Summer 2010
Interview
No Problem Is Too Big for This Scholar
Edward Miles is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UCS board of directors. A native of Trinidad, Ed received his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Denver in 1965. A year earlier, he was invited to join a project on the state of the ocean, and has been working on ocean issues ever since. This spring, he stepped down from his post as Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Marine Studies and Public Affairs at the University of Washington to focus on ocean acidification, a direct consequence of global warming. He spoke with UCS Media Director Elliott Negin in April.
What prompted your passion for protecting the ocean?
I come from a seafaring family, and when I was growing up I spent a lot of time swimming and bodysurfing. I also became interested in astronomy and space technology at a young age—before Sputnik [the first orbiting satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957]. I’m interested in both the ocean and space for the same reason: how we make laws for the global commons. The two biggest global commons are the ocean and space.
| In this issue of Catalyst:
> The Weight of the Evidence |
You helped negotiate the 1982 Law of the Sea treaty, which governs marine resources, and you consider it a model for an international climate agreement. Why has that treaty succeeded while the Kyoto Protocol has faced such strong resistance?
Fossil fuels permeate everything we do. The inertia that generates is massive. We have to “decarbonize” the economy, and fast. Such rapid change threatens a lot of people, and they fight against it.
Climate change is so massively difficult to comprehend that it will require a catastrophe to force a shift in attitude. [Hurricane] Katrina, for example, is consistent with what we are talking about—whether or not it was connected to climate change. We need a common enemy threatening human civilization.
No matter how quickly we can grasp the mitigation problem we are already committed to a fair bit of climate change globally, and some countries will suffer more than others. We need to figure out what the future climate will look like and what the major vulnerabilities will be so we can effectively build capacity to deal with the changes we’re going to face.
You started a regional climate service in the Pacific Northwest in 1995. In February the Obama administration proposed a new national climate service to predict the impact of global warming. This is something you have been advocating for some time.
I was fed up with all the talk and no action at the federal level, so I wrote a paper in 2006 calling for a fully integrated service cutting across agencies, with NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] taking the lead. We need massive investment in our observational capability. There is good science, but we are limited by a lack of observational data over long-enough time scales. We need significant model development and a well-funded effort to take what we have learned from NOAA’s regional assessment programs.
Your life’s work has been focused on bridging the gap between science and policy. How do you think UCS is doing in that arena?
UCS has people who know how to do that very well. I was always concerned about nuclear proliferation, and I first noted the leadership and courage of UCS in pursuing the nuclear issue [in the early 1970s]. The second thing that made me a loyal supporter is the stand UCS took on scientific integrity even before it exposed the abuses of the [George W.] Bush administration. The Bush administration went to an extreme that hadn’t happened before, but it has been a constant theme. So it was an easy decision to join the UCS board. In a way, you had me at hello!
