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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>March</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 19, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ reconsidering the tipping point ]</i><br>
<b>Will Earth hit a climate "tipping point?" Here's why experts say
this framework is problematic</b><br>
We can still stop some environmental damage before it gets worse and
slowly reverse the trend of global heating<br>
By MATTHEW ROZSA, Staff Writer<br>
PUBLISHED MARCH 18, 2024 <br>
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."<br>
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."<br>
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."<br>
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.<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
Hansen pointed to melting permafrost as an example for why the
framing implied in the phrase "tipping point" is misleading.<br>
"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!"<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"There is a big chance (natural variability) component to when and
where these threats are realized," Trenberth said.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
Meier confirmed Stroeve's observation about the potentially
catastrophic consequences of rapid loss to those ice sheets.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.salon.com/2024/03/18/will-earth-hit-a-climate-tipping-point-heres-why-experts-say-this-framework-is-problematic/">https://www.salon.com/2024/03/18/will-earth-hit-a-climate-tipping-point-heres-why-experts-say-this-framework-is-problematic/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Climate Migration Modeling and impacts of Catastrophe ]</i><br>
<b>Day 1 - Climate Change and Human Migration: An Earth Systems
Science Perspective</b><br>
National Academies - Earth and Life Studies<br>
3-18-24<br>
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.<br>
<br>
National Academies - Earth and Life Studies<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0J8WKe2wwI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0J8WKe2wwI</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ advisors plot to visualize changes ]</i><br>
<b>Cool News: Migration Map Project</b><br>
American Resiliency<br>
Mar 18, 2024<br>
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. <br>
<br>
If you want to check out Professor Koylu's work, here's a video that
could help you use his beautiful approach:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaeT8UkM7E0&t=0s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaeT8UkM7E0&t=0s</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM3Pnwv_2y8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM3Pnwv_2y8</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ Heat danger and wet bulb temps ]</i><br>
<b>Peter Brannen on Adaptable Limits of Wet Bulb Temperatures</b><br>
Nate Hagens<br>
Mar 18, 2024 #103 #thegreatsimplification #natehagens<br>
Excerpted from The Great Simplification Episode #103 aired on
January 3rd, 2024<br>
Full Episode: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/3l81C_11D7A">https://youtu.be/3l81C_11D7A</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsObspMUXDg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsObspMUXDg</a><i><br>
</i>
<p><i>- -</i></p>
<i>[ more full discussion ]<br>
</i> <b>Peter Brannen: "Deep Time, Mass Extinctions, and Today" |
The Great Simplification #103</b><br>
Nate Hagens<br>
Jan 3, 2024 The Great Simplification - with Nate Hagens<br>
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?<br>
<br>
About Peter Brannen:<br>
<blockquote>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.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l81C_11D7A&t=0s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l81C_11D7A&t=0s</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ a thousand years ago King Canute tried to hold back the seas ]</i><br>
<b>King Canute and the tide</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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]<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide</a><br>
- -<br>
<i>[ "Lessons not learned will be repeated" as 150 people fail to
hold back the seas ]<b><br>
</b></i><b>They spent $600K on a proposed climate change solution.
Their failure is a warning.</b><br>
No matter how wealthy the individuals, they can’t by themselves
effectively hold back a rising sea.<br>
March 17, 2024, <br>
By Jarvis DeBerry, MSNBC Opinion Editor<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Ad hoc efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change are poor
substitutes for a more global approach.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
They quickly built a dune to replicate a previous barrier. And then
the ocean quickly washed it away.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
Flood mitigation is a government’s task, and it should be a
government expenditure.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/salisbury-beach-sand-dune-climate-change-rcna143201">https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/salisbury-beach-sand-dune-climate-change-rcna143201</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>March 19, 1996 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> 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.<br>
<blockquote><b>Walter Sullivan, 78, Dies; Showed Science at Its Most
Daring</b><br>
By John Noble Wilford<br>
March 20, 1996<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="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</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="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">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</a><br>
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