The Heat's On
U of U Rosenblatt Prize winner David Chapman says the science is clear:
Global warming is here, and it's time to take action.
by Lee J. Siegel
As a geophysicist who measures how heat flows within the Earth, Dave
Chapman says global warming is real, is caused by carbon dioxide emissions
from society’s burning of fossil fuels, and has dire consequences.
He advocates conserving energy and living a lifestyle less oriented
to mass consumption. Yet he is not sure that even those measures will
stop global warming from disrupting crop production, flooding coastal
areas, and perhaps triggering water wars.
“But not to do anything … ,” his voice trails off.
“I’m not willing to say the problem is too big for an individual.”
So Chapman, 64, dean of the University of Utah’s Graduate School,
tries to live how he talks.
 “Dave’s
home conservation movement—complete with push lawnmower, low-tech
dryer (a clothesline), vegetable garden, and ancient Peugeot bicycle—are
all but legendary,” says U paleontologist Scott Sampson, assistant
professor of geology and geophysics.
Chapman has never bought a parking permit during his 30 years at the
University. He bicycles the four-mile roundtrip daily, except when snow
forces him to walk or take the bus. And 20 times a year, he lectures
to community, industry, and academic groups, among others, about how
and why Earth is entering into hotter times.
“His efforts to raise awareness about the reality and perils
of global warming have been truly stellar,” Sampson says. “He
is one of those rare, passionate, overachieving, multitasking, and simply
wonderful individuals able to excel simultaneously in teaching, research,
and administration. And these accomplishments are almost always accompanied
by a ready smile and ever-polite manners.”
Chapman’s skill in administration, research, and instruction
made him this year’s recipient of the $40,000 Rosenblatt Prize,
the University’s highest honor, recognizing excellence in those
three domains.
Chapman is known for urging students to learn by doing. He says he
was inspired by his own college experiences, including a memorize-the-facts
geology course “taught by a fossil” and, on the other hand,
a physics professor who ordered him to read a textbook, then soon yanked
it away, declaring, “Enough textbook for you. Let’s get
to work.”
Chapman says his laboratory is a nurturing environment “where
good ideas and students are given the freedom to grow.”
Todd Ehlers MS’96 MS’97 PhD’01, now a University
of Michigan geophysicist, remembers how nurturing Chapman was when Ehlers
visited Utah before deciding to attend grad school at the U.
“Dave was kind enough to drive me to the airport, and his parting
words were, ‘The chemistry is right between us. You should come
here and work with me,’” Ehlers recalls. “I was completely
floored by this statement, because no one had ever said this to me before,
not even my girlfriend.”
Chapman also is known for innovative administration, sometimes getting
struck with lightning bolts of inspiration in restaurants, bars, and
airline flights, where he has scribbled outlines for entire courses
and programs on the back of a napkin or envelope. As an organizer for
an annual geophysics convention, he faced poor attendance at poster
sessions, where studies are presented on bulletin boards. Chapman’s
highly effective solution was “to give out free beer, right in
the middle of the poster sessions,” recalls U geochemist Thure
Cerling.
Chapman’s proudest administrative accomplishments include helping
secure health insurance for graduate students; training international
students on how to improve their teaching skills; opening an office
to help postdocs with visas, employment contracts, and other matters;
devising a program that sends science graduate students into public
schools; and starting a master’s program in science and technology.
The global heat engine is overheating, and Chapman
has little patience for politicians who doubt global warming is real
and caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
David S. Chapman was born Aug. 31, 1942, in Comox, British Columbia,
and grew up in Union Bay, a small town on the east side of Vancouver
Island. The third of five children, he attended a four-room school and
lived in a big house on the Strait of Georgia, which separates Vancouver
Island from the mainland, until his family moved 10 miles north to Courtenay
when he was in seventh grade.
His father worked as a carpenter for a coal-shipping port, and was
a “prairie socialist” who battled coal companies, took his
kids to political rallies, and advocated social justice and world government.
His father and mother had sixth- and ninth-grade educations, respectively,
yet “they were extraordinarily well-read, political, civilized
individuals,” Chapman says. “We grew up in a house of books
and stories and plans for us kids doing things. It was a family governed
more by expectations than rules.”
Chapman recalls an idyllic youth filled with long days of playing
baseball, swimming, flying kites, damming ditches, and flattening nails
on railroad tracks. His interest in science awakened in 1957, when the
Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.
He went on to attend the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,
where he received a bachelor’s degree in physics and math (1964)
and a master’s in physics (1966). He also married Inga, a schoolteacher.
The couple then joined the Canadian version of the Peace Corps and
moved to Zambia to teach. Chapman taught three years at Canisius College,
a rural Jesuit secondary school, and then taught physics for three years
at the University of Zambia.
The Chapmans’ two daughters (both now medical doctors) were
born in Africa. Their son (a 2006 doctoral graduate in creative writing
at the U) was born later in Ann Arbor, where Chapman earned his Ph.D.
in geophysics from the University of Michigan in 1976. He worked with
noted Michigan geophysicist Henry Pollack, studying heat flow from East
Africa’s Great Rift, where Africa is splitting apart.
Pollack recalls learning how Chapman’s Zambian students became
movers and shakers in the newly independent nation. Once, when Chapman
entered Zambia with Pollack’s geophysical equipment, a customs
officer insisted he post a $10,000 bond. Chapman asked for a supervisor.
“The customs officer got a snarl on his face and took Dave up
to the director of customs,” Pollack recalls. “Dave was
ushered in and the director said, ‘Mr. Chapman! What are you doing
here?’ It was another of his students. They rose to high positions
quickly. Needless to say, we didn’t post an import bond.”
Chapman taught briefly at Michigan’s Dearborn campus, and then
moved to the University of Utah in 1976 to start a research group in
thermal physics.
“Heat is the biggest energy source in the Earth that drives
plate tectonics,” the slow drift of Earth’s crustal plates,
he says. “The Earth is a heat engine. Volcanoes are the tailpipe,
and earthquakes are the rattling of the engine.”
Chapman has studied heat flow’s role in faulting and earthquakes,
mountain-building, volcanism, Earth’s evolution, geothermal power,
movement of polluted groundwater, and when and where oil and gas are
“cooked” underground.
Chapman, Pollack, and others pioneered a method of measuring temperatures
at various depths in old wells and other boreholes to recover the underground
“memory” of temperatures on the surface during recent centuries.
Weather at Earth’s surface sends “thermal waves”
underground, warming or cooling subterranean rock. Geophysicists lower
sensors into boreholes, measuring temperatures at deeper and deeper
intervals. Then they subtract out the effect of heat rising from inside
the Earth. The resulting pattern of underground temperatures can be
used to calculate how surface temperatures have changed over time.
"The fastest, easiest thing is to conserve energy,
particularly fossil fuels, by switching to solar, wind, geothermal,
hydro, and nuclear," says Chapman.
In a key study published in 2001, Chapman and his colleagues looked
at weather station temperature records since the 1860s and data they
and other scientists had collected from 439 boreholes throughout the
Northern Hemisphere, including Utah, the Great Plains, Canada, central
Europe, Russia, and China. The weather station records for the past
140 years confirmed the accuracy of the borehole measurements.
The 2001 Chapman study and similar studies by Pollack and others indicate
2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming in the last 250 years since the
advent of the Industrial Revolution, when a sharp increase in the burning
of coal—and later oil and other fossil fuels—led to greater
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that warms the
climate by trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Chapman says the
change is most notable in the last four or five decades, and with the
planet’s rapidly increasing population and consumption habits,
he and other researchers predict another 5-degree-Fahrenheit increase
by 2100.
The global heat engine is overheating, and Chapman has little patience
for politicians who doubt global warming is real and caused by carbon
dioxide emissions.
“The overwhelming body of science shows the current episode of
warming is clearly beyond natural variations,” he says. “It
saddens me that our current administration is not showing any leadership
on this issue, in contrast to some local mayors and governors.”
Chapman believes global warming will disrupt agriculture and raise
sea levels, spelling disaster for Florida and other low-lying areas,
and also may bring more hurricanes, heat waves, and droughts.
That, he says, “could cause population shifts and create a more
anxious, unsettled world. If global warming affects water production
and supply, that could lead to wars.”
To reduce global warming, Chapman says, “the fastest, easiest
thing is to conserve energy, particularly fossil fuels, by switching
to solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear. The nuclear waste can
be isolated geologically. The danger of global warming and its consequences
in the next 100 years is greater than the danger of storing radioactive
waste underground.
“If we all bought less, consumed less, and used less energy,
in response to global warming,” he says, “then it might
prompt us to be more sustainable globally.” He acknowledges that
is difficult “in a society based on our buying more, consuming
more.”
But Chapman is unwilling to do nothing. So he continues to spread the
word: “The science is quite certain and conclusive on warming.
It is a major environmental problem, and it is going to require action
to solve the problem.”
—Lee J. Siegel is a science writer for University of Utah
Public Relations
Listen
to a podcast of Professor David Chapman discussing the Science of Global
Warming
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