 My name's Simon Donner, I'm an associate professor of climatology at the University of British Columbia, and I work on several aspects of climate change, but mostly the impacts of climate change on marine systems, on coral reefs and coastlines, and also on how we can adapt to those changes in the developing world. One of the things I've been interested in over the years is sort of the root causes of what can make people skeptical about the basic science for climate change, or even just make them just not concerned about the problem. And there's tons of good research from psychologists and everything on this, and I've really been curious about the root causes, and where it comes from for me is really just, I live in a city that's, we're lucky we're on the ocean, we have mountains here in Vancouver, and what do people do in Vancouver? They go climb up in the mountains to take a view out over the ocean, and why is that exciting? Because it's vast and it's huge, and it's, you know, ponderous moments. You see the, you know, the grandness of nature and of the earth, and it is, we're looking at things that seems beyond human power. And so I started really thinking about where that comes from. And if you go back and look at most of the major religions, major belief systems and whatnot, the land is the thing that humans control, and the sky is sort of the domain of the gods, and that's sort of the research that I've been doing, and a couple papers about it, but I'm also sort of trying to write a book about this. And the idea is that really our modern relationship with the climate started, you know, around 10,000 years ago when we first developed agriculture and settled into cities, because we went from being hunters and gatherers to being people who depended on the rain to provide food. And that was a really fundamental shift, and really like a paradigm shift in the way, not just we live, but we viewed the world, is that we needed to, we could control the land, but we had to depend on whatever it was that controlled the sky to, you know, provide us with rain, to provide us, you know, with fertility, basically. And I guess what I've kind of been tracking is the ways in which just this sort of really basic assumption that this climate in the sky of an outside of human control for thousands of years, you know, still influences the way we think today, you know, and it doesn't mean that just because you're religious, you're not going to believe in climate change, because it's not actually about religion so much, it's just about the vastness, you know, in history, what we're used to controlling or we're not used to controlling, and you really see sort of the tentacles of that ancient belief in a lot of, you know, sort of skepticism about climate change, the way people think about adaptation and whatnot today. So this does, of course, vary a little bit depending on the cultures, and there's been some good research, you know, pointing out that, you know, the sort of theory I'm presenting doesn't obviously apply to everyone. And in fact, a lot of what different cultures have been trying to have been sort of developed over the years is a way to control the sky by sort of communicating with the gods that lived in the sky, right? It's the idea that you could think of it instead as, well, it's not the sky's outside of direct human control, but we can kind of indirectly control it because we have a sort of religious or belief infrastructure that we use to do that. I should say that what's really telling, and you know, they have to speak to religious historians, which I'm not really about, about that, is that, you know, the major Semitic religion, so Judaism, Christianity, you know, in Islam, come from a part of the world and a time in place where everything was very drought-prone. And so that is where the major civilizations in much of, so the Westernized world today come from and grow out of this, of a place where we were really dependent on the supernatural to provide the weather and the climate for us. So it is true, there's a lot of research today, fantastic research from communications experts, psychologists, et cetera, showing all of the different things to sort of factor into people being skeptical or becoming sort of denialists of climate change and whether it's, whether it's legiosity, it's about your political views, all these sort of different things, they come into play. And I would say that the theory I've sort of put forward, it's not necessarily adding, you know, an extra item to the regression analysis. It's actually what I think underlies some of all this. So if you want to know why does politics influence things? Why does being left on the political spectrum versus right on the political spectrum influence things? What I'm sort of proposing is almost independent of all of that and is trying to like just go into the historical explanation. So, you know, personally the inspiration for thinking about this came from working in other cultures. I do field research, the scientific field research in the Pacific Islands and was really struck by a few different things that I've learned from staying in villages in Fiji and having people talk to me about what happens when there's a drought that people blame the minister or they blame each other for not being devout because they prayed for the rain at the planting festival, it should have rained, right? But also the fact that, you know, people I've met in Kiribati is very common, this is in the central Pacific, really low-lying islands. And these people are learning today that the sea level is supposed to be rising because of climate change and the old men generally don't believe it because there's a covenant in the Old Testament saying the, you know, the seas will never rise again, right? And the story of Noah from Genesis. And so it may be that all, you know, of course all these other factors come into play in defining exactly somebody's modern opinion on climate change, but I'm just saying that there's these thousands of years of history that we should take into account as well. And really what I've taken away from all of it is almost a bit of I'm probably quite forgiving to people that are ardent denialists of climate change in a way that I think upsets a lot of other scientists. But the reason is I'm just saying from a historical perspective, it's not that crazy because for thousands of years it would have been really hard to believe that we could affect the climate. And it's just taking time to transition away from that. It's a really tough paradigm shift. So how should scientists respond and interact with climate denialists? You know, when it comes to actually speaking to, you know, dealing with an individual climate, climate denialist, I don't know that there's a perfect recipe as to what to do. What I, the only thing I advocate is humility. And if you think about it, like if you didn't have the chance, you know, I'm lucky I studied atmosphere and ocean sciences in school, right? If you don't have the chance to sit through and do radiative physics and fluid dynamics classes, right, for years, which is not necessarily something people all want the chance to do, you're going to learn about climate change from like a half an hour public seminar from an item you, items you hear on the news, right? You're not really going to be immersed in the subject. And I think it's, we need to accept that, you know, a 20 minute presentation you give isn't going to be able to upend thousands of years of thinking in the other direction. So just be humble about the fact that this person that you've met at a seminar or that's in your class that you met on the street or your uncle or whatever that is, you know, sort of denying the sort of basic scientific reality of climate change, there are good historical and cultural reasons that they might deny it. And it might be really hard for you to change that person's mind and that's okay. Because if you really think through the history, you can't expect to change things overnight. And I always think about sort of Darwin and the theory of evolution, right? I mean, it's been 150 years, right? And people are still fighting about whether they can teach creationism in schools. And so one of the things that I think anyone who just follows the news about climate change as I do, it's my area of interest, I do research in the area. So I, and it's hard not to notice how it seemed anecdotally to me like things like when it's been a warm winter, you hear a lot more about climate change in the news is particularly in Canada, where it's really striking if the winter is warm. And, and there has been a fair number of fair amount of psychological research, where basically pulling people to see what their opinions are about climate change. After after, you know, the previous day was warm or cold. So you call people up say what was the weather last day and do analysis like that. And there's also been experiments, which I just think are fantastic, which where they literally turn the temperature up in a room and discovered that if it's hotter in the room, people are more concerned about climate change, which is just fascinating to me. And I'm oversimplifying the experiment. But so I actually worked with just an undergraduate student of mine, a really sharp guy named Jeremy McDaniels, to look at, you know, to what extent can we see that effect in the data from opinion polls. Now the trick with this, of course, is that opinion polling on climate change is only done, you know, every every year or so. And so we just wanted to see whether the large scale swings in climate was it a warm year or cold year overall? Did it move with public opinion and statistically speaking, it seemed to in the data we analyzed. And so we went sort of the next step and looked at opinion pieces like op ed pieces in newspapers, and classified them as sort of whether they agreed with the scientific consensus or disagreed with the scientific consensus on climate change, and tried to see did that vary with temperature. And it also did, which was really interesting. And when I say what temperature, we're talking about nationally average temperatures in the US. And so I think really what that in what those relationships are saying was that the variability in climate is one of the things that drives public opinion about climate change. And it might be through the sort of mechanisms that the experimental psychologists are finding that it's literally hotter and then you think about it more. But I think my sense was it because you're seeing this influence in the newspapers as well, that I think what's happening is it's sort of more just the movement of the like sort of the issue public, getting excited about an issue, getting less excited about an issue and whatnot. And there's a sort of a feedback effect. So it doesn't have to be warm where you are. But if the country as a whole has been warm, it's going to get reported in the paper, you're going to read about that. That's going to influence your thinking. And then when you got a call from the pollster, you might answer the question differently. Now that again is only going to be for a small fraction of the public, because for whose views on climate change are actually malleable, because you've got a good chunks on either end of the spectrum whose views aren't really changing over time. The take home I got out of the statistical analysis we did of the op-ed pieces and of opinion polls and temperature was really that there's give in the sort of public, average reported public opinion on climate change and goes up and down. They're not huge swings, but there was statistically meaningful and detectable using basic measures. And the best way to make sense of it in our analysis was that there's kind of like a climate change swing voter, that there's sort of people in the middle that depending on the conditions and those conditions might be a change in temperature, but there might be other current events as well. Whatever else is going on in the news, they may say, oh, you know what, I am concerned. I am worried about climate change now, whereas the next year they may not be. And, you know, we call them climate change swing voters, but as far as I understand, there are other papers that have done analyses like this and have found that, you know, people are sort of in the independent part of the political spectrum. So neither left nor right, those are the ones whose opinions were most likely to change with temperature. So it kind of gels with our findings. I should say that there's been more recent publications that kind of challenged the relationship we found. So I don't think the verdict is 100 percent that, you know, that climate variability number one is a number one driver, but I think it definitely plays a role. Could you talk about how different types of El Nino affect, like short-term surface temperature trends? We're getting everything in. I traveled a long way, I'm going to get as much as I can. So one of the areas that the research that we've been doing in my lab for a while is on El Nino events, but on sort of the typology of El Nino events. And there's a lot of scientists, folks in Japan, folks in the United States and elsewhere, that are saying we maybe should be classifying El Nino events into different types, or sometimes they say flavors, which I like that term. And the classification we're generally using is sort of the classic Eastern Pacific El Ninos, the events that most people are used to, like the big 1997-98 event. That's the classic definition, but we also have these events that are where the warm water temperatures are mostly found in the Central Pacific, and people refer to them in the United States as Central Pacific events, or warm pool events in Japan. They're called Madoki events, and Madoki means, is a Japanese word that means same, but different, basically. The non-El Nino events are created equal, and mostly centers around where the abnormally warm water is in the Pacific. Is it right across from the east to the center? Is it just in the east? Is it just in the center? And how does that affect, like, so the average temperature of the planet? You know, the surface air temperatures on the planet. And what's come out of our research really clearly is that the Eastern Pacific events, which are the real classic events, like the big 1997-98 El Nino event, they are globally warm. You can do the statistical analysis and show those years in which, after those events form, are warmer than all of the years on average. But if you actually take out the Central Pacific events only, they're not warmer than average. And so it's really just saying that the old line that a lot of climate scientists use saying, oh, it's an El Nino year, it's going to be warmer than normal, isn't actually always true. It's true for certain types of El Nino events, and it's actually the other types of events are not abnormally warm. And I think what's really relevant about that now is that we haven't been having those large Eastern Pacific El Nino events in the past 15 years. We've had a number of El Ninos, but they've been on the Central Pacific variety. And so every time one of these things starts developing, people start saying, oh, next year is going to be really warm because we have an El Nino event developing. But they need to take into account it's not like the big monster Eastern Pacific events. And the Pacific Ocean's been in a state over the past 15 years because of longer term variability that it's hard to generate those big Eastern Pacific events. And so we get the Central Pacific ones, which aren't globally warm. And if you add it all up and do the math, it helps explain why the rate of temperature change on the surface has been slower the past 15 years. And the Pacific Ocean state's going to change pretty soon. We'll go back into a place where it's easy to create those Eastern Pacific El Nino events and the rate of global warming will increase again. This year has been really fascinating, I think, for all the obsessive El Nino geeks like me. We've been looking at the temperature updates every few days basically to see what's happening in the Pacific. We had, I think, back in May and June, ocean temperatures developing in a way in the Pacific that made it look like this was going to be one of the big Eastern Pacific monster events. And it isn't. It is not going to turn into that. What we have right now is, depending on who you ask, could be classified as an El Nino event. The Japanese government agency that does this work says, yes, it's an El Nino event. None of the US agencies has declared it one as yet. And it's because this is one of these sort of mild in between events. Until the data is all in, six months from now, I can't say for sure. But just looking at this week's temperatures, it's December right now, it looks to me like what we would call a mixed event. Where the pocket of warm water is sort of in between the center and the Eastern Pacific. But it doesn't, it's not going to stay seated way over into the east over the Galapagos and everything. And now those, those big events like that, those are the ones that really drive a global temperature. I do expect though that this mixed event, it's got enough warmth in it that we are seeing a global impact from it. And I wouldn't be surprised if 2015 ends up being the warmest year ever. But 2014 will, depending on the agency, because there's different climate data sets, will, some will list it as the warmest year ever, you know, in other, in other data sets it will get the silver, the bronze, but it's going to be pretty close. It's going to be a photo finish, basically right. And you know, a lot of people think it's pretty amazing because this hasn't been a full El Nino year. And, you know, although the globe is warming, we've got this noise, you know, of ups and down variability on top of that noise. And so generally the records tend to get broken when we have a strong El Nino year. But you don't need El Nino to do it, right, because the globe is warming anyways. And I think what's happened is that, especially the past 15 years, we haven't had a really strong big El Nino, Eastern Pacific El Nino event. The ones that really drive global average temperature up. We've had these central Pacific ones that don't have much influence. Do you have advice for scientists who are struggling to find a balance between doing science and advocacy? You know, one of the things I talk, I talk about science and advocacy a lot with my graduate students, but also just with people around the university at UBC. And, you know, the thing I always, people are torn, you know, should I speak at this event? Should I go to this event? Should I be part of a protest? How will it affect my career? How will it affect science? And, you know, my advice is always just to be thoughtful about it. And in fact, it'd be almost thoughtful about it. I mean, if you're a scientist, be scientific about it. Do your research, read up on what are the impact, you know, there's so much psychological communications research these days. What is the impact of doing this activity? Will I be effective at engaging with people given my background? Really do the research and really do the self analysis. I think one of the mistakes we make is just not thinking enough about ourselves and our motivations and recognizing when, you know, maybe you want to speak about an issue because you are an expert, but maybe you're also personally motivated for some other reason. And if you're going to be doing that, that's okay. But you should be aware of it. Yeah. What do we need to do to save coral reefs? Most of my research over the past 10 years has been on climate change and coral reefs. And, you know, I get asked all the time, but what we should do to save coral reefs? And the stock answer is, well, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid ocean acidification and frequent bleaching events. But in the meantime, we can work to help make reefs more resilient by reducing terrestrial runoff and reducing overfishing and everything. And that is absolutely true. I mean, we want to do everything we can locally to make reefs more resilient. But I think we have to be careful with pushing that message too hard because it's true that you can make reefs more resilient to bleaching, for example, by by reducing all these local stressors. But in the end, if we are on the business as usual trajectory we're on, it's hard to envision a world in which there's many corals left a hundred years from now. And that's not just our modeling answering it. It's fieldwork, it's geology. You can look at reef gaps in the historical record. And so it's not to say we should give up on conservation. But I think people who work on reefs that want to care about their future have to be talking about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. It's just unavoidable. You know, I think like a lot of people who went into becoming doing climate science, they probably started at some stage just because they were good at math and physics. And for me, you know, I actually wanted to be a physicist for a while and I was more interested in things out in space than things on our own planet. But I was also somebody that spent a lot of time outside, spent a lot of time like a lot of young Canadians hanging on lakes and whatnot. And I was really interested in my local environment and how it changed from year to year. And so I got driven to studying climate change not because not out of a great concern for the planet at first. It was really out of my own personal scientific curiosity about how the lake looked different when it was a dry year versus a wet year and how it would affect the biology. And I came into studying climate change because I wanted to understand climate. And you just couldn't avoid studying how it's changing. It's been a lot of fun the past few years doing blogging and doing things on Twitter. And we've made some videos, I think, that are good and bad. And, you know, I think the thing for scientists, I mean, I got asked all the time, like, you know, oh, should I be doing this? Should I be doing outreach or whatever? I said, you should do what you enjoy and what you think you're good at. You know, and for me, I've just I've really loved the chance to interact with people and engage with people. I mean, I find that as much as I love research, I mean, teaching is such an exciting part of our lives and our job. And I also just, you know, I take really seriously the fact that I'm Canadian, I'm at a Canadian University. It's all public money. And my job, you know, I'm being paid by taxpayers' dollars to try and answer questions. And so those questions are coming from the public, I'm going to answer what the, you know, I'm going to answer them for the public. And so I spend an inordinate amount of time answering questions from the radio and TV or whatever. And to me, it doesn't matter if it's a national thing or it's just a local station. It's all important as long as people are listening and I can sort of do something to deliver back the fact that they're helping pay for my existence. We should do it. So one thing that's definitely changed at universities in the years is that, you know, we're trying to collect, you know, universities are living in the era of big data, too, right? And so we collect data on what the students think about your classes. And a lot of faculty complain about it, right? Because you wouldn't want sort of the popularity of a class to completely dictate what students learn because sometimes popularity doesn't line up with what is maybe the most important things for your education. But but I love it because you get this great detailed feedback on what worked and what didn't. And I find that if students were found one part of my course popular and some other part unpopular, but that unpopular part was the part that I really think they need to learn. To me, it's like, why didn't do a good job at it? And I have to think about how to engage them differently. So I think it's fantastic. It's, you know, I'm a scientist. Give me the data, you know, so. So if I had an elevator pitch for global warming, let's see. I got to really practice this, I think I would say, you know, stuck in an elevator stuck in an elevator with somebody. I would just and they say, oh, you're a climate scientist, which so what do you think of this global warming stuff, which I actually do get asked a fair bit. I usually say, you know, despite what you would, despite what you may have heard, it's all real and it's all and it's all just basic science, its physics and chemistry. And the key thing to know is that this isn't some new thing that Al Gore kicked up a few years, cooked up a few years ago. It's rooted in the basics of physics and chemistry. The experiments on this started 200 years ago. So yeah, you might see some headline that questions some aspect of it in the news, you know, tomorrow, but that can't affect the core because the core is so grounded in what we know at this point that you'd have to tear up most physics and chemistry textbooks for us to be wrong. Yeah, I mean, some people have their hair is their kind of defining thing. I thought that was your kind of your defining. It's curly and it just I just I get it shorter. No, no, it's actually we're going to just put a wig on a chair and just animate it. It's the wonders of computer technology. We're going to spend most of our mook budget adding all the curls back in.