 His talk is about climate change, the latest and some things unforeseen. And he will give us some updates about climate change, about what is ahead for Vermont, the growing variability of strengths and the need to be critical, and what the land of sea ice has in store for us on our planet. And he'll talk for about an hour, quarter, and then he will take a few questions. So, thank you for coming. Thanks for coming out on a very snowy night and not very snowy, but I think it's what we're all kind of hoping for eventually, right? So, yeah, we might maybe end up with 10 inches on the other side of the weekend, little three storms coming in, so that would be nice. I know there's a lot of very depressed skiers and cross-country skiers and snowshoers like myself and just people who like to have snow and there's a lot of psychological reflectivity, you know, the snowpack. And it just makes things a whole lot better, I think, especially when it's all, when the sun comes out, there's nothing like it. And of course, we cherish snow, so bring it on. Well, my talk is going to be about some of the things that are new, a little bit of review. I also did a presentation for the Sustainable Montpelier and I'm going to add to some of that and go over some of that stuff too because there's a lot of interesting things going on in climate right now because of the way it affects weather and mostly has to do with winter and we're going to get into a little bit of that. I have a lot of slides, so I just want to warn you. Some of that stuff I'm going to go through pretty quick. Some of it is a little tedious and I want to spend too much time on a few things, but other things will slow down and get the important stuff out of the way. So thanks very much for coming in and we'll proceed. This is my disclaimer and attribute. You can see the papers there, the Peer Review papers. These are, of course, the researchers and the climate scientists, climatologists, various experts in different fields. They do quite a bit of the work that, of course, we presenters talk about and they're very, very important. Of course, being a climate scientist nowadays is not a real good situation. It's like logically. It's a little bit of a downer, I guess, but we need to know more and more and find out some of the feedbacks and what's going on and that's what we'll be talking about a little bit. So the new normal. So, you know, you see the jet stream here and that's part of what we're looking at. Some of the changes that are taking place with the jet stream beginning to slow down a little bit and what that is caused by. But we're going to kind of do a little bit of a summary here as I go along. So this next slide here, I want to show you, okay, that is the, of course, the problem. But this is what that smokestack was producing, if you will. And you might notice that I have the mediums, the mainstream press talks about carbon dioxide levels, too. That's mostly what we ended up talking about. But if you put all the greenhouse gases together, you come up with higher amounts, unfortunately, that have that interaction with sunlight that excite the little molecules and move them around and create, generate heat. And so that's the name of the game there. So as you can see, the carbon dioxide levels kind of back to that because it's one solid measurement. The levels are the highest, of course, in three million years. And that's a long time before humans are around, for example. And the temperature is responding, although not evenly across the globe. January 2020 is the 420th consecutive month in a row that has been above normal. So let's look back a few thousand, a hundred thousand years. This is the Vostok ice core in Antarctica. And so basically what we're seeing is a corresponding of carbon dioxide with temperature. And carbon dioxide, of course, is very much linked. It's basically a thermostat to our atmosphere's temperature. CO2, the highest in the last three million years. Of course, that's what we are right now. And you can kind of see just how out of whack things are, unfortunately. And the temperature has yet to really respond. This is the latest monoloa carbon dioxide on the top of a monoloa, the southern volcano on the big island of Hawaii, a pristine environment. And what you can see here is the cover is where we are right in 2020 and how the averages are still going up. And unfortunately, they're not really stopping. They might even be getting a little more accelerated. Just how out of whack carbon dioxide is compared to what it has been. How do they know about all this? Well, they can take the bubbles in the ice core samples, take those little bubbles and do incredible measurements on that to find out exactly what the atmospheric chemistry was thousands of years ago. And hence they can reconstruct the temperatures. Sometimes they use proxies, but sometimes it's just straight right out of the little bubbles out of the ice cores. Well, I had to lead that with this, unfortunately. So this is the course that we're on. And you can see that we have a few choices here. Of course, the best case scenario is the green line here. The middle ground is maybe the way we were kind of trending through maybe a decade ago or whatever. And we're basically on that red line, unfortunately. And we're going for the highest amount. The most at CO2 and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as if it's some sort of race, as if it's some sort of apocalypse. And this is the response. This is the temperature. So what we have two lines here, you're looking at the land temperatures of all the continents as measured. And then you're looking at the ocean temperatures. And you notice the ocean temperature warms a little bit slower because it's like boiling a pot of water. It takes a little while to boil that pot of water. So there's a lot more energy. A lot more energy has to go into that to boil that to get that going compared to the air temperature. So the air temperature of the land is really rising. You can see the pretty steep curve. It's not 100% linear. It's not a straight line, but the averages come out to that. And there's a lot of, of course, noise in the system. We call, you know, variation, sort of natural variation that we see with El Nino and La Nina and other cycles throughout the climate cycles throughout the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and Atlantic and so forth. So look back at 2019. This is the latest information pretty much hot off the press. And 2019 was the second-west year on record. In the United States, the temperatures were above average despite the regions that were among the only cool spots on the planet. And it's been true. And we're going to get into some of the relationships as to why. The interesting thing is that North America and typically the parts of the United States generally east of the Rockies have, for whatever reason, been the coldest temperatures over the last few years. Pretty much everywhere else in the world it's been, you know, right off to the races and very warm. So this is 2019 temperature, looking at the United States. So you can see it interestingly. Vermont kind of averaged a little cool. Of course we had a very long winter. It was a very cold winter. And it kind of knocked the averages down. Otherwise we would have been warmer than normal, like most of the country. What we have been noticing is the signal most recently is the southeast United States. You can see that at least in 2019, it's been pretty warm there. Out west and in the upper Midwest, the plains, the Rockies. That's where some of that colder air has been kind of displaced out of the Arctic. And that's kind of the connection. How what was 2019? You can kind of see where the little hotspots were. And there were some in Vermont. You can see in parts of the northeast U.S. But the most part is the upper Midwest, the lower Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, Mid-Mississippi Valley, and so forth. Remember about all the fields that were flooded back when we had that sort of stuck with our system in the spring? Where we were really concerned about food. And whether or not farmers could get their crops in and grow anything. I think since then it's gotten better. But pretty scary scenario. There was a lot of damage done early on. So this is showing how wet we are in Burlington. A lot of local scale. For example, 2019, this is just pretty much hot off the press as well. And what we have is the... I'm sure a lot of folks remember 2011, especially around here. 2011, of course, was the year that Hurricane Irene hit us. But even prior to that, we had training thunderstorms that were pretty amazing. I remember it well. It was May 27th. And it flooded like crazy in many, many locations in central Vermont. And even in Burlington, though, that reflection showed up there 2011 being the wettest. The drives, you know, you can see here is 1894. And we've been kind of in between on the average, but we're running still above average. So 2019 was a little bit wet. And all you have to do is remember back to, I believe it was June. It was a pretty ugly month, and we had a ton of rain. And also in the fall prior to that. More U.S. downpours. This is not one inch. It's not two inches. It's three inches. Three inches in one day is usually going to get the job done for flash flooding. It depends on the antecedent conditions, the ground, how much soil moisture there is, how much saturation and whatnot. So let's say we just had a heavy wet soaker come through. We had another heavy wet soaker come through. Now you've got your ground is very saturated. So the next system that comes through is going to be obviously even a moral problem. And it means it takes much less to get runoff. And runoff is the name of the game, especially in the northeast United States. More downpours. You can see that we're kind of a hot spot, 55%. 90% out in the Pacific Northwest. They're starting to see a little bit of an uptick out there. And kind of have you cleaned so far in the desert southwest and the southern plains and whatnot. This is something that's interesting. Climate Central have this. It's the power of trees. And trees are a very, very good thing for climate change. Why? Because there's so much water vapor. There's so much rainfall coming down heavier, more intense. And the roots of trees is very, very important. For example, you take the 1927 flood. We had a lot of rain with that. And the antecedent conditions ahead of that was very, very moist and very wet. So we had high soil moisture, the runoff situation and whatnot. But we had a lot of trees that were cut, of course. And Vermont was a lot less forested. Well, that's a huge contribution to runoff. And runoff is a problem, of course, for us because much of our towns are all based along rivers. There are no towns and whatnot using the river as a source of energy. So a lot of our towns, a lot of our roads to get to our towns are right along the rivers. So this is an issue. And it's going to be probably getting more and more notice because we're going to unfortunately see more and more flooding. Runoff avoided by trees. Kind of interesting there. You take a look at the Northeast United States. You can kind of see that. Also the Pacific Northwest of the California coast, also regions sort of in the upper Midwest lower Great Lakes. And now it's like the mid Mississippi or Southern Mississippi Valley, lower Mississippi Valley and a lot of trees where there's no trees. Good luck. So back to warming now. And this is new data. We just turned to 2020. Now we have new climatology and we got a full decade to go back on. Of course, not all the information is in right now. But you can see for yourself that the 20 teams have been on the warmest and temperatures are going up. We have to go back to the 2018 record. I don't have 2019. It's just not quite in. I think it comes out around the 15th of the month tomorrow. So we're missing it just by one day. But you kind of get the picture here. What it looked like last year was the fourth hottest year on record significant itself. Of course, going back last year, they have incredibly warm Europe. You can see that they were pretty much very, very warm. The other thing you might know this is just south of Greenland. There's a kind of a blue spot. That's a cold spot. And that cold spot is related to milk waters coming off of Greenland that then that fresh milk water sits over there. And it doesn't sink and that kind of slows down the conveyor belt system. And that's kind of a warm-wise related to the Gulf Stream. And that is another kind of a feedback that's taking place with the Gulf Stream. With the feedback of the oceans and the atmosphere. The hottest year is on record globally. The last five, you can see we're 2018's ended up with. We're going to spend a little more time on this. How we know that carbon dioxide is affecting the atmosphere. So if you look at the top chart there, you can see solar plus volcanic natural. Let's say humans didn't exist. There was no cars. There was no coal being pulled out of the ground and then burned for whatever reason. You can see that that observed temperature goes up and down to see the natural variation. So you can see the model of temperature. And what the model of temperature would do based on the conditions of volcanic ash, aluminium, several other sort of natural variations. And you see how they separated there about 1960. Well that blue line is what the where we should be if we didn't have greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we put in. Instead we have that line there in that top graph going up and that is related to our changing climate. It's warming. Now if you look at the bottom here, you can see how that matches very nicely. So when you apply greenhouse gases through the technology, through all of the various ways of interpreting, computer modeling. You come out with these lines basically showing the observations and then you can see obviously it matches up pretty good. And the models, the climate models are really catching up and they're actually very, very good. So what the heck is going on? Is human cause climate change real? Okay, so global temperatures. So what we have here is we've already, first of all, the Paris climate accord was to try to keep everything under 1.5 degrees Celsius. And we've already hit 1.5 degrees Celsius in some spots. That's mainly back, it's like this is in 2016, it was an extraordinary year. Probably would happen if I remember correctly, 2015 was a pretty strong El Nino. When you have an El Nino which is surface warming in the subtropical Pacific, you put natural variation of El Nino on top of climate induced warming through greenhouse gases. You come up with this. But most of the energy is going into the oceans. And so we're seeing actually very little, very little of the energy that's creating the warming right now is actually happening in the atmosphere. It's mostly going into the oceans which then interact with the atmosphere. So this is I think summer, kind of an opposite situation to right now. Let's say we had a great snowy winter and it was fabulous and we had tons of snow and then it all melted out in, I don't know, pick a date. A week after town meeting, maybe the perfect situation. And then we got through mud seas really quick and then we start to have flowers coming up, dream grass. We're headed into summer. Those summers are getting hotter. Vermont is, it's as if Vermont has migrated to around Binghamton, New York. You see that? And then we have the highest emission scenario and the lowest emission scenario. And you can see how if we continue on the course of business as usual, which we are, we're headed for, I don't know, Northeast, either Northwest Georgia or Northeast, what is that, Mississippi? Alabama. Alabama, Alabama. They have great music in Alabama and the barbecue is supposed to be excellent. Never been there myself, I gotta go. All right, so fastest warming season is not in the summer though. It's the winter. What happened over the weekend? We broke records, right? 60 degrees, 60 to 65 generally. Crazy stuff. So climate change is really affecting our winters much more than our springs or our falls or our summer. And that's kind of the name of the game. That's the trend. So getting back on a local scale, just to sort of measure that out back to winter. What we're looking at here is the Lake Champlain freezer pits through 1816 through 2014. And note the diamonds. These are the little diamonds here. The diamonds, no reported freeze. So you can see the diamonds increased after 1944. We had more and more diamonds right after 2008 and so forth. Obviously it's a proxy showing the warming and how erratic or variable at least some parts of our winter is going to be to that formation or non-formation of ice. The other changes we use for proxies can be a freeze date. You can see that our growing season is getting longer because we're having warming temperatures. So we're getting an earlier spring and a later fall. Not always. And there are some curveballs I'm going to show you. Precipitation, the number of days per year with greater than just one inch falling at Burlington, for example. You can see how that's been hooking up. And that is definitely related to a couple of things. Water vapor and the fact that we're getting weather patterns that are featuring heavier rainfall because of the jet stream configuration. And that's related to the loss of Arctic sea ice. Occurrence of high flow in the Manor River Valley. On the Manor River, it's 10 more days per year. And that is projected by 2100. The crazy thing I've been hearing in climate is that the new 2100 is actually like 2050. So the earth is starting to catch up on its temperature. And this is of course measured the global land-ocean temperature combination anomalies. The red is warmer, the blue obviously cool. And you can see where we got. And I want to call your attention, it's very interesting. You can see a little sort of about 1940. You can see that little bit of a sort of uptick there and then a down-tick. And it's kind of back and forth, natural variation kind of the typical kind of thing. And then it really started to shoot up your opera right about 1975, 76, 77, 78, 80. Right? Guess what happened then? We had the Clean Air Act that was passed. A great thing. It lowered the amount of smog. But it also took soot out of the air. And when you take the soot out of the air and you allow free sunlight to then interact with climate with the global greenhouse gases. Well, it excites those molecules and generates heat off to the races. So, oddly, yeah, if we had a more polluted atmosphere, that's what was masking that. For 1950, if you see how the temperature warmed and then had industrial pollution, you can see how it basically kind of took what, 30, 40 years. So, that period was because we had particulate in the atmosphere that was reflecting back to sunlight. Take that particulate out and what you end up having then is free sunlight and a rising temperature due to carbon dioxide. So, the temperature is starting to catch up, although not evenly around the globe and it fits and starts. And you notice here the annual temperature anomalies are much warmer up at the top of the globe there and the Arctic. So, what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. These are Arctic temperatures that work for the records. You notice that you start out with two is February and so forth. You see it all the way to December. So, in the middle of the June through August, you see kind of a dip there. So, the Arctic temperature record high basically from 70 to 90 north latitude way up there from 1950 to 1980 base-wide. The comparison is that the temperatures have been going up in the Arctic during wind, the winter. This is a today's shot that was just taken from the global of the climate program. And I just want to follow your attention. You can see that in the Arctic how warm it is above normal. Right now we're into, that looks like a little bit of a negative AO of Arctic oscillation. But what it does is it displaces a lot of colder air south and you can see there's some blue there. Incidentally, that blue was 45 to 50 below zero around the Alberta and British Columbia. And I was looking at it today. I'm going to be headed out there actually on Saturday. I was kind of hoping I'd hit the worst of the Arctic air but unfortunately I'm going to miss a little bit. But that is a really cold air and that's what's going to be here at the end of the week, my friends. Oh, so why is it being, you know, what's the deal, why is the Arctic warm compared to average, right? Versus the cold. And look at how warm it is on the eastern part of that North America. So why is that? Well, the jet stream is gone longer. It's slowed down and that jet stream is slowing down, creates very large oscillations. And when you have that large oscillation, it takes the Arctic air that should be over the Arctic, displaces it to 45 more platitudes where we live. This is kind of the average temperature now. We've been sitting in January and February for the past 25 years. You can see that those averages show that they're above normal from the baseline. And notice where the colder air has settled. Settled into Siberia and parts of Asia, Eurasia. And then take a look at east of the Rockies into the United States, Great Lakes. And we're kind of on the edge of that. That has been the climatological trend lately. Should be warming, right? What's up with that? That should be warming. Now, remember, this is wintertime. So during that time, we're actually seeing a signal. And this is very young science, because we haven't lost any Arctic sea ice since 1980. So we don't have a lot of great data sets. And there's a lot of controversy about this. In fact, what we're having is that the warming of the Arctic is displacing that colder air as the jet stream is pushed further south. And hence, that's why we're having a more extreme weather. So this is the Arctic again. You can see the ice cap. This was, so far, the 2012 was the minimum sea ice extent. And when you have open water like that, at that point in time, it takes a long time that ocean water to warm up, melt that ice, you know, have the weather systems correct to pull in warmer air from southern climbs and whatnot into the Arctic. It starts to melt that ice. And that's what happened in 2012. We had the best of all conditions. We're very, very close to that right now. So what is happening is salt will hit the ice. It reflects the albedo. I'm sure we've all seen this before. You want to know the snow a little faster, take some blood particulate, throw it into snow. It'll melt, right? So what is happening is in a perfect situation in the Arctic, perfectly white and very strong albedo, that reflectivity will then reflect back out to outer space. That's not happening now because this is the ice's melting. And the sunlight goes in the energy, goes with that dark, dark water, and it heats it up quickly. How unusual is this? And that's 2012. Let me kind of get the picture, but that's kind of a short-range picture. Let's look at it in a longer range. You see what I'm saying? Okay, so here's what we got right now, 2020. So if you take the light blue line, which is 2019, it's on the bottom there. This is January, December, the season. And you can see that the maximum ice in the Arctic is during wind. February, late February, March. When you think about how man-sealed has this maximum snow, the snowpack builds up in about the same time, right? Maybe a little bit later, elevation dependent. So then you go, when is our warmest time of the year? Well, typically for us it's June to August. A little bit offset there. It takes a little harder, a little more energy to heat the water. The Arctic Ocean. And so you see the dip, and then basically as we get colder, there should be more ice being made, right? So more ice is being made. And you can see that also the ice is at some of its lowest lows. The sort of fuzzy line there, the sort of solid, the tank line, the drain line is where we should be. And those are the two standard deviations. And we're around three, four, maybe about four standard deviations. That's pretty significant. So your surface air temperature in the fall, you can see that in the mid-latitudes. It's a little warmer lately. It's warmer below after 1988. Again, that sort of thing I was talking about. But you can also see that in the Arctic. Really, really gentle. So when we consider a layer of the atmosphere stretching from here, it is, say, the warmth of the Bahamas where it's warm there or something. And then how the atmosphere is much thicker where it's warm. The atmosphere, when thunderstorms form, for example, you have the atmosphere thickness is extreme. So you have tops of the thunderstorms that are sometimes 50,000, 60,000 feet. That's nothing unusual in the tropics. However, that north where it's much colder, the atmosphere is much thinner. So it doesn't take as much. It's just the thinness of the atmosphere is part of what is some of the physics arrangements. So what we have is an Arctic that's warming, right, compared to down in the middle latitudes. So that yellow line kind of represents now. You can say maybe the blue line represents the older days. And consequently, high latitudes are warming faster. It's slowing down the jet stream. And it's been measured in basically in metrics showing us now that O&D, that's October, November, December. So that's the peak effect of the loss of Arctic sea ice and what it's doing to the jet stream. And it does mimic, it's not 100% correlated, but it's pretty close. This is some of the work produced by Dr. Jennifer Francis and Steve Vargas. She's from Rutgers and he's from the University of Minnesota. And the paper came out in 2012 in light with everybody. And there's been a lot of body of knowledge since then. But it's very controversial. The reason is controversial. Why other climate scientists is because simply there's not enough data set. We haven't had enough time to go, yeah, that was right because they wanted to be time data sets. Well, the Arctic sea ice has only just melted since about 1980 it started. And now we're off the braces. So the Ross Beach area here is the weaver-westerly flow. There is more meandering patterns, longer eastward wave propagation. So instead of having a jet stream that kind of circles the northern hemisphere, maybe a little short waves kind of go, you have these big giant undulations, all right? Kind of like rivers when they hit a flat spot. They have a tendency to meander. It's the same kind of fluid dynamics, air or water. So the effects of AA is not alcohol anonymous, but Arctic amplification. Arctic amplification is what's going on in the Arctic. It's warming two, three times faster than the rest of the planet. And we saw that with some of those temperatures in the air. So it causes basically weaver-westerly winds a slower jet stream. And it intensifies the troughs too, but mostly the ridges of higher pressure have a tendency to be expanded. And so California, you think California with its west coast droughts and whatnot. Right now, of course, everybody's fresh in your mind as you think Australia, the same kind of thing. Antarctica is doing the same thing now in the southern hemisphere as it's doing in the northern hemisphere. It was a little later start because Antarctica is a continent of land with a lot of two-mile-thick ice. And of course, the Arctic Ocean is just a nice cap and it's very thin in terms of comparatively. So there's a high latitude and some water. Middle latitudes. You get this sort of thing. And that's what we're seeing now. The ridges are expanding further to the north. And that basically makes this. And this is why our weather is all screwy. So an example from Jennifer Francis, basically showing a bridge along the west coast. Let's think of kind of a, it's called Pacific North American P&A, plus when it's negative, there's a lot of storms coming into California. So in this particular case, the jet stream would right north and all the ways from really the Pacific would reach up to Alaska. And in California and the west coast would be under drought conditions if that's stated or permanent. Nature's carbon tax. So that's kind of what we're getting right now. There's a budget of energy. There's a budget of carbon. And we're sort of undergoing that right now. You can see that 2019 is not the worst, but 2008 was from 1980 to 2019, the year-to-date, that's the billion-dollar disasters. You can see that we're not at the worst, but still pretty bad at this point. And of course, it does things like this and affects us here in Vermont. Selective carbon properties. I'm going to go through really quickly, but this is just for the love of January. They have the love of February, but they stopped. I hate to say it, but I think it's political. It means the data, they're just going to put the clamp down on it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm suspicious. They shouldn't have, you know, March, April, May, June, July. I know, but they don't have it. So one of the things I'm going to call attention to right here, you can see all these little red kind of wall things. That's temperature records. They're across the world. A lot of places seeing that. And Arctic CI6 that you can see, or Arctic CI6 down there in Greenland, Iceland area there, and so forth. So you can add a line, of course, this is January 2019. The top five of the hazards, as we head into 2050, through the years now, you can see that basically what we're looking at. Our problems are precipitation. Our problems are probably a little bit more included in that would be severe weather and erratic winters and maybe very large blizzards, very large snowstorms that we haven't seen yet. The kind of snowstorms that might have infrastructure problems or marines problems and this kind of thing. Think of the St. Valentine's Day storm. How much snow fell. We're seeing more of this across the planet. Why? Because there's more water vapor. Check that box. So screwy jet streams. And sometimes these jet streams cause much slower moving storms and if that storm is unloading over you for a longer period of time, it's going to be more extreme. It's going to break more ravines. It's going to unload more water. Or snow. So we're going to go one by one here. It's kind of busy along here. So let's turn it back. This is overall 2019. So I haven't gotten that point yet. The big deal. Most of concentration. More or less in the middle part of the country. East of the Rock, east of the most part. They're not selection of the northeast in the United States. We haven't really seen a lot of climate really bad climate disasters here. It's been just a little to the west or a little to the south, major flying, figure Iowa, the things that happen in the spring, for example. Or think about the California wildfires that we had here in Vermont. We complain about, you know, 65 degree temperatures when we lost the snowpack. Of course we're losing cotton. It makes us upset. But it doesn't hurt your house now. Okay, this is the month of January. We're going to kind of roll through these with that quickly. You're going to see a lot of these here. We've got 11 of them on the board. And you might keep an eye on the landscape. Varying the sea ice extent. Cycloids on record. There's one on the west coast. Because of that, that's feedback. And then you're looking at craziness. Okay, you're talking about record warmth and loss of sea ice. And then you go down to Arizona. Snowing a single day on record in Flagstaff, Arizona. Hmm. Displacement. Screwball jet strains. Bizarre extra moisture. More to go into snowfall just because the temperature is below freezing. Warmest March on record for Alaska. Early as 70-degree temperature in Alaska on record. Meanwhile, Major Winter Storm early March over a foot of snow across Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. You see a pattern here? Kanzubu had the warmest April on record. And now, and coastal wind, rivers had their earliest record out on record. And then you're looking at Seattle, April record, 12 consecutive days rainfall. Why? The jet storm got pushed south. Picked up the pacific moisture. Pushed it in, right? So, you're seeing this kind of things are happening on the Arctic in the northern regions. And then there's a response down further in the lower 48 in the United States. And that is our record of woods here. We've got Alaska in the sixth one of May for Alaska. Part of Southwest Alaska extreme drop for the first time in one of the 20 years. Meanwhile, we're looking at record 70 heat wave from South, Southeast United States earliest 100-degree day on record for many locations. In June, there's one foil. This is a little anomalous, I guess. We're going to get a Montana item over here. One of the foot of South across parts of northern and central Rupees. June 25, the 22nd. Wow. But it's high elevation. Things can happen in high elevation. Still. And then severe weather, flash flooding. June 20, parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, all island Illinois. And so forth. Also keep your eyes on Hawaii, too. There's a lot of stuff going on over there. So, for example, Hawaii. Sea surface temperature departure from average of both Hawaii, across the Hawaii region, remains well above average for July. That's why some of those hurricanes that form off Mexico are now making it pretty much on a regular basis. Either a little bit to the south of Hawaii or sometimes to the north and sometimes right over. That's another issue that's a climate change relationship because of warmer weather. You've got a tropical storm errand on the east coast there in North Carolina and so forth. And then still looking at Alaska. Second one with summer on record for Alaska. You can find your drought all along. See the number of these are the interior sections. And, of course, it contributes to what? Wildfires. So, we're in September now. We're in September, generally. So, northeast, no problem. But look at the other places. See if you had any weather storms or a few of snow and losing conditions in part of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming during September 28th and 30th. Anybody have an idea as to why? I'll tell you why. Because it was hard to hear that it was to play southward. And, again, it caused near 45 more latitude. We had more storms than that. Okay, we're in October and kind of just more of the same. Keeping our eyes on Alaska and also, let's see, why you had the Honolulu, Honolulu, the Hubee. They're warmest January through October on record. That's interesting because it takes a lot of energy to heat up the Pacific Ocean way out there in the middle of the ocean, basically. So, that's a significant deal to get that kind of energy to heat that to produce that kind of record. Okay, we're getting close to the end here. Let's see, we have this is November and a room that's a tropical swarm of marine animals. We've got Puerto Rico, we made drought-free during November, a small area of moderate drought in March and early December. They had been getting really bad drought there. Of course, that followed a tremendous Hurricane Maria a couple years prior. Puerto Rico, they've been just and then they get its seismic activity, you know, in earthquakes and they're just getting really bad droughts. But the notice of a strong low pressure system in the Northeaster on the East Coast brought coastal flooding, beach erosion, North Carolina had a base, to the England ice, though, to the Northeast. That was in November 17th and 19th, you know. Yes, our November was like our winter and ever since then it turned. So, this is mean temperature percentiles and we'll look at it here as January through December that's what it looks like. So, there's a water here for us. So, some of these correlations are related to how warm the Arctic gets. So, they went back and they did a study. And this is just one part of the study. What it shows is every time the polar, the atmospheric cap, the polar cap we call it, the heights it takes warmth to create those heights to rise. This is as we were showing you that jet stream squirrely thing with the two lines and how it's been rising because it's warming much faster in the Arctic. Well, that warming has also been correlated with before these extreme water events. Pretty amazing stuff. So, there is some kind of correlation going on there. That's why what goes on up in the Arctic doesn't stand there. So, here's some of the emerging mechanisms that's, you know, why is it getting cold in November? What is up with that? Well, Dr. Judith Cohen of MIT Atmospheric Environmental Research Institute, AEON has been working over the last, I would say a decade and a half on trying, his whole thing is to try to predict the winter. Long-range prediction. And what he has discovered is that there are mechanisms that are related off of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean there that when snow is basically it's called the SAI when Siberian I forgot what that means it's an index. And what it means is basically when there's a lot of snow in Siberia during the month of October, if it happens fast, his winter prediction is that we're going to have a tough winter here in North America and some parts of Asia, et cetera. If that snow laid down and during the month of October only is slow, we're going to have a long and normal winter. Well, this year came out really on the edge 50-50. We kind of had that sort of thing going on in November. Now it's kind of toasty, but we might be going back into a colder cycle now. So this version of mechanism basically goes like this A is our prediction in a more marked way. So we get earlier so-called along the coast this promotes the tropical or pressure that wave energy transfers to the atmosphere above the troposphere. Where our weather is basically located where planes fly, even the high jet stream that's all in the troposphere. You get above the tropical laws, it's roughly depending it was up and down or something we talked about atmosphere thickness. Well, typically it's above the jet stream levels where the stratosphere is. It's top or the ceiling of all the weather. So above the stratosphere we also have a thing called polar vortex over the pole. And when energy is reflected from the ground through the troposphere into the stratosphere it does this. Basically the polar vortex is weakened that's in the stratosphere and then it begins the polar vortex down below in the troposphere. It's like a boomerang effect. It takes about two weeks to a month and you get a wager jet stream. That wager jet stream promotes a weaker polar vortex at the surface in the Arctic that releases all that cold air. I guess what that cold air goes through Alberta east of the Rockies, the Canadian Rockies, and so forth. And right in the two, sometimes they're up with great lakes, sometimes right into our neck in the woods and typically when they get cold in the great lakes we'll probably get cold too. That's the mechanism that he discovered but it's long-range forecasting. Judith Cohen he's brilliant. And that mechanism affected us last March. This is Lake Champlain and we're going to show you all those diamonds about polar ice. We've got a new curveball going around. That new curveball means our winners may be actually in a polar shocking. What's this global warming thing? So if you connect the dots it basically is all that energy going to the ocean is melting ice. That causes energy that reflects up the stratosphere that strength energy in the stratosphere weakens the polar vortex which then boomerangs down takes about two weeks to a month weakens the polar vortex releases all the cold air which is now coming from Canada right now I showed you Alberta that's an example of it that's centered our way and it will be here late in the week. That is exactly what's been going on and that's what happened in March first which there was no no ice, not all the ice right there there was simply no open water on Lake Champlain. So Arctic ambientation is alive and well now latitude is warming much faster than the mid-minorities especially if all the weather over thickness gradient is weakening you get zoned lean flow 500 millibars which is about the cut halfway in the stratosphere if you will at 18,000, 20,000 feet which is a kind of halfway point with the use of the measurement 500 megapath scales and millibars it weakens the flow we get there for peaks of regions very long in Northward the work for Jennifer Francis is done Steve Harris you're getting these up and down emotions now this sort of configuration in the jet stream that's kind of crazy by roughly way it should progress eastward more slowly and increase the likelihood of blocking when you get blocking storms come to a halt uh oh what happens when a storm sits over you for days think hurricane harming see the connection weather conditions are more persistent let's say it's a bridge of higher pressure that bridge of higher pressure is going to produce what? dry so unfortunately greenhouse gases in the stratosphere messing with the configuration of the jet stream is causing simultaneous droughts and simultaneous flooding or simultaneous big big snow storms increase probability of the streams cold cells, heat waves, flooding so forth and drought uh greenland ice out 2019 this was this summer you can see that the 1981 to 2010 was about the dashed lines there in the 2019 melt percentage you can see how just extraordinarily lots of melt lots of water on the front that's what it looked like on the edges there it was kind of melted back and then again this is January 1st August 13th and this is quite amazing because the greenhouse is a big it's a big hotbed really I think I'd consider it an island you know it is a the number of melt days is about a lot so they actually have little tiny forests on the edges now around and I think in vignery 4 it's part of the oscillation of natural variation but those forests because of our screw wall jet stream and blocking areas of higher pressure have caused forest fires in Greenland and lots of runoff okay back to a little bit more closer to home here it's weird it's crazy to say this but because of climate change we might be seeing bigger snow storms and actually those years that we have the setup right fabulous snowfall colder winter, fabulous snowfall but our winters are not consistent there's no persistence to them there's these ups and downs again that jet stream moves along eventually cutoff low gets kicked out the next one tries to set up or whatever and so there's a lot of variability and so the name of the game with our winters is going to be variability it's going to be one year it's going to be totally different than the next or say two in a row this kind of thing and this is the trend of what's going on again what is it related to this is a little bit bad and this is going back to the young union year 2015-2016 and this is the the top of Mount Mansfield the average snowfall at the stake this is the snow depth I should say not the snowfall so what you're getting here is you're seeing it was pretty low but you can see how bad the season started now do you remember that 2015 how the winter start out was just disgusting it was a very four year for skiing and all that this on the other hand was another year 2018-2019 that was last year look at the amount of snow at the stake from fully opposite variability see that? here's where we are as of today the the green home there on the left that's of course average snowfall and then you can see where we are as of just a couple days ago the 12th and we're not starting out too well and the reason for it is because the systems that look like this you get these big oscillations big ridge of higher pressure pushes north downstream it produces big tropical pressure sometimes it cuts off from the jet stream and then you get that business and this particular stuff it ejects the energy over the flat ridge and that's also how we get high swarms it's not a good setup for us so in general this is you might notice this is the extreme weather forecast across the world was one of the 100 million dollars worth of damage in 2019 but we can't do a carbon tax I find that really funny notice it's the water it's 25 billion, California October 2019 I remember probably in the Midwest there that was the that was in spring March to June and then you got in the various types of weather and in Asia you're staying the same thing it's costing a lot and ruining its infrastructure magically people think that just a little more we can't do anything about it it's too costly can't do anything it costs too much well that's what's going on right now what is the laundry training I would ask what is the meters what are the politicians what sort of laundry training are they using that's supposed to be the tropical cyclone Ida a lot of heat going on in Australia I'll get into a little bit of that later on but we're getting closer so this is like paleo-climatology past and current climate change so the permanent drastic extinction 250 million years ago was geologically instantaneous and what they mean by that is that it happened very fast it doesn't do this nice sort of curve and linear kind of thing you know it's like it goes along and it jumps and it goes on again that's called the broad climate change lots of evidence in the paleo-climatology that we're in for some big jumps I'll go back to that because it was actually a little bit more okay so paleo-climatology initial temperature that was the Siberian traps where the volcanic activity for whatever reason a continental seismic activity lots of volcanoes went off the volcanoes went off they put up a lot of CO2 and they raised the temperature okay they raised the temperature 56 million years ago they may have been over less than two decades in terms of the abrupt climate change that took place then because I think the fifth mass extinction and then the additional rise of 2.5 2 to 5 degrees Celsius is rejected over the next 80 years that's according to the IPCC back in the latest year that came out in 2014 however a much faster scenario is likely given trends and difficulties to account feedback mechanisms which I'm showing you what of the Arctic ice and how it's spring with the jet stream creating colder winters but on a variable scale so a globally accelerated climate change global warming event we're waiting for one might be happening right now might actually be happening with this last go around of all the fires in Australia so just to read that we've got the sea ice extent down that's the Arctic we've got Greenland ice mass loss we've got the Arctic also meaning the Arctic now we've got three fast rates with mass loss as well we've got Alpine glacier ice mass loss we've got the sea level rise going up we've got hurricanes that are slowing down we've seen over one particular island and just absolutely taking everything almost leaving the soil that's very normal that was a story everybody remembers story and I don't want to give you to this too much but tropical cycle behavior threat this is if the world rises on average the two degree cell sits remember we're not there, in fact the world right now using climate reanalyzer I saw it was about 8 tenths of a degree above the 1980 to 2010 baseline so they figured these are the things that would happen but they're already starting to happen and 8 tenths of a degree cell sits this is predicted to be a 2C so this is a Mozambique and a reminder abrupt climate change is one system of ecological overshoot abrupt climate change is the use of the symptoms here topsoil loss natural resource pollution ocean pacification mass extinction toxicity should say chemical nuclear plastic pollution growing social economic inequalities economic instability political instability rise of authoritarianism should not just around here it's all over symptom cross feedbacks and each one of these symptoms amplifies each other Australia look at their type of derives which are soy and water major index these are the changes in part of littering this or whether risk I should say and you can see that there are certain spots that are not going too bad in the center there I don't think anything gross I think it's that that's what the desert is there's nothing to burn and then on the other side of the scale you have flooded that was the spring in here was Oklahoma climate solutions there's actually a little bit of hope it's amazing I you know on a personal level I'm very depressed any climate sciences anybody dealing in my work that I do meteorology on a day to day basis and on a climate basis is very very sour people are no one listens no one wants to do anything everything just continues to bumble as if you're just talking to the wind you know but there's actually some solutions now the first solution and there's not a lot of data this is all fairly young and fairly new is iron filings in the ocean mass plumes of phytoplankton those mass plumes of phytoplankton pull out more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than anything imaginable turns out if they could mass-reduce some of this under the certain there's like there are limitations ecological limitations the water temperatures have to be such and such and this and that but under those situations this is something that needs to be explored promptly we don't have any leadership we have to go around the leadership our so-called leadership which is not leading so we need to circumnavigate people, businesses, people want to make money to be made in this sort of thing lots of money this is the other new thing that we found recently is that lo and behold in Iceland they started to capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and pump it deep into Iceland and the volcanic chambers there and lo and behold they discovered it makes limestone well guess what there's companies that now can use that limestone to make cement they don't have to mine limestone anywhere if we had this on a mass scale pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere we could change things through these sort of technologies based on the mass scale this is that one of those companies called Blue Planet and you can see the rings around this kind of thing that's actually carbon dioxide being pulled out of the area around San Francisco so what this company has done is they've worked with this carbon dioxide sequestered aggregate they call it and the last picture here on the right hand side is a taxiway that they built with that carbon dioxide pulled out of the air by this company on this taxiway from San Francisco International Airport pretty awesome now why can't we repeat this on a mass scale where is the leadership and that's what we have and so what we have to do is we have to take that 500 parts per million right there that's the problem we have to push that down to 280 if we push that down to 280 with new technologies I hate to say this and you're going to think it's blasting me you can pull it until you can have all the carbon dioxide the oil, the coal, you can burn straight coal as long as you pull it out of the atmosphere and keep it at 280 parts per million we're good to go except that coal is very nasty there's other side effects and they want to do that obviously we want to bring renewable energy but you would think that the fossil fuel ministry would get behind some of this so they can continue their business you would think and that's it, thank you very much a question about the Gulf Stream some years ago and I don't know if this may not be the case but some years ago I read that with increase in ice melt the ocean cools it can slow down the Gulf Stream the Gulf Stream is what keeps Europe from reverting to the ice age is there a concern? yes and so yes it is slowing down and is that fresh water melt that they interacting with the thermal hailing circulation and it's the Atlantic multi-calos, no hold on, it's like amok Atlantic a real overturning circulation, thank you okay so that conveyor belt goes not just in the Atlantic though it goes all over the place all near and under ground it cuts all over the place but they notice that there's two places that drives it I think one of them is in the southern Indian Ocean very similar to the Atlantic and in the North Atlantic and the one in the North Atlantic is being slowed down because of the fresh water melt the fresh water dump that's taking place right now off of, I showed you greening I showed the ice melt it's messing with this whole conveyor belt and when you slow this conveyor belt down now you've got heat wants to go north cold wants to come south and when you all of a sudden stop that kind of thing going on you have massive disruption and massive climate change any questions good work good stuff good way of presenting that stuff I don't know how to say that yeah, good bad stuff a lot of the geoengineering that you mentioned for the end presumes that we have some breathing room and that breathing room has been decreased with each Arctic so climate scientists were saying that the worst effects of climate change would be occurring about 2100 then narrowing that 5 years ago to 2050 narrowing that now to 2030 and I just made a quick list of some other linked effects that are where you're talking at one of them is because the greening will see a nice sheet of gnomed soap or it is stowing itself in ways that don't even possibly have predicted making people shake their heads with disbelief that water is flowing out of the west side of the Greenland into the Labrador Sea the surface temperature of the Labrador Sea as you've said is much warmer but what also happens is that as storms come off North America as you've seen they reach this sum of armor in Labrador and Newfound and they they do what hurricanes do in the North Atlantic so there is enormous low pressure systems which park themselves and those low pressure systems like there's one going on yesterday that was just devastated Ireland with 16 meter waves and gusts of the 60 miles an hour and my caller came over and said low pressure at the center that was lower than category 1 and this particular storm of like every other one that has preceded it because low pressure systems are counter-cloud wise they rotate and the warm air from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain, Portugal Morocco is pumped right into the Greenland interior as a consequence and the interior spikes up during those storms 2 to 3 degrees above normal center and melts more ice and melts even faster so there's a thing that was mentioned and then you have the overturning that is absorbing the surface of the heat that has been taking it down to the bottom of the ocean on our behalf today is the bottom of the ocean has been a bank that has been storing heat that was generated in the surface and as a consequence it kept our air much cooler than it would have been if this overturning didn't occur I mentioned to a major climate scientist in England that it seemed like the ocean had run out of room to store extra heat and as a consequence starting this year the ocean's surface average temperature is now at a degree centigrade higher than it was for the first time in history this surface heat unlike air heat is much more dramatic in its impact because first of all a lot of that ocean that is being warmed is further north and the shallow parts of the Arctic Ocean and above and actually below the free point of methane some of the methane has been released in very large quantities from the southern Arctic in general last after the methane center said there was an enormous spike that it never received before in January of this year and it has been continuing to alarm people and it is added to the CO2 because it's a significant greenhouse gas for 40 years ago and the last thing is that the ocean as a result of this is acting less and less like an adsorbent heat in my case in New York so my basic question for you is from what you've read I think you and we are a group of people how to have the crossing points in terms of what geoengineering, how many years it would take to do that versus what's changing as far as the amount of time before the atmosphere becomes intensively blocked in treatment well I don't think we have a whole lot of time the thing is very most concerning to me by far away the climate scientist his name is Paul Beckwith I don't know if Dr. Beckwith you follow along and he's Arctic that's why I like to watch the Arctic because the Arctic is dry on a lot of stuff right now lots of ice up there it's really driving my day to day job because of the weather I have to deal with the weather and weather hazards and this sort of thing are keeping me extremely busy coming back to the thing that's the most scary is what we call blue ocean as when in September that sea ice melts out completely and then it lingers maybe a month and as the season changes the lower angle of sunlight will start to see more ice and the next year because of that first time around that warmed up such and such the next time it'll be now two months and then three months and then four or five, six months you're looking at what they call blue ocean and let's say it's over a period of a decade to two decades that we see this sort of thing taking place it's going to happen it's just around the corner well you think our weather is crazy right now and then there's a paper that just came out it's very scary papers basically equated that it would be worth 40% of all greenhouse gases the contribution of the latin sea ice would be like 40% of all greenhouse gases since we started the industrial revolution and if that's the case it's sidearm so that could be as early as 5, 10, 15, 20 years I know this is a momentum but I'm not going to tell you folks yes, you have a question? all the facts so my question is that there is a part of the human community that believes we're in the Anthropocene and believes that that's a good thing that in some ways that it's almost a manifest destiny for us to get to this point and that our technology will enable us to continue so this is clearly a uniformly considered in it it's only a technically because we've put too many in the atmosphere and it's not by accident we've come this intentionally as a human species so I think the discussion needs to be what is our relationship to that the atmosphere is doing what it's doing because it's the atmosphere what is it that we can do as a species besides the geoengineering which is a band-aid effect to make some choices about lifestyle about the economy to mitigate that sure, so I mean we want to do everything we can individually we want to drive less we want to do all the things we can do individually, recycle try to stay away from plastics we have to really get real on this these are nickel and dime things we need massive, large, heavy scale industries to change if they don't change all the stuff that we're doing is a joke and I'm sorry to say that but it helps it maybe makes us psychologically feel really good about ourselves but if we don't get the pitchforks out and some leadership everyone talks about existential threat I'm looking at the threat we don't have a corner here and everything I'm seeing is on a daily basis there's just more and more and more and more if we could get, like I say, mass scale what people make lots of money on doing that mass scale this is a capitalistic system that is driven on unfortunately greed I'm just going to speak real here, okay we're either going to have to change that model or we're going to have to use greed to dig ourselves out of this hole anyone has any great ideas you need to talk to people and get that out of the open say it one more time hello if you were invited to a 6th grade classroom in Mr. Bermuda I was wondering what you would say to the kids I was going to I have a granddaughter and it's horrible I don't know what to say I really don't have any good answers as I look at weather every day and the things that I see freak me out and when I see young children knowing that their life span is not going to be that long and you think that I'm exaggerating if you want to think that I'm exaggerating maybe that's more power to you I'm just full of it here this is all just nothing but I don't have anything good to say I'm very very worried we have no leadership we have a dysfunctional political system it's based off greed and donors the greediest donors and until we change things up I don't have anything to say I would love to have optimism I'm going to go home and watch a debate and hope that one of those people win for one thing mainly one of them and if for some reason that doesn't happen I figured that the election of 2016 was good for about a meter and a half to see the horizon something like that you know there's all this geo-engineering stuff and there's also frankness to this stuff if we tweak this a little too much and all of a sudden we have too much of this and you can't oh my god it's a nasty situation but things are happening very fast now it won't be long you'll be seeing it with your own eyes I hate to say that but this is the truth so what we need to do is to get leadership and get some mass scale production there's things that I think at Swiss company there's a fuel now that are actually taking CO2 out of the atmosphere very quickly and some of them are using that for storing it storage, capture and limestone I talked about the cement why aren't cement companies looking into this and saying hey we can save the planet and the cement and we don't have to mine it we don't have to pay for that so this is what we have to do we have to start thinking out of the box because our leadership because they are going to kill us for the quotient explanation of science because I've understood the politics for a long time but not the way the climate is behaving it was extremely helpful to explain it one question I have is because it's hard to see or follow some of the slides is where can we find the geoengineering ideas in writing there was an idea after idea which was such a clear response to people who say well what can we do not just what can we do politically but also what can we do I guess in terms of engineering so where can we find what was your question where can we find some of the ideas that you ran through in terms of I think iron filings was one is there a place that this is written down that CC defines thank you I wish I had more information for you my sort of study is connected in meteorology and in the climate and the cause of the effect of that and how it's playing with our weather the solutions that are out there and there are new found new fangled stuff coming online this is not only affecting us here in this building this is affecting everybody the rest of the world outside of the United States is freaking out and they are looking at new ways because it's going to as Miami gets flooded and Shanghai is going to get flooded too Bangladesh is going to be flooded and there's going to be massive migration I got to tell you I attended a Norwich University symposium on climate and I got to tell you the military they are on it they have looked into it and they are freaked out let me tell you why just for an example Norwich Naval Base all their wiring is under their tridocks and all their wiring is made of stuff that will completely collapse so they have to redo all of that because of sea level rise and that was just one example I mean the military is supposed to protect us right instead of building things to kill people why don't we attack climate change I saw a fire it's a documentary it shows all over the world all of the geo-engineers that's been tried so much it does start out with recourse and then it goes around the world and it shows many many people many people many engineers working to sequester CO2 it's very exciting I mean why are we not educating the company money why are we not educating them hey guys look over here I was just going to say what I want to say you know the science of climate it's really not that it's not the climatology it's the science it's a psychological illness that is throughout this planet that puts greed and profit over life and sustainability one day what does that say