John Bullard sails in on Cramer

The Cramer, crewed by students, sailed back out on Thursday morning, bound for Woods Hole, Mass. Bullard stayed behind. That night, he gathered a crowd of people together in the Lunenburg fire hall – including Lunenburg Mayor Lawrence Mawhinney – to talk to them about something important to him.

John Bullard’s classmate at one time was Al Gore, a few years ago within a whisker of being the president of the United States. When Gore was vice president and Bill Clinton the president, Bullard was a part of that government. Today he shares Gore’s passion for waking people up to the fact that the climate of our planet is changing, and changing fast.

Thursday was Lunenburg’s 254th birthday, and it was Bullard’s opinion that given the attitude of people on the South Shore, the town would be around to see its 300th. Bullard liked the fact that both Lunenburg and nearby Mahone Bay own their own electrical utility systems, and that a friendly competition seems to be developing between the two towns to see which can have the most environmentally-friendly power.

He is developing a warm relationship with Lunenburg. There were broad hints by the mayor that Bullard was planning on establishing a residence there. But as he told the audience, changes going on with the earth’s climate would affect Lunenburg, just as Hurricane Juan affected Halifax.

Bullard is the president of the Sea Education Association, which has its campus in Woods Hole. The school takes university students and others and teaches them about the oceans, with six weeks on campus and six weeks at sea, on tall ships, doing research. He was mayor of New Bedford from 1986-1992, and served in the Clinton administration as head of the federal Office of Sustainable Development.

On Thursday night, he asked himself the question what was he doing in Lunenburg, and answered it by saying that he had two motives, the first being his two grandchildren, Madeline and Wyeth, who will be affected by what he does. The second was professional, as he has a responsibility to teach students. In that context, he always asks his students to find out what is going on in a situation, and then to ask themselves what they can do about it.

Bullard says his bias is around action. He believes that it is not enough for people to have information – it is required that they act on it. As a consequence, one of the things he does is work for Al Gore, spreading the kind of word Gore does in his Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. That film was given an encore screening at the town’s Pearl Theatre on Saturday night, part of the birthday celebrations.

The charts and figures he put before the gathering were shocking. In the last few years of the 200,000 years humans have been on the planet, average temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations have shot up. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred from 1998 on. The hottest winter in history was the one we are just leaving behind.

He talked about how rapidly the ice in the polar regions and in glaciers is melting, showing before and after photographs of glaciers and mountain ice caps that have disappeared. He said 40 per cent of the world’s people get their water from the Himalayan watershed, and that by 2035 90 per cent of the glaciers that feed that watershed will be gone. The implications are staggering.

He talked about the Gulf Stream, which warms Nova Scotia, England and Europe. Research by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute shows that melting ice in the Arctic and Greenland could divert the Gulf Stream, which would have enormous effects along the South Shore. He noted the Arctic ice cap is melting 30 years ahead of predictions, and that the rate of climate change everywhere is accelerating.

Bullard showed how the warming of the atmosphere and oceans is intensifying the effects of hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and rain storms, even as the moisture content in the soil in large parts of the world is lessening, which has grave implications for the idea that biofuels can help to replace our dependence on oil.

He talked about the kinds of things we can do, and need to do, as individuals. More about that next time.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppar@ca.inter.net