
    said, "was held up not because of pressure or interference by the
    Government or the White House but because responsible journalists on
    The Times believed this action was in the overall interest of
    science and the country."

    As Mr. Sullivan covered a greater range of science topics, he also
    became a prolific book writer. His most notable ones were "Quest for
    a Continent," about Antarctic exploration; "Assault on the Unknown,"
    about the geophysical year; "We Are Not Alone," a best seller and
    prize-winning account of the search for extraterrestrial
    intelligence; "Continents in Motion"; "Black Holes: the Edge of the
    Space, the End of Time," and "Landprints," a book about the
    geological history explaining American topography.

    One of Mr. Sullivan's most coveted awards was the Public Service
    Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, which made him a
    nonvoting member of that body. The award had never before been
    presented to a journalist.

    He visited Antarctica seven times, the last time as a lecturer in
    1993. A 30-mile mountain chain there was named the Sullivan Range in
    his honor. Other honors included the Daly Medal of the American
    Geographical Society, the George Polk Award, the Distinguished
    Public Service Award of the National Science Foundation and several
    writing prizes from the American Institute of Physics, the American
    Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of
    Science. The American Geophysical Union even named its science
    writing award in honor of Mr. Sullivan.

    Survivors include his wife, Mary; three children, Elizabeth, of
    Cleveland, Catherine of Cambridge, Mass., and Theodore of Westport,
    Conn.; two sisters, Constance Carden of Manhattan and Jeanet Curtis
    of New Haven, and three grandchildren.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/20/us/walter-sullivan-78-dies-showed-science-at-its-most-daring.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/20/us/walter-sullivan-78-dies-showed-science-at-its-most-daring.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d00.6anX.zdqIMoT_i3ui&smid=url-share



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