“The future is, if not wide open, at least half open.”

This is how journalist Elizabeth Kolbert assessed the future of global warming in Finney Chapel Wednesday night as part of Oberlin’s Convocation series. She said, “We don’t have to continue down that path [of global climate change].”

The tone that imbued her lecture evoked uncertainty; the only sure fact was that the process of climate change is in motion and will continue in the same vein for at least a generation longer.

Kolbert opened her talk with a description of the time she spent on a desolate ice sheet in the middle of Greenland with a team of Danish scientists. They were drilling two miles down into the ice to gather clues about the temperature and atmospheric makeup that existed ten thousand years ago.

The analysis of these samples showed that temperature and CO2 levels have shot up to unprecedented heights in the past three hundred years.

The lecture was rife with sobering data, not the least of which was that the five hottest years on record have all been in the last seven years. To put global warming in layman’s terms, Kolbert said, “The earth is radiating out less energy than it is receiving.”

Much of Kolbert’s talk revolved around the fact that global warming is a gradual process, so the damage from current CO2 emissions will not be felt for several decades.

 “The warming we are seeing now is not the warming we have caused — not even close,” she said. “Global warming is always farther along than experience indicates.”

Kolbert also emphasized that global warming is a self-reinforcing process.

“You find that, historically, temperature changes have tended to precede changes in CO2 level,” she explained. “So temperatures would begin to creep up and then CO2 levels followed, pushing temperatures up higher.”

Kolbert offered an illustrative small-scale example of this phenomenon. She recently visited a village in Alaska where residents could still remember when a protective layer of sea ice kept the winter storms at bay. Now that the ice forms later in the season, the village is not only being battered by waves, but the situation is also aggravated as reflective sea ice is replaced by absorbent seawater and the ocean’s temperature rises still further.

Kolbert anticipated the arguments of opponents of global warming theory and said that while there is much that is not known about climate change, the majority of the international scientific community agrees that if the human race doesn’t act soon, it very well may be too late.

“Of course there is uncertainty about global warming,” Kolbert said. “[But] uncertainty can always cut both ways.”

She illustrated this point with the analogy of a car speeding towards a cliff: The distance to the cliff is uncertain, but that doesn’t mean the driver should speed ahead blindly.

Again referring to the data provided by the Greenland core samples, Kolbert underscored the message that climate change is not just a “disaster that threatens all life on earth or even our species,” but rather a process that could affect our ability to maintain highly organized societies; Civilization only appeared after the earth’s temperature reached relative stability around the time of the agricultural revolution. Climate change of the kind anticipated to occur by the middle of this century could, she said, send us “back to the Pleistocene.”

She concluded by bringing it back to her audience.

“If everyone in this country cut his or her energy consumption by ten percent, that would make a difference,” said Kolbert. “Everything should be looked at and everything should be pursued. Someone just has to do it.”

Coverage of a rebuttal to Kolbert’s statements from lecturer and climatologist Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the Cato institute and professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, sponsored by the College Republicans, is to come.