, 

+ 

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 ManhatJIM 

DWYER 

tan. He stands about 6 feet 4 

inches, atop metal legs that 

replaced the ones he lost 

two decades ago, when he 

our made it his job to hound ele- Nt: YORK phant poachers in Kenya 

and the plane he was flying 

crashed under murky circumstances. 

He is 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, of skeletons and skulls that had 

, rested in the ground for millions of 

years, have shaped the modern understanding of human evolution. 

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 built over 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 paleoanthropologists,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 stewardship of the climate,'' 

Mr. Leakey said. Some have taken comfort from evidence that the climate has 

changed drastically before, he noted, 

but that misses the point of the revelations of fossil evidence. 

"Go to the geologic record and say, oh 

yes-five mass extinctions before," Mr. 

Leakey said. "If this is 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 happened 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 of anthropology at Stony 

Brook University, saw 

sedim entary rode and 

thought it might contain 

fossils. H e began an expedition that unearthed 

the remains of multiple 

human ancestors, and 

he says this evidence of 

the past can tell a lot 

about the future. 

Ul.l SElf FOR n1g NFW YORK TIMES 

wanted no part of a life hunting for fossils. He 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 over Thrkana 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 fossils that exist only as 

fractions of the original creature, Mr. 

Leakey offered an analogy. Imagine a 

full set of dishes, salad plates and meat 

plates and fish-course plates. Then picture them all being smashed into pieces, 

and trying to identify what the bits 

looked like before they were broken. 

"You have knowledge of what they 

look like intact," Mr. Leakey said. 

"There is no way you could stick a piece 

of a Wedgewood fruit bowl onto a modern 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 not enough 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 

what you do with bones." 

Having spotted Thrkana as a likely 

target and set in motion the harvesting 

of its fossil 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 help from the musician Paul 

Simon, who gave a benefit performance, 

and from Rich Gel fond, the chief executive of Ima.x, he has raised about $2 million on this swing through New Yorl<. 

As for Chelsea Piers, a study done for 

the city iO 2009 estimated that water 

levels in the region would rise from 1 to 

12 inches by 2050. The piers will be able 

to hold a few decades more of dinners 

and hockey practices, as long as it doesn'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, 111 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 her joy 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. Walterebmeyer@comcast.net. 484-380-2222.