Virginia H. Dale

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Virginia H. Dale had a front row seat to last year’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning work on global climate change. As a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, her work was instrumental in the IPCC and former-Vice President Al Gore’s award for their efforts in expanding information about the problem and possible remedies. Dale has a doctoral degree in mathematical ecology from the University of Washington. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee.

What sort of work did you contribute to IPCC for the Nobel Prize?
Well, the Intergovernmental Panel has been working for years; the report that came out recently was a Fourth Assessment. It’s always a highly collaborative effort. The topics are divided up and given to different experts over the years. There are hundreds of scientists involved, and different people are involved in different ways. The scientists who organize the reports rely largely on previously published assessments. Part of the scientific process is to test your work through publication. When a paper is submitted to a journal, it’s given two or three reviews. Papers are almost never accepted the first time. Then the original scientist has to make the revisions and then [the paper] is reviewed again and maybe given back to the scientist for more revisions. It’s a very detailed process for getting your work to published literature, and the IPCC report referred largely to existing literature. I was contacted to serve as a reviewer for the IPCC work.

How did you come onto IPCC’s radar for that job?
From my prior publications. Like I said, publication is a big part of the scientific process. I’ve published work on the effect climate change has on forests.

How long have you been involved in the IPCC review process?
I don’t know that I’ve kept all my correspondences with them, but, for instance, I have an e-mail here that was from them in July 2005 about the fourth assessment. Then I got another e-mail in September of 2005 when I was given a draft, and in July of 2007, there was another version of the draft.

As it’s produced, they send it to a large body of scientists, and we all give comments. The part I’m involved with, you are given access to the draft as a whole if you want to read it, but most people focus on particular chapters based upon their areas of expertise. It is all confidential until it’s released; they give us Web sites and passwords. They don’t want it seen before revisions because scientists really are highly responsive to the comments we make. The drafts go out to a broad variety of scientific experts in the area.

What is your particular area of expertise?
I’m an environmental scientist focusing on terrestrial ecology. I look at forests and trees, how they grow and how they respond to different disturbances.

How grave of a threat is climate change to those systems?
You said “grave threat,” but I don’t think of it that way. The science of ecology is about change. Change is very ongoing and natural. What is different with the climate changes occurring now is that there are increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

There is strong, strong evidence that the changes in climate are caused by human activity like the burning of fossil fuels. The changes in temperature and precipitation that are observed recently are happening at a faster rate than has ever been observed. The temperature is changing faster than it
ever has before.

The kind of work I do is largely modeling. I use computer models to understand how disturbances affect trees. These models make projections into the future. Models suggest that with temperature warming and changes in precipitation there are likely to be changes in biomass and some changes in species. Some species are more adaptable to climate changes than others.

Are you looking at this regionally 
or globally?
Researchers at ORNL do both. Some do global models and look at the entire Earth, and all forest systems and all vegetation systems that exist. Mine is more regional in focus. Some of that has been in Tennessee, but I can’t talk about some papers I currently have in review until they come back. It’s all part of the scientific process.

What kind of time frame are we looking at before the impact of climate change 
is obvious?
The changes that are being made are projected into the future by climate models. That is how we work. I take information from climate models and input them into the computer system. I do it out to 2030 and then out to 2080. What we do is linearly extrapolate. So I’ll start at 1980, go to 2030 and then 2080. We run models year by year. Climatologists are also looking at temperature changes and precipitation changes.

What other research is being done at ORNL in these topics?
Oh, wow, there are tons of things. Another big area right now is bioenergy. What we are doing at the ORNL Department of Energy, along with several excellent UT scientists, is looking at on-the-ground implementations of other kinds of bioenergy feedstocks [such as agricultural, forestry and municipal residue and herbaceous, oil and short-rotation woody crops], as well as modeling what the impacts of that bio-energy would be.

What is the biggest thing individuals can do to help reverse climate changes?
As for reversing the effects, that’s not really possible. For the future, one big thing is to think about our energy use and conserve energy. Think about using alternative sources rather than fossil fuels.