 Hi everybody, welcome and thank you for joining us to the 2022 NCAR-UCAR Walter or Robert's Distinguished Lecture. As you listen to the lecture today, we invite you to submit questions for Dr. Shepard using the Slido platform. To do that, you simply can scroll down below the webcast screen to find Slido where you can submit questions and you can also upvote others questions as well. This lecture will be recorded and it'll be made available on the lecture web page following the event and the link will be provided in Slido. With that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to UCAR President Tony Busilaki. Thank you Tiffany and thank you for all your efforts in supporting this lecture series. Good afternoon everyone. I'd like to welcome you all to the 15th Walter or Robert's Distinguished Lecture. Walter or Roberts was an American astronomer and atmospheric physicist. The first director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the founding president of UCAR, the non-profit consortium of universities that manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation. Walter or Roberts for those that you don't know was a true pioneer in studying the sun and earth atmosphere and had tremendous influence over the growth and direction of the atmospheric sciences in this country. Dr. Roberts became a visionary leader in the broad international scientific community as well as here in the greater boulder community. He was a pioneer in sounding the alarm about the potential impacts of human induced global warming and this lecture is supported by private donations including those members of Dr. Roberts family. It was established in 1998 to pay tribute to Dr. Roberts and to highlight and honor the work of the chosen speaker and it serves as part of NCAR's and UCAR's larger public outreach to the broader community. So again my thanks to all those that have supported this series. It is now my distinct honor and personal pleasure and privilege to introduce today's Walter or Roberts Distinguished Lecturer. Professor Marshall Shepard is a leading international expert in weather and climate and is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. He serves as Director of the University of Georgia's Atmospheric Sciences Program and full professor in the Department of Geography. Dr. Shepard also holds a joint appointment in the College of Engineering and is Associate Director of their Program on Climate Outreach in its Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems. Dr. Marshall Shepard was instrumental leading the effort for the University of Georgia to become the 78th member of UCAR and this was a significant milestone both for University of Georgia and for UCAR because it helped Georgia in establishing their Atmospheric Sciences major as well as a significant contribution to the strength and depth of UCAR's membership. Dr. Shepard received his bachelor's, master's and PhD in physical meteorology from Florida State University. He was the first African American to receive a PhD from the Florida State University Department of Meteorology as well as being the second African American to preside over the American Meteorological Society as their president in 2013 where he is a fellow today. After receiving all three degrees from Florida State he then left Tallahassee in 1993 and went to NASA's Goddard Space Glendale's Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Sounds like a trajectory somebody I know. In 2021 Dr. Shepard was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which are considered to be among the highest honors bestowed to an American scientist or engineer. He currently serves among a myriad others on the Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Academies as well as on the committee examining the research priorities for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Professor Shepard is frequently sought as an expert on weather, climate and remote sensing. He has advised leaders at NASA, the White House, Congress, Department of Defense and officials from foreign countries. In addition Marshall is well known for his public outreach as host of the Weather Channel's award-winning talk show and podcast The Weather Geeks and as a contributor to Forrest Magazine and other outlets and it's an understatement to say that we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Shepard with us today and his talk on the extreme weather climate gap, a discussion at the intersection of weather, climate, risk and vulnerability. Ahearty welcome to you Marshall. Well Tony first of all thank you so much for that introduction. You know as I've looked over my career and yours over the years there are quite a few similarities and you're certainly someone that I have looked up to as a mentor and a scholar and a colleague and so I want to thank you and everyone on the committee and anyone involved at UCAR and NCAR with this invitation today. I have many friends and fellow colleagues there at both organizations so it's really an honor to be a part of this so I am hoping that everyone can see my screen and I wanted to start with the comment from Gilbert F. Wyatt, a noted geographer and then I want to sort of share something that I read about Dr. Roberts actually a few days ago. So Gilbert White said the gap between the rich and poor is growing among and within most nations. The global environment shows signs of widespread deterioration both natural and other events are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic disturbances. Now this is something that he said a couple of decades ago and it really frames something that has been on my plate for several decades now as well with just this idea of how we think about our changing weather and climate system and its impacts on society. That's something very important to me and doing a little background on Dr. Roberts and you know obviously I'm aware of his contributions in the sciences but I found an interview in Mother Earth News with him and it talked about how he really had moved into a concern about weather, climate and the Earth's ability to feed human population and so it really is important to contextualize what I'll talk about today and for me to be comfortable knowing that this is something that Dr. Roberts himself also understood as a challenge for our planet and so I want to thank his family and thank anyone involved in the establishment of this lecture series and I hope that I can do it even the bit of sense of justice in giving the talk today. So I'll move forward. I'm a former NASA guy as you know and as Tony just said in the introduction and so I usually try to find a way to include at least one satellite image and so hopefully we can get that going one more time so this is total precipitable water as Hurricane Ida moved into the Gulf of Mexico made landfall around New Orleans and then the remnants of that storm actually moved into the northeast and as you may recall a significant rain flood event. In fact I saw estimates of three inches of rain in an hour in parts of Central Park. This was an extreme hydrometeorological event one that brings with it what we would expect to come from a landfalling hurricane but then also the inland remnants of the storm. Now the New York Times covered this event from many angles. An angle that caught my eye was this one how the storm turned basement apartments into death traps at least and that's that's at the time of writing of this Times article at the time of writing at least 11 people were found dead in basements after a torrential rain flooded New York from the remnants of Hurricane Ida. It wasn't even a hurricane at that point. Now if we frame that from this perspective there's something that we have to note here. This was from the article and I want to focus on that first paragraph. It says that people living in illegal basement apartments face danger that's nothing new. They worried about fires until lesser degree carbon monoxide poisoning but climate change and extreme events such as the remnants of Ida now bring a different kind of concern deadly flooding. Again I am going to preview something that I'll talk about later but think about the privilege that each of us have to not have to worry about going into our homes and sleeping at night and being flooded and this is really a challenge because many of the people that likely died in those basement apartments some of which were illegal were illegal basement apartments were people that likely had situations of poverty, people of color, disenfranchised communities and so this is another layer of vulnerability that we have to face when talking about extreme weather and climate. So I now get to my slide. I wanted to give that context before I introduce today's talk. The title of the talk is the Extreme Weather Climate Gap a discussion at the intersection of weather, climate, risk and vulnerability and by the way there you see all of my coordinates. I do want to take a quick moment to explain this Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor because I get asked about it all the time. I don't study kinesiology or athletics. Many places have perhaps an endowed professorship sponsored by IBM perhaps the IBM Professor of Computer Science or the Georgia Power Professor of Energy. Well at the University of Georgia we have a pretty solid athletic association, one the football team won the national championship I must add this year and that athletic association actually gives money back to the university for several endowed professorships competitive endowed professorships for some of its high performing faculty so I happen to have one of those. The other thing that I want to say about this introductory slide before we get into the talk is I hate for these lectures to just remain in the webinar space or in the ivory tower so you see my twitter handle there at Dr. Shepherd 2013. Feel free to tweet, engage, discuss, share anything that I talk about today in this lecture I like for it to more broadly engage when I give these types of talks. So I want to move on I just want to pose a question let's let's engage again I when I give talks they're not just talking at you I want you to think and engage as well so I pose the question here what do you remember most about the climate you grew up in now what you see here is a Google Earth image from space of or at least airborne of my hometown or at least a part of my hometown I grew up in a little small rural community called Canton Georgia and this is a place that now is a suburb of Atlanta but at the time it was a fairly rural location and if you look at that river that's the Etowah River and there's a bridge that's spanning the Etowah River as a child I remember driving across that bridge coming across in this direction headed into town and on days where we had significant rainfall it would flood this region here this entire area would flood but what's interesting is this is a fairly recent picture these apartments and these buildings they weren't there now we have human infrastructure and people living in these places that actually used to flood and what that leads to is a situation like this so I remember a time when I would see the natural landscape flood but now we live in a time where that natural landscape and the flooding has direct impacts on society human activity commerce and infrastructure and so here's a look at one of the major interchanges onto the expressway in that location that I was just showing and so we know that extreme climate events and extreme weather events now have disproportionate impacts on our society as a whole in fact here are the billion dollar plus weather events that happen in the United States in 2021 and I mean take your pick it's a grab bag we know that it was a record hurricane season we had tornadic outbreaks we had rachos we had fires we had heat waves this is the new normal climate system that many of us have talked about as climate scientists for many years now but interestingly enough take a look at this you know I just showed you my hometown of Canton Georgia I pulled this data from the Yale Climate Communication Group for for Georgia and parts of the southeast now the county that I grew up in is right there that's Cherokee County here's Atlanta and if you're curious Athens Georgia where the University of Georgia is is over here I am actually talking to you right now from this location Gwinnett County which is where I I live this is the estimated percentage of adults who think they are being impacted by climate change now the Yale Climate Communication Group does something every year called the Six America study and they sample various perspectives on climate change and I would invite you to take a look at that website because it has several interactive maps like this that you can bore into your home counties wherever you may be listening to this from but look at what I found when we look at parts of Cherokee County where I grew up if we go over you know less than 50% in fact closer to 40% or so of people in that county believe they're impacted by climate change you know and there are some counties in the southeast that are even less and you you can look across the western counties and so forth and find similar numbers clearly as you get closer to the metropolitan Atlanta area those numbers go up but people don't perceive generally that they are being impacted by climate change even if you look at other statistics from the same survey they believe it's happening so this is a a significant disconnect in fact you know we we experienced here in Georgia back in 2018 Hurricane Michael there you see a satellite image of Hurricane Michael just as it was making landfall near Panama City, Florida I use this as an example to talk to Georgia families about how indeed they are impacted by climate events like Hurricane Michael for example studies out of the University of Georgia's extension showed that upwards of two to three billion dollars in losses happened across our state the agricultural industry because of Hurricane Michael. Hurricane Michael still possessed gusts greater than a hundred miles per hour as it was in parts of southwest Georgia here where I'm showing you with my cursor if you know anything about the agricultural region this is where much of our nation's peanuts poultry pecans bell peppers cotton all in this region and so they took significant hits so when you talk to a family in Georgia or you talk to someone in that survey and they say well climate change isn't affecting me I said well wait a minute are you wearing a cotton t-shirt today did you have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich did you stop by KFC or Popeyes or some place for some chicken nuggets or some chicken tenders if you were at that time it's likely that you were paying more because of the reduction in supply it's basic economics supply and demand there was a reduction in supply because of this extreme weather event but people don't make the connections but in fact we know the numbers you hear the losses from the cotton crop that year pecans timber and vegetables just from that part of Georgia alone well something else that people don't think about and again I am talking about the kitchen table issues I like polar bears they're cute but for too long we have talked about these things in terms of polar bears of the year 2100 when in fact there are things happening right now that impact people's kitchen table lives so for example this is a map from the national climate assessment report 2018 showing the changes in hours work outside there are OSHA regulations that suggest that there are temperatures or wet bulb thresholds that we shouldn't exceed for people working outside now how dependent is our economy on outside workers in agriculture and in construction and so forth so again reduction in hours mean reductions in hours and pay for people and kitchen table issues so again people's lives are impacted by these things they just they don't perceive them to be here's another example AT&T they provided a significant amount of funding to several universities including the University of Georgia in recent years to study how climate change is affecting their infrastructure their their cell phone towers and other things that they rely on for their business are very much impacted by extreme events hurricanes flood and so forth and so these are just some of the ways that people are affected by these extreme weather climate events in ways that they don't think about and so one of my sort of mantra is that I kind of soapboxes I often step up on is that we have to focus on those kitchen table issues for people to understand so let me get this out of the way I mean I this is probably a preaching to the choir slide so I don't really need to spend much time on it climate is changing the signs of climate change are all around and human contributions and are significant particularly in the last 30 to 50 years I don't want to spend much time on that but I wrote this article in Forbes recently three questions about climate change that need to disappear in 2020 I get calls weekly daily even from the media about various things and one of the questions that I often get is are we in a new normal climate and I say yes we are stop asking me that in fact that I'm being a little bit facetious we are and that's why I say yes yes yes and I'll even go for as far as to say we need to stop referring to it as a new normal climate it is our normal as the young young folks say these days it is what it is this is our climate system now what about what do I think about it being the warmest this or warmest that I get questions about that all the time well I what I wrote in that article I think that type of information is not breaking news anymore I expect extreme temperature rainfall sea level sea level Arctic sea ice loss hurricane intensity records to be continually broken let's stop reporting that we can share it but we we need to tell the other stories about climate change there there's something that we can talk about related to climate change every day that doesn't deal with another record those are going to happen let's talk about the implications on on poultry or our mental health or our equity that I'll be talking about today our infrastructure there are climate stories and narratives that we need to tell beyond the oh it was the second warmest I mean these those aren't breaking news headlines anymore and then the other question that I often get is are we acting fast enough and I say absolutely not I I wrote an article recently with Tim Gallaudet and Kathy Sullivan talking about we need operation work speed Apollo Manhattan level a project level action on climate change in the same way that we saw with the COVID pandemic we saw the operation work speed and a scientific at Marvel the rapid development of vaccines that are now keeping us safe we need that type of concerted effort Manhattan project effort for climate change because this is a threat to society that won't be episodic for a few years like we see with viruses but for years and decades to come and over multiple generations and so that's why I wrote that article now bringing that closer to home and I believe Tony Busilaki and Scott Rader were sitting right behind me but this is a me testifying before the House Science Committee back in 2019 September and I told them at that time the extremes are becoming more extreme and people feel them more than averages this is a statement that I have to make because we don't notice average change people notice and are impacted by extremes which brings me to the weather climate gap that's really the title of my talk well what is this weather climate gap I don't own that I mean I've seen it in literature before but I've really tried to amplify it broadly it's this disproportionate sensitivity to extreme weather climate events and a delay in the ability to bounce back now again this figure that I'm showing you I took this directly from the National Climate Assessment Report and it shows you that there are certain communities that exhibit particular sensitivity to these extreme weather climate events low-income communities communities of color children the elderly again we've known this I suspect that there are researchers there at UCAR NCAR that have done research in this area so this is not sort of earth shattering in the sense but I think many people in a broader sense may not understand this weather climate gap so let's let's pour into it a little bit and before we do that I need to contextualize the statements here Dr. Robert Bullard who you see in the picture there is one of my mentors and friends and colleagues he is widely regarded as the founder of the modern environmental justice movement this idea that certain communities disproportionately are placed near landfills or that their communities get burdened with toxic industry and plants and other things that threaten their health and so look at the statement that he made he said today's zip code is still the most potent predictor of an individual's health and well-being individuals who physically live on the wrong side of the tracks are subjected to elevated environmental health threats and more than their fair share of preventable diseases this is the whole notion of environmental injustice the extreme weather climate gap is a manifestation of this environmental justice what I've often called climate justice issues and I'll show you a little bit later maybe even some weather justice issues as well and so this climate justice or extreme weather climate gap fundamentally is rooted in principles that I've studied and read in the environmental justice literature so to dabble in that my former PhD student Benita Casey and I and along with a colleague from the US Forest Service Cassandra Johnson published a paper in 2015 where as a part of her dissertation Benita developed a climate vulnerability index for the state of Georgia she bored into county level data on things like health numbers access to hospitalization energy rates and so forth these metrics of social vulnerability race age and so forth and we couple that with our understanding of how exposure to heat waves drought and floods in those counties over the last several decades now what you see in this study is the entire state of Georgia has become more climate vulnerable you will look at the 1980s it's mostly yellow but by the 2010s it's become a hue of orange and red so that tells me right off the bat that the entire state of Georgia has become more climate vulnerable but then if you kind of dig into the details you see that certain counties are more climate vulnerable if you look at this region here for example that's the metropolitan Atlanta area this is Savannah this is the Columbus Georgia Macon Georgia Augusta these are our major urban areas within the state of Georgia and we found increased climate vulnerability because of vulnerable populations people of color poor communities living in those counties but also exposed to these extreme weather events but look around the state you see other pockets of high vulnerability along the coastal areas and obviously that's due to sea level rise in inundation and poor communities people of color in those regions but even within our agricultural communities we found that these communities light up as being drought of climate vulnerable because there's an intensive agricultural region so when there's drought those people can't go to work they're not in the fields and it leads the vulnerabilities from that perspective in 2021 we extended this analysis that was sort of a retrospective look uh bonita who went on to do a postdoc at uh department of energy she started looking at some of the cement data the model projections and we started thinking about ways to project out social vulnerability in the future and so it you know here's the sort of framework of our risk vulnerability exposure and hazards and we said what this vulnerability in every county in the united states looked like in the in the year 2040 and so that's what we did in this particular paper published in natural hazards so here are our climate hazards based on uh assessment of our models things like heat waves reduction in coal spells dry conditions and extreme precipitation and so these are the places where we expect elevated occurrence or or frequency and intensity changes associated with the exposure events themselves the climate events themselves this is a look at the social vulnerability projected in time now the things pop out to me immediately i clearly see the black well known black belt region of the southeast areas where a significant african american populations i see clearly the desert southwest and those high hispanic latin population same in florida and parts of texas as we move up into the northern part of the country indigenous communities and so forth these are people or regions and counties that have high social vulnerability if you look carefully you'll see many urban counties there but also rural counties this is not just an urban phenomena and so when we combine these all together if you're interested in our methodology definitely take a look at the paper here is our perceived relative climate risk at county level in the year 2040 in this country now right off the bat do not be sort of confused by all of the yellow you might be saying well wait a minute there's a lot of yellow there that means those people aren't vulnerable to climate that is not what that means this is a relative scale so places that you see in orange and purple and blue have extreme climate risk so relative scale so in other words what we're showing are the counties that we believe have the highest level of climate risk when we couple those model projections with projections and social vulnerability and what do we see we see these coastal communities we see urban counties we see the desert southwest we see parts of the pacific northwest and so forth we regions around the lakes and coastal regions highly populated areas but within many of those areas we know that that social vulnerability is being driven by the fact that you have a large collection of people of color poor communities and so forth here's a headline out of a newspaper showing that a year after Hurricane Harvey which happened in 2017 Houston's poorest neighborhoods were still recovering a year a full year after the hurricane well I can do you one better here is a newspaper article that I saw in 2016 white New Orleans has recovered from Hurricane Katrina black New Orleans has not 2016 if we put on our thinking caps for a moment Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 so 11 years later there are still parts of New Orleans and even in 2022 I've been the New Orleans several times or AGU and AMS there are still places where I see the fingerprint of Hurricane Katrina all over some of those communities this is a study by one of my former doctoral students Neil Debitch who's now a professor at the University of Texas San Antonio Neil found that in the Charlotte mega region the I-85 corridor between Charlotte and Atlanta African-Americans were 44 percent more likely to reside in areas at risk of flooding than white citizens in the MSA scale for the Greenville-Spartanburg area there were even larger flood risk he found that 80 percent of African-Americans were more like there was 80 African-Americans were excuse me 80 percent more likely to reside in 500 year flood zones this is a manifestation of what I am talking about when I refer to the extreme weather climate gap well even closer home in Athens, Georgia part of that AT&T money that we had studies have shown that the counties and communities around Athens, Georgia that have a disproportionately higher number of communities of color are at risk for flooding at a greater rate than other communities this is the reality of the extreme weather climate gap and it's not just related to the weather climate disasters themselves it's very much tied into the wealth gap the income gap here's a look at the racial wealth inequality in this country from 1983 projected out to 2024 look at the blue curve which is the white population in the United States versus the the red and orange curves Latino and black let me put these numbers into real terms for you let's think take Hurricane Ida which we know was approaching parts of the Gulf of Mexico including New Orleans and Louisiana last year I want to kind of contextualize or make it plain as one of the pastor of mine used to say these numbers now we have a cat four cat five level hurricane approaching New Orleans now if I don't live in New Orleans I live in Atlanta but if I did live in New Orleans at my social economic status I can take my family pack up into my wife's Ford Explorer and we can drive to Atlanta or Memphis and stay in a hotel for a week I have the economic means to do that or I can leave my home and feel safe and knowing I may lose some things but I have adequate home insurance to cover there are people that that's not their reality there are people that can't leave don't even have a car or can't afford to go 100 miles inland and stay at a hotel for a week and that's why you saw and I think I showed it earlier in my very first slide or one of my first slides my title slide those images of people at the New Orleans Superdome that needed health care needed food needed shelter after Hurricane Katrina you know I used to be somewhat judgmental I was like why don't people leave when we know there's a category five hurricane and there are some people that are just stubborn and have normalcy bias and say well I survived the last hurricane or the last 10 why do I need to leave well newsflash normalcy bias doesn't prepare us for anomalies people get rainfall and flooding in Houston Texas all of the time but they don't get a 50 inch in one week event like we saw with hurricane RV but nevertheless there are some people that are stubborn and just won't leave that's not who I'm talking about there are people that don't have the means to leave and so I fundamentally believe that we have to rethink in the same way that we've done with the virus we have to think rethink enabling people's resiliency and adaptive capacity to leave these events or at least weather them in the sense so we've got to erode this gap this this wealth and income gap I want to show you a couple of other examples of the extreme weather climate gap that aren't necessarily related to broader global climate change here is some work that we are doing right now at the University of George as a part of some funding that I have showing the urban heat island we know that cities are warmer than their surrounding rural landscapes because of the heat absorbing surfaces lack of vegetation the anthropogenic waste term from bus engines and so forth so if you look at this graphic here's the Atlanta's heat island we are this is showing it from the perspective of surface or skin temperature heat island as measured by MODIS which is an instrument aboard two NASA satellites now look at the breakdown of where people live by race and what we have found in the study is that African Americans and to some degree Hispanics are disproportionately in the hottest part of the urban heat islands of Atlanta so we're calling this a racialized urban heat island or an RUHI it's a completely new construct this idea of enhanced risk within an already risky scenario which is the urban heat island now there's work that's coming out that suggests that historical redlining practices from past decades may be the blame now if you don't know what redlining is it's this idea that mortgage lenders and banks and so forth redline certain areas on maps based on who was living in those regions at the time it's like no don't make any investments there all right and so what has happened over time we hypothesize we're actually writing doing some work right now on this is that many of that land had become degraded had become converted to industrial commercial which we know amplifies and further and intensifies the urban heat island so we have a forthcoming paper and a book chapter on this very topic that we'll be happy to share oh by the way what are your solutions to that well I was just recently involved in a large engineering research center proposal with Georgia Tech University of Georgia Arizona state North Carolina A&T where we radically proposed solutions to engineer I came up with this term because I just needed a way to frame it engineer cities for thermal justice what is thermal justice well it's this idea that of what I just showed there are parts of cities that have in just or inequitable exposure to heat and so can we engineer cities to remove that thermal injustice that's the concept that we came up with and you know we'll see what happened and I'm talking about going beyond sort of vegetation and white pavements and white roadways we're talking about some radical ideas put forth by my colleague again to Joshi who's a mechanical engineering professor at Georgia Tech who has spent his entire career removing excess heat from server and computers farms and units from Yahoo and Google and all these big tech firms he came to me and said what if I what if we could do this using some of these techniques for the scale of a city and I wasn't I was immediately intrigued and so that's how we sort of went off down this road we got a planning grant from the National Science Foundation to explore this idea and so keep an eye on this going forward now another area of inequity is in weather warnings and communication this is a really intriguing slide by a graduate student at Cornell named Jack Sillard who is by the way one of the best follows on Twitter if you're really interested in following someone that's very engaged a young rising star I believe in the area of weather this is National Weather Service radar coverage and you can see that there are gaps well look at those black and gray counties that is that black belt that I mentioned earlier in the south so here's Atlanta's New Orleans there are significant black populations in the southeast that fall within some of these radar gap coverages whoa that's a real equity and risk communication issue I recently served on a team looking at NOAA's weather research priorities over the next 10 years it's kind of like their own version of a decadal survey and one of the things that came out of that is you know when we issue weather warnings and risk they don't translate very well in other languages including Spanish there were experts that speak Spanish that say certain tornado and hurricane warning language doesn't convey the same way in translation and so these are the types of things we also have to think about even at the weather scale so how do we close the gap this weather climate gap that I've talked about today well there are some big picture answers obviously we've got to reduce emissions and increase adaptation to solve the climate change problem as a whole to sort of ramp back what we're starting to see but we also have to erode this income gap that I mentioned those are the two most obvious solutions to me but we also have to ensure that mitigation and other policies and strategies benefit all and are not all at the disadvantage of a select a few or at the advantage of a few I should say as well give you an example of that in south Florida parts of Miami we know because the sea level rise we're getting water intruding into the fresh water system there is a lot of groundwater the aquifer type water supply there we also know that there's inundation issues in parts of the south Florida region and so people are literally leaving those coastal areas and moving the high ground people that are very affluent leaving their million dollar condos on the coast but they're moving the quote unquote higher ground in Miami and guess where a lot of that higher ground is where many people of color live and so there's climate gentrification going on in those communities so that's what I mean when I say we have to make sure that policies are not on the backs of others we've got to continue to educate marginalized groups about their vulnerabilities and increase climate literacy in general so I want to end this with a discussion of that Dr. Martin Luther King said in his letter to a Birmingham jail now that's if anyone that knows me or follows me on social media knows that that's one of my favorite writings by Dr. King or any civil rights figure at the time Dr. King had gone to Birmingham to protest racial injustice and strife in that city and he was being called out by clergy and people at the time about being an outside agitator and so if you read that letter there's one part of the letter where he said moreover I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states I can't sit by idly in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly now he's talking about the civil rights fabric of the day but if you take those exact words and frame them within the context of what I just talked about with extreme weather climate justice and equity the same thing applies and so that's why I can't sit by idly in Atlanta Georgia either I'm very concerned because we only have one planet to live on so with that I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak one shameless plug because I was so concerned about sort of some of the racial justice issues in the wake of George Floyd I wrote this little handbook trying to give some proactive positive non sort of confrontational solutions to moving us forward on these ideas of race and so with that thank you so much and I look forward to your questions thank you Marshall thank you for such a profound presentation eye opening thought provoking and as expected excellent presentation so thanks very much as you see Slido is open so I encourage our viewers to submit their questions and I will read them for Professor Shepard from Becky Rettenberg I remember daily summer thunderstorms in Boulder in the 1970s around 4 p.m. what one could almost set your watch by them and actually Marshall since you've done some of this work would say a little bit more about the heat island effect in Atlanta as impact on local severe events and storms yeah sure that's my work on urban hydrometer a lot of logical processes that's I get what I'm known for from the scholarly work I mean there's some other things that I do as well with hurricanes and so forth but I did receive the landsburg award from the AMS for this some of this work on this idea that cities themselves can perhaps even initiate or amplify or enhance existing thunderstorms there's even some work done by colleagues at NCAR Fay Chan and others shout out the Fay if he's listening so quite a few folks that have done this work but I've done some of the earliest work in this area because of the urban heat because of the roughness of the buildings perhaps even the aerosols or even these sort of mesoscale circulations that set up on the urban rural interface we know that there are changes to the precipitation now it doesn't happen every time it rains and there are certain synoptic situations background situations that we know exist that are more favorable but we absolutely know that some of those random thunderstorms that are popping up quote unquote around cities particularly in sort of these moist southeast tropical environments like Houston or Atlanta or Memphis or Nashville they're not as random as you may think they are they are very much tied there and we've established this in the literature and others have established it globally it's not just the U.S. phenomena so I call this the urban rainfall effect in a paper I published in 2010 Thank you Marshall next question go back to Slido from Alexander Etström joining us from Utah thank you very much is it simple enough to say vulnerability is tied to economic security the maps appear to indicate those populations but I don't want to oversimplify yeah that's a great question and again our method of quantifying vulnerability is just one of many and there are some controversies but I would say it's a first order driver of vulnerability because it's not so when we take this sort of I guess IPCC and other broader framework for how vulnerability is defined there are three components of vulnerability there's the exposure term the sensitivity term and the adaptive capacity term now the exposure term is not related to you know economics everyone is exposed to the heat wave or everyone is exposed to the hurricane but then we get into those other two terms the sensitivity term there are some people because of their economic situation because they're already pre-existing health conditions or poor infrastructure in their homes have more sensitivity to that hurricane but then on the top on top of that those same people are likely the ones that have less adaptive capacity in other words they get hit by the event or more sensitive to it but then don't have the means because of economics to bounce back so it is not the only factor but it is definitely a first order factor for sure All right thank you for that question and your response Marshall next question or comment from Jeff DLB great talk Marshall a former NASA Goddard alumnus can you talk a bit more about the topic of climate gentrification and where we see it happening yeah hey Jeff good good to hear from you fellow colleague there we used to walk the halls of Goddard you know Jeff I am not the expert on climate gentrification but I definitely know that we're seeing it in various places like South Florida we're seeing bits of it here in Atlanta many major cities where I would point you to if you really want to deep dive on climate gentrification is the work of my colleague at the University of Georgia Dr. Jennifer Rice she's really publishing some of the most important work in this area but I'll give you another example of climate gentrification it's tied to climate to regular gentrification so for example here in Atlanta my wife grew up in Southwest Atlanta and I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta and there were very distinct sort of racialized groups and populations in the city of Atlanta versus surrounding area now when you drive into Atlanta it's an amalgamation it's in some places they're white neighborhoods I just want to be as clear as possible that used to be places where I 40, 30 years ago wouldn't not have seen one my person walking around that's the idea of gentrification that's not a problem but part of the reason that many people say they are moving back into the city is because they're trying to lower their carbon footprints the Atlanta area is a place that's not really sort of set up for public transportation we have a martyr system but it doesn't go far into the suburbs and so people have this really good intention of I want to live closer to work I want to burn less fuel I want to lower my carbon footprint footprint but people that I know or my wife's family and people that she knows they can't afford these same communities that they grew up in and that had had have roots in all their life so you have this really interesting thing where many of those populations now are being forced out into the sort of close in suburban counties like Cobb County and DeKalb and parts of Gwinnett so you have this really interesting sort of racialized dynamic happening and some of that is related to this idea of climate gentrification and good job thank you Marshall get back to the questions from Emma Hagen thank you Emma you slightly touched on gentrification and I appreciate you touching on it I live in Denver and gentrification has been quite rapid over the past few years I'm curious if you have any knowledge about as communities of color get pushed out of their neighborhoods if racial UHI moves with them thank you that's a that's a that's a really interesting question we are you know we have just proposed this idea of the racialized urban heat island and this forthcoming paper so the next step will be to study the dynamic and I'm collaborating with a colleague Steve Holloway our urban geographer and Dr. Jerry Shannon who's a GIS expert on what the sort of this changing character of migration and urban heat means so one of the things that we've there were one of the sort of arguments in early urban heat island literature by some of the greats of of the past is that you have densely populated cities and so the urban heat islands were most significant in these sort of densely populated urban environments but then there was another body of literature that came out and said no way it's the sprawling large footprint cities like Atlanta and Houston that have this sort of expanding urban heat island well my my student Neil Debbie sort of rectified both arguments it's actually the contiguity of urban space is no matter whether it's densely populated or sprawling and so you know you if you come to Atlanta now and I know I'm somewhat familiar with the Denver area there are these little pockets of contiguous urban space and so you are going to start to see you know the urban heat island expanding from a from a racialized urban heat island standpoint I don't know that we will see the same dynamic that we've seen over the last 30 years because over the last 30 years many of those sort of communities were sort of the fact those seen as distorted communities and so people started developing industrialized commercial spaces there so that's why we started seeing that it will be interesting in the next couple of years as we embark on the study to understand those very dynamics that you're asking about thank you Emma thank you Marshall from Kevin Rader some of the stubborn people who don't evacuate are afraid of abandoning their property do you have any insight into what would make them feel secure in evacuating you know this is an interesting comment because we've had you know one of my colleagues here and I know others are studying this too but I'm just referencing people I happen to know at University of Georgia my colleague Meredith Welsh Divine and colleagues studied why people choose to leave or not leave after Hurricane Matthew that happened here in the southeast several years ago and you know you're touching on something people have sentimental value to their properties or they don't want to leave their pets there are these reasons that made to us from a far sound quite odd as to why you wouldn't leave when a potentially life altering or life ending event is approaching you but I think this is where we're seeing increasingly more social science to sociological psychological research to try to understand these decisions so that we can tailor our warnings perhaps it's not just good enough to issue a hurricane warning and say hey a cat five it's bearing down you're in the cone get out there may be some more psychologically frame messaging that can be utilized in that space and so I think this is you know I know that there are colleagues there at an in car and various other places that are really starting to think about some of these very issues but I do I have a dad that says these very same things he's he lives in Melbourne Florida and he says like I'm not going anywhere I'd love to survive every storm and you know it's just a normalcy bias and you know he has survived every storm so there's he has data to suggest that he'll survive the next one but that's framing his normalcy bias from the perspective of all hurricanes will be just like the ones he's experienced in the last 70 years of his life or whatnot and I that's that's just something that we have to kind of really communicate is not the case so it's really an interesting question I don't have all the answers but I I do think we need to study this not just from a risk communication standpoint but an understanding how people and why people make decisions standpoint so actually actually March I'm going to follow up on that as someone who does live in New Orleans a good part of the year thank you and the pictures about Katrina and Ada hit home and thank you for mentioning that the Black community in 2020 still has not recovered and that we are experiencing climate refugees in this country not in some far off land and Ada hitting in Grand Isle is another unfortunate example but the question I have is there's been increasing discussion in New Orleans post Ada of actually sheltering in place having hardened shelters either was supported by a micro grid or solar panels because of this reason for whatever reason populations not leaving could you speak to sort of the viability or is that emerging as a topic well I this is very much in line with something I frustratingly wrote in Forbes several months ago after Ida I was we have to have a fundamentally new playbook for how to respond to these extreme events well let me tell you what I mean by that and it's very much in line with what you were just saying Tony I was I took part in it well I can't really say much about it but there'll be some really interesting long form documentaries coming forward discussing some of these issues involving scientists and the mayor and the governors and so forth one of the things that I heard the mayor who I think she had well intentions and even the governor says we couldn't call for evacuations for Ida because it was within 72 hours that we you know we need at least 72 hours to do contra flow on the interstates and mandatory evacuation but here's the problem with that we are increasingly in my view and this is this opinion but there's some literature that supports it this idea of rapid intensification this idea of going to bed to a cat to storm and waking up to a cat for storm less than 24 hours away I think that's a reality that policymakers and jurisdictions have to face and so that 72 hour rule just may not work anymore so we need another plan perhaps it is sheltering in place perhaps it is short term sort of grants or tax shelters or something that encourage people to leave for 10 days or five day whatever but I will say I have no problem with fundamentally rethinking the playbook because we are seeing the planet rethink its weather we're seeing in a generation of weather that our heart fast and tried rules of policy may be antiquated that 72 hour rule is one of them point well point well taken thank you Marshall next question please from palm of the we're a singer thank you Dr. Shepard what advice would you give the scientists for looking for ways to inform the kinds of policy changes which you noted are needed similarly what would you ask from policymakers to help increase climate literacy in our society thank you palm of the yeah thank you so one of the things that I've often talked about is we need to fundamentally change how we're trained scientists and I'm I'm a part of a system that's guilty of it you know we we produce a generation of scientists that know how to write papers and dissertations and presenting conferences but we don't train them in media training in public speaking and interacting with policymakers and so I believe we need to incorporate into our curricula this concept of what I call it end to end scientists this idea that in addition to taking your core curriculum courses on your disciplinary topic there should be a course on media training or a course on engagement or using social media effectively everyone will use different things differently people have different personalities or interests but we have to to your question we have to as scientists engage in the policy sphere if we don't people with disingenuous or misinformed perspectives or or even agendas will fill the gap that we leave behind so I think we fundamentally need to shift and change how we train scientists the other thing we need to do and this is I don't know as much of an issue at a place like an in-car or a daughter somewhat but in the university world the young vibrant scholars that are doing the most interesting work and the work that might be most informative informative to policymakers they're not incentivized to go do these things it can actually work and count against them because they're not doing the quote unquote things they need to do to get tenure or promoted and so we need a fundamental way of changing the way we think about that and so those are the things that I really think about the other thing that I will say and I will challenge any scientists out there listening to me we need to move beyond thinking that engaging with policy or the media is extra stuff the question that I get all of the time is how do you do all that extra stuff I don't consider it extra I consider it a part of my scholarly portfolio to do the things that I do and I still lead my department and rent money every year and the number of peer of you publication so I'm blowing I'm dropping a grenade on this idea that you can't do those things at a high volume and still do these things as well but I don't consider them extra I consider them very much part of of the scholarship and so I just think we need some narrative change the second part of your question how do we how can policymakers enable greater climate literacy you know I think that it is all wrapped up into this idea of communicating about climate and enabling our agencies like for example NOAA NOAA just debuted a revamped version of their climate.gov website that I think is brilliantly done and so I think you know with organizations like NOAA UCAR you know this is a shout out to the comic modules in MedEd I embed comic modules in my classrooms almost daily when I teach at the University of Georgia and so if we can enable these or we won't have to invent the wheel UCAR knows what it's doing NASA and NOAA know what they're doing so if we can enable them with capacity to increase our climate literacy I think it's a no-brainer let me just add especially for the first part of your response there a hearty here here could not agree more thank you Marshall next question or comment from Jonathan Vai I live in the Sagamore neighborhood which completely burned in the Marshall fire and as Jonathan knows our heart goes out to and our support to all of those in the Boulder community that are still recovering disaster-related gentrification is happening in real time as people who are underinsured put their lots up for sale has society recognized the role of underinsurance in driving gentrification after disasters? that's a really amazing question that gets at some of the interdisciplinarity and complexity of these problems I think you're really on to something there you know I interviewed Bob Henson on my Weathergeeks podcast for the Weather Channel recently and we were talking about the Marshall fire and and some other things that happened in that region and that you know you you know as I was talking about even when I started this talk how you know that little bridge that I drove across in my community it used to just there would be flooding there but there was nothing there but now there are apartments and Walmart's there in the same way that you know perhaps that brush fire 80 years ago there was nothing there but you know I've been out in that part of the area I know that there's quite a bit of development and so forth I think these complex economic insurance underinsured issues are real I just had a discussion with Steve Bowen from Aeon a corporation that thinks about insurance and reinsurance on the podcast that will be debuting in a couple of weeks so make sure you're checking out the Weathergeeks podcast it's on all your podcast outlets and we talk about this very topic I don't have an answer for it it's not in my wheelhouse of expertise but I think you're seeing with clarity some of the complexity involved in the couple human natural system thank you Jonathan thank you Marshall wait for the next question to and Tony I saw a few that I maybe were there that I didn't address I thought as you were scrolling I think they're so what's happening is people are up voting so it's kind of dynamic so it's going and I see yeah I saw at least one that I did yeah that's changed so we're going to deal with for a question from Chris great talk fully agree seems like a lot of the work you're doing involves both geoscience and social science in a very integrated way why do you see the role social science being in the future of geoscience research another question it's critical I mean that's you know when I when I left Goddard you know I had an opportunity to go some very traditional meteorology departments as a faculty member but I deliberately chose the University of Georgia because I saw so many intersections between the kind of science I was doing and what some of my geography and social sciences and political colleges and urban geographer colleagues were doing that that that that study I just showed you on redlining and urban heat islands that's probably something that I never would have done as if I were a member of a different department but because I had access to an urban geographer who does sort of race based studies and had access colleague that does geographic visual visualizations of GIS you know we were able to do those studies so I think I think social sciences is critical not just in the climate sphere but also in weather we're seeing that more and more you know our good friends at NCAR and NOAA and various places are bringing us the very best radars and satellites and modeling systems and they produce they're really good they're I mean that's a misconception out there among some that our weather court forecast gets really good these days but if someone didn't get the forecast or they misinstrued or misunderstood it it's a bad forecast still even though we had good technical information on the particular event and so that gap is where I think social scientists and again I don't even like to refer to social scientists we're in that generic term because there's so many different corners of social science from communication to sociology to psychology political ecology educational psychology my colleague at Georgia Alan Stewart who I know some folks at NCAR know he really does a lot of interesting work in this this concept of weather salience and so I see that as really one of the next great frontiers I don't I'm not sure well I better not say this too because I there's some really good sort of technical things that we still need in our community for sure you know the epic and you know new you know high resolution phase array radars so there's still technical technological need but we also need advancement on that front too I think bottom line it's not either or it's in it's in that's correct thank you next from John Rispy related to your third question that needs to disappear in 2022 are we acting fast enough no in a recent discussion with the relative they said we are moving too fast away from fossil fuels they said that technology is costly and not reliable enough what would you say to this objection well I would say that's upton Sinclairism if you remember upton Sinclair from the right to jungle he said it's difficult to get a man to understand something when the salary depends on him not understanding it now that's not necessarily related to what that specific person said but there is this sort of inertia of our current economy fossil fuel based economy and people are comfortable with it and familiar with it and so forth and the reality is I still have a couple of cars that burn fuel in my garage I did just recently invest in a an electric vehicle as well and you you should see the push back I get on Twitter when I occasionally mentioned my electric vehicle I mean there's this sort of violent reaction it's almost as bad as people's reactions these days of vaccines or whether climate changes or not I get real vitriol about just the very mention of owning a electric vehicle and so I've been I even posed a question out of there on Twitter I'm like I'm fascinated why that happens or even why your relative sees it that way because again as Tony says it's not an or a proposition yeah we still are going to be in a fossil fuel based economy for time but we also can and should start transitioning to a renewable energy economy as well and so why do we poo poo one to elevate the other let's kind of work together and it's like you know I'm a professor at University of Georgia we just won the national championship but guess what I still pull for Florida States football team because I have three degrees there so I mean we don't have to live in these binary perspectives it's really odd now of course I have to agree with Marshall on that last but actually on the electrical vehicle on just last week I guess it was we hosted an event with the governor of Colorado with respect to an electrical compact compost vehicle but I didn't realize that 10% of the vehicles on U.S. roads today are electric and 13% in the state of Colorado so it's actually growing faster than the number of us may realize oh I see it as someone I mean I bought my mine in in August and you know there were these sort of narratives that were all aren't are there enough charging stations well I've got apps all over this phone that show me exactly where they are and they're actually pretty good and it's about to get a much better with the new infrastructure bill well what if you what if the power goes out can you charge a car well the power goes out you can't pump gas either and so there are these narratives that are out there that I find interesting it's just it's just been really fascinating to see the response I mean you know I'm not telling you're bad because you're still driving gas car I still have two gas cars too so it's an interesting I'd love some psychology expert to tell me why there's such a vitriolate reaction among some circles interesting from Paul Kussera greetings from Hey Paul NASA Goddard colleague great presentation we have been implementing impact based forecasting for developing countries do we have any thoughts on what type of messaging that would help that would help the most vulnerable communities to take action when high impact weather are forecasted yeah Paul and hey Paul another colleague and by the way you know it's always neat because I go on to the college of the pages weather site sometimes one of my favorite sites to go for real-time weather and I always like to pull up and I it's always neat to see the to cheer a precipitation type there as the acknowledging the work of Paul who just asked that question you know Paul I don't this is something I think about all the time and sort of how you know I think impact based messaging is the right way I still get very frustrated for example when I see all the hymn and hawn over oh it might be a cat to hurricane no it's a strong cat it's a weak cat three no strong cat two what's the difference what what are the impacts of it no matter what category it is and so I think you know I am I am increasingly of the mindset that we have to really convey these impacts but I think you know and the way that Tony just said this questioning of the dynamic process I think we need very dynamic scalable impact messaging to certain communities uh you know my little community that I grew up in in Canton Georgia which is a sort of low to middle class African-American community may need a different messaging for a flood event than perhaps someone that's a bit more science and flood attendants so I'd love to see a bit more social science related research sort of on these dynamic scalable impact messaging I think I think that's important because I think you know for too long we've treated messaging as I mean we've we you know I guess what I'm saying is if you look at marketing people who know how to message marketing and ad agencies they don't use one type I mean I turn on BET which is Black Entertainment Television if you don't know what it is and I see a completely different set of Ford commercials and Walmart commercials than I see when I turn on CBS or the Weather Channel and so there's dynamic and targeted marketing I think we need to learn from some of that for our messaging and weather and climate yeah my take on adaptive communication adaptive communication and and really and the importance of again the two-way exchange of individuals from the community being part of that absolutely absolutely what we you know I refer to that as co-production of knowledge my former agency and Tony's form of agency I think was guilty of this a little bit I'll give you a quick story they they developed this apply applied sciences division at now and within NASA's earth sciences division I I did a detail there with Goss Moser a few years ago and I remember being the deputy project scientist at NASA of the global precipitation measurement mission or GPM and I hosted this workshop of water resources managers and flooded emergency managers and so forth and we were trying to get a sense of how they could use the NASA GPM data and well I will first of all you know you're giving us net CDF and HDF files we don't want any of that we want just something we can pop into our GIS system and go and so I you know there was this push model as opposed to going into the end users co-producing what they need and developing it together yep absolutely all right we have time for about a couple more questions it's been just a great dialogue from Anna Del Moral Mendes I'm from Barcelona, Spain and I believe that COVID-19 has been a major factor in increasing the gap in climate justice especially in the city and coastal regions lots of people have lost their jobs in our risk of poverty I'm wondering if that trend is also visible here in the U.S. thank you well that's a great question and I've written in Forbes over the last two years about the sort of similarities among the climate COVID and racial discourse narratives in this country I think they are interconnected I think in the heart of the pandemic you had people losing their jobs left and right and that further widens the wealth and a gap that I talk about I will say and I don't know you know what it's like in Europe right now in Barcelona by the way my wife and daughter visited Barcelona a couple of years ago and loved it so loved your hometown I wasn't able to travel with them but I'll speak here in Georgia right now our economy is actually booming it's really weird and I don't know what the reasons are but things feel sort of back to pre-COVID here in Georgia and Atlanta and so I don't know that I'm seeing those gaps in fact our unemployment rate in the state is like two or three percent right now we're amazingly low but I do know that there are certainly cases around this country where you certainly have the double and triple whammy of losses of jobs due to COVID and then you know in fact it's interesting we actually are studying this right now I forgot to mention this we got a seed grant from the president of our university like myself John Drake it's led by John Drake here and in fact just disease ecologists and so we're looking at the sort of duality or of this compound impact of COVID and the extreme hurricane seasons we've seen the past two years in 2020 and 2021 so for example how does sort of be sort of a hurricane season that's very active in the midst of a pandemic affect certain things so for example you have places where you have a hurricane approaching you have a hospital at full capacity because of COVID how does that affect sort of operations there or how does it affect people's ability to evacuate into other counties where they may be really COVID sort of hot right now in terms so these are some really interesting comments and I mean I've got questions that we've been asking in that for a little one year sort of seed study that we were funded to look at I mean again another follow on a case in point of IDA is that residents in the in the value parishes were were without hard instructors for two months and and largely unvaccinated populations living in close quarters and tents etc some in cars for a well over a month without food without power and water all right I think we have time for one last question Michael Lewis what positive changes have you seen that give you hope for the future encourage you to keep working on these issues great question to end up with yeah I am an optimist I feel like to you know if we kind of stop him and haunt about all this and put our minds to it we can figure this out and technology's there but the some things that I've seen that that testimony that I gave in 2019 that Tony was there that before the House Science Committee you know I did not find the questions unreasonable from either side of the aisle I mean there was not this contingency you know there's certain side of the aisle they're going to say you're this is all hoax there were there was real concern from both sides of the aisle about these compound weather events hurricane Harvey and extreme so I see and I talk to you know policy makers from both sides of the aisle all the time I see a movement away from the narratives that I think we saw 10 20 years ago we had the climate conference here in Georgia last summer our governor actually delivered via video the opening remarks so our governor is a Republican and so some people might have thought that he wouldn't do that I also see more movement in the faith based communities private companies like AT&T and Coca-Cola and amongst our military and I've always said when those three sectors start viewing this as a significant problem they're sort of by their coattails drag along the general public too so these are now of course there's still these sort of narratives out there you know there's there's the seven to nine percent dismissive crowd that pops out of the you know climate communication Six America study but that's just sort of noise noise out there there's a lot more signal than noise these days in my view Thank you Marshall and there's some other questions in the queue but need to give Marshall a break because you've been very gracious for this time he's going to be meeting with some of the leaders of the organization and then or some of our early career scientists and so we'll give Marshall a little bit of a break but let me but on behalf of all everyone in the virtual world here let me thank you Marshall look forward to greeting you in person but thanks so much just tell by the engagement of the questions what a wonderful talk as I said profound provocative and something that leaves us much to think about a what we can all do individually and organizationally and again thank you for that and congratulations as our Walt or Roberts distinguished lecture Thanks Marshall Cheers Thank you Thank you