Four well-known figures in science and the humanities were to speak at a public forum Jan. 17 at Columbia to discuss earth's capacity to support human life. They are art historian Simon Schama, population biologist Joel E. Cohen and geologists Wallace Broecker and Paul Olsen.
Admission is free.
The broadly inclusive discussion will range from scientific appraisals by Broecker of the planet's supply of carbon dioxide and its effects on global warming to insights by Schama on the elements of landscape and their relationship to human attitudes and history. Both are faculty members, Broecker the Newberry Professor of Geological Sciences and Schama the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of History. Schama, who recently became art critic of The New Yorker magazine, is the author of Landscape and Memory , published this year by Knopf. Paul Olsen, also a Columbia geologist and a renowned scientist of earth's long-term fossil record, will discuss how feedbacks between climate and life forms seem to be making earth's climate more stable and so more hospitable to life. He is the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Geological Sciences at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where Broecker is also based.