Claire L. Parkinson’s scientific paper “Arctic sea ice decay simulated for a CO2-induced temperature rise” was published in Climate Change in 1979, the peer-reviewed journal, when it was just 2 years old. So was the Vermont native’s doctorate in geography and climatology. Parkinson’s paper, co-authored by William W. Kellogg, was pretty much ignored. What it argued, based on mathematical modeling, is that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide above preindustrial levels would make the Arctic free of ice in late summer probably sometime in the middle of the 21st century.
We now know that four-decades-old prediction was spot on, as Sabrina Shankman points out in a story in the Pulitzer-winning InsideClimate News. In fact, the likelihood of the scenario Parkinson and her colleague posited then could occur a decade or more before mid-century. As scientists in the past 20 years have been predicting, whenever summers do become ice free in the Arctic, the global impact will be titanic. Indeed, we appear to be feeling some of that impact already.
Today, Parkinson is a distinguished senior climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Project Scientist for the Aqua Earth-observing satellite mission and has pages of scientific papers and a few books on her résumé.
She became interested in math in first grade. When she graduated from university with a math degree in 1970, however, she hadn’t yet figured out what she wanted to do with it. But since she also had an interest in Antarctica, she enrolled in graduate school at Ohio State University’s Institute for Polar Studies, now the Byrd Polar Research Center, with the specific goal of getting to spend time on the ice-bound continent. She managed to talk her way onto her first expedition there in 1972, but it was a close thing.
The captain of the ship was “horrified” to learn that there would be a woman aboard and that the research team would be coed for the first time. But Terry Hughes, the expedition’s leader stood up for her. “Terry understood that going to Antarctica was the whole reason I wanted to be at the Institute of Polar Studies, so he included me on the expedition,” Parkinson said.
When she returned from Antarctica, she became a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. That’s where she and Kellogg developed the model that underpinned their study.
"It was one of these landmark papers," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. "She was the first to put together the thermodynamic sea ice model.
What's more, collection of better data on sea ice over recent years has strengthened the models, making their predictions even more reliable—and disturbing. [...]
Serreze, who began his career in 1982, said Parkinson's results—and the reality of what is happening now in the Arctic—would have been hard to believe then. "I just could never have imagined it," he said. "Over the course of my career, to see this happening to the Arctic? It's this eye-opener to me that climate change is not this far away thing—it's here and now."
Ten years ago, even five years ago, a few people could still get media attention—and payouts from the Koch Brothers—by claiming that the Arctic wasn’t losing ice, that it was all a scam. Even the small cabal of amateur and professional climate science-denying dead-enders don’t take that position now. The connection between rising CO2 concentrations, rising temperatures, and dwindling ice is too strong.
Last month, the Arctic’s levels of sea ice were the lowest in the historical record. And, NASA said last September that Arctic ice is receding 13.8 percent every decade. That same month, four climatologists led by Alexandra Jahn, published their paper, “How predictable is the timing of a summer ice-free Arctic?” Their computer simulations “show that internal variability alone leads to a prediction uncertainty of about two decades.”
Jahn told Shankman: "The atmosphere is a chaotic system. [...] We have limits of the predictability. For climate, people are still starting to understand that we can't predict exactly what is going to happen." Or when. But the big picture is still one in which summer ice is gone from the Arctic and in which the deep blue of the unfrozen sea absorbs more heat from the sun, thus making its waters even warmer, which affects the climate everywhere.
Even though she has written skeptically about geoengineering, Parkinson, now reaching the end of her scientific career, continues to be at least somewhat optimistic that humankind will get its act together and make changes necessary to ameliorate climate change:
"To turn it around is not going to be easy," she said. "I'm not sure that the Arctic is doomed. I think it's still possible that the Arctic sea ice has a chance of rebounding a bit."
While many of us, scientists and laypersons alike, view such optimism as wishful thinking, we can hold onto a bit of hope that maybe she will turn out to be as right now as she was 38 years ago.