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cc >> We have two goals for our time together this afternoon. First, I want to offer a bit of a reflection on the nature of science, the nature and beauty of science, and then, secondly, illustrate this point in a very big way with three talks from leading researchers here on campus. I'll introduce them as they come up to speak to you, and we'll save our time for questions into one big chunk at the end of all three talks. Now, linking these talks is carbon pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, and lakes that's occurring because of human combustion of fossil fuels. This is at the root of global warming, a story we all know the rough outlines of I would say, but I think you will hear some fascinating nuances of the dominate story of our changing climate. We're purposely directing your attention toward some effects beyond just simply increasing air temperatures. But first, I'd like to offer a thought or two on the nature of science. Science educators in recent decades have come to appreciate that it's very important to teach not just scientific knowledge but also about the very nature of science in order for students to appreciate the ways in which science is important, useful, and beautiful. Now, like many of you, I was taught a rather rigid step by step process by which science is properly done. But a bit of experience in actual practice revealed to me this isn't how it worked most of the time. And now the teaching of the nature of science emphasizes the diversity of ways by which scientific understanding comes to be. In practice, there's a messy process of making our own observations, trying to reconcile those with others, forming tentative understandings, bouncing these off other scientists, revising initial ideas, all quite messy business and, importantly, very social business. Now, maybe it would sit better with some if the process of science was linear, step by step recipe, formerly taught as the scientific method. But the world is too complex for that, and as humans we are imperfect observers. So scientific understanding evolves slowly with missteps along the way and some confused ideas only eliminated one funeral at a time, as a famous physicist once quipped. Well, you know the story about the farm youth who decided to build his or her strength every day by lifting up a newborn calf. This is the obligatory dairy cow reference in a Wisconsin program. Scientific understanding about a topic is a bit like this calf. It gains weight through time, has new observations, and experiments are reported. Periods of weight loss can occur during illness. In the case of science, some flaw or misunderstanding of earlier results that took some time to come to light. But at some point, the evidence for a scientific idea becomes just too great to ignore, just as the calf becomes too big for the human to lift. Our scientific understanding of what human carbon pollution means for Earth and its inhabitants is like this. A great weight of accumulated evidence, too much to ignore or misidentify. Incomplete and still growing, but there's no mistaking this bovine for a tractor, to round out the agricultural reference. But beyond the sheer mass of evidence is the diversity within that evidence. That is, our rich and growing understanding of the human impacts of carbon pollution on Earth comes from multiple lines of evidence arising from quite diverse observations. So these diverse lines of inquiry are all linked and converge at the same point. The carbon pollution is following well established laws of physics, chemistry, and biology with diverse and profound impacts. And this diversity, like the many instruments in an orchestra, contributes great beauty too. This convergence of multiple lines of evidence is one of the ways that science can send a shiver of excitement up the spine. When science reveals a number of phenomena to be linked, it adds weight to each individual explanation and certainly about our understanding of the root causes. So let's see examples of this convergence of understanding of carbon pollution. In what ways is carbon pollution being manifested? We understand it now. Our first speaker is Galen McKinley. She's a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. She's a leading researcher on the topic that she's going to present on today. That is, how the extra carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere is actually changing the oceans and, increasingly, even our lakes. Galen.

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>> Thank you, Bill, for the kind introduction. I want to talk today about a topic called ocean acidification, which to some is known as the other CO2 problem. So, to begin with, it bears reminding in this session, the data we have, the temperature of the planet from the IPCC's most recent report. Shown here are the observed change in the average surface temperature over 1901 to 2012 where we see really warming everywhere where data is available. With perhaps an exception here over the ocean, which is interesting but not the topic for today. But if we make an average of this all globally from 1850 to 2012, we clearly see a positive trend in the temperature, and if we average over every decade, so taking 10-year chunks, we see that each of the last three decades as been clearly and statistically significantly warmer than the one before. So there's no doubt that the planet as a whole is warming, and that this is due to the fact that we're putting a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere largely by the burning of fossil fuels which feeds the energy that we all use to have the lifestyles that we live. And the reason that CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the planet is because it lowers the radiation of heat from the Earth back out to space. So energy comes in in solar radiation, hits the surface of the planet, and when it is reradiated back as heat back out towards space, a good part of that is absorbed in the atmosphere and returned back to the planet. That makes, actually, the natural part of that makes the planet liveable and at a temperature that water is liquid and that life can be sustained, but the more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, the more of that heat is returned. And that is the enhanced greenhouse effect that is causing the increased temperatures. And that is a well known, undisputed fact. There's no uncertainty in the greenhouse effect or its ability to change the temperature of the planet. But there's another effect of carbon in the climate system. The same increasing CO2 is also driving more carbon into the water of our oceans and, as I will talk about, we believe, into our lakes. The Great Lakes is the example I'll use later. So the chemistry of carbon and water, carbon joins with water, makes carbonic acid, and separates into a bunch of different ions. The net result of putting more carbon in the water is that we have an increased H-plus or proton concentration, and this is a decrease in the pH. So this chemistry is complicated, and so we thought we would do a short experiment in here with some water to help make that clear to you that carbon and water does cause acidity to go down. And my lovely husband, who's a high school teacher at Monona Grove, is going to give you an experiment here. So he's going to put some water in a beaker there and add a dye that indicates acidity. And you'll that in the plain water... >>

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>> It's called universal indicator. You can see the color there as he stirs it. So it's kind of a blue color in the plain water. And so now he's going to add just a little bit of vinegar. Okay. And the vinegar itself, we only had red wine vinegar at home, so it does make it a little red. But you'll see that it's just slightly pale because of the color of that vinegar. And then we'll add the indicator dye again. And you can see that clearly now we have a different color here. The acid in the vinegar has changed the pH of the water, and now we have that red which indicates acidity in the water. So now the last experiment we're going to do is we're going to open a can of carbonated water, which water is carbonated with carbon dioxide. First rinse out there. And that has a lot of carbon dioxide in it. And so the question is, what's the color going to be of this water when we add that indicator dye? This water has a lot of CO2 in it. Those bubbles that are coming out are CO2 coming out of solution once we remove the pressure in the can. So it's clear, and then we'll add that indicator dye. And you can see that this water is acidic. Because of all that CO2 in the water, the water is acidic, more acidic than the original water. More like the water with the vinegar in it than like the water, just the plain water that we showed you initially. So adding carbon dioxide does increase the acidity of water, and that's what this is showing here. So what is the evidence from observations for ocean acidification? How do we know that this is actually occurring? The oceans are large, people aren't out there all that much, so what is the data? Well, one really great effort that has gone on in the global oceans is that they're, at a few sites, not too many, but at a few sites people have been very dedicated, going out on boats on approximately monthly basis to a few sites. In Bermuda, Hawaii, here near the Canary Islands, Curacao, around Iceland, and off of New Zealand. They've been taking very carefully pH measurements. Some of these observations started back in the early 1980s, actually, at Bermuda, and some of them started more recently. But all of these data, and these are done with very careful observations, people have worked hard to get the data so they're all intercomparable, but they all show that if we look at the pH indicated here, and here's just another way of looking at the pH, the anomaly of pH, all of those show a decline in the pH at these time series stations globally. So across the globe, where we have detailed monthly observations, we see that the pH of the water is going down, consistent with our understanding that putting CO2 in the atmosphere means that that CO2 goes into the water, means that the acidity increases or the pH is lower. Another way we can learn about ocean acidification and know that it is occurring is by something such as the Ship-board surveys that were done in a great global international experiment, the -- survey in the 1990s. This was going on when my husband and I were both in graduate school in oceanography. Going out on boats such as the R/V Knorr out of Woods Hole, and taking very detailed measurements. These are bottles that go down to five kilometers in the ocean and grab bits of ocean water at depth. And we can begin to map, globally, where there is carbon in the water that would be there only because of human activity. It's a bit complicated to make this calculation, but it can be done and multiple different methods agree that if we estimate where there's anthropogenic carbon in the water, carbon that's only there because of human activities, there is a significant amount in the surface oceans and that that has changed where we have corrosive lower waters. Because of the pressure of the water and the deep ocean, calcium carbonate, or chalk, is dissolved because of the pressure. Now, as we put more acid into the water, where that chalk would dissolve becomes higher in the ocean. And you can see, compared to pre-industrial, which is the dashed line, now the corrosive waters are a little bit higher in the water. Dashed line here, in the Indian Ocean the corrosive waters are just a little bit higher in the water. So we do know from these observations that anthropogenic carbon is invading the ocean and that is modifying the chemistry of the water. And we know this by hundreds of dedicated scientists going out for months on boats and working very hard to take careful observations. So this is why, and the IPCC in 2003, this was actually the first time ocean acidification was included in the IPCC reports It told us that the pH of the ocean surface waters has gone down by about.1 units since the beginning of the industrial evidence, since the industrial era. And this we have high confidence in because of all these observations. And this corresponds to a 26% increase in the hydrogen concentration, hydrogen ion concentration in the water. So here are just the plots showing those increases in carbon dioxide in the water and decline in pH at a few of the sites, the time series sites that I mentioned before. So this is now a well established fact. And if we go forward, thinking about what's going to happen if we don't mitigate our emissions of CO2, we see that under kind of a business as usual scenario where mitigation is limited, we're looking at a decline in pH in the global oceans of about.3 units or so, which is 100% increase in the hydrogen ion concentration of the surface oceans. However, we do have a choice. If we are to change our emissions, we can have a much lesser impact on the acidity of the oceans by reducing our emissions and reducing that decline. So, what are the impacts of ocean acidification? Well, we know that there are many organisms in the ocean that make their hard parts, their shells or their skeletons, out of calcium carbonate, which is essentially the same thing that's in chalk for a blackboard. And so we know that the coral reefs make a lot of their hard parts out of calcium carbonate. So do oysters and other pelagic organisms that are often the base of a food web for whales and fish. And this is just one example of these marine snails, which are quite common in the southern ocean and are an important food source for large whales, that if we put those terapods into high CO2 water, and these are different magnifications of the edge here, for example, of this terapod bit that's been in this high CO2 water, we see that the terapod begins to dissolve. And if we compare that, for example, to the normal terapod that hasn't been in that high CO2 water, we see a clear difference in the edges of its hard parts, indicating that this organism is dissolving because there's CO2 in the water because the pH is lower. Now, as Bill mentioned, the science on ocean acidification and its impacts is less clear than the fact that ocean acidification is occurring because biology is wonderfully complicated. If we look at the issue of calcification, how much an organism can make those hard parts, and we say, what's the response to increasing CO2? Many of them show negative responses but a few of them even show a positive response to increasing CO2. Why would that be? We don't totally understand that. If we look at photosynthesis, this has been looked at less, but these few organisms have shown actually a neutral or positive response of photosynthesis to more CO2 in the water. So, why would that be? And so we are still in a process of beginning to try to work out what really are the impacts on an organismal level of this increasing acidity of the oceans. And it's a difficult business to be in. And ultimately what we would really like to understand is what are the ecosystem wide impacts? What are the impacts to the large fish and to the whales? How is this going to affect the whole ecosystems of the oceans? Is it going to promote the turning of the oceans into a jellyfish soup? Or are, for example, the fish just going to be able to choose something else to eat, and on the whole things are going to be okay even though some organisms might be negatively impacted? And then the last point I'd like to talk about is something a little closer to home, which is the question of will ocean acidification affect the Great Lakes? This is work that I've been doing here at University of Wisconsin. So, if we look at the chemistry, the same chemistry that we looked at here in our experiment of freshwater with carbon dioxide, it's quite the same. And if we simply say that if the atmospheric CO2 is the dominate control on pH in the Great Lakes, the pH of all our lakes, all five of the Great Lakes, will be declining as we put more CO2 in the atmosphere by the very same chemistry as is happening in the open ocean or here on the lab bench. Now, do the available data reveal this trend? This is a really important question. Can we confirm that this is happening or not? Well, the first question we have to say is, how much does pH vary across the Great Lakes? And here is a compute simulation that I've done in my laboratory here just asking what the pH be of Lake Michigan on the 15th of April of 2008. It's an estimate and it indicates that we might have very large variations in the pH across Lake Michigan because of where biological productivity is happening, because of the temperature of the water, because of where upwelling of water is happening from the deeper lake, that there's a lot of variability. And on top of this, if I'd show you where the EPA takes and samples in about mid-April every year, you can see that at these locations, to some degree they cross a lot of that variability but not entirely. And this is only 11 grab samples that are taken by EPA twice per year, once in April and once in August. They're not doing this because they want to monitor for ocean acidification, they're doing it for other reasons, but this is the available data that we have. So, what do these data show? Well, these data show that there's a lot of uncertainty as to what the pH actually is, going back here to 1986 when these observations began, that because of the large uncertainty on these observations, we really aren't able to say whether there's a declining trend happening because any of the points in each of these observation points is equally likely based on that uncertainty. So we don't really know whether there's declining pH in the Great Lakes or whether there's other processes occurring in the Great Lakes, such as the invasion of the Dreissenid mussels or eutrophication that might be modifying the pH of the Great Lakes. So we don't really have the data to know this yet. And I would suggest that the data is insufficient to determine if it's happening. So what I can conclude, briefly, is that, yes, the chemistry indicates it should be happening, but the monitoring is not really sufficient at this point, and so we really need some more pH data and data of better accuracy. And that's what we hope to be able to begin collecting with some of the grants we're proposing now and in the near future. So conclusions on ocean acidification. We do know that increasing atmospheric CO2 is invading the surface ocean and is driving down the pH, and that our expectation is that by 2100 about.3 to.4 unit pH declines will occur, if emissions are not significantly mitigated and that evidence is clear for negative impacts on some organisms by the declining pH of the oceans but whole ecosystems impacts are still unclear and deserve a lot more research. Thank you for your attention.

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>> Our second speaker is Steve Vavrus. He's a senior scientist at the Center for Climatic research here on campus. It's one of the research centers in the Nelson Institute for Environmental studies. He's an authority in particular on ice and snow in the arctic, and he'll update us on current understanding of the changes underway in that region. Steve.

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>> Good afternoon. No props or assistance in my presentation. This is going to be an old fashioned PowerPoint talk. So, the Earth is faster now. Why did I pick that as the title for describing climate change in the arctic? Well, it stems from a Smithsonian compilation of interviews with Alaskan elders that was put together about 10 years ago, and in this volume, one of the quotes and interviews that resonated with me was a comment by an elder woman named Mable Tuly, born in 1912, and she described the conditions of change in the arctic as, the Earth is faster now, is how she put it. And she didn't mean literally faster, but what she was talking about was weather patterns. The weather patterns that she and the other natives in Alaska have observed, they seemed to be changing. She even says that things like people used to think that they could predict the weather patterns a few days in advance, but not anymore. The weather patterns are changing so much she thinks that the Earth is moving faster now. So a fundamental difference in what people observe in terms of the day to day weather, and ultimately the climate, in the arctic. So, what was she talking about? What are some of these expressions of change that she meant by the Earth is faster now? Well, one dramatic example is if she traveled to southeast Alaska when she was in her 20s in 1941 and looked at Muir Glacier, this is what it looked like. Very strong, healthy, solid glacier. Nowadays, this is what it looks like. Not only the obvious retreat of the glacier and the meltwater pool in front of it, but it's been retreated so long that now there's mature vegetation along the side. I know this is an iconic image. I think Al Gore even showed it. But it does really represent some of the dramatic changes that are happening in the arctic. But just to show I haven't cherry picked this as an example to prove my point, here is data from a collection of all available measurements of arctic glaciers going back about 25 years. And this is showing the mass balance. This is the difference between the snowfall coming in to thicken a glacier minus the melting and runoff during the summer that thins the glacier. So years in which you have bars above zero, the glaciers are thickening, and all the other years below zero, the glaciers at thinning. Clearly, the thinning is winning. Over the last 20 years, every year over the arctic as a whole, the glaciers have been in a negative mass balance. So they've been losing mass. And then this blue line represents the cumulative decline since the beginning of this record. So it's a very clear signal, fairly steady decline, and one of the concerns outside of the arctic about melting glaciers is that the meltwater from land that gets into the ocean makes sea level go up, and that has implications all around the world. A more visually powerful example of the loss of ice in the arctic is not glaciers, because that's a fairly slow process, but rather sea ice. So the ice that forms in the ocean surface during winter and then melts or partially melts off in the summer. And we can see that really clearly from satellite images. Starting in about the late 1970s when satellite images became very reliable in this region, records have been taken day to day, and so this is the end of the melt season in 1979. This is what the ice looked like, and it was covering the entire Arctic Ocean, basically, and the pinks and the dark pinks represent more compact near 100% concentration of ice cover. So this is the way things looked about 25 years ago, 35 years ago now. And then a big change happened. 2007, there was a really big drop in the amount of ice cover. This made international news as a symbol of arctic change. And by the end of the summer that year, this is how the ice pack looked. So a big retreat of the ice cover, no longer covering the entire Arctic Ocean but retreated toward North America. And that was the way things stood until 2012 when we set a new record. You might think that, well, maybe 2007 was just a fluke, and it wouldn't happen again. But it has. 2012, there's an even bigger loss of ice cover in the arctic. And you can see that the places where the ice remained was less concentrated, this kind of reddish color, compared to the dark pink color in 2007. So, less ice, less compact ice, and really big implications of this. One of the implications of less ice cover is that it makes marine navigation a lot more possible. So the northern sea route here across northern Eurasia became open in 2012, and to some extent 2007, whereas in 1979 you wouldn't dream of taking a boat, try to get through this ice pack. It just wouldn't be possible. So that's one example. Another one is oil and gas exploration has become possible now in recent years. And also the potential for geopolitical conflict, which is already getting the state department quite interested in the arctic. But it's not just that the ice pack is retreating. It's not converging more, but it's also thinning. And this image, also a before and after, this is from 1987 compared to 2012. It's showing the age of the ice cover. So the ice flows in the arctic for in the winter, some of them melt off in the summer, but others don't quite melt off. And then they grow the second year, and they get even thicker and then thicker. And, basically, the age of the ice is a direct indicator of how thick it is. So the dark oranges are ice flows that are at least five or six years old, and then the yellows are ice that are only one year old. And you can see that in the late '80s that there was a lot of orange. So a lot of old, thick ice existed in the arctic basin at that time, whereas by 2012, that record low year, not only was there less ice to begin with but what ice remained was much thinner, and some of this ice along the periphery was so thin that it becomes very vulnerable to melt-off. And so it's an example of how vulnerable the ice pack is nowadays. Another one of the implications of reduced ice cover that has nothing to do with marine navigation but is an ecological concern is this remarkable image of what's called a walrus haul out. This was taken just this month earlier in October on an Alaskan beach, and it made quite a news story. If you just looked at this, you might not necessarily know what you were looking at. These are all walruses. It's kind of like jellybeans in a jar. See how many walruses you can guess are in this photograph. But it is actually emblematic of a serious problem, and that is that walruses, like polar bears, rely on the sea ice for their habitat for hunting platforms. And now with the ice cover becoming farther and farther away from the coast each summer, it becomes more and more difficult for walruses to reach the ice, more stressful, and the same is true for polar bears and certain other species that depend on the ice pack. So there are ecological concerns as the ice pack retreats. Things aren't just happening in arctic seas. They're also happening on arctic land. One of the examples is the pretty dramatic loss of snow cover we've been experiencing over the last few decades up north. This is showing the hemispheric-wide snow cover extent anomalies. So zero is normal over this period. Starting in the late 1960s and going until the present year. Red years indicate above average snow cover by the end of the melt season in June, and everything in the last 10 years, consecutive, has been below normal. So this is not just a general trend downward, but one of the things scientists look at to figure out how seriously to take these trends is how consistent this is. And 10 years in a row is pretty strong. We hadn't seen anything that dramatic over the last 35-45 years of record. One of the consequences of reduced snow cover in the spring is an earlier start to vegetation. So just like here when we have an early spring, things leaf out earlier and very noticeable, and the same is true in the arctic. And we can capture this greening of the arctic through satellite images. This is called the NDVI. It's a vegetative index. It basically shows how green an area is, whether there's vegetation, whether it's leafed out, the foliage, and so on. And this is showing the trend of the vegetation index over the last 30 years. Green indicates more vegetation, brown less. And you can see that along the arctic coasts of both continents that there's a general pattern of greening, meaning that the vegetation is coming earlier. It's becoming more robust during the summer. And even though it's not a colored picture, this before and after from a shot on an arctic river valley from 1949 showing a near barren landscape to 2000 showing the emergence of shrubs in this area. And I would bet that if you took a picture in 2014, it would be even more dramatic showing the expansion of vegetation there. But it's not just dwindling snow cover and expanding vegetation that's happening on arctic land. One of the big changes that's been observed and has serious consequences is the loss of permafrost, or permanently frozen soil, in the arctic. So it's so cold there that all this area in purple represents soils that are permanently frozen, either near the surface or at depth, and they've been frozen for quite a long time, hundreds if not thousands of years in most cases, and some places it's continuous, other places it's more sporadic, but in all of this area, there's some frozen soil beneath the surface. And that soil is warming and it's thawing, and when it does that and it gets to the melting point, bad things can happen. Particularly, if you're engineering and you built on what you thought was very solid permafrost and the climate changes, things like this can happen, whether it's road building, houses tipping over. This is sort of an interesting example. It's called a drunken forest. And so we've got trees that, as the soil sinks, submerge this way and that way, and then they sort of form this odd looking pattern like they're drunk. And an example that just came out this summer that people are still trying to figure out is this huge Siberian sinkhole that occurred in July, and we're not sure whether this represents a methane explosion or meltwater from the permafrost draining and causing the soil to sink. But this is in a remote area of Siberia, and it's believed that it's, in some way, an example of the warming arctic, of permafrost thaw and the consequences. Permafrost is not only important inland, but it's also an issue along the coasts. So the coasts in the arctic have been eroding over the last few decades. That's been documented, and that has serious problems for people who live in villages along the coast. This is an image from a native village in Alaska, and you can imagine that people probably didn't build the houses here when the coast looked like this. It was surely out farther to sea, but now this is the way it looks. And you get this wave action eroding the coastlines. And a before and after picture that's very short in duration is the effect of a storm on this coastline. So here's the before picture, and, for reference, here's a barrel marked by that red arrow. And then just two hours later, here's the barrel, and there's the coastline. So the waves from this storm had eroded the coastline by that much in just a couple hours, and the photographer said this was not an exceptional storm. But when you remove the buffering effect of sea ice, which kind of damps the waves during a storm and replace it with open water, the waves can get really big and can erode the coastline. And it's really a triple whammy for coastal erosion right now because with less sea ice to buffer, we get bigger waves, with thawing permafrost along the coast, you get slumping soils, and that too makes the coast more vulnerable. And then there's evidence of stronger storms, which by themselves create bigger waves. So when you put it all together, those are the ingredients for more coastal erosion, which is what the arctic has been experiencing in both Eurasia and North America. Though, I've been describing all these different changes in the arctic and some of the consequences, but what's so special about the arctic anyway? Is is just because it happens to be one of my research areas, or is there something really unique about the arctic that makes it important to study? And in terms of climate change, I would say the arctic is like the canary in the coal mine of a global climate change. It's a very sensitive part of the climate system. And we have a term for that. It's called arctic amplification of global climate change, and here's an example of it. This is the temperature record starting in the 1880s to the present. And the Y axis are different latitudes. So the South Pole at the bottom, the equator in the middle, and the North Pole at the top. The colors represent temperature anomalies from the average over the record. Blues indicates cold years. Red indicates warm years. And first of all, kind of like Galen's map, you can see that in the 1880s, 1800s, the climate was much colder than today globally. A lot of blue. And over time things get more orange toward the right, and so here we are today. But what's important for this talk is to look at how the arctic responds to those global temperature changes. So over the last decade, not only has the Earth warmed considerably, but the arctic has warmed a lot more. And, going back in time when we had a much colder climate during the 1800s, the global climate was cooler, but the arctic cooled quite a bit more. And this is the typical signature of arctic amplification. If the globe changes a little, the arctic changes a lot. So it certainly bears monitoring for that reason alone. There are some examples of the past for this arctic amplification, not just a graph, going back 20,000 years ago toward the end of the peak of the last Ice Age. This is how the world looked. The global average temperature was about five degrees Celsius colder than now, but that was enough to produce humongous changes in climate and environment in high latitudes. So ice sheets covered all of Canada. They actually extended all the way down to Madison and a little beyond. Much of norther Eurasia was covered in ice, and, of course, parts of Alaska. So here's an example of where the global climate gets colder but the arctic gets much, much colder. And if we go to the other extreme, very warm climates, say 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs were still around, we know from various geologic evidence that the arctic was much, much warmer than today and was more like a subtropical climate, lots of open water, no evidence of ice, lush forests, even palm trees existed back then. So you warm the Earth somewhat and the arctic experiences an even bigger warming. Fortunately, we're not expecting a Cretaceous climate any time soon, but we are expecting a considerably warmer and different arctic climate than we've experienced in the last century. And here's an example from a computer climate model projection for the last decade of this century. These are projected temperature changes on the right, Celsius and Fahrenheit. Don't worry about the numbers. I want you to look more at the colors. The purples indicate the maximum warming in the globe, and notice that's right around the arctic as a whole, particularly the Arctic Ocean, as a result of that reduced ice cover, sea ice melting being replaced by a dark blue ocean, absorbing more sunlight accelerates the process. The rest of the world warmed substantially but still, the arctic amplification has shown up very clearly in this map. And all indications are that by sometime this century that there will no longer be continuous sea ice throughout the year, that it will become ice free during the summer over the oceans. And we may get a harbinger of what's to come by looking just a couple years ago during that very hot summer here in Wisconsin. It was also very warm in the arctic. That was the record minimum sea ice cover year that I talked about before. It also experienced something unusual in Greenland. In the middle of July there was a day when all of the Greenland surface experienced melting conditions. That hadn't happened in over a hundred years. So that was really a remarkable example of a warming climate. And then, perhaps not unrelated, was the existence of this strong mega cyclone, you might call it. A really, really strong storm typical more of autumn or winter in the arctic that helped churn up the seas to erode the ice pack and contribute to that record minimum ice cover. To wrap up, you might say that in the arctic the future is now. So a lot of what we expect in terms of climate change the arctic is already experiencing and is visible right now. The region is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world. And we expect that ratio to continue in the future. The sea ice cover appears to be in what you might call a new normal state. So these record or near record minima have been happening each of the last eight summers in a row. Glaciers and permafrost are thinning and melting and contributing to coastal erosion coupled with the loss of buffering sea ice cover. And you might think of the color of the arctic changing from white in the past from snow and ice to more blue for the open ocean and green on land as vegetation expands. And then, finally, the future changes in the arctic should be even more pronounced. So there's all indications that what we've seen currently is a pretty good indicator, qualitatively, of what we should expect in the future but the magnitude will probably become even greater in the future decades. Thank you.

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>> Great. Thank you, Steve. Our final speaker is Ben Zuckerberg. He's a professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. His expertise is in how much our changing climate will affect nonhuman animals. Like so much of the carbon pollution problem, the main offenders are not necessarily those who would be most effected. There is a great subtlety in this mix of biology and climate that Ben is going to tell us about.

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>> Great. Thank you, Bill, and thank you all for coming today. As Bill mentioned, there are some pretty marvelous subtleties when we start thinking about the impacts of climate change on wildlife populations and biological communities. So today I'm going to tell you just a couple of stories, and some of them from our own backyard, so to speak. I'm not going to really go through because Steven and Gale have already done a great job talking about some of the trends in climate, but really what I would point out is that I think most of what we've seen here is really undebatable at this point. We've seen rising temperatures. We've seen shifting patterns in precipitation, shorter winter periods, earlier springs, and changes in extreme weather events. I think for many of the species that many of us hold dear, what we should keep in mind is that all these changes are relatively unprecedented, or at least a rate of those changes are unprecedented over the last 1,400 years. So when we think about species that basically have adapted and evolved under certain conditions and these changes do represent a very significant shift in their baseline. Though, ultimately, wildlife species adapt to environmental change. But, in many ways, they have three different choices here when we think about climate change. Ultimately, the change can be so unique and so unprecedented that they can go extinct, that they can effectively move in relationship to those changes, or that they can stay where they are and they can adapt. One of the major lines of evidence or predictions of climate change is that species are in fact limited by climate. Then if we have a warming throughout the northern hemisphere, we should actually see them shift in their distributions. So shifting where they are and are not found geographically. So you can imagine then, if we've got, let's say, two species here, one of them is sort of a southerly adapted species that has a sort of northern range boundary, and then you have a northerly adapted species in the blue here that's, let's say, a boreal species, and it's got this southern range boundary that terminates here, that if you basically have a warming over time in the northern hemisphere, what we would predict to see is a shift northward in that northern range boundary of that southerly species as it's moving north. And, at the same time, we should see a retraction in the southern range boundary of that cold adapted species. And that's really one of the main predictions of climate change, at least when we think about wildlife species. That if these species are in fact limited by climate and we have a warming northern hemisphere, we should see this northward shift over time. I'm going to kind of show you two examples of why we think this is occurring. One of them is the snowshoe hare, and this is the species that exists and survives up in sort of the northern part of Canada, and it reaches its southern distributional limits, its southern range boundary, in the Upper Midwest. In fact, if you kind of zoom in there on Wisconsin, you can see that its range, its entire southern range boundary basically terminates somewhere kind of in the middle of Wisconsin. So the question then is that, if this cold adapted, boreal adapted species is limited in some way by climate then, how might their range boundary be changing over time? So the real difficulty in looking at range boundary shifts is that you need historical data. You need to be able to go back and look at this over time, and you need to understand what are the mechanisms, then, of why this species would be particularly sensitive to climate change. So, the real issue with snowshoe hares is that they go through a coat color change. So if you happen to kick up a snowshoe hare while you're walking around the summer, chances are it's going to look a lot more like this. They're brown in the summer, and then they shift to all white during the winter. That shift is almost entirely predicated by day lengths. So as the days get shorter, they go from this brown coloration to this white coloration. And they do this over the course of a few weeks or so. So the real question then is that, if we have day length, which is effectively not changing, but, as Steve kind of mentioned, we've seen pretty significant changes in snow cover, so, as Steve talked about, we've seen this declining snow cover extent throughout the northern hemisphere, and what I would point out is that if you look at this axis here, and we're looking at basically an anomaly of frozen ground extent or a measure of snow cover extent, that we're talking about millions of square kilometers. So if you think about that as a habitat for snow adapted species, that rate of loss of habitat trumped anything we see in terms of the loss of Amazon forest. It's an amazing contraction of what is basically a very seasonal type of habitat for boreal and snow adapted species. What I think is important to note is that some of the main components we've seen is that months of maximum snow cover has shifted from February to January, there's been an earlier spring snow melt by almost two weeks throughout many parts of the Upper Midwest, and so there's been an overall decline or decrease in snow cover, roughly about 10% or so, over the last 30-40 years throughout the northern hemisphere. This is a problem. You've got a snowshoe hare here that has basically undergone its full coat color change and it's now completely white, but if you can see here, not much snow cover and it's on a brown background. So what's the problem there? >>

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>> Yeah, right. The problem is you look like a light bulb running across a brown background, and, frankly, if you're a snowshoe hare, there are a lot of things that like to eat you. And so for a species such as this that's really driven that has an adaptation of camouflage system that's governed primarily by day lengths but it's almost completely adapted and evolved to basically benefit from snow cover, you've got a real problem. So Leopold, one of our great naturalists from Wisconsin, obviously, 1945, actually went out there and started documenting where he was finding snowshoe hare. So he created this map in 1945 trying to document what is the southern range boundary of snowshoe hare. In the late 1970s, Lloyd Keith and his graduate student at the time, Dave Buehler, went out and they redocumented that snowshoe hare range boundary. And they were really interested in land use change and habitat change for snowshoe hare. It's a species that requires some early successional forest habitat, a really dense forested area. So they were really concerned about land use change. And what they documented was its range contraction. So that red area are areas where Leopold basically found snowshoe hare but they didn't, and those green areas are where they found snowshoe hare but Leopold didn't. So they called those colonizations. So the question is, is as we've seen sort of that shifting land use up until the 1980s and then concurrently around the late 1970s or so we're seeing this decline in snow cover, what is the southern range boundary? What has it done over the last 30 years. So the great thing about being a professor is that you can basically convince a graduate student or two to brave a winter.

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And get out into Wisconsin and hang out and look for snowshoe hare tracks. And that's exactly what Sean did. He went out there and looked at all these different historical sites that they had, over 200 of them that they surveyed in the late 1970s. And this is what he found. So those blue dots are basically sites where they found snowshoe hare in the late 1970s, Lloyd Keith and Dave Buehler, but we did not find them. And then those red dots are areas where we basically were able to relocate them. And so we do this using snow track surveys and looking for kind of any evidence of snowshoe hare. And what you can see is a continued northward shift in that range boundary over time. And what we're really concerned about is the central forest here which has always been something of a refuge for snowshoe hares. And you can see that potentially in the next 20 or 30 years, they may completely vacate the central forest. What I would point out, too, is that we can now use snow cover data, and one of the most important predictors of that range boundary is, in fact, snow cover duration and changing snow cover duration. Okay, so that's one example. Another example, really a group of species that I find particularly fascinating, frankly many of you may be familiar or have wisdom in that, you look outside your kitchen window and you might see at your feeder a black cap chickadee or tufted titmouse or northern cardinal. And many of these feeder birds actually have always been sentinels of climate change. Some of the original work looking at how species are in fact limited by climate, like winter climate, have focused on these wintering birds. And that's because they basically are surviving during a time of lower resources and also very inclement weather. They have to make some pretty significant choices and energetic tradeoffs. So, one of the data sets that we've been able to look at is data from Project Feeder Watch. So this is a program, a citizen science program, that's run through the Cornell Lab or Ornithology. And what this is is about over 12,000 participants throughout the United States actually watch their feeders throughout the winter, and over a two-day period they record what birds are showing up and how many of them are showing up on that day. And they submit these checklists online. So they do this continuously, separate these two-day times separated by about five days or so. And they do this throughout about four months throughout the winter period. So you can imagine that this offers over 12,000 people recording what birds are showing up, had been doing this from 1990. And so we've got data, over 20 years worth of data, to look at how the changes and the distributions of these species have occurred. And we've found or are beginning to find is that many of these species are in fact shifting northward. What I would say is that what we haven't been able to document as well until now is what has been that sort of effect on the communities of these winter birds. So if you look outside your window and if you live somewhere in the southeastern United States, chances are that your winter community birds is going to look a little something like this. You have some morning doves, you may have Carolina wren, you may have a tufted titmouse at your feeder. As you kind of go up in latitude, there are kind of subtle changes. You might have some species showing up in more numbers, maybe a species that wasn't in the south is now coming in or a species that's more common of the north. And, of course, if you're in the Upper Midwest or so, you have something of a very different community of birds. Some of them stay the same throughout, but you start getting very subtle changes in what birds are showing up and the density of those birds. So our question was, if climate change is occurring and we are beginning to see the northward change in these bird distributions, are we seeing concurring change in the communities? Are these communities effectively becoming more dominated by warm adapted species? And that's exactly what we're finding. So we use something called a community thermal index, which basically is just a ratio of what we refer to as warm adapted and cold adapted species. And so the more positive it gets, the more these communities are dominated by these warm adapted species. So species like chipping sparrows, Carolina wrens, these are species that have always traditionally been very southerly adapted. They tend to be a little bit smaller in their body size, so they're much more sensitive to things like cold snaps and minimum temperature. And what we're finding is that community is becoming more warm adapted over time, leading to what is potentially sort of these new novel assemblages of birds over time with a northward shift. So this is really one of the great lines of evidence that we talk about with climate change. So much so that Chris Thomas, who's a climate change ecologist in Britain, has basically suggested that more than half observed animal range boundaries have already shown a response to modern climate change. The other component is phenology. So what I just talked about is really just about changes in distribution. So where species are and are not moving, and, potentially, with that predicted impact of a northward shift. But the other component of species biology is obviously phenology. The timing of life history events, like migration or when they decide to start making a nest. So really, actually, one of the first studies to actually suggest that in fact we are seeing these changes in early spring phenology and the life cycles of many species was work done by Nina Leopold Bradley, the daughter of Leopold. And what she found in taking her sort of observations and comparing them to Aldo Leopold's observations was that over a period from 1936 to 1998 she found 55 indicators of spring occurring sort of on an average of about 1.2 days earlier overall. So geese arrival, for example, coming about 30 days earlier over that time period. Cardinals first song about 22 days earlier. Butterfly weed, 18 days earlier. And this is really one of those great, again, lines of evidence that species are in fact responding to warming conditions by shift in their spring phenology. So you may ask, okay, what's the problem with this? If they're responding earlier to spring conditions, maybe it actually benefits many populations. And here, again, is that mismatch problem. So we've got a number of species that arrive, again, mostly, in some cases, driving by migration which is driven by day lengths And so they come and they arrive generally around the same time, at the same time every year. But their food resources, like caterpillars, are responding to temperature, that spring temperature. So what we are getting is this mismatch where, let's say, the caterpillar abundance is shifting slightly earlier over time and you get this window mismatch. And this is really important, not necessarily for the adults who are arriving from migration, but they've timed their migration arrival and then when they start building their nests so that when their nestlings have their peak resource demands it actually coincides with the peak in caterpillar abundance. So when their nestlings are really requiring those calories, what we're seeing is that that caterpillar abundance has shifted earlier. So if you can imagine a good analogy would be that if you came home for dinner every night and dinner was ready for you somehow at six o'clock and you're just used to that, coming to dinner at six o'clock, and then slowly but surely the dinnertime shifted without you knowing so that, okay, maybe

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55 and then maybe it's 5:45, 5:30. You're still getting dinner, but it's a little cold, right? And then eventually it's five o'clock and you're missing dinner by an hour. And that has significant implications. And what they've found for many populations of birds are that those species have been unable to track that shifting resource, their populations have declined by almost 90%. So what we have here is, basically, a story of a phenological mismatch in time, where you've got a number of components of an ecosystem like the leafing out of oaks and insects that basically can emerge and respond to these temperature changes much more quickly than the birds that are arriving and feeding their nestlings all the way up to top predators that feed on those birds. So I'd kind of like to wrap up and kind of point out a couple things. When we think about climate change impacts on wildlife, we really try to think about vulnerability. We try to think about what species are going to be more or less vulnerable to these climate impacts. And so I think it's fair to say that when we think about certain species, there are those that are, I would say, a lower risk or a lower vulnerability. These are species that have generally short generation time, they have wide distributions, they can move easily across the landscape, they have sort of general habitat requirements, and they're generally not sensitive to human activity. These are species that if a climate changes, they can potentially track it with less impacts on their biology. But there are those that we consider to be higher at risk. These are species that have long generation times, they're narrowly distributed or they're only found in a few areas, they're fairly poor dispersers, and they have very specialized requirements. Maybe they're wetland dependent species, or they're very tied in with a certain habitat type, or they're also sensitive to human activity. I'll kind of wrap up but with a sentiment from Leopold, that to keep every cog and wheel is certainly the first rule of intelligent tinkering, and that plays a very important role in how we think about climate conservation. Wildlife are responding to climate change. They're doing so by moving and adapting and, in some cases, failing to adapt. We are seeing unexpected interactions. So as new species, like I showed with those feeder birds, as we're gaining these differences in these communities, we're getting new and novel interactions between species, we're seeing higher risk of disease transmission and competition. And I think what's really important to note when we think about wildlife species is that, in fact, many of these species have obviously sort of evolved under climate variability, but they're not doing this now under homogenous landscape. That the synergistic, the combined effects of climate and land use change basically represent a new and novel threat for many of these populations. Ultimately, what can we do? Well, I would kind of say that we can promote this idea of climate smart conservation, and we're seeing this. We're seeing this at state agency and federal agency levels where we're no longer ignoring the impacts of climate change. In fact, we're requiring many managers and wildlife conservation practitioners to think broadly about what are the impacts of climate change on the species and communities that they are stewards of. Providing room to roam is critical. So we can't ignore landscape conservation. We can't ignore habitat conservation, primarily because these are going to be tools for how species respond to these shifting climate space. And ultimately, we have to support climate change adaptation. I think we all know that it tends to be very politicized, but when we think about wildlife conservation, what we are beginning to understand is that we have to have a much broader sense of how these species or how we can help these species adapt to a changing climate. Thank you.

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>> Well, I realize that I failed to introduce myself at the beginning of the session, but that doesn't really matter. Anyway, for those who are curious, I'm Bill Bland. I'm a faculty member in the Department of Soil Science, and I tried to organize this session to have a great discussion here at the Science Festival about climate change. So we've heard three great stories from world authorities in each of these diverse topics. While we heard much to be concerned about, I can't help but marvel at the diversity of influences of carbon pollution and the amazing set of tools that these folks are employing in their work. So another human animal fable occurs to me as I think about what we've just heard. That of the elephant in the very darkened room in which a handful of humans are using only their sense of touch to observe what's inevitably only an isolated part of the elephant, like the trunk or the ear or the tusk or the foot. Now, this fable is variously interpreted to show how little we can understand of the larger whole and that we inevitably only know what we can touch. But I'd add another interpretation, that through the application of the norms of science, the individual work of countless science merges, by fits and starts admittedly, to reveal a picture bigger than what any one of them could have seen on their own. The three researchers and their work that you've just heard from, I think illustrate this wonderfully. The elephant of carbon pollution is becoming ever better understood and appreciated as these multiple lines of evidence all converge. This convergence is both a hallmark and, I think, a reward of really great science, and you heard wonderful examples of that today. Now, I was struck in listening to these three speakers. Their professionalism, their calmness, their scientific reticence, perhaps, to insert any value judgments into their talks. And I could scarcely have selected three calmer, more professional presenters than these three. But I'm also reminded of how commentators related to space disasters are often very calm, right? The Houston, we have a problem and the shuttle blowing up was an obvious malfunction. It was the first thing they had to offer. So, we have a lot of time for questions. You can ask questions of these three researchers, and maybe you can pull them out of their scientific reticence and their professionalism to reveal a little bit of the passion that underlies their work. So, with that, let's open it up to questions, and we'll ask all three of our panelists to just come up front and roam around while you ask your questions. We have microphones. You raise your hand, and one of these folks will get a microphone to you. >> Right here. Yeah, one of the neglected areas which is equally important is the effect of climate change on the plant world. I've had 50 acres by Lone Rock, and I've seen numerous invasive species take over an entire ecosystem, effecting the entire ecology of the animal world. So much so that I found a species of Spanish goats that actually eat invasive species. They'll eat buckthorn, they'll eat honeysuckle without using chemicals. So sometimes we have to find creative ways of adapting to some of the changes that are ravaging the natural world without being too aggressive and without hurting nature. So you can address these points about the plant world and how that's being affected strongly. Poison ivy loves carbon dioxide, in case anybody doesn't know that. >> So, yeah, in fact, when they do climate change surveys to state agency and federal agency managers who are people doing on the ground conservation, the number one thing they point out as evidence, or what they perceive as evidence, of climate change impact on the properties that they manage is the spread of invasive species. And I think this is something that's being looked at in many different ways, but it definitely is something that managers are recognizing that the conditions for invasive species spread are only getting better, frankly. >> Good. Thank you. >> Yeah, I've got two specific questions for the first presenter. The first one is, technically there doesn't appear to be, what I'm saying is the pH values that were obtained in Lake Michigan and in the oceans are still above seven, so, technically, it's a basic issue. They're not acidic yet until the pH drops below seven. My second question is, do you know if any research has been done on whether or not cave development has accelerated as a result of acidification because it would be almost the same process as what you discussed in your paper. Thanks. >> Sure. Yes, it's true that the waters of the ocean and lakes are still above acidic, but the question is acidification is a trend and it's trendy towards lower pH. So that's why we use the term acidification, but you're technically correct. Whether cave development is changing, I don't know much about that. I would begin in that research thinking about in areas where there's been a lot of acid rain in more intense changes in acidity because of the direct effect of smokestack pollution. In regions of downwind of Ohio, for example, that would be maybe what people looked at that. But I don't know about that detail. >> We have one over here. Okay. >> I know there's been a report out from the state, I guess maybe the DNR, about this effect on tourism in northern Wisconsin and hunting and fishing, snowmobiling, economically is going to have a huge impact I would think. And we just had a governor's debate last night and no one brought this up. >> Yes.

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Yeah, in fact, I do think that in many parts of Upper Midwest and the northeastern United States too they are worried about winter recreational activities, skiing and other components that are going to be effected by basically a shorter winter season. >> This is a question for Steve Vavrus. Last winter, of course, the term polar vortex entered our vocabulary, laypeople's vocabulary. You guys have used it for a long time. You proposed a hypothesis that the cold was the result, essentially, of the lessening of sea ice, the warmth up there. And that hypothesis generated some controversy and disagreement among the climate research community. And I'm just wondering where that hypothesis stands now. Has there been any resolution of it, or is there still a good deal of disagreement about it? >> Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So this hypothesis that I and others have put forth is that ultimately the jet stream winds or weather patterns get their energy from the temperature difference between the arctic and lower latitudes. The arctic is warming faster than the lower latitudes, and so that temperature difference becomes smaller. When it becomes smaller, the jet stream winds should weaken. We argue that, in tandem with that, the jet stream winds become wavier, and that sets up the conditions for more extreme weather, like the kind we had last winter, but that's not to say that last winter is necessarily because of that mechanism. The jury is definitely still out on that one. And in terms of the overall research question, I'm working on it right now, almost as we speak, this hypothesis, and I would say you're right on the mark. That it's very controversial. The jury is still out. We're only a year into our NSF grant to study this, and I think one of the reasons it's gotten so much controversy, more than I ever expected, is because the implications are so big. A lot of the scientific hypotheses people put forth, there may be debate, but it's in a pretty small area, small arena of scientists. But this one, potentially, is really big because if it really does affect the weather throughout the northern hemisphere, not just in the arctic, then that's really serious, and we need to understand if that's happening and what the expressions will be in the future. So the short answer is the jury is still out. The longer answer is that I still think that it's a viable hypothesis, but it's undergoing some revisions too. >> Dr. Zuckerberg touched on adaption as a response, but none of you touched on mitigation or things that might be done to reduce greenhouse gases and reduce the actual warming effect that's going on. So what are some of your thoughts, and this is for all of you, as far as mitigation strategies such as carbon fee and dividend, which groups like Citizens Climate Lobby are advocating. If anybody wants to talk about that, I'm right here. But, generally, mitigation strategies. What are some thoughts? What are your thoughts on carbon fee and dividend or other approaches that might be helpful? >> It's pretty clear from the economists, and increasingly even from big business, that the most efficient way to address mitigation is a carbon tax. Right? We put a tax on the behaviors we want to avoid, which is the emission of CO2, and we find ways to reduce taxes, other ways that balance out the total tax burden. That's clearly the most efficient mechanism, but obviously that's politically difficult to think about having a new tax. But it's also very clear that if we don't do something to reduce our emissions at the large scale, that we will be paying a lot more in the future for adaptation. So, for example, if sea level rise happens at the higher level that has been predicted, we're looking about major relocation of people around the world. And that's obviously incredibly expensive. And even without major changes in sea level, we're looking at a cost of building new infrastructure and modifying old infrastructure. So it's pretty clear also that the economics are much better for mitigation than for adaptation. And there's a lot that can be done individually, of course. Thinking about the car you drive, thinking about the insulation in your home, thinking about the choices you make in terms of air travel are also incredibly important. Everyone can go online and calculate their own carbon footprint and figure out what it is that is their biggest issue, and that's a lot where the action can happen. >> And to follow up on that, there's sort of two degrees, I think, in which you can use tax policy or, say, other forms of support to try and encourage mitigation. One of them, on a smaller scale which has already been done, are things like tax credits for energy efficiency, light bulbs, insulation in your homes and whatnot. Some of those tax credits have expired, I think. Some of them may still be enforced. And that helps to a degree, but this is really a much bigger problem than that. People driving Priuses, it helps. It's better than not, things like that. It's better to insulate your home than not, but that's really just a small piece of this. This is a huge problem. And so my thinking is that this is going to take something like a really huge energy technological breakthrough perhaps. Something on the order of cold fusion or some seismic societal change if we're really going to switch off from our fossil fuel dependence. So the way we're going, those CO2 curves we showed today, there's no end in sight if we keep going the way we are. And so in terms of really trying to come up with a mitigation strategy, I think we need to think really big if we're going to tackle this problem. >> Yeah, from a personal point of view, too, I would say that oftentimes if you're working with certain agencies and a group of managers, if you're talking mitigation, it's falling on deaf ears. If you expect to make any in roads, to some extent, in terms of changes that they're willing to implement on the ground, they're much more willing to talk about adaptation. And that's just a reality of the situation, and that can vary quite a bit, obviously, as to where you're working and what agencies you're working with. But that's a reality of it. >> I would respond to that too. Even in Washington, DC, and across DC, including in the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, they're interested in thinking about adaptation. There's a big report that came out from the DOT just in the last week or so about the value of adaptation, the importance of adaptation, the challenge of adaptation. That's all okay. And it's a step in the right direction because it admits that the problem is happening, but mitigation is not an okay discussion yet. Okay? The DOT wants to reduce their energy costs. They want to have solar for other reasons, right? But it's not part of this debate. And we have to take the steps we can take and encourage people to recognize the problem. And I do think that people are starting to become increasingly aware and the need for sea change in how we do things, but it does have to come. We do live in a democracy. It has to come from the democratic process in saying we really want to change our direction here. We want to invest in new energy technologies. We want to do the science and engineering required. In the 1960s, people said we need to go to the moon, and they did it in less than a decade, right? We can do that if we decide that that's what we want to do, but I think it does take people committing and saying that this is the challenge of this decade, is to figure out this shift. >> Great. We're getting a little bit of the human behind the scientific. >> I wanted to ask two different questions. One is kind of related to what you just talked about, which has to do with solutions. And my question is, is there any preparations being made for communicating solutions and impacting solutions during a time when maybe some kind of trigger event wakens the public up or wakens when you're talking about democracy. Are we ready with plans to implement the solutions rather than just these are the solutions, because at some point people are going to pull their heads out of the stars, and Dancing with the Stars, and they're going to look around and we need solutions, that's one side, before they put their heads back into Dancing with the Stars. And the other question is, I wasn't here for the whole thing, but are any of the presenters aware or can speak to the solar effects that we've had a minimum maximum, if you will, a low solar and how solar relates to how some of this has been not as much of an effect as it would have if we had the usual or a maximum maximum of solar energies hitting the Earth and so on. Any of that. But those are the two things. >> Well, in terms of solutions, I do think that when my husband and I bought a car in 2005, we were excited to be able to buy one of these new Prius things, right? And that was great. And now we just bought a Leaf, right? And that's a new thing. That's an all electric car that puts out a lot more CO2, a lot less CO2, excuse me. I do think that technologies are being developed. Tesla released all their patents because they want to make electric cars more easily getting out to the market. And so I do think that things are going in the right direction, but I think we just need that much more increase. People recognizing that you drive the Leaf, it's a fun drive, right? That's a fun car to drive. So go buy it. There are good things out there, and I think the more we do that and I think but we do need political change. It can't be done just by individuals going out and buying the electric car because they want to. We do need to change our direction. So, yeah, in terms of the question of the solar, the solar energy, clearly the amount of warming that we're getting is also effected by the solar constant. That is part of the total warming. I don't know the particular study you're talking about, but yes, if there's been slight less increases in solar energy, that would reduce the rate of warming. And then going back to the cold winter we had last year, I think one way to think about the cold winter is not that that winter was such a cold winter, but that the previous 16 years when we didn't have such a cold winter was actually the anomaly. When you think about the '70s and the '80s, that was the anomaly, right? So yes, a lot of people say, oh, but it was so cold last winter. Yes, but the previous 16, 15 years or so were not cold. That's what's anomalous, and that's what the data really shows is the fact that we didn't hit a cold year like that for so long is what's anomalous. >> I have to chime in on the last winter thing too because it came up earlier. I wanted to point out that as cold as it seemed here, at least, it was the coldest winter, I think especially in northern Wisconsin, in about 35 years, the global average temperature in December was the third warmest on record. January was the fourth warmest on record. So even though we were shivering here in Wisconsin, as a whole it was a very mild winter. So anyway, just thinking locally to globally. In getting to your first question, if I understand it right, are you talking about how the public attention or support fluctuates according to, say, some climatic weather event? Because that certainly happens. >> Yeah, yeah. In other words, at some point something happens, don't know what, Florida goes underwater, I don't know, and people wake up, and then is there a way to implement solutions or bring solutions to those people? Is there planning? Is there strategies strategizing, saying, okay, as a scientific community, this is what we must do, and even though it's onerous to our economy in terms of because we're oil based and all the rest of it, this trigger event, let's call it, wakes people up to the point where there's an opportunity to do that. That opportunity could go away because it becomes old news. Is there some way or is there, talking about strategizing, about how to deal with implementing solutions when the pan is hot, if you will? >> That's a really good point. It largely comes down to political will, of course. But Hurricane Katrina, right after Hurricane Katrina and right after Hurricane Sandy, the public's interest and acceptance of climate change really spiked. But as you say, the attention span is so short. If you don't act within a few weeks, it drops back to the back burner. So I think your strategy is a good one to anticipate that we certainly will have some sort of seismic event, like Hurricane Sandy or maybe something bigger, and have something ready to go so we don't have to say, well, everybody's now suddenly waking up to this issue, let's think about what we should do about it. Because if you do that, it's too late. >> Right, but a challenge there is that if we're talking about how do we generate energy, electricity for example, a coal fired power plant lasts 30 years, right? So even though we have that moment there, that's still how we're going to get our electricity, and you can't just change it on a dime to natural gas or solar or something like that. So one of the real challenges of the CO2 problem is that there are long lag times in our infrastructure, long lag times in, of course, our political process, but it takes a while just to build a wind farm or something like that. And so I think people, scientists, and that's not the scientists job that are here, we're trying to understand what's going on, but I think that politically we need to be moving in that right direction. I think to some degree we are, but I think there is increasing understanding from scientists that we need to be ready to communicate effectively about climate change when those things come up and be ready to put the message out there. But ultimately, it is not up to the scientists to make that shift happen. I think there's a lot of engineers working on better energy solutions, better engines, a lot of things, but there's a long lag time problem. >> And also a long lag time with CO2 in the atmosphere. A very long residence time. So that's why it's one of these thorny issues because it's unlike smog where you can tackle it fairly quickly. The CO2 residence time is very long, and so what we do or don't do now has repercussions many decades in the future. >> Do we have another one? >> Is this live? It's on? Okay. I recently read an article in BBC Science News about a warming pause over the next 10 to 15 years due to more CO2 absorption by the oceans. I was wondering if you have any further understanding of that or how it might affect your research? >> Yeah. So I personally do work quite a bit on understanding the CO2 uptake by the ocean. The ocean takes up about 25% of our emissions, and that's what leads to the ocean acidification, but it does reduce the rate of warming. So I don't know the particular story you're talking about, but in terms of making predictions over the next 15 years or so, that is really the largest change in global ocean CO2 uptake is associated with the El Nino phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific. And we're not very good at predicting that out that far. So I don't think we understand the ocean well enough to make that kind of prediction, but I don't know that particular study. Going back in with the past 15 years or so, we have not had an El Nino event, and an El Nino event, a large one like we did in 1998, and that actually means that the ocean would be taking up a little bit less carbon, if we don't have an El Nino. So I guess I'm not really in tune with what you've asked, but I think we do have some understanding of how the ocean varies in its CO2 uptake. The variability is relatively small compared to our emissions, for example, and it seems to be, that variability seems most related to the El Nino phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific. >> Well, great. We're out of time now. I'm afraid we're out of time. Our speakers will be up here and can answer some questions afterward. But we'd like to thank our speakers once more.

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