 I'm Ken Howe and I'd like to welcome you to our webinar entitled The Evolving Crisis, The Escalating Threat of COVID and Climate Change. Before we get started, let me do a little housekeeping. Let me remind you that you can access closed captions by hitting the CC button at the bottom of your screen. We're here to revisit the issue of the interaction of pandemics like COVID-19 and global climate change. That complex linkage between the two was the subject of our documentary last year. Now we want to see whether we've gained any new insights, whether our assessment of the future has changed in light of both politics and COVID variants, such as Omicron, and what research our panelists have undertaken or hope to undertake since last we met. If you haven't seen the documentary, here's a taste of what it was all about. Two major crises have descended upon humanity. I'm a change and the coronavirus. They may seem independent of each other. In fact, they are very closely linked. The emergence of COVID-19 on top of climate change is a spiraling crisis and it's just the beginning. As you can see, the culprit when it comes to pandemics and likely COVID-19, all too frequently is climate change and the human actions that cause it. They're not the only reasons, but they are prime reasons why many diseases emerge and spread. Think of it. Pandemics like the bubonic plague and the Spanish flu have been with us for a long time, but global viral outbreaks like the coronavirus, which were once fairly rare, have become more common. In just the last 60 years, we've had the Asian flu, the seventh cholera pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, HIV AIDS, SARS, H1N1 or the swine flu, H5N1, avian influenza, MERS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19. Together, they've caused more than 42 million deaths according to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. All of these are zoonotic diseases, those that originate in animals in the wild and are capable of infecting humans. We've promoted their spread. That's the whole point. Our CO2 emissions have warmed the air, the land, and the oceans, which have dramatically expanded the range of vectors that carry these diseases. As we warm the earth and the oceans and the air, we've dramatically expanded their range. And as a result, mosquitoes, flies, ticks, rodents, even snails and phytoplankton have expanded their territories further north and south of the equator and into highly populated temperate zones. At the same time, other human activity that causes or contributes to climate change also play a major role in the spread of zoonotic diseases. Principally, that's through deforestation, which pushes disease-bearing wildlife, such as bats, civet cats, chimpanzees, into closer contact with people and people into closer contact with them. According to a report from the UN, the underlying causes of pandemics are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change. It argues that human damage to biodiversity is a leading cause and is leading us into what it calls the pandemic era. Today, we want to reexamine some of the issues that we investigate in our documentary. And to do so, we've invited back several of the experts who appeared on our earlier presentation. Today, we have Dr. Chip Fletcher, Interim Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. We have Dr. Jim Thompson, Principal Oceanographer, Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington. Dr. Angelique White, Professor, Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa. And Dr. Camilla Mora, Professor, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Each panelist will have about 10 minutes. In the first five, they'll address topics that they've been working on. In the next five minutes, I and other panelists will ask questions. Then there'll be a 20-minute or so Q&A session at the end in which you can ask questions by going to the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Let's start with Chip. What is your sense of how much was accomplished at the Climate Change Summit in Glasgow back in October? More specifically, how would you compare pledges made to actual national policies? Thank you, Ken. And thank you, everybody, for joining us. It's great to be part of this information sharing opportunity. So, by the close of the COP in Glasgow, the announced promises from the world's nations, the members of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change, basically put us on a pathway to global warming by the end of the century between 2.5 and 2.8 degrees Celsius. Now, this may not impress many of you as a high degree of warming, but you need to think of it in terms of the total energy of a closed system, such as your body temperature. If you run a low-grade fever of one or two degrees, and that should increase to two, three or four degrees, you are incrementally, with just a couple of degrees change, moving from a somewhat tired degraded state to eventually into the emergency room at the local hospital. So, only a few degrees increase in a closed system, such as Earth's atmosphere, Earth's surface, can result in major changes in the ecosystems and physical systems that operate there. But pledges or promises from the world's nations as part of the UNFCCC are different than the actual policies that are enacted by the world's nations. And when you analyze nation by nation, and we're talking about roughly 198 members of the UNFCCC, we're looking at a pathway of warming that exceeds three degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature. Now, at three degrees Celsius, modeling has told us that we're looking at roughly one-fifth of the global land surface being unfit for human habitation, and potentially one-third of all of humanity needing to migrate to new locations in order to find food and water security. Putting this many people into a climate migration status will exacerbate already widespread problems with human equity. It will further degrade ecosystems that we are consuming at alarming rates. In truth, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by roughly half in the next eight years by the end of this decade. And we need to be at zero emissions by mid-century in order to stop warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, which has been identified by scientists as a relatively safer level of warming from which and under which we have a better chance of adapting to the changes we put in place. Now, unfortunately, as we have emerged from the global recession stimulated by COVID-19, 2021 is already showing us that we have just about made up for the reduction in greenhouse emissions related to the recession in 2020. We've seen a 5% increase in global emissions in 2021. So we really are not coming out of this recession with any significant gains on the global carbon budget. We have a lot of work to do and the work is accelerating with every year that we don't make significant progress. I was going to ask you another question, but what you just said about climate migration, I just wanted to know whether because of that climate migration, does that exacerbate the interaction with pandemics, with zoonotic diseases? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because displaced human populations bring with them their own diseases, plus they will be disturbing natural ecosystems as they move, needing to survive from natural resources that are available to them. It puts stress on socioeconomic lifelines, hospital systems, transportation systems, etc., reducing the availability of these for everybody. As the climate zones of the planet expand, as the tropics expand, and as vectors that carry these diseases expand, all of this movement away from this unlivable zone of the tropics and continental areas, spreading disease will be one among several negative impacts that go with it. You know, I also want to mention the Washington Post did a study during the COP meeting in Glasgow and found that on average emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, are under reported by the world's nations by 23%. So even the numbers I gave you are an underestimate. A panelist, do you have any questions for Chip? Actually, I would like to add to the things that she just adds, the reality of this. You know, sometimes when we speak about these people think about like scenarios in the future, this is as real as it can get. You can see that with the COVID today, right? Like you can see, for instance, when you talk about migration, now people, the economies of entire countries being blocked because they cannot trade things from country to country because they are being blocked by COVID. Even billion, millionaires like this tennis player today is stuck in Australia because of the regulations that were put in place because of this issue of migration and COVID. So it gets to be very real once these pandemics are in the move, especially when it relates to people moving from place to place. There are multiple consequences beyond just people dying from this thing. It's the fact that the entire economy can go down as we see today with this COVID. You know, in addition to the barriers and challenges to global trade that Camilo is mentioning, an isolated location like Hawaii needs to rapidly build its resiliency and self-sustainability given that global trade is really growing on a more fragile footing. That's an excellent point. I think that that is actually one of the most worrisome thing for local economies is the fact that that's not going to be cheap. You can imagine what it costs to build an infrastructure for you that is resilient to this. We are talking not only about hospitals, but also immigration officers, police officers. I mean, the whole thing needs to be a scale up. So the cost is brutal, I believe, for local economies when it comes down to increased resilience locally, which again, for me, is the reason why we really need to fix this problem from the beginning, which will just not adapt to it because the adaptation is just going to be super costly, in my opinion. I would like to follow on that and just say that when we first said the cost is going to be a lot to build it, to do it, but it's so much less than what the cost will be 10 years down the road if you don't. So really making the point that the investing now in that resilience, that's what's going to give communities around the world a strong footing for 10 years from now and avoid a much bigger cost later. That's a critical point, Jim, and one that when you're an elected official facing up to the fact that having to spend money now in order to save money when you're out of office later, that's a difficult decision. It'll take a courageous leader to do that. Are we seeing that? I think we see it in places. I think we're seeing it at the federal level now. I think Hawaii is a good example and I think there are other places in the U.S., the U.S. Climate Alliance, for instance, we have what is it, 26 states that have signed on to the UNFCCC. These are places dedicated to reducing their emissions. But I don't believe at the level that we needed though. You see, for instance, the U.S. and the Congress and all of these things right now, we're debating how to invest this thing as part of that Biden agenda to reduce greenhouse gases. So the whole Congress is divided and in fact, right now, there is even less people supporting that than the people that is in favor of that. So, I mean, yeah, we need to do it. The solutions are there, but we need to have more people getting on it, especially the politicians. This division is kind of playing against us, I believe. Do you think that sort of the demise of Build Back better is kind of put a dagger in the heart of the change that you might have been hoping for? Yes. Well, I mean, not answering that question in particular, setting the goals is going to be much easier than reaching them. But at least we're having the conversation more so than we had in the U.S. in prior years. Hey, let's turn to Jim now. Jim's an oceanographer and has taken several expeditions up to the Arctic to study wind, waves, and ice melt. I'm wondering, Jim, whether you've been keeping that in touch with any of the, particularly the indigenous people in the Arctic, and how they are dealing with this double threat of climate change and COVID. Yes. So Ken, that's something I have spent a lot of time in the Western Arctic, so north of Alaska along the Alaska North Slope. And there is a very vibrant indigenous population there. There are villages like Cactovic, Utkyadvik, New Exid, Point Lay, and Wainwright, where people have been living for generations for thousands of years. And those communities are communities that have been living with climate change on a daily basis for a long time. Now, climate change is a global problem that has been at their front door for decades. And so they are a really interesting group of people to talk to right now, because now the rest of us have a global problem that came to our front door. These global problems have been abstract. Climate change has been pretty abstract for a lot of us, unless you actually work in the field. You don't see it in your day-to-day life. But climate change has been in the day-to-day life of an Arctic resident for quite some time. And give you a few examples of what they're struggling with. There is less sea ice, dramatically less sea ice than they used to be. And that changes their patterns of day-to-day life in terms of how they get around. Use the sea ice as a way to get around and to move through the environment. When the sea ice melts and the permafrost gets soft, you can't travel over the ocean and you can't travel over the land very easily. So it makes it hard to go out and just do subsistence activities, hunting and foraging. Makes it hard to get to other communities and have any exchange between the communities. So the loss of sea ice and the melting of the permafrost has been a big issue just for traditional means of transportation, but also for how they get food. And so food security has been a huge issue in these communities for more than a decade now, very directly related to climate change. And if you live in those communities, you can't just go to the store and buy dinner. I mean, they do have stores, but what's available to them is extremely expensive and not very nutritional and not their traditional way of life. They grew up, they've had generations eating caribou and eating seal and eating off the land and living in a way that has a very low, a tiny footprint on the land. And it's not something that they can just pivot to a new mode just because the climate has changed. So I think it's been remarkable to watch them respond to COVID in those communities. COVID has been a big problem in those communities. It did make it to the communities, even though they're in remote areas. It has been, the level of contagion has been quite high and they've had to deal with it on top of all these challenges that are there because of climate change. And they've had to sort of shift their focus to deal with that. And there's a lot of memory in those places. There's a lot of storytelling and a lot of oral history that goes on in those communities that I've seen. And they very strongly remember the Spanish flu. One of the places I've spent a lot of time in is Nome, Alaska. And Nome, Alaska lost half of its residents to the Spanish flu. And so when COVID came around, they said, we've seen this before. And they locked down early and much more effectively than any external government was asking them to or telling them to because the community remembered this was absolutely devastating. So I think we've seen them be much more in this mode of thinking globally, acting locally that we talk about all the time in the rest of the lower 48 and the rest of the U.S. I don't know that we're very good at. And with these problems now, both at their front doors, I give them a tremendous credit for being really good at that mindset and that approach. And really remembering for the generations what worked and what didn't and how to move forward. Hey, Jim, can I comment quickly something here? So I actually think that these immediate impacts of climate change on people are happening in the lower 48. You know, like you see wildfires, people losing their homes to wildfires, people being displaced by hurricanes and floods, people losing livelihoods to drought. I think that what we are missing is understanding there is a connection between those things and climate change. And obviously the people, the native people probably can see those connections clearer. I think that the problem for us here is the fact that we have failed to understand that there is a connection between these climate disasters and climate change. And that, I believe, is the real problem of us when we don't seem to understand climate change. You know, this also speaks to a point, Jim, that you were making last year, which had to do sort of with, if I can phrase it correctly, the conflict between sort of the individual responsibility and community responsibility. And it sounds, actually, all of you mentioned it last year, and it sounds like they understand that a little bit better than they actually were used to. I think that's a great way to paraphrase it. And I think that's definitely a strong sense I get when visiting those communities is that the community health and the future of the community and the future of the next generations is really paramount. And, you know, if individuals need to make adjustments to prioritize that community health, and then that's what happens. That's what they do. It's sort of the obvious thing to do. And you can see the rest of our culture here in the lower 48 and beyond, you know, the individual freedoms are somehow always come to the forefront instead of the, you know, community responsibility, community future. Yeah. I'm also wondering, just sort of in a different level as a scientist, has the emergence of the Delta variant and now Omicron affected your work on climate change? And how are scientists trying to meet those terms? It has definitely affected it. It's affected it probably in a similar way to what many people have experienced in terms of supply chain issues and restrictions on travel and those kind of things. I mean, much of my work involves going somewhere and making measurements, right? Measuring the loss of the sea ice, measuring the increase in the waves and the Arctic, measuring the erosion of the coastline and the Arctic, those kind of things. It's a very hands-on field that I'm in. And so that requires, you know, a lot of travel and expeditions and the supplying those expeditions and getting a lot of equipment and gear. And we build a lot of custom equipment for this. And all of that has been really just impacted by the supply chain issues. Everything's been slowing down. So it's harder to do our work. It's hard to make the measurements. There are two efforts I'm involved in that are really trying to continue long time series, you know, to really be, continue to demonstrate the changes that we see. And, you know, having a long time series, a long data record interrupted because you can't get there to change the batteries on the instrument. That is just the most painful thing to me at a very personal level. You know, I really invested, you know, a lot of time, 20 years trying to keep some of these data records going. And so we now, unfortunately, have a few gaps. And if things have gotten better in that, you know, we have found ways to get out there and do the work. But even as we do it now, and as we all, you know, we're all vaccinated on my team and we're all wearing masks and we all go do our work, we still have these restrictions that mean that I can't involve as many students. We keep the teams really small because that's lower risk, right? So now I'm missing an opportunity to train the next generation of scientists because they're not going to come to the field and see it and have that hands-on experience. And I'm also missing the opportunity to do more outreach and engagement when I'm there. You know, we were just talking about the local communities on the northern slope, the northern coast of Alaska. And one of my favorite things about working up there has been getting to know people up there and getting to learn how they see that environment and their traditional knowledge. And now the last thing I want to do is go knock on someone's door just in case I am unwittingly carrying a variant. You know, so now I don't have that engagement either. So I think the good part of the story is we have developed protocols to keep some of this work going. And I think we're back to getting most of the data that I hope to get. And so that part from the initial pandemic, we've sort of solved most of that problem. But now we're still missing out on that human part of how we do science. And I think that part is really important. I think we don't have much future with our science if we don't keep bringing the people along with us as we do the work. Interesting. Actually, that sort of leads us to Angelique because I think you've had some of the same issues, haven't you, Angelique? Can you explain that a little bit? I know you've got a presentation. I want to explain first a little bit about Station Aloha and what you've been doing because that whole issue of a time series that Jim talked about, something that I know has been very important to you. Yeah, absolutely. We're facing very similar challenges. If we want to start the presentation, I can speak to these issues. So part of my job is really what I call spreading the gospel of hot, which is helping people understand what the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series does. And similar to what Jim has been talking about, we are monitoring the open ocean to evaluate changes in the ecosystem, biology, the physics, the chemistry. And we do this at a place called Station Aloha. This is a long term oligotrophic cavatate assessment. This program has been running with a huge team of people since 1988. I'd say it's about time we start paying attention because we're seeing data emerge out of these time series, which if we think about our impact on the planet, 30 years is a pretty short time series, but it's some of the longest time series that we have in terms of understanding the open ocean. It has been a challenge just like Jim has described to maintain our monthly cruises, to maintain the personnel to do all of that with in the beginning, of the quarantines, pre-cruises, the going to see in a mask, the reduced personnel, the lack of student volunteers, the inability to engage in any outreach, either with the local populations or other populations. We weren't able to have visiting scientists come in as well. So there were large impacts to the program as a whole in terms of the regularity that we were able to monitor these ecosystems and the ability of us to involve other people on the program. We also have gaps. Those gaps are related to, as Jim was talking about, some supply chain issues, but the entirety of oceanography was stalled due to COVID. So that created a backlog of lost ship time. There were nearly 300 days of ship time, so various ships within the fleet for unals that had science that was planned and weren't able to conduct that science for various reasons, travel or supplies, other issues. And so that has rippled into 2022 as well, where we're still dealing with people who didn't even get their projects off the ground in 2020 and are trying to play catch up. So that whole issue, I think it's broad, particularly for sciences like oceanography that require a lot of logistical support, but it's hurt science, geosciences as a whole. You had some more slides you wanted to show though, right? Yeah, I didn't want to see if you want to follow up on that. Great. So back to the Gospel of Hoth. This is one of, I think, the most important data sets that we have within the White Ocean Time series, and we call this the Aloha curve. So what you're seeing in red is the Keeling curve. It's the change in CO2 in the atmosphere that's being recorded at Mono Loa. And in blue is what we are seeing in Aloha, where we're looking at the increase in CO2 in the upper ocean over time. In this plot, this was the first publication that showed some of this data. We're seeing that increase from 1989 all the way to 2015. So CO2 increases in the atmosphere, CO2 increases in the ocean. That changes the acidity of seawater. So we're seeing this process called ocean acidification. Next slide. And I show these data because they are data, right? There's no debate here. We're showing the data that had been collected over 30 years. And how has COVID impacted the carbon chemistry of the atmosphere? Chip made mention of this. This is a paper that came out in late 2020 that was showing that we did have a brief respite in emissions during COVID, about a 17% drop. I think that's important for two reasons. One, it shows that we can reduce our emissions if we so desire. There are big changes, transportation, the ways in which we get goods and services that led to this drop. People sort of locked in their home, not conducting daily activities. But I think it's important because it does show that if we change our actions, we can reduce CO2 in the ocean, as well as in the atmosphere. Next slide. And also, as Chip mentioned, this is still preliminary data from Rodeum for the 2021 greenhouse emissions. We bounced back really quick. So we saw a 6.2% increase in these preliminary numbers. And it was people getting out and traveling again. We've seen tons of tourists come into Hawaii, for example, which is good for local industry, but also brings us back up to our previous carbon footprints where we're looking at transportation and power. All these things are going to take a real fundamental shift in the way we live our lives in order to reduce these emissions. So they dropped. They're coming back. Next slide. And one thing about the ocean is it's a great integrator of emissions. So there was no respite from change for the oceans. These are the updated PCO2 data into 2019, 2020. So a little 17% decline in the atmosphere. The oceans see almost none of that. We'll see how it goes once we update the data. But we're still walking along the same path we were prior to COVID. Next slide. And so this came out recently. This was actually just a couple of days ago. This is a paper from Chang and co-authors that's looking at the global heat content in the upper 2,000 meters of the water column. And in this case, what they're doing is looking at that heat content relative to a baseline of 1981 to 2010. And you can see there are years that were colder and you start to cross in the mid 90s this threshold where you're higher than that baseline to the point that 2021 was the hottest year ever recorded by humans in the ocean. This is the real power of time series is we're not debating. We're showing data that are collected from a range of glues and ships and mooring and gliders and floats all across the ocean that make a really convincing and I think powerful case for this emergent change, both in carbon content as well as in heat. And we start to get a better understanding of how those changes are going to impact ecosystems. And just got one or two more slides. So another thing I've been involved in that we might talk about at some point is if we look at these emission scenarios that Chip has discussed, you know, reaching that no warmer than 1.5 degrees, no warmer than 2 degrees, there are a range of models that predict which track we're going to be on when we're going to hit these these baselines, whether we stay in the very high CO2 emissions, you know, plus the 20% that's unreported, whether we go into intermediate or low, every single one of these scenarios, every single possibility of staying at 1.5 degrees warming requires negative emission technologies. And that means that we need to develop technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Next slide. And one way one might do that is, you know, it's a it's a form of geoengineering in some ways quite contentious. But I was part of this National Academy of Sciences consensus study report. We've now published that report in December of 2021. This was supported really with the by a company called Climate Works that was really looking at ocean CDR carbon dioxide removal as a mechanism to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help us meet those temperature guidelines. That mechanism is secondary to reduction of emissions. No part of this report suggests that reduction of emissions shouldn't be the first step. Because I want to just point out what the key recommendation was because it's big for the future of ocean funding is that to inform societal decisions, which would be a broad climate response mitigation for portfolio, we need to start to understand how these various mechanisms of carbon dioxide removal should be implemented. And we should start funding that at the federal and international level immediately. And really to address current knowledge gaps, we've got a few scenarios, we could add iron to the surface ocean, we could use wave pumps, we could grow seaweed, all of these things sound a little crazier than others, but our potential ways for increasing the carbon sink in the open ocean. And we're at the point where we've walked so far up that CO2 line, that we actually have to start considering these various geoengineering strategies as a way to maintain that warming within sort of a safe body temperature like Chip describes it. So I just wanted to show that data, there's one last slide. This was the cover of the IPCC report that came out. It's the first time they've used an artist for the cover of their report. This is work by Elisa Singer. And in describing this work, she makes mention that as we witness our planet transforming around us, we have to watch, listen and measure. And that's what the time series are doing. But now, we're at the point where we have to respond. And we are now talking about things that even five, 10 years ago were verboten in many ways. For example, geoengineering the oceans to help remove CO2 from the atmosphere. That's something I know that was very important to Camillo. I know that when it comes to battling climate change, one personal commitment you've made is to plant a million trees. Can you catch us up on that and tell me how it's going and how are your seedlings growing? Yeah, actually, I had to tell you how it got there though. All of the science, the data is pretty solid, especially for us as scientists that are working on these things. You start, eventually, over time, getting to you. I started to realize that I was having this we are feeling. It was not a pleasant feeling every time that I was working on these things. For a long time, I thought that it was depression. Then I came to realize that it was sadness. I honestly was sick of being sad. We are doing this thing and people don't want to add on it. We decided to put words to action and we started to work on these solutions. Let's just stop talking. Let's start walking the talk, so to speak. So we started this project to plant trees. And before I show you some of the things that we had done there, I want to tell you that there are phases though. When you look at big achievements of humanity, like when we went to the moon or when we decided to go fly, those big projects go through phases. Phase one is when somebody proposes the idea and they say, that's crazy. Phase two is when you actually start working on it and you realize there is a moment there of super excitement when you realize actually this is possible. We can do it. And then it's phase three when you actually go and do it and you achieve your thing. So the idea here is that we can plant enough trees. I am talking about exactly the same thing that Angel Lake was pointing out, but rather than in the oceans, we want to do it online where we have plenty of land to do it on all of the species. The idea is to plant enough trees to upset most of humanity's carbon emissions up to now. And that's the general idea. So I already went through phase one, which is to think that this was crazy. My project right now is in phase two, which is to when we started to work and started to realize that we actually can do this. Can we share a quick video now that we prepare for you guys? So how I can to realize that this is doable was to understand that there is a huge need of people and people is eager to work on these things. So we decided to start walking the talk. We joined with a local group of individuals that love working with plants and I capitalized on their expertise to produce seedlings. And Barbara, this is Barbara, she's like my rock star. We produced 10,000 seedlings in a couple of months and we had them growing in the nursery. Then we came and picked them up. We talked them in a U-hole and we started to work on the site. So I got volunteers. I had all of my students. It was mandatory for them to come and participate on this thing. And again, I just don't want you to know that this is bad. I want you to be part of the solution. I partner up with a lot of different NGOs. These individuals that you see there are my captains, so to speak. And these are the holes. I don't know if you guys managed to see there. We dug 10,000 holes. I got my captains. We went through some training just to ensure that every tree was planted accordingly. And then now that I had every captain, we invited 2,000 people. Can you imagine this? We went to a local news channel. We told everybody come and the next thing we know, we had 2,000 people showing up there. We had the people organized in groups. Every family, school, classroom. They came. They were assigned to a team captain. And then we started to plant trees. And seriously, it was a lot of planning to get there. But in 2 hours, we managed to plant over 10,000 trees. Look at that kid, man. I love it. Just to see that kid getting his hands dirty. You can imagine the footprint that that's doing in the brain of that kid. You know, an individual that 10 years later, 20 years later, is going to start voting in his conscience when we start choosing politicians. But I had to tell you, I was fascinated. For me, it was going from thinking that this is crazy to thinking that this is very doable. Once we decided to go and do it, we mobilized 2,000 people for this planting event. Right now, obviously COVID put a huge break for us as well. But we decided to do was to actually use that as an opportunity to improve the way that we do this. Now we obviously had all of the protocols to follow with COVID. We go and plant trees with smaller groups. Right now we are planting trees at a rate of about 100, 500 trees per Saturday section. So these are about groups of four, four people to 20 people, everything by the COVID following the standards. And now our rate is about again, 500 trees per section. Look at the beauty net. Oh my God, I get the goosebumps. Just knowing again, just knowing again, that the eagerness of people to be part of the solution or what we got to do is to start putting a science to make this solution work. And that's what we are working on right now. Building the science to ensure that this is bulletproof. I don't want to try to do the same thing again because we identify multiple sections, but we are in our way to make this happen. And eventually at some point I'll tell you, I'm going to die one day. I'm going to go to heaven. And God is going to let me get in there when I say, I planted a million trees for you in the plant. I'm not going to tell him, I publish 100 scientific papers. That's not going to cut it for him. But I'm confident that me saying I planted you a million trees is going to be my ticket to get into heaven. And if you guys want to get into heaven, I promise you, I will grant you a very nice little reference. If you join my project, come and help me up on three. I'll be there tomorrow. How's that? There you go. Okay, I guess I'm going to have to ask the tough question of the other panelists. Is Camillo crazy? No, he's not. He's the exact type of enthusiasm that we need. I already went through the phase one thinking that I was crazy. I had to tell you for the longest of time I thought this idea is crazy. And there were many times that I doubted myself. It wasn't until I saw the people coming that I realized this is actually doable. You know, all what we gotta do is plan it just like we plan scientific projects, but apply to a social service. Yeah, I already passed the phase of thinking that I was crazy. I don't think I am anymore. I just need to get the things sorted out to move to final phase, which is to get those million trees done. And I want to do it, not by 2050. I want to do it in one day. And I'm telling you, let me give you my maths. In Hawaii, we had a million people. Let's imagine that 90% of them don't care about climate change. I only get 10% of them caring. That's 100,000 people. All I got to do is to figure out a protocol in which every one of those individuals plan 10 trees. 100,000 people, that's your million trees that we can plan in one day. Again, it's just a matter of coordination and planning. And we can do this a lot faster than what we think. And you have a lamb? Oh, well, that is what's part of the problem right now. Originally, you cannot imagine the amount of people that deny us access to plan the trees because, again, they thought they were crazy. Fortunately for us, we got a few landowners that say, you know what? Go for it. If you give me the trees, go for it. We got a ranch called Gunstar Ranch. There is a local NGO who is directed by Jeff Domster. And he says, you know what? Go for it, man. Once we prove it, now we had actually a lot of more land available to us. So we had actually more land right now available than we had capacity to plan trees. And once we start proving the concept, a lot of people are going to get on board with this. So Camilla, in the ocean, the equivalent to planting trees in the geoengineering would be to add nutrients to get the phytoplankton to grow into sequester carbon in the same way that they do on land. In doing that, you run into other nutrient limitations. Is that something to worry about here in Hawaii? Well, one of the things that I was thinking about the oceans, again, I haven't really worked so I don't really have too much expertise on that specific field, despite the fact that I'm a marine biologist. But my thought is the fact that we have all of these areas in coastal areas around the world that had this problem of electrification where there has been a lot of nutrients actually dumping there. So that actually creates prime conditions for us, for instance, to have a macroalgae growing this thing. Now they had these algae farms that produce agar. It's a very good business for many countries. So my thought is rather than us going and tampering potentially with the nutrient cycle of the oceans, let's rather use those areas that will benefit actually from as removing nutrients. In the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, I know that's a huge problem, especially at the delta of the MCC River where you had the nutrients coming from all of these rivers from agricultural land. So again, it's just a matter of getting to work on it and just realizing that there are opportunities where we can do this, where these things can actually work well. Yeah, macroalgae production is covered in that National Academy report. It's something that, as you suggest, it's getting a good bit of traction. No, what's the question from the audience? What kind of trees are you planting? Oh, yeah, that's an excellent question. All of the trees are the same. And in fact, one of the first things that we had to do when we were going to plant trees is to cut down trees. It's kind of ironic, right? For us to plant trees, we got to cut trees. So one of the problems in Hawaii is that over 80% of the land has been transformed, right? So original forest was cut down for agriculture. And once that land was abandoned, that land got overgrown by introduced species. So we had tons of species right now that have been introduced that are brutal or how bad they are for the environment. You have things like alcoa, albisha, guava trees. So unfortunately, the first thing that we had to do is to clear the land from those introduced species. And then, in my case, I only plant native trees. There is some debate among local people here that works on these things to plant trees that have been introduced that are not invasive. I had personal reservations on that action. In my case, as an ecologist, I only plant native trees. And we are working, I have multiple students trying to figure out the Lysalcos to ensure that we can maximize the production of these seedlings. So right now, we have capacity to produce about five species of native trees by the thousands. In fact, by the millions, we want everything sorted out scientifically to ensure that we can produce tons of native species now. And you know, when last we spoke, one of the big issues we were talking about was that a lot of these newly planted trees got a water. And we were working on methods to make sure that happened because you were saying there was a big die-off. That is a huge die-off. But actually, that is beautiful how good that is. We normally get 10% survival when we plant and we never come back. And a lot of people see that as a terrible thing. Oh my God, 90% mortality. That's crazy. And I thought, why are you talking about that? It's beautiful. If you think about what happens in nature, a single coa tree produces 100,000 seeds of which only one of them should survive. So that's one out of 100,000. When we talk about 10% survival, we're talking about that 10,000 seeds out of that one tree are going to survive. So we're making things 10,000 better than nature. So again, one of the problems that we had today is the misconception that high mortality is a bad thing when in reality it's a natural process that actually we're improving quite a lot. Now, the other problem of having huge survival by helping the tree a lot with water and we didn't know all these things is that we created individuals that might be able, not might be able to survive that well later on when they are in their own. So the process of natural selection is actually good to have it playing a role in our, in our plantings. But I understand that a lot of people don't really see very well you having 90% of your trees dying. So we are working on different, again, putting a science and engineering to ensure that our trees survive. And we have several technologies that we're working on. I had a pattern now in one of the devices to ensure that once we plant the trees, they had higher chances to survive. But again, I want to point out to people that seen 10% survival is actually 10,000 times better than what it is in nature. Interesting. You know what I'd like to do now is maybe turn some of these questions over to our audience out there who's been sending some questions in. But first, as I need to look at some of the questions, I guess I'd like to start with, you know, when last we spoke, it was, you're all scientists and oftentimes loads the weight into the politics. But is anyone concerned about the 2022 midterm elections and what needs to be done in terms of promoting science? I'll take a quick stab at just one of the key frustrations I have as a scientist that we feel like sometimes that the status of science in the U.S. right now is in decline, right? There are a lot of people who deny the climate science that's going on and just pick and choose what is convenient to them to believe in, even when we show pretty clear signals and clear data. And what drives me crazy about this as a bit of a technologist and someone who builds instrumentation and works on technology in addition to science is that all of these, all this misinformation is getting propagated through technology, right? I mean, almost everyone is walking around with one of these in their pocket, right? This is my iPhone. And it's incredibly powerful and complex, and most people have no idea how it works, right? They have no idea how it connects to the Internet. They have no idea of the battery technology. They have no idea of the processor and the operating system and the low level code. They just don't know any of it. And yet they can use it to do such effective harm basically, you know, to spread the disinformation that just carries us backwards as a community at large. And so I find that so ironic is to be painful, you know, that we're able to use these technological advantages to basically take our global society backwards. And so when I think about the upcoming election, I think about all of the sort of finger pointing and half truths that are thrown around. I think, like, God, we've created our own system to do this and do it incredibly effectively with the very thing that's supposed to be the answer. Hey, Jim, I want to add something to this that is a personal thought of mine about this problem that we see today. Because for me, one of the things that this situation is revealing today is the poor education system that we have, not only the United States, but everywhere. And I see just the incapacity of people to think critically the information that they get. And I try to question why does the kids, you know, why is people is not judging this information more critically? And I think it had to do with the fact that we are failing our kids at the high school and the university to ensure an education system where they can just that information more critically. When you look when you see our country, I find in mind blowing the half of the people cannot get basic concepts in a science. And I, for instance, it frustrates me when you see reporters saying that recommendations from the CDC are confusing. Why are you talking confusing? They're very clear recommendations. They're basically what we're talking there is your intellectual incapacity to comprehend processes that are complex. And I try to understand what does the case. So it points out, I believe, to a more social problem of society overall. And I personally, I just don't know where it comes from. I think that it comes from education. So somehow we're failing our children by not funding well the teachers by not giving good support to the parents. But I think that this is pointing out to a more serious problem in society than what we see today. Camilo, that's a very good point. I just want to add that a lot of the education must involve the parents. Members of my family are deeply involved in education. And we've been talking lately about the fact that in the science classroom, the junior school and middle school science classroom, and even in the high schools, my family members are seeing children come in believing that earth is flat. And they are answering questions on tests for the purpose of getting a good grade, but fundamentally, you know, and they'll answer the question correctly that earth is spherical. But because at home, there are certain belief systems that are guiding their parents. In fact, getting concepts related to evolution, getting concepts about earth's position in the solar system and in the universe across to these children is like swimming upstream when family members at home don't believe these same fundamental basic proven scientific concepts. So yes, the education system is critical, but also what takes place at home is critical as well. Well, and that is again, the importance of these laws that have been proposed by the Democrats, I believe today, you know, like trying to provide some kind of support to families, although I think that the problem that you're pointing out is so critical. It would be nice to identify how do we fix this thing, because I'm totally on board with you on this thing. One of the things that scares me the most is to engage in conversations with people that actually had use evidence, pick up evidence to support ideas that I know are crazy. Like, for instance, this idea that you are talking about the planet being flat. I was shocked several times talking to people that totally believe the thing and they use scientific evidence that I don't know where it comes from. So yeah, it is a tough problem to address. I was just going to say on a similar topic, but on a different level is the fact that we as scientists traditionally aren't trained to present our work and in sort of sound bites or in ways that are digestible. I'm not saying that we need to make all of our research, you know, Twitter ready or anything like that. But I think what we see in this last IPCC report, you know, there's a lot of material there. Clearly, they've worked with social scientists. Clearly, they've worked with, you know, other journalists to try to put that information in a more digestible way, creating, you know, single PDF slides with bullet points. And we have to do that more often. It's an added level of work. And it's something that, you know, another yet another thing we're not necessarily trained to do. But I do think that there's a burden of that that we have to take on, particularly this next generation of scientists, when there has been some erosion in the confidence of science in general, particularly to you, scientists. It's been proven that the oil and gas industry has funded groups that are sowing doubt, the same strategy used by the tobacco industry. And this has been going on for several decades. And they've been having a significant impact. They have they have tremendously slow progress in the United States. And I put a link in the Q&A box here for a paper that came out in the in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which, which shows data that the more a member of Congress votes against environmental initiatives, which would include climate change policy, the more funding is available from the oil and gas industry. So this is a huge, huge problem. Our congressional members are are being paid by the oil and gas industry, not all of them, but there are a significant number of congressional members who are paid by the oil and gas industry to stand in the way of significant climate policy moving forward in the United States. And the whole world watches the United States at this point with great frustration over the fact that our system is preventing us from reestablishing the leadership role that that we've traditionally had in this field. If it's funny, here in the United States, that's got loving in my country, that's got corruption, you know, I was just wondering whether whether as scientists, you feel like you can get out there a bit more either on social media or or in the press or on TV. You see yourselves becoming a little bit more activist. There are a couple of things to that question there. One is first to have the opportunity and the reality is that we are competing against Justin Bieber and all kind of other people that dominate public's attention. So we don't really have too many opportunities to do this. But the other thing that needs to happen is what Angelique pointed out, which is that we need to have training on this. You know, I don't know, you have seen for instance, the latest debate between Paul Rowe, Ron Paul and sorry, this Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci, how Dr. Fauci was trying to make a point and Ron Paul was constantly interfering, you know, so that's training. So when you don't want to have a message being delivered to another person, what you do is you raise your voice while the other person is talking, it turns out that that's part of the training that they had. You know, so we need to somehow be trained on the same skill so that when we have those shots or message is going to be delivered and it's going to be delivered well. And unfortunately, we don't go through that training. So you can potentially go through this presentation alone and you will see hundreds of errors that we have made that could be fixed by us also having this training on media communication. And yeah. One of the panelists that we had last year, Dr. Aaron Bernstein, he was concerned that one of the ways COVID is affecting the work on climate change was that it was sort of pushing climate change off the again. And that he said that this often happens. We have a big major crisis and all of a sudden people can say, well, I'll worry about climate change after we deal with the pandemic. Are you guys concerned about that? Yes. The tyranny of the urgent, right? It always dominates the day. And that's where teamwork, for instance, you know, Congress, teams of people need to help leaders tackle multiple critical goals, critical issues simultaneously. It's such a shame that the stimulus money around the world that was used to pull the economy out of the recession caused by COVID-19 did not have a much larger component dedicated to making the pivot to renewable energy. There was a significant investment in renewable energy systems around the world, but not nearly enough to put us on the pathway to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius. And so that's a failure of our leaders globally that that was a lost opportunity. So not only did COVID divert our attention, but it also provided an opportunity, right? And there's opportunity buried in every crisis. And we need to be ready for those as they continue to occur in the future. And I don't know whether you have an answer to this question or not, but another question from someone attending the webinar. Are enough students and kids going into these fields? You know, science and anthropology, are we short of students and graduates? And what can we do to encourage students to go into these fields? I'll try that one, at least from what I'm seeing here. I think that in general, we're still seeing a strong pipeline of students and starting to see little upticks in a more diverse student population. The geosciences has been predominantly male and white for a very long time and has a real diversity problem that is not talked about enough. But I do see little bits of improvement here and there. And you know, in this last year and the year before, in terms of graduate students applying to the program that I teach in and where I would advise students, they're still very strong candidates coming through. I do understand that more broadly across higher education, there is perhaps a crisis emerging in which some people are not returning to campus, not returning to schools, and that enrollment is down a bit across all of there's an MPR piece on it yesterday or enrollment is down across all sectors of the undergraduate, you know, bachelor level education. So it's yet to be seen there. But I think I am somewhat optimistic for us to have the next generation of scientists who can keep going with the kind of data records that Angelique and I have been, you know, putting a lot of our careers towards, and that that will keep going. What I really wish for is a general population that's more science literate, that's more able to have these discussions where present some data, we talk about the hypothesis, we see if the hypothesis is valid or not. And if they have some alternate hypothesis, something that they heard on the street or heard from a family member, they can really assess it critically and come to their own conclusion and not just, you know, make a sort of a story up that is convenient to them that reinforces something that they already believed. And that, you know, that that I see is the bigger problem. So I'm not worried about the experts that become the next PhDs. I think that pipeline is still there. I'm worried about the general public really just understanding how we do science. And, and, and it really comes down to trust, right. And trust is a hard thing to build trust is something that's usually built over a lot of time and effort on a one-on-one basis. But we need more throughput, we need to get to the point where we as a scientific community are trusted in the larger world, you know, at scale. And I don't know how to go from I know how to do it on a one-on-one. If I spend enough time with someone, I usually can get there, right. But we don't have the time to do that one-on-one with every person in the world, we've got to do it at scale. And that's I don't know how to do that. I would just echo those comments. You know, I think we've we've still got a pretty amazing stream of students that are interested in the Geosciences, a passionate group of students that really want to affect change and care for their environment in the various ways that that they're interested. I also think we have to mention that it's a real challenge for a lot of these students, new students coming in, particularly people with families. One of the things we've absolutely seen in this era of COVID is, you know, the mental health challenges of isolation that have been inflicted on students at various levels. You know, so there's there's some some issues. I think COVID has put up some barriers to the student population that we have to acknowledge at multiple levels. And then, you know, beyond that, I just I couldn't agree more with with what you said, but the effect of it is that on climate change in some ways is sort of the learning loss that a lot of students have undergone. I think I know in education, that's a big issue, but how do you how do you recapture that? Or have we got a we got a whole generation of students that are, you know, just one or two steps behind? What I'd like to do now is maybe go around the room and see if you've got maybe some summary remarks and some insights that we've gained or would like to leave us with. Jake, you'd like to add to the discussion at this point to wrap things up since we're close to running out of time. Yeah, thank you. This is hard for me because I'm constantly criticized for leaving audiences without hope. And I'm so embedded in the science related to climate change that I follow all the papers that come out and we the scientists are doing an incredible job of tracking the growing instability of global biophysical systems, major ocean currents, the ice sheets, the alpine glaciers, coral reefs, the great arctic pine forests, the Amazon basin, all around the planet. We're seeing amazing negative impacts to systems that really we depend on for our livelihood, for our natural resources. But where I do see the opportunity for an amazing future is if people, once they come in contact with the facts, with the science here, and they come to realize that we are putting our only planet at risk, we are putting our only home at risk, and can come together to fall in love once again with planet Earth, and to fall in love with each other, to quit this fighting and this factionalism, and to instead realize that unless we pull in one direction as a single human community, and make this pivot to a clean future, to a healthy future, both in what we eat, the natural resources that we use, the forms of energy that we utilize, how we move in transportation systems. This is a fully consuming transformation of human society is what's needed here, and as has been mentioned, it is a crisis, it's an emergency, we cannot afford to wait any longer. But the good news is that the future could be an amazing place for our children and grandchildren. If we can just get through these classic human problems of bias and competition, and instead work in one direction, because there's only one planet, and we have to get this right, there's no alternative. Jim, do you have any thoughts along these lines? Mostly that I would also like to end on a note of optimism, and I do see, you know, tremendous energy and intent in the youth and the students that I'm around. That's really exciting, that's really encouraging. And, you know, to just end on the idea that the solution to despair is action. And, you know, I share a lot of these, my colleagues, feelings of just sadness, you know, when you get depressed, when you, I mean, I go up to the Arctic and I see less ice every year and it is just plain old depressing. But I feel when I can do anything, not just report it, but do things in my own life, then I, you know, it feels better and to try to to showcase those things, not to brag about them, but to nudge people in the same direction and be like, you know, hey, I rode my bike to work today, it was great. You want to try it with me tomorrow? You know, hey, we're putting solar on the house this year, what do you think? You know, hey, my neighbor just got electric car, man, that thing's cool. I went for a ride in it, it's great. You know, like, and just bring everyone around you, even on that really small scale, it just starts to, you know, feel like you're building momentum. So, those are the things that I'm looking to do that try to, you know, basically reinforce my own optimism when I'm feeling a low point. And the thing that's always best when I'm really trying to lean into that approach is to just hang out with some kids, my own son or his friends or, you know, just, man, there's a lot of promise there and a lot of energy there. And, you know, that's to be harnessed, pun acknowledged. It sounds like that each of you have some fairly specific viable solutions that you'd like to see people start doing. I know Chip actually had some effect on me when he was talking about last year about what was a sort of factory farming, I think was one of the issues that Jim was talking about and how that was affecting climate change. And, you know, the more he started thinking about it, and frankly, Chip was talking about how he became a vegetarian, in part because he wanted to be more responsible. And I can't claim to have become a vegetarian, but I'll tell you, you had a big influence on me. I just got way back on the kind of factory farming food I was eating. And I know it could live longer too. Perhaps there are some other issues involved. But Camilla, you've got a fairly practical approach to this whole thing, which is to plant trees. Yeah. And I'm telling you, I love it. It's everybody that comes to do this thing, sweat like crazy, hard work. But I'm telling you, when you walk away from this, you will feel very happy. I know that every one of you are looking for solutions about things to do. And I have to tell you that I work on this with my daughter. Actually, I mentioned that much earlier, she's the one that came out with this idea of planting trees. And actually, she's kind of my boss now. She's kind of the one driving this whole thing. And just to acknowledge that I'm from, but one of the things that I want to finish with is that, yes, everyone of us can do something. Every American produces over 20 tons of carbon. So you just want to care about your own carbon footprint or what you got to do is plant 20 trees. The calculation, I already did it. So if you want to do something, starting with yourself, you produce 20 tons of carbon, one planted the 10 trees. And I want to plant a million trees myself. I'm not going to do it alone. So I would love if the people from Hawaii come and give me a hand anytime next time that we do this. But speaking of that, Camilo, can you tell people where to go to volunteer? We are actually the whole project is in standby because we need to prepare several things, bottlenecks that we encounter. Once those bottlenecks are overcome, is that we're going to go, well, at this moment, I don't want to rush a product to market, so to speak. We already identified several problems that need to be overcome, especially with the COVID situation. Once that thing is done, I'm hoping to have a program in place that anyone can come and plant trees right now. So at the current time, we're just planting trees here and there, whenever we had an opportunity, but nothing as large as we did prior to the COVID nor as big as we want to do it once we overcome these problems. But I think if people wanted to know a little bit more, they could simply Google your name and treat planting in Hawaii. They could probably get there. That's great. Angelica, I'm going to leave the last word for you. Give us some hope here. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And thank you for the time to have this conversation because, you know, whenever we have these conversations, there was a book that came out a few years ago called All We Can Save. And it's an anthology by 60 women climate scientists. And its theme really is hope, but it also recognizes that it's not geoscientists that are going to solve these issues, right? It's humanity. It's sociologists, it's philosophers, economists, engineers, geoscientists. We do need to come together. And so that's, I think, the theme of hope and resilience that I would like to leave here with. Because the climate crisis is a moment of peril, right? But it's also a moment of great possibility. Just to build on what Jim had said, when we see what the climate youth, the youth climate movement has done in terms of transforming the conversation to really, really work on this portfolio of solutions that involve the ocean, you know, trees. And most importantly, how we utilize resources from our planet and the ways that we eat and the ways that we transport ourselves around the planet to be more mindfully connected to the world around us. I think that hopefully that if there's, for me, at least one take home out of this conversation, it's that is that we do need to think about our footprint on the planet and the ways in which we can connect with others that are trying to preserve this one single habitat that we have for future generations. Excellent. Well, I think I'll leave it there. This has been a wonderful webinar and you folks have really done a wonderful job of explaining what you're up to and what's ahead of us. And I really appreciate, and I think everyone viewing does, is sort of threatened to find the optimism in what we're going through. But I wish you a great deal of luck in your further research. And I really appreciate the audience sticking with us and hearing what our panelists have to say. So I want to thank you very much and end the webinar there, if that's okay. Thank you again. Thank you guys. Thank you very much. Thank you.