Bert Bolin: Scientist-Organizer

What follows is a historical case study developed to help secondary and post-secondary students learn the Nature of Science, or how science works.

It follows the career of Bert Bolin a scientist of great, yet often overlooked, influence in the development of climate change science, the motivating of scientific consensus on the effects and dangers of climate change, and the organizing of international political will towards climate change prevention.

Here we see that the role of the scientist is not necessarily one of the stereotypical antisocial laboratory scientist, but is often one of the organizer, manager, and politician.

Bolin, the weatherman

The ability to predict the weather matters. Before you leave for a walk along your favorite river or beach you need to make a decision about what to wear. So, you stick your head out the front door to get a sense of the temperature. It’s warm, sunny, and calm. Shorts and a t-shirt should serve you just fine. But this walk will take you a couple of hours, and you only know what the weather is like right now! It could, in fact it will, be different in an hour. But in what way and to what extreme? Will shorts and a t-shirt still be appropriate? Now you are asking questions about future events and to answer them, you need to make predictions. Based on your understanding of seasonal patterns, you know that, since it’s June, you are unlikely to encounter a sub-zero arctic snowstorm, so a winter jacket is unnecessary. However, a thunderstorm is plausible, and so you bring a light jacket. It’s a fair and probably safe assumption. But in the 21st century, you also have at your disposal the hourly forecast, courtesy of your local meteorologist. So, you check this instead and learn that the probability of a storm over the next few hours is extremely low. So, with confidence you leave the jacket and enjoy a predictably warm, sunny, and calm walk.

The next week, you're planning to leave the house again, only this time you’ll be hiking and camping for multiple days. Once again, you must try to predict the weather you’ll encounter over the next few days, but you refer immediately to the local weather forecast. Only now you’re less confident in its predictions. You know that these predictions become less reliable the further into the future they look. So, you err on the side of caution and overpack just a bit.

Now imagine you’re about to book your dream vacation. However, you need to book years in advance. How confidently could you predict what the weather will be like for that week, 5 years from now? Will the ski resort receive fresh powder every night? Will the beach be cloud-free each day? Based on historical data you might be able to make predictions with some level of confidence. If December is historically on average the snowiest month at the hill and June the sunniest at the beach, you could make some reasonable assumptions. However, the uncertainty is still very high. The accuracy and precision with which you can forecast the weather is dependent upon, among other things, time. The weather gets harder to predict further into the future. For example, while 3-day forecasts are around 98% accurate, 10-day forecasts are only around 45% accurate (Bauer et al., 2015).

In all these instances you're engaging in the practical science of short-term and long-term weather prediction, and climate science. This was the lifetime preoccupation of Bert Bolin, pioneering meteorologist and the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative organization on what might be humanity’s greatest challenge: anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

As a young boy, Bert was fascinated by weather. His father’s passion for meteorology sparked Bert’s interest at an early age and he set up and monitored his very own weather station in his small hometown of Nyköping, Sweden (Taba, 1988). In 1943 and by the age of 17 he was at the University of Uppsala, Sweden studying mathematics and physics where he was first told during a lecture, of a very influential Swedish meteorologist named Carl-Gustaf Rossby. Bert thought nothing of it until while serving in the Air Force after completing his degree he attended a special lecture from one Dr. Rossby. Now Bert was hooked on meteorology, and the timing was perfect. Rossby had just returned from the United States in hopes of building up a strong meteorological sciences base in Sweden. He established the International Meteorological Institute (IMI) at the University of Stockholm and was looking to build a strong team. Bert was ready and began his graduate studies with Rossby immediately.

Think Question: Why are you pursuing the degree you are? Who influenced you in this decision? What role did your parents play?

Bolin, the data processor

In the late 1940s to early 1950s, numerical weather forecasting was not limited by lack of datasets but lack of processing power. While it might seem quite natural that we have at our fingertips accurate weather forecasts, they are relatively new phenomena. In the 1920s, human were making calculations by hand to predict the weather, but they could not predict very far into the future, and their accuracy was just about as good and intuition (Lynch, 2008). It would also take around 64,000 human computers calculating non-stop just to keep on track (Harper et al., 2007). To predict the weather, one would have to use a model - a simplified abstracted representation - of the environment, simple enough for humans to make calculations with. But models this simple don’t represent reality in a useful way and the resulting predictions are horribly inaccurate. What was needed then, was a way to handle the necessary complexities of models and their related calculations. Some thought that the electronic computer - essentially created during the Second World War - could have applications to numerical weather predictions (Harper et al., 2007). However, most thought the possibility of weather forecasting, regardless of the available tools, was impossible. Fortunately for Bert, he was a young smart chap studying meteorology at a time when the very first electronic computers were being built to aid meteorology. Even more lucky for Bert, his supervisor was one of the only people on the planet helping to develop such computers and apply them to numerical weather prediction (Taba, 1988). He was sent to the University of Chicago and Princeton University for a year to learn from Jule Charney and John von Neumann who were - alongside Rossby - working with the ENIAC machine - one of the first ever computers - with aims of applying it to numerical weather prediction.

Bolin, the data collector

On the morning of October the 5th, 1957, the West woke to news of a new Soviet satellite orbiting above their heads. Sputnik-1 was the first artificial satellite to successfully orbit the Earth. Americans were terrified of this new development, a clear demonstration of Soviet technological and scientific superiority. Was Sputnik listening to them? Watching them? The world knew that this was a new era, of what though, they were unsure.

Bolin was unaware that Rossby, who died a few weeks before Sputnik was launched, was working with the Americans to help develop their own satellites (Taba, 1988). He had recognized, well before Bolin had, the potential meteorological applications of satellite technology. It was well over a year later that Bolin finally realized the revolutionary potential of rockets and satellites. While on a walk with a friend and family on a mild spring day in Washington DC, he learned that TIROS-1, the first ever weather satellite, had just successfully achieved orbit. It’s 2 cameras were now transmitting photos of the Earth from space. He looked to the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse, and knew in that moment that he needed to get his own.

How does one get their hands on a rocket? For Bolin, you simply ask around, hoping that someone will have a few extras just lying around. And so, he did and found some Arcas rockets through some American colleagues. But don’t those cost lots of money? Sure they do! So, where does one get such funds? For Bolin, you simply ask. And so, he did. The Swedish Research Council provided him with the funds to begin launching sounding rockets which, though not capable of launching satellites into space, could carry a host of instruments higher than weather balloons (Taba, 1988). Bolin and his friends set up a launch site in Northern Sweden and began launching these rockets, acquiring new and robust datasets. They were even able to record a temperature of -143℃, the coldest ever detected in Earth’s atmosphere until then (Taba, 1988). Now more people wanted in on the fun and so Bolin joined the Swedish Space Committee which then joined the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). In 1965, he was asked to serve as scientific director of ESRO and so he did for the next 2 years, during which he was able to get the Esrange Space Centre built in Northern Sweden above the Arctic circle which provides the international scientific community with the ability to launch sounding rockets for microgravity and atmospheric research to this day.

But while sounding rockets were useful, Bolin and the meteorological community’s gaze were still towards satellites. In the early 60s, scientists were eagerly discussing how satellites could improve weather forecasting and help answer some key scientific questions. It quickly became apparent that the scale of the questions and observations needed to be huge. Bolin noted that

“Improvement of weather forecasting requires the development of a better understanding of the dynamics of the general circulation of the atmosphere, a fundamental research topic that was also very relevant in the field of climatology… International coordination… was essential in order to define the observational requirements for testing and further developing existing models of the general circulation of the atmosphere” (Bolin, 2007).

Bolin discussed with the president of the International Council for Science (ICSU) the necessity of international and large-scale research initiatives. So, in 1964, the Commission for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS) was established and Bolin was elected its chairman.

Think Question: Imagine you want to get your hands on some rockets to do some scientific experiments. Outline a plan that you think could work. What steps would you need to take to conduct experiments with rockets?

Bolin, the organizer

Since the very beginning of his career, Bolin was an inspiring leader with a focus on international and multidisciplinary collaboration. However, his chairmanship with CAS truly solidified his role as such. At the first CAS meeting, held in Geneva in 1965, CAS’s objective was defined to develop ‘an entirely research oriented co-operative international meteorological and analytical program with the goal of producing a vastly improved understanding of the general circulation of the global atmosphere…’ (Bolin, 2007). How does one go about understanding how the entire atmosphere circulates? What kind of instruments would be needed? Would Bolin’s childhood weather station suffice? Or his computer models? How about his sounding rockets? To provide a comprehensive understanding of the global atmosphere, one would have to run an experiment of such size and complexity requiring a pooling of resources and expertise spanning many geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries.

This experiment was proposed at the Geneva 1965 meeting and was to be called the Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP), ‘a twelve-month period for an intensive, international, observational study and analysis of the global circulation of the troposphere and lower stratosphere’ (Bolin, 2007). The complexity of this study took well over a decade to plan and the experiment finally took place between November 1978 and June 1980. However, in the interim, it was important to perform “smaller” experiments first, both to fill in the gaps and resolution of the larger experiment and to test the feasibility of such a large-scale experiment. One such experiment was the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE) conducted in 1974 which focused on tropical environments. While GATE was a “smaller” experiment within GARP, it was in no way small, requiring, for example, “two geo-stationary satellites, a dozen well-instrumented aircraft, two of which had to be long-range jets, and some 20 ships to establish a network of ocean stations” (Bolin, 2007). Now that’s an experiment! Bolin’s organizational skills were truly put to the test. Yet, these vast and robust datasets produced through the program provided insights into, not just local short-term weather forecasts, but long-term climate models too.

Think Question: How much do you think an experiment like GARP would cost? If you wanted to launch a similar experiment, how might you go about securing the funding for it?

Bolin’s early work on the carbon cycle and anthropogenic atmospheric pollutants heightened awareness amongst climate scientists that human activity could influence the global climate. In 1959, Bolin and Erik Eriksson published an important paper forecasting the atmospheric CO2 concentration by the year 2000 (Bolin & Eriksson, 1958). He shared some of these insights at a symposium in Washington, DC, where he warned that by the year 2000, CO2 concentrations were likely to be 25-40% higher than pre-industrial levels. He was silent, however, on the expected temperature increases (Rodhe, 2013). In 1975, the Swedish government, on the advice of Bolin, concluded in a bill on energy policy that “it is likely that climatic concerns will limit the burning of fossil fuels, rather than the size of the natural resources” (Bolin, 2007). Anthropogenic climate change was slowly, ever so slowly, becoming a political matter and Bolin was helping it come to the surface. He realized early on that climate change needed to become a political issue since political action likely would be needed in the future to avoid any environmental, social, and economic harm. However, the more political the issue became, the more challenging it was to facilitate the necessary global scientific collaborations. This became particularly obvious to Bolin at an energy workshop in Georgia in the USSR in 1985 which faced heavy surveillance from the Soviet government. Was it any wonder? The USSR’s fossil fuel deposits were vast and represented a significant portion of their economic power. His political skills were now to be tested more than ever before.

Bolin was now being pulled away entirely from weather modeling and forecasting and pushed headfirst into future climate predictions. In 1985, a joint conference in Geneva organized by the United Nations Energy Program (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the ICSU forced the issue of climate change outside the scientific community. Bolin’s political acumen was tested further when Dr. Mostafa Tolba, Director of the UNEP, opened the meeting with dire predictions of future natural disasters resulting from a warming climate (Bolin, 2007). These are the kind of things the politicians needed to hear to seize their attention and motivate action. So, when it was his turn to speak, Bolin could have repeated the warnings. But he chose not to. The science, in his opinion, was still too shaky to recommend specific action other than to ramp up efforts to improve the science itself. However, political momentum continued. Key political figures, like the Prime Minister of Canada, were present at a conference in Toronto in 1988 that Bolin helped to organize. During this conference, there was a call for specific political action, like a 20% reduction of global CO2 emissions by the year 2005 (Bolin, 2007). Such ambitious goals were a good sign, however, Bolin recognized that such goals were based on a lack of scientific consensus on solid, synthesized, and quantitative predictions. The scientific community still hadn’t agreed on how much global mean temperature might rise, yet political decisions were being made on quantitative predictions of 0.2-0.5℃ per decade (Bolin, 2007). Such confidence likely resulted from recent wins at the 1986 Montreal Protocol where decisive action was taken to reduce Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) emissions and protect the ozone layer. But Bolin recognized the dangers in comparing CFCs with CO2. CFC’s are not tied with activities which are at the very heart of the global economy. CO2 on the other hand is. Once governments realize how difficult and economically costly it is to reduce CO2 emissions, they’re unlikely to follow through, especially if the scientific projections are not solid (Bolin, 2007). During a 1988 summer heat wave across the USA, NASA’s James Hansen made public statements that caught the ears of the public, implicitly suggesting that the heat wave was man-made (Bolin, 2007). The media and the public ate it up. However, most scientists disagreed strongly. For Bolin and the other scientists, “the data showing the global increase of temperature had not been scrutinized well and there was insufficient evidence that extreme events had become more common” (Bolin, 2007). This single event made it clear to him just “how chaotic the debate between scientists and the public might become” (Bolin, 2007).

On November 9, 1988 only 28 countries were present for the very first meeting of the IPCC held in Geneva (Bolin, 2007). It was here where Dr. Tolba asked Bolin to serve as the Chairman for the IPCC. Bolin accepted, unaware of the challenges that lay ahead for him. At the meeting, the country of Malta asked that the IPCC produce its first review on anthropogenic climate change by 1990. It was agreed upon and Bolin, no doubt, was slightly terrified. How could he, in this new and daunting role, pull together the international scientific community to provide a comprehensive report in less than 2 years on a problem which, after decades of work, was still so fractured? Bolin was given little in the way of suggested procedures for accomplishing the task. It was here where his skills, knowledge, and professional networks accumulated through decades of experience participating in and leading international organizations like CAS, IMI, or WMO, paid off. He maintained flexibility in the procedures of the IPCC but when in doubt, followed WMO procedures. Yet he quickly found that the IPCC needed to become stricter and more professional in its work. However, he noted, “this had to be achieved without losing the scientific atmosphere and integrity that was essential to be able to attract the very best scientists into the work” (Bolin, 2007).

Work on this first assessment began immediately and was split across the 3 working groups. Working Group I was to provide the scientific assessment; Working Group II, the impact assessment; and Working Group III the response strategies. At the first meeting of IPCC’s Working Group III, Bolin was surprised at the makeup of the crowd. There were very few scientists, mostly political delegates. How was he to maintain the centrality of science under such conditions? The attendees were ready for political action. ‘Tell us what needs to be done’ they plead. But Bolin was adamant that scientists still didn’t really know what changing global conditions might look like. If you don’t know exactly what problems a warming planet will bring about, how can you preemptively address them? Here Bolin was balancing on a political tightrope. He needed the support of the policymakers and politicians, and he had it from the start. But he couldn’t really ask much of them until the science was clearer. Try telling them ‘just wait here for the next 5, 10, maybe 15 years while we figure out the science, then we’ll come back to you for help’. You’d lose their support and investment in no time. So, he diplomatically attempted to maintain interest and involvement from both the politicians and scientists all the while. During the initial stages of the development of the first assessment report, Bolin noticed a few interesting challenges, one of which had to do with unequal access to funds. It was agreed early on that the participation of developing countries from the start was essential. Yet, getting delegates from these countries to meetings was challenging; there simply was no money. So, an IPCC fund was set up to pay for the travel of those in need. However, during the final synthesis of the assessment a year later, developing countries voiced serious concerns with their lack of inclusion. Yet by that point, it was too late to make any changes. At the third IPCC session, right before the release of the first assessment report, political support for IPCC initiatives seemed nearly unanimous. US President George Bush opened the sessions with a strong endorsement. The thing that Bolin and so many others were fighting for for so long seemed to be achieved. In his address at the conference Bolin cheered that “the large number of meetings… as well as the President of the US greeting us at this time shows that there is now general awareness among nations about the threat of a likely climate change” (Bolin, 2007). As the report came together decisions had to be made and conflict ensued. Working Group I was divided over what level of uncertainty they should represent. Can a 1.5-4.5℃ mean temperature increase be expected for every doubling of CO2 or is it between 2-4℃ (Bolin, 2007)? Working Group II was divided over its acceptance of the use of analogues of present climate changes to future changes. There was also disagreement on what positive consequences of climate change, if any, could be expected. Working Group III was to present strategies for responding to the scientific information. However, it was unclear how they should distinguish between scientific information and political judgements. This section, then, ended up more or less as a list of issues that should be considered in political negotiations. There were many disagreements, both stylistically and methodologically, between the different sections of the working groups. And uncertainty remained. Would all three sections come together to create a document better than the sum of their individual parts? Would the information get to the relevant parties? Would the report make a difference? Bolin decided to write a synthesis report which he believed would be the central document. He invited the chairmen of the working groups to a meeting to approve his synthesis, but he had not given them sufficient time to read through the document and the meeting devolved into a near-breakdown. Even though this synthesis report was finally agreed upon, to Bolin’s surprise, it was not much used. Instead, the individual sections, especially the first, had the biggest impact.

Bert Bolin’s contributions as a scientist are not easy to summarize. While he no doubt spent many hours working on equations, interpreting data, and publishing papers, much of his time was spent in leadership positions. From leading the IMI early in his career, to ESRO, CAS, and finally IPCC, he was able to mobilize people, funding, instruments, politicians, and all the necessary components of large-scale science. To measure the temperature and wind speed in his backyard all he needed was a small weather station. But to understand and predict the intricate details and consequences of a warming planet into the next hundred years, he needed an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He needed international and interdisciplinary cooperation.

Think Question: When was Bolin most like a scientist? Was it as a young man with his weather station? While he was writing scientific papers on climate modeling? Launching rockets into the upper atmosphere? Sending emails to collaborators? Presenting at the United Nations?

References

Bauer, P., Thorpe, A., & Brunet, G. (2015). The quiet revolution of numerical weather prediction. Nature, 525(7567), 47–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14956

Bolin, B. (2007). A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511721731

Bolin, B., & Eriksson, E. (1958). Changes in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and sea due to fossil fuel combustion. In The Atmosphere and the Sea in Motion: Scientific Contributions to the Rossby Memorial Volume.

Harper, B. Y. K., Uccellini, L. W., Kalnay, E., Carey, K., Morone, L., Note, E., Meeting, A., & The, R. (2007). WEATHER PREDICTION he Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit ( JN-. May, 639–650.

Lynch, P. (2008). The origins of computer weather prediction and climate modeling. Journal of Computational Physics, 227(7), 3431–3444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2007.02.034

Rodhe, H. (2013). Bert Bolin (1925-2007)-a world leading climate scientist and science organiser. Tellus, Series B: Chemical and Physical Meteorology, 65(1). https://doi.org/10.3402/tellusb.v65i0.20583

Taba, H. (1988). THE BULLETIN INTERVIEWS : Professor B. Bolin. WMO Bulletin, 37(4).