Marcus Hanschen

In the seething, barely perceptible world that Inez Fung's mind inhabits these days, tropical storms pinwheel raggedly out of the Caribbean basin. Raging grassland wildfires tumble across the intermountain west. Shrinking glaciers at the very top and bottom of the globe deform ocean currents and boost sea levels. Ocean temperatures are on the rise and precipitation patterns are changing, spurred by accelerating densities of carbon dioxide stacking up in the atmosphere and brimming in the surface of the sea.

Into this world she has interjected her own plotted universe of data points, spectrographic measurements, and logarithmic graphs that attempt to unravel the logic behind the chaos as well as the seeming cosmic connectedness that links ocean temperature readings off the Argentine coast and the amount of snowfall likely to accumulate in the High Sierra. Her three decades of inquiry into the dynamics of meteorological behavior take in the best evidence scientists can now marshal to predict both the short-term behavior and long-term trends affecting the earth's landmasses, oceans, and atmosphere. Her work involves billions of calculations input over a long period of time into complex computer models. Yet as she reviews her latest batch of data on a sunny July morning in her spacious McCone Hall office on the Berkeley campus, taking in air temperature readings, long-range weather patterns, oceanographic measurements, and precipitation measurements, plainly Dr. Fung is not happy about what this mass of data is telling her.

Dr. Fung, a professor of environmental science and founder and former director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, is one of a growing group of experts on the UC campus who were laboring-long before Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, or the devastation of Hurricane Katrina brought home the nation's potential vulnerability-to quantify and predict the extent to which climate change is already affecting natural phenomena, and began working to develop policy responses to keep the fragile earth from reaching some "tipping point" of no return. With more data coming in, and with more fieldwork being carried out to corroborate conjecture, these climatologists find there is far more to be concerned about.

"Now I have a knot in my stomach," Fung says, the curve of her mouth turning southward into a tight pout, to match the pitch of her graying, pageboy haircut. "The hurricane season has already started," she says, and the evidence points to the likelihood that more intense, Katrina-like hurricanes of the sort that devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi coast last summer are due to strike again. "The weather is getting more and more extreme."

Fifteen, or even five, years ago the havoc that the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases in earth's atmosphere might wreak on weather patterns, crop behavior, and the churn of ocean currents might have been considered speculative, or somehow vaguely theoretical, science-fiction fantasies. But with a recent rush of data from tree rings, boreholes, and glacial samples all pointing in the same direction, scientists such as Fung are more convinced than ever that, as the National Research Council concluded in a paper released in June, there is a "high level of confidence" that the past few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, and that this warming will have global consequences. Such new and more accurate readings are, in turn, sending powerful tremors of concern throughout the scientific community.

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