 Thank you. My name is Leslie Andy Pinijiru. I am a professor of climatology and geography in the geography department at the University of Vermont. I'm also the state climatologist and a couple of other things that you see listed on there, little hats that I wear. I'm the lead author for the Northeast chapter of the National Climate Assessment, which I think is a piece of what you wanted me to come in and talk to the committee about today. Yeah, great. Thank you. Okay, so do you want me to just... Yeah, the floor is yours, and we'll rudely interrupt you with questions. I'm just trying to keep everybody... But generally what we do is if someone has a question, we ask people to raise their hand and I'll call on people. But if you would prefer us to hold questions to the end, we're happy to do that too. No, because I think I have quite a lot because I do the fire hose type of thing. So as we're going through, if there's something that you need to have clarified or follow up question on, please feel free to ask it at that point. So what I thought I would do is start off maybe sort of big picture, climate climate change and that sort of stuff and then get it into the National Climate Assessment, which is what I spent two years working on. And then if there's time, if there's interest, if there are questions, if there are any pieces that are specific to the state that we can actually sort of look at. So some of these types of information you probably have seen already. So if there's anything that you're starting to fall asleep on, I will take that as a clue to keep moving and to move a little bit faster. If you do fall asleep, please don't snore. That's all I ask. All right. So this is a picture from NASA that kind of sets the stage for warming patterns across the entire globe from 1880 to the present. And I like to show it at the beginning because what it does is it shows you where the warming is occurring, where it's occurring fastest and how it sort of goes back and forth over time. So the blue patterns are patterns colder than the average time frame that they're using as a base for this. And then the yellows and the oranges are warmer than that period. So the base period that they're using is 1950 to 1980. So I'm just setting that up for you so that when you start to see it play, you'll have a little bit of a sense as to what you're looking at. What's the range of temperature? So the range, you see that there's a little scale up here. So the darkest blue is like two degrees colder than the average period and the most reddish orange is two degrees warmer than the average. So it's a four degree temperature. At least Celsius. Right. Can you play it again? I will. Thank you. And did you want to follow up on that Celsius to Fahrenheit? So two degrees Celsius is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit? Yes. So it's actually at least eight degrees difference that you're looking at here. And what's the baseline? The baseline is 1950 to 1980. See my philosophy is life begins at 70 degrees. Which is not my level of remark, but did you catch the year when things went like that? It was about 1980. And so we use that as a sort of hinge point for when we look at the really pronounced effect of human influences, because we see the really big change in that particular timeframe. And is there a concentration of carbon dioxide associated with that? So these are all of the various inputs, whether it's carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. It's that. It's the melting of the sea ice at the polar regions. It's melting of the permafrost releasing methane. It's land conversion. It's agriculture. It's all of those things combined in there and not just one single piece. So this is just temperature. So this is just showing you the temperature. So difference between, you know, that five year and the average. Okay. All right. So the other piece that I like to kind of start with is to put everything into perspective. When me as an atmospheric scientist looks at the entire earth system, but we're looking at everything from what the atmosphere is doing, how that influences your water patterns, how it influences the vegetation, the soils, everything together, because if you miss one, then you're going to be missing something. So, you know, going back to the act that is being proposed, you know, you see things like carbon sequestration in your soils. And so everything has to be sort of how it's linked and interconnected. Otherwise, there's going to be a piece that's missing in here. So we're looking at it from a whole systems perspective. And so, you know, movement of energy, movement of water, movement of everything sort of continually cycling through around the earth itself. We also think of climate change as a system because the term climate change is actually a couple hundred years old. It sort of appears in the geologic record back in the late 17th and 1800s, looking at climate change. Change is, they used to call it back then. And so, Al's asked my class, how old do you think the term climate change is? And I get everything from 20 years. And then some people say 20 plus one, kind of like prices, right? And then some people say like a million. And so, when you're seeing that sort of range and understanding in what it is we're looking at when you think about how climate's changed. And so, again, because it's more than temperature, it's more than precipitation, it's more than clouds, it's more than all those pieces, the diagram that you're seeing on your right sort of brings together the various ways of trying to quantify and wrap our minds around what's happening as the climate changes. So warming is one thing, so global warming is one piece. But we're also seeing things like changes in phenology and changes in who's getting rain and who's getting floods, who's getting droughts, and all of those are sort of all interconnected, right? Because if somebody gets more rain, that means somebody's getting less. So we're looking at how this all is sort of like woven together. So this is one of my favorite diagrams because it helps to visualize which aspects of our changing climate we're talking about. And some of it has to do with, you know, like the processes like your greenhouse gases or changes in agriculture. And those are what you're seeing on the left-hand side there in the oranges, okay? And then in the middle part of the diagram, you're seeing what happens next, the sort of impacts. So things like changes in when birds come or changes in sea level rise or that sort of stuff. And then the right-hand side of your diagram is the strategies to either mitigate against climate change or adapt to climate change. So you've got the green stuff on the right-hand side there. So this is a way of looking at it from a process perspective. What's happening from an impacts perspective? What are we seeing? What are we observing? And then from a strategies perspective, what are we going to try to do either to mitigate against or to adapt to? And so I don't know if this helps or not, but it helps me to sort of frame which aspect am I either doing research on or what aspect are my students interested in or what aspect is of a particular interest, you know, like a community group that I might be talking to. So this is from Puget Sound. If you're going to look it up, because I know some people tend to do well in talking, they're not doing other stuff. They're just googling all this stuff that I'm actually talking about. So this is from Puget Sound Science and, you know, once I give Daniel a copy of the slides, you'll be able to have all the links to go back and digest and pick a part and get all the additional questions that you may be interested in looking at. So just out of curiosity, which bucket of these is sort of like resonates with you the most? Like where's the committee sitting? And so I'm going to ask the left-hand side, the middle, or the right-hand side? No, you guys are not on camera. I am, so it's okay to raise your hand. Do you mean the green? Do you mean like, yeah, is this the piece that is of most interest? The response piece? Or the impact piece? I'm doing this kind of like blind, because I can't see. Or what's what's what the causes and drivers are? Okay, so responses. In terms of the legislature, all of the legislature, I think that's that's going to be the piece. In terms of this committee, I see it more on the mitigation. And we're learning a lot about adaptation and there may be some intersection, but in terms of the legislation we work on, I think it's more mitigation. Okay, yeah, thank you for that. All right, so we've got the personnel and the professional is one way of looking at it, right? And how those two sort of come together. Okay, so the last thing in terms of sort of intro types of information is how do we kind of actually think about put numbers to understand, explain climate change. And so we can look at it, whether it is, you know, in a geologic record, there's these big jumps in the record. That's the second one that you see on there. I'm afraid to move my mouse because you know, I don't want it to just skip ahead. So can you say this if I do that? Okay, so sometimes these big jumps or sudden jumps in the record, that you usually see in the geologic record, the one that we are probably most familiar with is a trend line of some sort, whether it's an increasing trend or a decreasing trend. But the one that I like to kind of stress, and by the time I guess I give enough of these presentations, everybody will know about this last one, which is do you see how there's squiggles around an average condition and how those squiggles are getting bigger over time? Okay, those for me are important because the red lines that I've drawn on there are sort of like the bounds that we function really well as humans, as a human society. And it's when you get outside of those bounds, that's when we get into challenges. So it could be increase heat waves and cold waves, increase droughts and floods, increase forest fires, increase brush fires in Australia. Okay, those are those going outside of that bound within which we thrive and function and have evolved, that usually sets us over the edge. And it's when we go over the edge like that, and we have other triggers like political or conflict issues, that's when it then becomes a spiral. Dr, what is the start and finish of that time? So this could be any, this is just like hypothetical. So it could be 1920, it could be 1800. So there's no actual fixes. This is what theoretical diagram, but we're seeing more and more of this end of the, you know, so all of those, the heat waves in Europe. And you know what happens next because it's outside their bounds, they don't have air conditioning, they don't have cooling centers and all that sort of stuff. That's the type of stuff that I'm having a sort of think about. And what would this look like for us here in the state? What is it that takes us outside our bounds? So that was a sort of introduction. Okay, what I'm going to transition to now is to talk a little bit about the national climate assessment and my role in that and the sort of rationale behind it and what happens next. So this is the fourth national climate assessment. I was involved in the second one as a reviewer, the third one as a contributor, and then this fourth, what I was a lead author for the Northeast climate assessment itself. And so a couple of things by way of introducing this, this, we're going to call it NCA for short, the Southern National Climate Assessment all the time, right? So a couple of things about it. The first one is that it is congressionally mandated. And it comes out of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which established the US Global Change Research Program, which is the Fed agency that actually coordinates all of this. So this is the fourth one, which means that we're a little bit behind schedule if there's supposed to be one every four years since 1990. And for the very first time when this one came out, we actually met the mandate first time ever. So there was a lot of excitement around that because before it had been like five, six, seven, eight years in between each one. Now, second thing about this is that again, in the congressional mandate itself, it says the way that it is written has to be policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. So we struggled a lot with how do you write this to meet that mandate? So you can't say you must do this and you should do that. You can say this is what the studies have shown. And then this is what the case studies are. But there's nothing in there that says here's a timeline that you have to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so on. So when you read it, what you'll notice is that that sort of comes through in there. So the one that I'm talking about is what's called volume two, which is where all of the impacts are put together. So there's one volume, volume one, that's just the physical science, and then all of the impacts are in this second volume in here. So when I give you the website, it'll be for looking at this second volume and you can look at the impacts of climate change in the various regions. So there are a couple pieces that were important for us when we were writing this assessment. And one of them is something called the state climate summaries. And each state has a four-page nice little glossy handout that talks about what does climate change look like in each state. So here is a little snippet of the wonderful Vermont. And it talks about, you know, changes in precipitation, goes into a little bit about Lake Champlain and so on. So if you Google state climate summary Vermont, you're going to get that little four-pager. And this was important because it allows us to drill down to the local level in a way that you wouldn't be able to do if it was just like this big national report. So that's one thing that was important for us. The other thing that was important was that the couple new regions that were introduced, so like the U.S. Caribbean was introduced, the Great Plains was brought up into two so that we could actually look at what the impacts were a little bit better. A couple other things that were important for us and might be important to the committee as well. We now have what are called economic valuation studies. And those give dollars and cents to climate change, impacts of climate change, the costs of climate change. We did not have that before. And so this is another one of those really exciting developments that we didn't have access to in the previous climate assessment. So economic valuation studies, I believe I have a slide after this that'll show you what some of those things look like. And I'm just going to do this and do that. So here's a little snippet of those economic impact studies, economic valuation studies. What they're looking at is what are some of the impacts in terms of changes in our work, so labor on the upper left in here. Do you see that? All right. As a result of changes in temperatures and so forth over time moving forward. And then the second one in here would be what happens to things like air quality. Because as temperature rises and you get more concentrations of certain types of gases like ozone, ozone contributes to smog. What happens in terms of air quality, our quality of life, and so forth. So now we're actually putting numbers on this. What happens if you lose days of work? What happens to folks who come into a region on a seasonal basis to work and are exposed to higher temperatures? What are those numbers that we're looking at? So in terms of the ozone concentrations, the blue would be better air quality and the red would be worse. Correct. So it looks, this is a change over from when to when. So this is, let's see here. This is current. So it says the map on the bottom, I'm reading from the last sentence up here. The map on the bottom is a change in ground level ozone concentrations compared to 1995 to 2005. So they would be current. Right. Or close to, close to current. Yes. Yeah. It is interesting that the, it's like generally the ozone concentrations go down in a place where that's warmer. That's correct. Oh, you mean in terms of the labor? The Texas and Louisiana. Yeah. Oh, I see that's ours work, I suppose, outside or not necessarily. So upper one says national, the difference between estimate of the economic benefit to the US from global mitigation actually. So slightly different from what you would think it is. Yeah. So again, this kind of stuff, when you get a copy of it, you sit there and you chew on it a little bit, or like I did before I came here, I'm using these graphics to get you to go read it for you. It's a little trick. All right. So that was that was one piece. The other thing that was new is between 2014 and 2018, what we heard a lot about was we need to have information that's local. We need to have information that we can do something with at a scale that is important to us. National stuff doesn't really help us on either a region, a state, or a city level. So we need more local stuff. And so the response to that was they expanded the amount of physical space, the pages that each region was allowed to actually talk about climate change and shrank the national overview chapters. So each region now had 20 pages to explore climate change impacts and the national chapters like six pages. So what is unique to each region? So to answer that for the Northeast, you know, we brainstormed and said, Okay, what makes us different in the Northeast? And we had things like, you know, that rural urban piece that's critical to us. Okay, and how that juxtaposes. We also have the inland versus coastal and the resources along the coast that are different from the resources that we have inland. We also have the fact that we are one of the most densely populated parts of the US and one of the oldest populated parts of the US in terms of length of settlement. And so that sets of challenges for things like urban areas that have subways that are 200 years old. And what are some of the risks to climate change, especially the coastal urban areas like New York and DC, okay, in a way that we wouldn't have in Burlington? So what are some of these changes that we're looking at? And so that's what you're seeing on that left in there. And the fact that we have some cultural heritage sites that are sort of critically important to us as a nation, to us as a region. And how does climate change affect a lot of those? So some of these are the things that we sort of kept in mind when we were writing up our chapter. So this report is a risk-based report. And it's asking things like, who is at risk? What are the vulnerable populations? What parts of our landscape? What buildings? What socioeconomic sectors are at risk? And what are the tipping points? And what would those mean if we passed a tipping point? So those are the questions that we asked when we were writing up the chapter itself. And we didn't do this in a vacuum. We actually had what are called regional engagement workshops and got input coming from all different sectors and communities, private, public, and other sectors, indigenous communities across all of the Northeast, helping us to answer those questions. And so those are the inputs that we use to actually write stuff up. So the case studies, all of the great stuff that we're doing like Reggie, okay? All of those sort of came together to help us to write up the report itself. So somebody at the National Office went through and summarized all of this. I have no idea if you can read any of this. No? Okay. All right. There's another one of those failing PowerPoint 101 because you can't read a thing. So what they did is they summarized for each region on here what are the impacts and what are the actions that are being taken. So everybody's training, trying to read what it says for the Northeast. So you got things like water, energy, transportation, infrastructure, being affected by snowstorms, droughts, heat waves, flooding, which is all sound familiar, right? What are some of the actions? Cities and states throughout the region are assessing their vulnerability to climate change and making interventions and investments to increase infrastructure resilience, all right? So really, really pertinent to a lot of the conversations that are going on, you know, within the committee. So again, when you have a chance, you can go back and look and see what the other states are doing. So I actually gave a presentation similar to this last year. And I thought what I would do is go and read all of the regions and what they had written to see if there were any commonalities or if there were uniqueness. And so this is what you're seeing here. Pretty much every single region talked about adaptation and ecosystem services and infrastructure, transportation, human health conditions, the effects of climate change on indigenous peoples, all of these things were things that were repeated over and over regardless of if you lived in North Dakota or North Virginia, okay? And so how does all of this kind of play out for us? The only thing that was unique was the marine and sea level stuff, which of course only the coastal and island places would have mentioned in theirs. So let's get to the Northeast chapter. So in pulling all of this together, what we did is thought about it and came up with five main messages. So instead of trying to read through every single word on there, let me summarize it for you. In the first key message, we're talking about the rural parts of our region and how changes in the seasons, so changes in spring conditions, changes in winter, changes in your summer, changes in the amount of rainfall that we get at different times of the year are affecting our economic livelihoods, our practices, how we live, and how we thrive in the rural parts of our community. So snowpack and spring floods and all of those things are important for us in the rural parts of the Northeast. And when we think about why did we focus on the rural part of the region first, here's a map that shows you it's a population density map essentially. And knowing that a lot of our large cities and urban areas, things like D.C., Boston, New York, Philly, a lot of them tend to be coastal, so that sets up one framework for us. But most of the Northeast is actually pretty rural. And so looking at what's happening in the rural parts brings in a lot of land mass, a lot of land bases as my colleague Mike Klein, he was here in some shape or form in the state house earlier today, I saw him a couple hours ago. He talks about this land base issue and how does that kind of play out in a place where you do have land versus a place like an urban area where you don't have land to do a lot of mitigative or adaptive type of strategy. So that's one piece. When you change your seasons, that's going to change things like the growing season. So what you see on the left-hand side there is the last time that it freezes in the spring. And on the right-hand side what you're seeing is the first time that it freezes in the fall. And so the time in between is your length of your growing season. And so we're looking at how that is changing and how it will be projected to change whether we're talking about business as usual scenarios or if we try to be a little bit more stringent in terms of reductions of emissions. And that's the three different parts of the panels that you're looking at. So yellows mean that there's a little bit of a change. So anywhere like six to ten, fourteen days longer growing season. And then the reds and the oranges could be as much as 30 days longer in your growing season. And everybody might say, well, isn't that a good thing? But there's a big button there. Just because you have a longer growing season doesn't mean you're going to have more production from an iron culture perspective because what if you don't get the rain? You got the temperature but you don't have the rain. What if the pests are now thriving so much they kill off your plants? What if diseases move in because it's a better environment? So just because you have a longer growing season doesn't necessarily mean your iron cultural productivity is going to go through the roof. So I'm just sort of trying to do this whole systems approach and make sure that all of the pieces are being considered as we kind of step through. Any questions so far? You've been extraordinarily quiet. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Okay, so it's coming, right? You're just sort of like, oh, okay. Maybe I should have just kept on talking. Okay, I will keep on talking. We're seeing a different perspective in some respects than we've seen before. Ah, hopefully that's a good thing. Okay, okay, good, good. So you're piling up the questions, right? Probably up here because oh, somebody's typing. The last time somebody typed for me an hour ago, they're like, oh, I have a few questions. How many is that? 12? Yeah, but I'm only on slide five. All right. So the other piece about this changes in the rural seasons is it affects when we get spring snow melt. And so what you're looking at here is the red arrows that are facing down. So the red triangles that are facing down mean that the spring snow melt is occurring at least 10 days earlier in the year. Okay, so if your spring has changed so that you're getting melting occurring earlier, what does that mean for spring floods? All right, so that's what this diagram is trying to get us to think about. Okay, so that's the first key message. It's rural, it's seasons, it's change. The second key message looks at coastal resources, coastal peoples, coastal livelihoods. Why? Because a lot of us either visit the coast, live on the coast, or have some kind of interconnection with the coast itself. And we have important sectors of the economy like lobster, you know, and other cretaceous shellfish that are, you know, impacted by warming sea level temperatures. Why is that important? The northeastern shelf is warming faster than anywhere else in the US. So knowing that our northeastern ocean is warming faster than everybody else has a sort of pale a little bit more attention to our coastal regions. Okay, so that interplay sort of comes in in there. So, do you want to go back? Well, I just want to add a question about that. Is that because of an influence that the Gulf Stream has on the way it flows up the coast? That might be part of it, but there's also the actual warming of the ocean itself. When a lot of the energy in the atmosphere moves into being stored in the ocean, a lot of that seems to be stored in the northeast and the other. South of here, and that Gulf Stream is bringing that heat up. But there's also, yeah, but there's also heat, because we're not particularly cold while compared to poles, right? So there's still energy here at our latitudes too, and so some of that is also being stored in the oceans. Yeah, so it's a movement piece, but it's also the in place piece that we're looking at here. So, thinking about this from a coastal perspective, you've got all of that warming, but you also have the fact that sea levels are rising. So it's sort of like a double whammy. And for our colleagues who live in places like New York City or Boston or any coastal place that has the potential for being inundated, either during a heavy precipitation event that if it might coincide with a tide is like a really bad situation. And then you layer on top of that sea level rise, then they're looking at the conditions that they haven't had to face before from an infrastructure perspective. So that's that piece in there. Okay, so the third key message connects the fact that we're rural, but we're also urban, and we depend on each other. So the third key message talks about the interconnections between rural and urban, but also what's taking place in the urban, in New York City, in DC, in Philly, that is important itself. And we have, again, like I said, a lot of really important cultural heritage sites in a lot of our urban regions, but we also have aging infrastructure. And so we have some particular challenges in our urban regions in a place like New York that we may not have in a place like LA. Okay, so you're busy trying to read this. I can see the body language is like that. I prefer everybody's engaged trying to read, try to read, and you probably don't have to read it all. So again, this is my subtle hint. Have you go read it? Yeah, okay. All right. So in those urban areas, one of the challenges is what's called king tide flooding. So when flooding occurs of particular tidal conditions, and that just, you know, amplifies the amount of water that rushes into these various places, that's one piece in there. And so Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was a great way to say, hey, what are some of the things that occurred in Sandy? And how can we adapt? How can we mitigate against this? And so what you're seeing here is the problem in Sandy is the the the grades on the street level were at the same level. So when all that rainfall and all that storm surge came from Sandy, it went straight into the New York subways and flooded the subways and shut them down. So one of the things that New York City did is a very simple adaptation measure to when they replace the grades, they didn't replace that street level. They replaced them with these raised grades that also are multifunction. So there's seats for you to sit while you wait for the bus. And also they've got, you know, like little racks to park your bike on. So it's serving at least three purposes in here. Just a simple replacement of a grade. So, you know, this is where, you know, bringing in some engineering, some design, some internship for credit, you know, all of this type of stuff. Get those juices going here on ways of moving forward. So the fourth key message was different because it came out of a lot of public comments, public feedback that says, where are the people? What are the vulnerabilities from a human perspective? And so in this particular key message, we looked at influences for human health. So whether it's waterborne diseases, tick-borne diseases, Lyme disease, whether it is air pollution events. Okay. Anything that affects us here, who are the populations that are vulnerable? Who are the populations that only come to the Northeast for certain times of the year and have a different vulnerability than residents? What are some of those things that we need to sort of keep in mind? And so that's what you're seeing across in this particular message. And one way to kind of track that is to see hospital room visits. So whether they were hospitalized and or whether they did they come in with a particular ailments or complaint. That's one way to try and track the effect of, you know, increase popular, increase pollution, sorry, or increase Lyme disease or other borne tick disease that you might be looking at. And so the last key message, how does take a step back and say, so we've done all of these landscapes, we've done all these people pieces. What else can we talk about as a region? And one of the things that we know is that the Northeast has been a leader in a lot of adaptation types of strategies and case studies and methodologies. And so this last key message actually was more of a show and tell because it sort of brought together a lot of those exemplars, if you will, of ways of doing or thinking about adaptation. So this is the last key message in here. So I would be most remiss if I did not just sort of give you a shout out to all the people who worked on this particular chapter at the various agencies and institutions and also folks who helped with either graphics and so on and so forth, including students at that UVM and so forth. So if you are looking for the chapter because I'm touted it enough that you're just dying to delve into it, here's the URL for it. That's the direct one to it. If you go to the lower one here, it says global change.gov, what you will find is every single bit of the report, all thousand plus pages, every diagram, every chapter, every figure, every PowerPoint, every PDF, including a copy of this. Okay, so this is the executive summary, which here's Daniel. Okay, there you are. I'll leave you two copies of this and I'll also leave you the link. So this sort of summarizes everything that I've just. All right, so before I move into the next part, any questions? Are you all still? Okay, so I'm still mulling over that first video, which is an accelerating rate of change and one of the things we've been hearing from in this committee is that in terms of weather and climate, the dangers in volatility, it's not necessarily warming overall, but the volatility that that brings. And one of the things we've seen in Vermont, an increase in eight inches in the annual rainfall in extreme events. And I'm just wondering, is that rate of change still expected to continue to increase the volatility? So I think a couple ways of answering that. First of all, the Northeast New England Vermont is one of those really, really highly variable regions. And so that's always been part of our M.O. And it makes it a little bit more challenging to sort of predict numbers in the same way that other regions are where the patterns are a little bit more stable for one of the better ones. So there's that piece. The other thing is where we are, the latitude of where we are, we're at a place where there's a lot of changes going on in the jet stream. And so that's also part of the reason for the volatility. And if I were answering your question five years ago, I wouldn't have the same knowledge as I have today, because they have been changed in the jet stream in the last few years that we did not have before. And so somebody asked me a question today about uncertainty. And uncertainty means knowing what you still need to find out. It doesn't mean that you don't know what you talk about. And so part of that, what you call volatility, uncertainty is the fact that some of these patterns are changing and some pieces of the understanding are also changing too. And so it's a question of always looking at the observations, looking at the data, looking to see what look like a particular type of pattern would look like a particular type of rainfall event a few years ago is no longer that. And so there's this constant need to keep on the ball with the evolution of all climate patterns over time. And one thing that we do know is that because the atmosphere is warmer, there are more water molecules in the atmosphere. So there's more rain falling or precipitation falling out of the atmosphere. One thing that is new for us in the last few months or so is that there is a bigger amount falling than we thought would fall simply by doing the math alone. Doing the math, mathematics alone. So if you didn't do the mathematics alone, you would say that you would get seven percent more. But what we're observing is that some places are seeing like 14 percent more. And so that, and this is like just off the press, right? So that means that there's something else that is changing in the system or there's some other piece that we still have to understand to help write Exactly. Exactly. And so there's always that keeping on top of things because it's not static and the answers are not static. So that just adds an additional level of complexity. But it's, that's what the system is doing. So my response to that is to prepare for everything, to try and keep all these pieces in mind. Because if you think only this is going to change and a couple things over here change, you're going to get caught with your socks down. So if you try and look at how everything might be factored in and a portion of the resources that way, then there's going to be less of a chance of missing something completely. You know what I mean? So if you only did temperature, you'd miss rainfall. If you only did rainfall, then you might miss soils, right? So that's what I mean by trying to make sure that you're trying to account for as much as possible. Yeah. So you mentioned the change in the ghost, the jet screen. And what kind of changes are we observing out at 1.34? So what's happening is if you can imagine, oh, I might just get kinesthetic here. I've been sitting too long. You have. Oh, yeah, I have. So if you can imagine the poles are up here and we are down here, mid-latitudes, like Vermont, and my computer is the equator. What's happening is there is more of a difference between the poles and the equator. And the atmosphere responds to that by having the jet stream become more loop-de-loop, more wavy. So the amplitude is changing, so it's no longer just being straight across like that or maybe doing a little bit of a dip. What we're seeing is this sort of like all the way down to Texas type stuff. So if you have a jet stream that's doing all of that sort of stuff, every time it moves down like that, all the coal there is going to come down with it. So when you see all those freezes in places like Texas, it's because the jet stream has looped so far south that all that coal there from the pole had a chance to come down with it. And then similarly, if the coal there is coming down like that, on the other side of it, all that warm air is coming. So you know when we have those really, really warm days in the middle of winter and you're like, right, it's because we were probably under this and all that warm air is coming up to us. And then a couple days later, we are back under this and it's bone cold. So now the challenge is figuring out how often it does that, how long is it going to stay like that? And what does that mean for us? Let me go from warm to cool. And we didn't have that 20, 30, 40 years ago. That's the volatility that we're hearing about. Right. So that's yes. There are several ways of talking about it, but that's that sort of... That's what our ski areas are saying. Is there seeing... That they're saying yes, yes. And I can see that because they're probably seeing it from a precipitation perspective. But even if they get the precipitation, if you get a sudden warming, you can have a snowpack that's the height of the state house. But if it warms so much and so quickly that it all melts or it blades, there goes your powder, right? I have a question on the adaptation piece. So that slide that you showed on the New York City where they raised things up about eight inches, why didn't they raise it up 12 inches? I mean, is it really, is it based on economy as well as studies from different groups or how why didn't they? So I don't know the specifics of why they raised it to the level that they did, but I'm going to put a plug in for any one of our agencies or groups that actually does do those type of design studies. Those design studies have to be redone more often than they have in the past. So in the past, they used to be reading every 20, 30, 40 years, bless you. Now, they have to be redone more often than that because the statistics are changing. And so when they did that changing of the grade, they probably used the statistics that they had available, like 2013, 2014, right after Saturday. And so you've heard the term stationarity, non-stationarity. Nobody's come and talked about that. No. Okay. What is it? What is it? So it means... You can't read your report. That's actually not in that No. So stationarity means that the statistics used to be stable and they used to have certain types of patterns, and now those patterns and stability are not there anymore. And so you'll hear hydrology is non-stationarity. And so what that means is all the statistics that we used to design with are no longer applicable. So I have a slide in here that talks about some work that VTRAN has helped to fund because they need to know what the latest stats are for sizing the culverts for doing all of the types of stuff. And those are the types of things that I would love to see more of because it's like this, right? And so you can be using this stuff from 1942 or 1968. You have to be using this stuff that says, okay, what do these new storms look like? And how is that going to change whether you put a culvert in this size or culvert in the size of the room? Because once that culvert goes in, you know, you want it to be there for. We just saw a video of a regional planning commission which replaced a big box culvert in an area that had flooded repeatedly. And in the last rain, it didn't flood. But the culvert was full. There was no additional capacity. But where did the water go? Out of town. Out of town. That's my first question. If the culvert is full, that means the water's not going somewhere. So, yeah. Okay. Down to the farm field outside of that. The one that was designated for it. All right. So, that 8-inch height probably is the height of the step. Okay. Any other questions? So, the next set of pieces, I think, talk about adaptation because I think that's an interest of some folks in here. So, this has way, way, way, way too many words on it. But it's in the introduction part of the entire report. And so, this is of a national perspective, thinking about the ways in which we can sort of mitigate against the risks to climate change, whether it's from a population perspective, whether it's from an economic perspective, infrastructure or whatever. And so, these are some of the bullet points that they're touting. So, I'm going to have you read that when you get the slides. Okay? So, put a note to self. The big awardee one that starts with reducing the risk, go back and delve into. But I do want to point out two chapters in the report itself, apart from chapter 18, which is the northeast. One chapter talks about reducing the risk via mitigation. And the other chapter talks about reducing the risk by adaptation. And they're right next to each other. So, chapters 28 and 29 in the report. And so, from a mitigation perspective, this is chapter 29. Okay? So, chapter 29 is all about mitigation. It's only six pages long because it's a national chapter. But it looks at the ways in which mitigation strategies have been in place and what they look like, some examples of them. So, I like this map because it shows us, you see, there's a lot of activity taking place in the northeast. A lot of strategies that have been developed. Those are all those orange dots that you see on here. Okay? So, can you give us a working distinction between mitigation and adaptation? So, adaptation means that you are building a resilient capacity, that you are making changes in response to what is being observed. So, adaptation would be something like, let me see if I can find a good example. If you know that you're going to be getting warmer temperatures and higher precipitation and a particular crop as well under that combination, you might switch from some of the crops that you're doing to that. That's adaptation. Mitigation is more of trying to reduce the reasons for the change. So, for example, it would be trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That's a classic mitigation type strategy. Or another one might be changing the land use so it goes back to being more carbon neutral, as opposed to carbon exporting or carbon emitting. So, doing an actual change to stop the release of gases or to stop the type of land use that produces deleterious. So, mitigation is to reduce the cause, adaptation is to decrease the effect. Right. Yes, that's a good idea. And so, part of the reason why they are usually sort of touted together is because there's a certain amount of what's called inertia in the system. So, even if we mitigated and didn't release any more greenhouse gases today, the concentrations that we have in the atmosphere already are going to continue that warming. And so, there's still that inertia that's going to occur. And so, that means the adaptation piece comes in due to the fact that stuff is still going to warm because it's already in the atmosphere, in the system. Does that make sense? Okay. Did you mention which chapter goes with adaptation? Adaptation is 28. Yeah. So, 28 and 29 in here. And so, we see a lot of activity in instance, I guess it's the two coastal regions. So, the northeast in here and then California, Oregon and Washington across in here are two places where we've seen a lot of mitigation types of case studies. And I went back last night and I pulled this out because this map here, this chart actually breaks it down by state in looking at the different types of strategies. And so, here's Vermont. Okay. So, we've got about at least 15 different types of strategies that we're doing as a state which is, it's pretty good, right? Okay. We're on par with some of the largest states, you know, California, Maryland, Massachusetts. But we're holding our own pretty well. And then the color codes on there show you the types of strategies. So, whether it's energy efficiency or whether it's renewable resources or our transportation and so forth. Okay. So, when you look at this particular chapter, so the mitigation chapter, chapter 29, and you have a chance to go back and look at that, you can take a look at where a lot of our success stories are. You can see a lot of them in transportation. The purple bar. Okay. So, these reflect successes? These are the case studies, actual activities that are in place on a per state basis. What's interesting to me is what doesn't quite, what this doesn't quite fall in line with is we're being told where Vermont has made the least of the expenses or had the least amount of success is in the transportation sector. It's from a mitigation standpoint. But what's the metric? What was the metric of success? Greenhouse gas emissions. And our ability to kind of reduce that as the amount of greenhouse gas load from our state that we're emitting. And again, I'm not sure if that's an overlay with this. This is the number of strategies that we have that are, you know, whether it's efficiency, which I'm assuming is using less, probably electric energy. Or it could be efficiency, Vermont, and all the other programs that we have in place. Yeah. And then if you have all our questions to this, what I can do is reach out to the chapter authors and ask them what data they used as an input. So, if transportation shows up in a positive light on here, what was the difference in the metric that they used for this vis-a-vis the other states relative to the feedback that you get that says transportation is not? And doesn't this just show the number of activities rather than the effect? Exactly. And that's why I asked about the metrics. Yeah. So, yeah, so have a look at that one for me, because I think it's- Is there a list of the activities? I don't know. I can delve a little bit more and see, because remember, this is a six-page chapter. So, they didn't have the space to get into the level of detail, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a bunch of other appendices that I can ask about, if need be. All right. Okay. So, adaptation is the other big piece in the report itself. So, this is chapter 28. And I really like this diagram here, because a lot of the activities that we now claim and own and are proud of, we're only getting started in 2014. So, if you look at this in a circle here, 2014, see it sort of stops right about here, because it's all of those things that we were just starting, all of those great programs, all of those great activities. And now that we've had an additional four years, now we can talk about them as success stories. So, 2018 actually comes across here, because they're online, they're being implemented, and we can talk about what metrics can we use for their success. Okay. So, moving from the planning, moving from the, oh, let's do this, let's do that. Oh, we are doing it. How well are we doing? Which is this in here. And so, when the next one comes out, the fifth national climate assessment, I'm hoping that this will be up in here, right? So, we're able to actually quantify how well we're doing and what do we need to tweak and so on. All right. Okay. So, chapter 28, the adaptation chapter. And what I did is I just pulled out a couple of their key messages. Remember, we have our own key messages, each chapter has its own that it speaks to, because I was reading through the bill and picked up on some of the things that are of interest in the bill. So, the term risk, the term going back through and looking at risk and quantifying risk in an iterative manner. So, not just once, but how well are we doing and how can that be improved and so on. That's also a key message in the adaptation chapter. So, that need to kind of go back and look at it, whether it's from a state level, an organization level, an individual level is one of those pieces that's important when we do adaptation. So, that's their key message number three. Their key message number four talks about the fact that when you do adaptation and you do it in a proactive way, it actually becomes a benefit because it exceeds the cost of inaction or the cost of other types of strategies. So, it looks at bringing in some of the words that we haven't talked about social justice, equity, who are the populations, who are the peoples that we're serving. It brings all of these pieces into here. Also brings in a piece that we haven't touched on national security. So, how do we make sure that we do it in such a way that we do it from a cost-benefit perspective? Can I actually, can you go back to that that's an important point I want to understand. The assessment says that this is the case or this is something that we're looking at. Say that again. So, I think an important concept that we're trying to work around far that the adaptation initiatives that we may be pursuing that cost money are at the end of the day going to have a positive return on investment. That's what this says. Right. So, and is this say this as this is something we think is in fact the case? We haven't proven that out yet or is this something where this is saying we see evidence that this is in fact the case? So, to answer that we go back to what the whole process is. The whole process is looking backward at what has been done over the last four years. So, to be able to make this kind of assertive statement means that it's been seen. Okay. Yeah. And so, writing it in such a way that it's been seen, we acknowledge it and touting it as let's continue doing this because it's a cost benefit. I understand. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. And so, the last one is and I think this is the challenge to the committee here in thinking about what other types of things can we think about to reduce risk. And I know that's probably one of the challenges that you're struggling with as you write the bill, tweet the bill or however you're approaching it. What are some of those cutting edge things that we need to kind of keep in mind or could keep in mind to help us do this in the most cost effective way possible and reduce the most number of risks possible, right? So, they don't have to mute you. They're exclusive, but what's that line, line between? If you get that one out? No, that's why I'm sitting over here. You're sitting up there. I'm just saying anything you can find and we'll do it I'm not going to say anything. Actually, I'm really helpful. So, I was at the Gund Institute before this, a bigger presentation, right? And one of my colleagues says, I have folds and fold as all of alternative types of strategies that nobody's talking about. So, I said to her, let's talk about those. So, I'd be more than happy to share those. Well, share her name. So, share her name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, all of these different things that, you know, she's aware of from an engineering perspective, from a design perspective that I may not because among the atmospheric science side, that would be of interest to I know folks in the room, perhaps. So, let me know. And I'd be more than happy to, you know, share names. Thank you. Okay. All right. So, we're sort of heading into the homestretch here and the sort of so what who cares, which is what I always do in my class, you know, so sort of all of these tanks law and all this something that's like freaking on and it's like, why are we doing this here? Here's the bottom line. So, we're looking at this because we have different choices to make either from a built perspective or working directly in the environment. So, we're looking at those. We're looking at all of the things that are changing. Remember, I said to you, the statistics are changing. So, you know, the one in 100 year event is what used to be a one in 60 year event, right? And so, how are those numbers changing and why do we need to look at it? And so, a couple of options on here, I'm going to just look at for a sec. So, this might surprise you, right? The National Center for Environmental Information What's what I'm going to call the billion dollar disaster events every year. Have you seen that? You saw this yesterday? Yeah. Tell me from whom. The insurance folks. Yes. Oh, they must have gotten it right. Because I showed it to Ami Khan, some of the other insurers. I think it's for you. Okay. So, this is the first slide. It was like, we saw this one. That's a good thing. All right. So, you know what's going on in this slide, right? Yeah. Well, that should be able to give you a quiz. No, if you saw it already, I don't need to talk about it though. I don't think there's had the gray line with the buffer around it or the light. The idea was harder to see. So, they failed 12.11. All right. So, what I like to show this apart from the fact that these billion dollar events are increasing, it's which ones? And that's the shaded bars that you're looking at. You know how we spend a lot of our focus sometimes on things like tropical cyclones and floods and stuff like that? Well, those are not the ones that actually cost the most. The ones that cost the most are your severe storms. Because if you think about them, it's the amount of water that comes and it could be over a relatively large area, affecting a relatively large number of people that is different from a more maybe an isolated tornado or more isolated flood event. And so, again, I show this to do the, let's keep everything in mind and not only put our resources in the flooding bucket or the drug bucket or the whatever bucket. Let's make sure that we're looking at all the buckets. And so, no apologies for this because I am a jargon fan, so I have to get at least another map in here. What are some of these things that are critically important to us? So we've got severe storms, we've got floods, every once in a while we have hurricanes and tropical systems, snow, definitely. Fire is not something that usually affects us because we don't tend to dry out as much as some of the other regions. And so fires are less of a concern here. It's not that they're not a concern, but they're less of a concern. Similarly with tornadoes, why? Because our topographies like this on tornadoes need flat land. So if I were in southern Quebec, I would be talking tornadoes because they've got a lot of flat land just across the border. So ice storms and freezes. So again, there's a geographic perspective in terms of the types of things that we need to think about and make sure that we are looking at and preparing for. So when you say extreme weather, it's not only rainfall, it's some of these other things too. All right, so this notion of extremes, a notion of what it would mean for us, whether we're talking about more hot days, more record hot days, whether we're talking about heavy precipitation, more of it over a longer period of time, those are some of the things that we are looking at with looking at this notion of extreme events. And this is my touting. So this is NOAA Atlas 14. And I'll let your eyes get a little bit of a look to this. The black lines and the state outlines are really good. The shading in here has to do with how much rainfall is falling in one day for the one in a hundred year event. So the hundred year event and how much rain would fall in one day, 24 hours. All right, so the color scheme goes from four inches, which is pretty much anyway, all the way up to you see places that have 10 plus inches, 11 plus inches, all in one day. Okay, so the grading goes from browns into yellows into greens and blues. So in other words, there's heavy and heavier stuff south of us, you see that? Okay, all right. Now, why am I showing you this? I'm showing you this because this came out four years ago and was designed to replace the stuff that we had been using since 1960s. So all of the stuff that was being designed was using values that were from the 1960s, which was older in and of itself. And here's the kicker. The stuff from the 1960s, because we didn't have the technology at the time, all they were able to do was to draw these yellow lines on a map. Do you see how white-based these are? So you're guessing in between those. So think about it, you try to design something for Springfield or Manchester or Bennington and your eyeballing between this line and that line, okay? And now, because we're doing this in more of a geospatial environment, now because we're using the statistics from the last 30, 40, 50 years, now we can get down to this small, almost micro level and do better designs than we were able to do with using just those three yellow lines on there. So to the extent possible, keeping up with how we are able to bring the evolving precipitation, evolving flooding into the data that our state agencies use will help us to make better decisions. And so just to bring all this to a close, because I've talked for long enough, my favorite word in all of this is systems. So whether we're talking about weather systems, whether we're talking about climate as a system, whether we're talking about climate change and all that, changes of the system, we can do this without looking at our topography and our geography and where we are because of our landscape. And if I had to choose one way of doing this, I would do a multi hazard approach because that way I don't miss anything. And then finally, thinking about my client's comment about land bases and all the things that we can do from a land perspective, looking back at changes in zoning conditions, changes in building resiliency at the community level, those are some of the pieces that I'd love to see. So here's my information, if you need anything, here's the National Climate Assessment website one more time. And please feel free to shoot me a line, ask me for information, data, follow up questions, names, anything else that you can think of. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We can't get your presentation. You'll have that, Daniel. I'll send you the PDF. And if there are any slides that I'm still working on, like for my own research, I'll just pull those out. Okay. But for the others, I'll just, yeah. Yeah, that'd be helpful. Great. Great. Thank you very much. Not a problem. Okay, so do you ask all your clients? If you got time. Oh, sure. Shoot. Did you want to go back since you had five? That's a good idea. I would just like to ask, has there been any consideration of studies or thoughts on other extreme events that would actually cool the climate, whether it's volcanoes, you know, any of that sort of thing that could reverse the condition that we're going down now? I know that scientists at NASA, the ones who are sociologists training in earth systems, do look at those. And they do use the events that we've seen in the last 20, 30, 40 X number of years to actually incorporate that into the models that they run. So that if you try and replicate the amount of cooling that we've seen when something like a pinnitubal, for example, blows, what does that mean? And what does it do in terms of the global temperature problems? And so what you see is a cooling for a few years after. And then because, again, the inertia in the system, we continue to work. Yeah. And I guess there are other scientists who look at the effect that maybe something on the order of asteroid striking the earth, what impact that would have, because that's also been observed in the past. And again, what can we learn and how can we project that forward to see what it might look like? Thank you. All right. So the first one is, do you have a rough idea of how much energy has to be added to the earth system to raise that one degree Celsius? No, I do not. But I do know that the IPCC was looking at the raising it by two degrees. And what would it take to not raise it by two degrees and move right past that? Okay. I'm thinking about the the jewels of energy that are now. It's probably in the IPCC report that talked about two degrees Celsius. If you Google IPCC 2019, two degrees Celsius, I'm sure that's probably in the first chapter. Okay. Yeah. So going back to that first video that you showed the changes in water patterns. I know that there is data. Right now we're at about 415 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere of CO2, cobalt greenhouse gases. And I know that they've been tracking that, whether it's by ice cores or whether it's by actual measurements over time. And it'll be really interesting to see the graph that we said that really started changing radically in about 1980s. And what the parts per million were up to that point. And then how the changes went with the accelerated increase in the CO2 concentrations. Would somebody send me a quick email about that? Just call the code? Yeah. Yeah. And I'll pull it up. Oh, yeah. Because it's probably on there. Yeah. Okay. Now we're on to that question. That's a annealing curve, right? Keeling. K-E-E-L-I-N-G. Yeah. You know, when I see that, I mean, it's over 300,000 years. And you got that really sharp spike right at the end. And it's kind of hard to break it down to, you know, 10 years. Right. Yeah. So if that side doesn't have it, how does it break it apart? And does it do like an interactive by decade? It goes back to different time periods, 8000 years decade. And does it allow you to sort of stretch decades? Yes. I'll send it to you right now. Right. And you're going to put your mic on it too. All right. Yeah. If you send it to me, I'll make sure he gets it. Next. With the added heat energy in the system, we get a lot more storms. Do storms actually dissipate energy to outside the system? Or does it just move the energy around within the system? Like, we've got a major hurricane. Does that actually end up calming the system for a moment? Or does it still contain all that energy? Okay. So if you're talking about something like a tropical cycle, which is a heat engine, what happens is it needs to be over warm water, because that's where the energy for the system is moving. And so one of the graphs that I usually show when I'm talking about something like Irino Sandy is before and after, and you see like a drop in the ocean temperatures of at least 5, 10, 15 degrees as it passes over, because all of that energy has been gone from later the energy into the system itself and then taken and dissipated somewhere else. And so you're left with a cold surface of the ocean because it's lost all of that energy. So to answer your system, it's a transfer of energy from one place to the next as that system moves over. From the ocean to the atmosphere? Correct. And then into it. And then in the atmosphere, then it's going to be released somewhere else? Yeah. So operation causes cool wind? Exactly. Correct. Where can people, like if somebody is building a house or planning a town or whatever, where can they get some like local information, small scale about what the new 100 or 500 year events might be for rain, for wind, for drought, etc. so that they can you know build their house 8 inches higher or whatever to be that much safer. So the New Atlas 14 is one place and then there's another website called prezip.net that also gets you down to sort of like a zip code level. Prezip.net comes out of Cornell. What's special about Southern New York and Central New Hampshire that their expected rainfall was like twice the rest of the region? You're talking more than they know of. So remember these are not projections but actual observations and so what they did is to create this they literally went through and got every single record at every time scale that they could get. So five minutes, hourly, daily, monthly and put it all together to create this. And so for it to have that bullseye, we don't want these bullseyes in here. That means that that was observed at some point in time in in the past record. And so this is not a projection for the future. This this is what's been observed in the last like 30, 40 years that they've redone the statistics for. Right. But like for New Hampshire I know that's roughly where Mount Washington is. Oh so you know something about the eight inches out here? Well yeah. This one up here? Both of them because there's such a disparity between those two spots and the rest of New York and New England. Right. So you hit the bullseye with Mount Washington for sure. But for that eight plus inches, 12 plus inches, if there's not an orographic feature similar to Mount Washington, then it's a system that was observed that might have stalled in place and produced that much rainfall. That's the Catskills, not this coastal weather moving in. That's the fresh mountains they hit. Exactly like Jay Peak. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. He gave us some reading for the weekend. Oh well. You're lucky I didn't say there's a quiz on Monday. There it is. There we go. Is Monday a holiday? It always is in the latter stage. Oh okay. We'll let you quiz this first thing or two. There we go. Well thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. I thought this has been moderately helpful. It's very interesting. And you know where to find me. If anything comes up as soon as I leave, like literally before I get to the car. Actually I have one administrative question. I didn't know we had a state climatologist. I was going to say that. Two weeks ago. What is your role as, you know, playing a state function? Is the state climatologist kind of in the agency of natural resources or older? What's the function? Okay. So the state climatologist I've been a state climatologist for 23 years. Really? No kidding. And she's six years old. Oh dear. It's part of my faculty position in the Darryl County Department at UBM. I would love to have more of a state connection. Just leaving out where that is. I do not have an office in Montpelius. Most people say do you have an office in Montpelius? No. It's okay. But I really would all kidding us. I'd love to have more. I mean I work really closely with colleagues at Beachlands and our Department of Health. And I did have a postdoc that did work directly with the health and A&R folks to help change some of the values that we have as thresholds for warnings. I would love to see more of that continue because I know we have so many unanswered questions and having you know a person sort of dedicated to just working on on state questions would be awesome because it would help move a lot of things that we would love to see move forward. So yeah. So that's the that's a short answer. Yeah that's helpful. Yes and most gracious of you. Thank you very much.