# ,

+ 

# A Warning On Climate



# In Fossils From Africa

Called from his seat to speak, Richard Leakey rose and seemed to keep going up, until he towered above a crowd gathered Monday evening for a swanky fund-raiser at Chelsea Piers in Manhat

# JIM DWYER tan

. He stands about 

### 6 feet 

### 4 inches, atop metal l egs that replaced the ones he lost two decades ago, when he 

## our made it hisjob to hound ele- 

# Nt: YORK phant poachers in Kenya and the plane he was flying crashed under murky circumstances. He i s 

### 67 now, and his face shows years under the African sun, as a boy who dug with his parents for the fossilized remnants of human ancestors, as a conservationist and as a political reformer and raconteur.

He has fractured his skull falling from a horse, had a wooden expedition boat destroyed by crocodiles, been whipped by political opponents in Kenya, and lost his kidneys to d!5ease and patches of skin to cancer. Discoveries by his parents, and later by him and his associates, ofskeletons and skulls that had

, rested in t h e ground for millions of years, have shaped the modern understanding of human evol ution.

Having read the past, 

### Mr. Leakey offered a few blunt words Monday about a future that would be warmer and wetter.

"I was wondering," he said from the podium, in a dining room builtover the Hudson, "how many dinners you 

### will be able to have at Pier 60 before it went underwater." 

### E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com Twitter: @ jimdwyemyt Mr. Leakey, a tenured professor at the State University at Stony Brook, spends most of the year in Africa, where he has been building the Thrkana Basin Institute in eastern Kenya

In conversation, he said the discoveries of origin hunters, or paleoanthropol
ogists,like his wife, Meave , and his parents Louis and Mary Leakey, offered profound lessons for modern human life.

"The link between the past and the future, as seen in the present, is fundamental to stewardshi p of the climate,'' Mr

. Leakey said. Some have taken comfort from evidence that the climate has changed drastically before, he noted , butthat misses the point ofthe revelations of fossil evidence

.

"Go to the geologic record and say, oh yes- five mass extinctions before," Mr. Leakey said. 

### " If thi s i s to be the sixth , there' s going to be a disaster. You've got five previous examples. It doesn ' t matter to say, oh, it's hap pened before

. Indeed it has. We can read it. That makes you twice as scared."



### Mr. Leakey, whose parents famously excavated Olduvai Gorge , originally



# ' Years ago, while flying over eastern Kenya, Richard Leakey, a tenured professor ofanthropology at Stony Brook University, saw sedi m entary rode and thought it might contain fossils. H e began an expedition that unearthed the remains of multiple human ancestors, and h e says this evidence of the past can tell 

### a lot about the future.

Ul.l SElf F OR n1 g NFW YOR K TIM ES wanted no part ofa life hunting for fossils. H e left school at 

### 16 and set up a business collecting specimen skeletons. Several years later , while he was traveling to Nairobi from Ethiopia, his llight had to change course because of weather and took him overThrkana Lake in eastern Kenya He noticed sedimentary rock and speculated that it might hold the remains of ancient human ancestry. He managed to convince National Geographic to give him a small grant for an expedition. Since then, hundreds of bones and fragments found there have revealed that humans had multiple ancestors.

To understand how so much could be deduced from fossil s that exist only as fractions of the original creature, Mr. Leakey offered an analogy. Imagine a full set ofdishes, salad plates and meat plates and fish
-course plates. Then pic
ture them all being smashed into pieces, and trying to identify what the bits looked like before they we re broken

.

"You have knowledge ofwhat th ey look like intact," 

### Mr. L eakey said.
" There is no way you could stick a piece ofa Wedgewood fruit bowl onto a m od
ern plastic thing

. " Then you have the rim of a piece, and from the curvature, you know this is a main
-course plate, but the curvature is notenough to teU me if it had fish on it or if it was used for serving meat. Then you find another piece, and , aha, this connects with that, and it was a fish plate, as opposed to a meat plate. That's whatyou do with bones."

Having spotted Thrkana as a likely target and set in motion the harvesting of its fos sil riches, Mr. Leakey moved on to other public lives. Most recently , he has raised money for an institute that will be a base for exploration of the region

. With hel p from the musician Paul Simon, who gave a benefit performance, and from Rich Gelfond , the chief executive of Ima.x, he has raised about $2 million on this swing through NewYorl<.

As for Chel sea Piers, a study done for the city 

# iO 2009 estimated thatwater levels in the region would rise from 

### 1 to 12 inches by 2050

. The piers will be able to hold a few decades mor e ofdinners and hockey practices, as long as itdoesn't rairl too hard. 

# '

# This is an article from yesterday's New York Times about Richard Leakey, famed anthropologist and son of famed anthropologists. He

was asked to speak at a fund raiser on Chelsea Piers, a dining room over the Hudson River in Manhattan. He said, 11 

# 1 was wondering how many dinners you will be able to have at Pier 60 before it went underwater."
Dr. Leakey and virtually all the tenured science professors in the world know about global warming and know what causes it: green house gasses, among which the greatest are water vapor and carbon dioxide. Yet during the news yesterday morning we were subjected to a visually elaborate ad for Americaspower

.org, a clan of fossil fuel producers and burners who are devoted to convincing the American people that there is such a thing as clean coal, and that continuing to burn coal, oil, and gas will somehow be good for us
. Virtually every night during the network news we see another ad featuring an attractive young woman sharing herjoy that energy need
not be a problem- that we only have to dig up more fossil fuels and

# burn them and all our problems will be solved. She even uses the phrase /(no question!"
I am seventy-seven years old and I have six grandchildren- seven years,

seven years, four years, four years, 17 months, and 3 months old

. I would bet that they could correctly answer this question: Should we believe the people who excavate and burn fossil fuels for vast profits,

or should we believe a tenured science professor at Stony Brook University? I'm quite sure a majority of them would get it right.
When we talk about carbon dioxide I worry about my grandchildren's future- about breathing problems, glacier melt, sea level rise, and

ocean acidification. I also worry about men and woman in our world who spend gobs of money spreading lies about /(clean coal " and the "no question" benefits of oil and natural gas. Who are these people? Do they look in the mirror in the morning? What do they see?
Walter Ebmeyer, 900 Montgomery Avenue, APT 502, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010

. Wa lterebmeyer@comcast.net

. 484-380-2222.