 Welcome everybody. It's 501 and some more people may join us, but just to be respectful of your time, let's get started and they can hopefully catch up if people log in later. I want to say first of all, thank you so much to Paul of my ASCII Dr Paul my ASCII who's joining us tonight and also welcome to all of you for joining us as we celebrate first week. My name is Rachel Brady and I'll be your facilitator for the evening. Let's see. Oops. There we go. We ask you that you please keep your microphone on mute throughout the presentation to help with background noise. You'll see a microphone symbol located in the lower left of your screen as shown here on the slide. If your microphone symbol is crossed through then you're muted. And that's great for during the presentation. Next to that you'll see a video camera symbol. You're welcome to stay on or be off video at your choosing throughout the presentation. This webinar is being recorded. So if you wish to not be seen, feel free to turn your video off. Lastly, we invite you to put any questions in the chat. I'll be monitoring the chat and we'll have some time at the end of the presentation for Q&A. Before we begin, we would like to take a moment to acknowledge the land beneath our feet. Here in Maine we live in occupied Wabanaki territory, and the Wabanaki people lived on this land and stewarded it for thousands of years. In these times, particularly indigenous communities are being hit hard by the pandemic and in most cases have fewer resources and less, less support. So please consider making a donation to support your local Native American tribe. At this point I'm going to stop my screen share and introduce Dr. Paul Andrew Mayesky. Dr. Mayesky is an internationally acclaimed glaciologist, climate scientist, polar explorer, and director and professor in the Multidisciplinary Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. Paul was born in Scotland where he was introduced to hiking very early in life, and he has thus far led more than 60 expeditions to the remotest polar and high elevation reaches of the planet. He has received many prestigious awards for his and his team's contributions to science, including the discovery of abrupt climate change driven by atmospheric circulation, human impacts on the chemistry of the atmosphere, impacts of climate change on humans and the ecosystem, and for achievements in exploration into uncharted regions of Antarctica for thousands of kilometers of polar traversing and for numerous first ascents of mountains all to gain scientific knowledge. Paul is the first person to develop and lead prominent multidisciplinary climate research programs at the three poles, the Arctic, which consists of 25 institutions, Antarctic, which is 21 countries, and the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, which is 34 international researchers. He has had approximately, he has had approximately 500 scientific publications and two popular books, The Ice Chronicles and Journey into Climate, and he has appeared hundreds of times in media, such as the New York Times, the LA Times, on NOVA and PR, the BBC, CBS 60 Minutes, and the Emmy Award winning Years of Living Dangerously. Thank you so much for joining us during Earth Week, Dr. Paul Mayesky. Thank you so much, Rachel, and thank you to the Sierra Club for this invitation. And I look forward to spending some time with everybody over the next roughly hour, hour and a half, and also happy birthday, 51st birthday to Earth Day. Today I'm going to be talking about quite a few things, and ideally tying them all together. I'm going to start with talking about climate change in various parts of the world very briefly. Press the right button. And then I'll talk about Maine in the context of what we've discovered in other parts of the world. And I'll also talk about what's happening in Maine today. And I'll also introduce you to the first abrupt climate change event of the modern era, which has quite an important impact on this. So the first question is, how do we figure out what's going on? There's the earth in the middle today. We all know what it looks like. We know that in the past it's been colder in the very distant past, it was warmer. And how do we understand all of the things that have actually been changing around the planet? In order to do that we need some perspective. From the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, which is by the way, one of the oldest climate research units in the world, we're 50 years old next year, we use several different techniques to gain perspective. The first is to look at what's going on in modern day climate. That's really the last 100 years of instrumental record. And we also look at the last 30 to 40 years of remotely sensed information. To do this and package this together, we've developed, or my colleague Sean Burkle has developed software called Climate Reanlizer, which you are all welcome to use. We get about 3,000 hits a day. It allows you to take a look at today's weather and also go back for time, look at a lot of the data. So you can see the graphics are quite pretty. In order to understand more about the climate system, we can't assume that everything that's happened to climate has happened within the last 100 years of instrumental record. So we go into the past. It provides analog, reporter, warmer times and also helps us to understand what the full dynamic range of the climate system is. And for example, how fast it can change. And both using both the present and the past, our intent obviously is to understand what's going to happen in the future much better. And we do this by monitoring what's going on today. In the very broad sense of science, not just our team. And we also look at climate models and we'll look at all of these. I'm going to focus on one mechanism that we use in the beginning at least for understanding past climate and that's a recovery of ice cores. That's what my teams and I have been doing all over these red dots for a little bit more than four decades. And we've used ice cores in order to understand the physical, chemical, biological and social aspects of climate change. Climate change is a rapidly emerging field. When you think about it, it actually touches so many aspects of our lives. And one of the big points for this presentation will be to show you, in fact, how critical it is for us to not only deal with climate change but to understand what's going to happen in the future. Well, I'll put the pointer on the screen here. Ideally, you can all see it. We recover ice cores from ice sheets like the Antarctic, which is on average about 10,000 feet in thickness, also places in Greenland. We also recover ice cores, again, this little red box, from high mountain regions. And we do this because it allows us to understand past rates of precipitation, temperature. We can look at chemistry that comes out of the ocean to tell what's going on in the ocean. We can determine how much agriculture occurred in the past, what the productivity was like in the ocean on land. We can see dusts coming off deserts. We can track volcanoes. We can look at industrial activity on and on and on. So it gives us a very robust record. And this record has gone back in our work, actually more than a million years, but it's gone back continuously 110,000 years, year by year. And in fact, we've developed new technology now that will actually allows us to look literally at storm scale events going back many hundreds of years. So all of that chemistry that I just showed you is constantly moving around the planet. So this is actual imagery from NASA. It's a series you can see in there. The clock is ticking and it shows you what's happening to the atmosphere. Let me just point out a couple of things that all of the colors on here will put on artificially by NASA, but they do a beautiful job of explaining how the atmosphere is is dynamic and impact so many areas. The area here is coming off North Africa and the Sahara and these are Saharan dusts that are making their way all literally into Southeast United States into the Amazon. They contain a lot of iron they go into the ocean which helps fertilize the ocean and the Amazon. If we took a take a look at this bluish area. These are low pressure systems that surround the Antarctic and they're blue because they're supposed to represent sea salt. We took take a look at the green areas. These are areas of biomass burning and the white areas that we're seeing in the northern hemisphere are intended to show pollutants coming off, not only North America Europe but obviously off Asia to note that obviously, based on this is a lot less pollution obviously in the southern hemisphere. So I'll talk very briefly about five areas. And that we've been working on on a global scale since 2018. And just to give you a flavor of why we're working in other places. The first is the Andes we've been working in the Andes for quite a few years, but also since 2018 and one of the big issues in the Andes of course is the recession of glaciers with climate change and warming greenhouse gas warming. And these glaciers are critically important in the Andes because they provide hydroelectric power for agriculture. Whole variety of things that in for example this particular case which is Peru and is relatively arid is extremely critical to the sustainability of not only the people but also the ecosystems in this area. And the quick answer to this is that the glaciers and the Andes are retreating dramatically there are literally places where you would have gone 20 years ago and you would have seen a glacier and the glaciers now gone. We've been working on pandemics of the past. This, this comes primarily from a regional on the Swiss Italian border, right in here it's called Colnifetti we drilled an ice core here, and we learned some interesting things about pandemics. When we develop a climate record, we were able to tell that the World War One swine flu, which killed 50 million people impacted 500 million people actually came at a relatively unique time in the climate history, it was relatively wet and cold time. It also happened during World War One. So for the people who were impacted in particular Europe and Asia have a large number of people in Europe and Asia died. Not only were they stressed by World War One but they were stressed by the pandemic in this particularly wet and cold time, which of course we know now in cobit time that it's typically in the winter in the damp winters that we are most affected. And then we learned, going back in time to the 1340s and 50s was the black death. And as it turns out, if you take a look at the lead record, our record goes back 2000 years. You see variability and lead the highest levels of lead and most recent time. Around the period of not around exactly during the black death the levels of lead in the atmosphere recorded in our ice core literally went down to zero, which means that that's probably the natural level and that everything else that's higher than that is caused by something not natural obviously humans. This is mining of lead and also smelting of metals using lead. This tells us that the health standards that we have for lead, which are currently based on levels just prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1850 are probably not telling us really what the natural levels of lead are in the atmosphere they should be pretty close to zero. So this, this actually was an important finding because lead is related to heart disease and it's also related to Alzheimer's and dementia. We've been working in the Southern Ocean, in many ways and all over Antarctica most recently since 2018 we've been sailing in the Southern Ocean to access islands, particularly these islands and in the South Atlantic, and these are of interest to us because the glaciers on these islands and melting as they melt they're pushing debris and pollutants and pollutants and also iron into the ocean, and we want to find out how the organisms that live in the coastal sites on these islands and how the ocean might actually change in productivity as a consequence of this of the influx of all of this chemistry coming out of glaciers that have been accumulating this chemistry since the Industrial Revolution. In addition, uranium pops up a couple of times today turns out that in Australia, it's the largest open pet my uranium mine in the world, and we discovered on the Antarctic Peninsula on the other side of the southern hemisphere that uranium from that and made its way to the Antarctic Peninsula in the last 35 years increased by 100 times the level of uranium in the atmosphere. We've also been working in the Andes for many years, interested, again in pollution and also water resources the Andes are the largest source of ice in the world outside of the polar regions there are about 70,000 different glaciers, and we focused, most recently as 2019 on Mount Everest I was invited by National Geographic and Rolex to be the leader of the Mount Everest expedition. And we did several things our team drill the highest ice core ever collected in the world 26,000 feet and implanted the two highest automatic weather stations in the world, 27 and a half thousand feet and a little bit a little bit below that. And why did we do that, because we know very little about the climate history of the, the roof of the world, where in fact, the top of the earth comes in contact with the highest, with the second lot highest level of the atmosphere, the stratosphere we live in the troposphere just below that. And in order for climate models to do a better prediction to be able to predict better for the future, we need to know more about the how what the behavior of this high level of the atmosphere has been doing for the last few decades. We can tell this from the ice core and from these automatic weather stations we also implanted the weather station at 27 and a half thousand feet in order to help climbers have a better understanding of the best days for trying a sense on Everest. We've also been working in the Arctic has obviously because the Arctic is warming and I'll have a lot more to say about that very, very briefly but let me just come back to uranium for one second. For those of you who've been following the news what's going on in elections in Greenland, which you may or may not have followed. It's been a big debate for the last 20 years about whether or not there should be mining in the coastal sections of Greenland the west coast. Right now the largest rare earth metal deposits in the world are in China, and China absolutely dominates rare earth metals, which we need for cell phones just fighters, everything that is in our new modern technology, but the second largest deposit of rare earth metals is believed to be in South Greenland or on the west coast of Greenland I should say, and it's often associated with uranium and turns out that one of the south Greenland sites as being projected for open pit mining of uranium and rare earth metals happens to be very close to a region of that is culturally very significant to the Norse who moved there since about the year 1000 and obviously to the local people the Inuits because they raise sheep, and they have farms at right in the middle of a world heritage site there would very well be an open pit uranium mine, and in the election that occurred last week the people of Greenland 56,000 of them decided to vote for a political party that would be less likely to have open pit mining for uranium in this area which is very important obviously, not only to them, but everybody in Greenland including Europe based on what we know from the Southern Ocean. So let me using using the Arctic as a as a sort of a platform for much of, for at least a portion I should say of the rest of the presentation, like to talk about the Arctic main first broad change event, look at the red arrows down here can see that mean is actually not that terribly far away from Greenland. In fact, South Greenland is a lot closer to Maine than the California is and we know that there are tremendous changes going on Greenland. But back in the 1980s and 1990s when we were mostly visiting Greenland to understand about the climate of Greenland. We undertook a program called the Greenland I sheet project to which I have the honor of leading for quite a few years. And we recovered from the center of Greenland where this red star is by drilling 10,000 feet down right to the bedrock in Greenland. We recovered a year by year record that goes back 110,000 years that has never been done since. It's the longest such record that's available in the Northern Hemisphere, and we did it to be able to understand natural climate variability by having a very detailed year by year record. And we also did it because we wanted to understand how different modern climate is since humans have begun to emit a variety of things versus natural climate. And we discovered many, many interesting things, but the thing that's probably most notable is the following. If you take a look at this sort of cartoon like graph going from zero, which is today back 110,000 years if you take a look at the top of this graph. This is a representation of how fast changed the global temperature changes this is relative. Here we are today it's zero change relative to the past. When it was maybe minus eight degrees centigrade globally cooler. This is when sitting over main we had about 1500 feet of ice as part of a large ice sheet that covers much of North America. An important message prior to the discovery that we made was that the climate system takes thousands of years to go through changes. Your eye has no doubt gone to the second and the third graph below, and you can see that it doesn't look like the one above. And in fact what this represents is the fact that there were massive shifts in storm patterns, precipitation temperature, and most importantly, these occurred in less than one to five years, which means that the climate, not only does not operate slowly, but it can operate as fast as a political cycle if not faster than a political cycle. And once it goes into one of these abrupt climate changes, it can be sustained for decades if not hundreds of years. And of course the question is these happen in the past under natural conditions, would it be possible in this relatively quiet, roughly last 11,000 years that we have been living in, would it be possible for this to happen now. We'll stay in the past for a little bit here. Now we have a record that goes from 10,000 years ago on the left to today, zero. And let's take a look at a record which tells us how much sea ice there was in the North Atlantic. This comes from that ice core. And we see that there was a very prominent period of not very much sea ice in the North Atlantic 4200 years ago. This led to the collapse of the Mesopotamian civilization. This is the Mesopotamia is in modern day Syria, Iraq, and Iran. So obviously has a lot to do with what we all think about and have been thinking about for the last couple of decades. And it turns out that this particular civilization in those areas was in a region of that, just prior to that that was not so dry. And all of a sudden, in a matter of just a few years the winds shifted that brought precipitation in, and the Mesopotamian Empire collapsed. Many people, including myself, believe that a large part of the underpinning for the Arab spring, and therefore all of the other things that happened after the Arab spring was because of a shift into drier conditions in the Middle East today, a time when there is not so much sea ice in the North Atlantic. Take a look at the time period 1000 years ago. This was a time again when there wasn't that much sea ice in the North Atlantic relatively, and that's when Eric the red goes from Iceland to Greenland sets up colonies this is this is an old structure that obviously built out in South West Greenland where we've been working most recently. And this was a cathedral, the North's moved into this area in 1000 it was green. There wasn't that much sea ice, they could annually get really supplies from your never adopted in you with system of sustainability by hunting in the ocean, I should say by fishing in the ocean. When the dramatic change occurred in AD 1400 suddenly in less than five years, see I suddenly locked in into the North Atlantic. The North could no longer get resupplies from Europe, or from Iceland, basically the people who had set up this colony and 1000 died. And the very same thing happened in terms of drought in 900 AD the same as in the Mesopotamian Empire this is in Central America. So these are brought climate change events fast, and they have a very big effect. Sometimes it's precipitation in these two cases, and sometimes it's temperature with sea ice. It wasn't we discovered this in 1992, it wasn't until 2004 that it made it into Hollywood, and actually Hollywood should be complimented because they were the first to actually recognize how serious that this could be. For those of you remember the day after tomorrow, the big question at the time was when will it happen and where will you be on the day after tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and this particular case was a matter of days during which obviously New York City gets covered by a tremendous mass of ice. Well, Hollywood got it right in terms of the speed, but not actually what happened. Obviously, we're experiencing much more warming now. But this whole idea of the day after tomorrow was actually based on the expedition that we had for several years recovering an ice core from Greenland. So, why is CI so important? Why are glaciers so important? You watching this image, you'll see flashing back and forth, changes in the white surfaces. The Greenland ice sheet stays pretty white. Obviously, when fresh snow falls there, it's even wider, massive Antarctica, but then of course there's sea ice surrounding both Antarctica and much the Arctic. This migration on a seasonal basis of sea ice and snow cover is arguably the most remarkable, if not the biggest seasonal event that occurs on the planet. So why is it important? It's important because it changes the surface of the earth over about 30% of it from white to dark. And that's important because when you have white surfaces that reflects incoming radiation, keeping the surface cool, and when you have a dark surface, either the land or the ocean, or if in particular you have sea ice, which is melted away and sea ice is not that thick. It's only three to 10 feet thick in general. And once you melt that away, you've taken away the cap that holds the heat from escaping to the atmosphere from the ocean because you have an ice cap, but also at the same time it absorbs a lot of heat because it's a dark surface. So this is called more amplification, the fact you get river white surface and substitute it for a dark surface, and in particular in the Arctic Ocean, you get literally for every one degree of warming that you get from greenhouse gases, you get at least two, if not three degrees centigrade of warming in the process. So now, what part of the world is this most important in? It's important in any place that there's sea ice, but in the case of the Antarctic we have a much more stable situation. We have a continent that's one and a half times the size of the United States, and it is surrounded by massive amount of sea ice in the winter. But because the ice on average is 10,000 feet thick here, it maintains to some degree its own climate. They're certainly melting going on along the edges. But in our case, the Arctic, which we're most interested in right now is a place in which sea ice, not that thick is centered right over the polar regions. So you can change this surface from light colored to grayish to open ocean, much more easily, you don't have to remove as much ice. So what's happened today. Today, of course, we've experienced a significant increase in greenhouse gases. And this is an ice core record that we did not collect but collected by colleagues. It goes back 850,000 years. And the red line is showing you the variability and the amount of CO2 over the last 850,000 years. And all of a sudden you get into the industrial era and we begin to see it rise. We went over 400 in about 2018. It is not impossible that we will double more than double what we have today by 2100. And the big deal here is that as of today, CO2 levels are one and a half times higher than they have ever been in the last 850,000 years. And perhaps, certainly as importantly, the level of greenhouse or I should say the rate of greenhouse gas rise is 100 times faster than it has been in the last 850,000 years. Just think about that. That's very fast dramatic change. And that change has been most effective in literally the last few decades. So here's a plot of world temperature. This takes into account the ocean and the land going from 1948 to today. All relative to the time period 1979 to 2000, which is this line across here, and it shows you times when it's been above and when it's been below this level and we can see that as of the 80s, we begin to see almost the first hints of really dramatic warming. It's only 0.2 degrees centigrade, but this becomes very important if you happen to be very close to a white surface. And then of course it's risen far more dramatically. So since about 1950, we've experienced about one degree centigrade rise in temperature, which is actually quite fast. So the next big question is, you know, this is this is a display of what's going on all over the world. None of us live in the average global temperature we all live in different parts of the planet. We're in heat coming into the polar into the polar regions and into the tropical regions. So what we're going to do now is we'll take a look at the most recent time period 2005 to the present and compare it to the earlier period 1979 to 2004, but not just in a time series all over the world. This is the evolution of war for recent era compared to the previous whatever 25 years or so. So it's pretty clear. Red is warm blue is cold. Let's just look at the cold first parts of the Southern Ocean have actually been cooling a little bit. How is that possible greenhouse gas warming without going into a lot of detail and I can expand upon this later. We see, it turns out that the winds have actually been speeding up around Antarctica because of greenhouse gas warming and other things, and they drag surface water, which is relatively a little bit warmer away and in the process to bring up from slightly deeper areas cold water. So we have a cold water anomaly surrounding Antarctica because of greenhouse gas warming, but we're, let's put our attention towards the Arctic and see that the Arctic parts of the Arctic have been warming quite a bit other parts of the Arctic have warmed dramatically faster. And what's going on in the Arctic in the last 20 years is really the poster child for the entire planet. And it's particularly interesting because of course, the people in the Arctic and the ecosystem of the Arctic are literally the last ones in in the population of the world that that produce this it's the rest of us that produce the warming that has impacted and created all of these changes and I won't go through these these are all whole lecture by themselves but it's affected sea ice it's affected indigenous people ecosystems fishing it just goes on and on and on. And it's a very important thing for us to pay attention to, because it's a precursor of the sort of things that we will experience as the decades roll on. In addition, there is literally a new ocean appearing an Arctic Ocean, this is sea ice covering the Arctic in 1980, and here's the same month and day in 2016. And obviously as we progress farther and farther towards 2100, we will see sea ice extent in the summer and fall getting less and less. And here there probably still be sea ice here but it'll be much less than now so in effect, we are exposing a new ocean and a lot faster than we thought, because in early 2000 when people started to project that this might happen. The expectation is what happened in 2040. And then by about 2010 it was expected this would happen in 2025 and then around 2014 or 2012 they thought it would happen in 2015 and basically it had literally already happened. So let's take a look in a little bit more detail. Let's look at the fastest period of change 2007 to 2012 that and in particular the Russian Eastern Arctic, and it turns out that in this area which warmed up the fastest, the annual increase in temperature, between what I should say the mean annual rise in temperature was about eight degrees Fahrenheit, just imagine what an eight degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature would do to a place like Maine. In the Arctic, you can't quite tell it from this, but you have to take my word for it. This is the equivalent of doubling the length of the summer. So that's probably the best analogy. Imagine Maine with the summer twice as long as it is today. It's already increased by about one week in the last few years. And what's even more dramatic, and this has a lot to do with the climate change is that this magnitude increased eight degrees Fahrenheit in five years. And not only the magnitude, well, the magnitude and the speed sorry, is equivalent to the abrupt climate change that occurred 11 and a half thousand years ago, which is the transition between the last vestiges of the ice age and modern day climate. So what we experienced 2007 to 2012, and which is sustained now is as massive a change, not quite as large an area, but as massive a change as occurred 11 and a half thousand years ago. So what does this mean what happens when you begin to warm the Arctic. This red line that you see moving along here is the jet stream. It's the edge of what's also called the polar vortex, and it separates cold air in the Arctic from warm air in the middle of the latitudes, and the more the stronger these winds are the better job they do of separating the cold from the warm air. As the Arctic begins to warm the temperature gradient between the Arctic and the mid latitudes begins to flatten, and that means that these winds begin to be much more irregular, much more in bed, you can see how in bed they are here. And this allows cold air to be pushed much farther south warm air to be pushed much farther north. Remember again that as air masses air masses are constantly moving around the planet. And as they do this they are transporting heat and wherever cold and warm come together there's an instability, they're transporting moisture. Therefore you should expect flooding and droughts, depending on where these tongues of war of air go, and you also have transported pollutants. So a lot of remarkable things have happened and we know about some of them in Maine but let's look at some really particularly dramatic ones. This is an event that first started in the winter of 2014 15 and has been repeated more regularly since then. This is the middle of winter, absolute darkness and the Arctic, you can see the shape of the jet stream that red arrow shows you that warm air can actually make its way right into the center of the Arctic. We've gone into a lot of detail if you look at the temperature plot here, the temperature in the Arctic in the middle of winter in the middle of darkness for not a long time a day or two, several times was above freezing. This is directly from Santa Claus so we know it's true. Another thing that's happened, of course, in the western, in western North America we've experienced tremendous wildfires. What are these wildfires have to do with the jet stream which of course is related, its behavior is related to the Arctic. As the jet stream begins to become more and more irregular, moisture that might be directly brought in for example to California where wildfires were particularly bad is forced northward as it's forced northward over the North American west. So the moisture is dropped begins to dry, because the jet stream pattern is now becoming irregular the winds increase. So you have the perfect situation. You have less moisture coming into California which makes the forest dry. You have high winds and as a consequence more and more fires which are expected with these instabilities that will occur over coming decades unfortunately in California and many other places. And let's take a look at the cold snap that we had this past February. Using climate reanalyzer. We see that that cold snap that we experienced, which was about 18 degrees centigrade colder than the 1979 to 2000 average was actually quite anomalous in the northern hemisphere parts of North America, and even parts of the Arctic were 20 degrees centigrade warmer than they would normally be. So how can you have cold, warm, cold, warm, it's all because of the shape of the jet stream and the more irregular the jet stream, the more unstable the conditions will be. There's another wildcard that appears in the Arctic to and as the Arctic glaciers are melting as CIS is melting. There is more and more permafrost frozen ground exposed half of the Arctic is in fact frozen ground. And what happens is, all of the organic material that's been trapped in there for a long time for thousands and tens of thousands of years begins to be released, and this pit with the fire and nobody threw a match. But nobody actually threw any kind of fuel in there this was simply methane that was trapped under the snow and ice, and they did throw a match in methane is 30 to 50 times more effective in trapping heat than co2. So this is a real wildcard is more and more methane gets released, we might expect to see faster and faster changes. And in fact, this is a projection of climate model projection, not done by us but done by climate modelers that suggests what the world with the Arctic might look like by 2090 to 2100 a five to six degree centigrade increase. Remember that we've already experienced in the Eastern Arctic, about four or five degrees centigrade increase, it may not as long as 2090 to 2100. If in fact, the methane gets released because these models are all projected, primarily on the basis of co2 emissions and some steady change in methane, not a sudden new methane source. So let's jump to something slightly different other work we've done in in Greenland. If you remember in the 1980s, the big question was not greenhouse gas warming wasn't greenhouse gases at all. It was acid rain nitrogen and sulfur getting into the atmosphere. It was the same debate, was it because of us was that part of natural variability. So we were supported by the Environmental Protection Agency to go to Greenland, drill back in time and see whether or not we could tell whether or whether these acid rain levels were directly related to emissions from North America. And remember that the missions have been tracked, we knew what they were we just didn't know what they were like in the past, prior to the industrial revolution. We found out that yeah the levels of nitrogen and sulfur in the atmosphere had increased quite dramatically but as if not more importantly we found out that clean air legislation works. We found out as a rate from uranium and now from acid rain and many other things that have trapped in glaciers that in the last 150 years this bar on the right, compared to the previous 5000 years, the levels of all of these things have accelerated dramatically. These are the undeniable human impacts even if people don't believe in warming. There is no way of escaping the fact that we have changed the air quality that we live in, and I've only plotted it back to 5000 years because otherwise you'd never see the last 100 or so years. So as far as to say that the air, the chemistry, the air that we experienced today is absolutely unparalleled in Earth history, obviously because of everything from engineered chemicals to radioactivity, but even in many cases the levels of toxic substances such as greenhouse gas, so we live in a very unique time. As a consequence of climate change and greenhouse gas increase and then all of the things that go along with greenhouse gases. We've created, and this is the most depressing part of the talk, it gets a little bit better as it goes on and at the end it gets much more hopeful so don't lose faith. These toxic substances impact our respiratory health, neurological cancer, they affect ocean acidification, a variety of things, vector-borne diseases. Why is this important? It turns out that one in 10 deaths worldwide are related to bad air quality and that translates into 7 million premature deaths per year. One of the things we did in our institute was to develop software that allows people who live in the United States because the U.S. is the only one that actually shares its air quality to see how good our air quality is. And the number, the number 10 is the best number, nobody gets a 10 because of greenhouse gases and other things. The fact about the best you get is a 7, which is Seattle. Where we live, you know, it's not great, but it's actually not bad to compare it to Los Angeles, Chicago, a lot of other areas. And if you go to 10 green, you can actually dig down and you can look at the 10 different measurements for the 10 different EPA pollutants, these are greenhouse gases, toxic metals. Green means it's safe level there, red means that it's an unsafe level, and gray means that there's no, there's no information at all. And this was a very important reason for us to do this because we wanted people to look at their 10 green score, see whether or not all of the measurements that affect their health are actually being made. And if we look, some of these 10 green stores, scores together, you can use it, for example, to decide what part of the country you'd like to live in. The Northeast is where we live in particular is not bad. You start to go into other parts of the country. It's not so great. And obviously, if you're in the Northwest, certainly not California, but if you're in the Northwest, you get a lot of clean Pacific air coming in. So, it turns out that the things that we've experienced that we think about as climate change are not just temperature. They're also air quality, and they're the effects of temperature and air quality. And these are all of the, I'll call them surprises, environmental surprises that have occurred as a consequence of us playing around in the last and emitting what we have obviously decline in Arctic sea ice various extreme events sea level rise. Read them all. I don't need to go through this. So, a lot of things have happened. I'll mention. Well, actually, we'll skip it for right now. But what's most important, however, is that legislation as I suggested with respect to acid rain has actually been very effective, unless you start weakening this regulation. Star tells you that we've done a pretty good job with acid rain. We've done a great job with reducing starting to reduce ozone holes, although the actual healing of the process takes 50 to 75 years. This is the Montreal protocol. Great job of preventing above ground testing of atomic bomb testing that radioactive material that was emitted into the atmosphere prior the band and on above ground bomb test basically said, there's radioactivity from that accident that's made with the South Pole better legislation for because we know this legislation is effective. So now a quick comparison. How does climate change compare, for example, to COVID-19 COVID-19 is utmost in our minds right now. Both COVID-19 and climate change have local to global effects. Obviously, both impact human health. As it turns out, the food insecurity that is created as a consequence of climate change, for example, the drought in the Middle East changes in growing seasons. These have made people, along with the human, the health consequences of climate change have made people far more susceptible to COVID-19. But then they would have been, we hadn't been as stressed. And both of these obviously create stress. Mitigation. Well, we're, it's super impressive, obviously, what's happened with vaccines. And with any luck at all, we'll see the other side of COVID-19 relatively soon. Climate change is different. Climate change is going to be with us for a long time. And the mitigation needs to be taken more seriously. Both of these have created new norms. Don't need to tell you about COVID-19. But the new norm for the climate system is instability. That's the key word. The climate system is less stable than it has been in most several of our lives. And in both cases, they provide new perspective. We know that as a consequence of COVID greenhouse gas levels decreased dramatically in the atmosphere at the same time toxic substances decreased because there was less industrial activity, fewer of us driving around. And that had a very small effect on climate change, the decrease in greenhouse gases. But it was yet another reminder of the fact that while greenhouse gases are very hard to mitigate, the toxic substances that go with them can be taken out of the atmosphere in a matter of days. And we know that the levels of cadmium, which causes autism in infants, not the only cause. We know that the levels of small particulates which are right on a level from throughout much of the United States. So now let's turn to Maine quickly. Maine has a very diverse climate range. It's the equivalent basically of going halfway up Scandinavia and halfway down Europe. In 2009, our institute was tasked by Governor Baldacci to put together what turned out to be the first report about a state and its future. It's an understanding of where we were up to 2009 and where we might go in the future. We updated that in 2005, 2015, 2019 and 2020, and it has formed the basis for the Maine Climate Council. Governor Mills has been very impressive in terms of turning our main state government towards much more positive thinking about what we need to do about climate change. And the scientific assessment of climate change is really a synthesis of most of these of these documents, plus obviously more things added, plus most importantly, the additions of ideas related to policy, much more understanding of impacts and a variety of things. So turning, focusing even more on Maine. Maine experienced in past times and certainly in the instrumental era periods during which Penobscot Bay was completely frozen for a good portion of the winter. We have a car from Camden across Penobscot Bay. The most recent freezing that we've had a Penobscot Bay and it was not that dramatic was in 1971. If we take a look at the temperature and this comes from from our reports that I just showed you and from the Maine Climate Council report. In 1895 temperatures increased about three degrees Fahrenheit. This has been primarily with an increase in overnight temperatures and some increases in daytime temperatures and we've experienced since 1998, the sixth warmest years on record. We take a look at temperature. In these three different time periods, there's temperature plotted just showed you, we can see that the temperature increase, which is the lighter, the yellowish and the green has been most prominent in the coastal areas, less so in the northern areas. This is largely because of the jet stream, and also because obviously getting into higher latitude and continental interiors are a little bit. They can create their own climate if we take a look at precipitation and drought since about 1895 has been roughly a six inch increase in six, six inches more of precipitation and the largest increase in the last 20 years the expectation is that this precipitation increase this moisture increase will continue. However, you look back through the record and I'll talk about this in a bit more detail in a moment, there are periods of drought. And the question is, will we have more periods of drought will they be larger. So predictions for Maine based on climate models and the climate models basically take, try to reconstruct the physics of the climate system they tend to look at it globally. And they take into account different scenarios for temperature for greenhouse gas rise. Somehow my pointer has has died here, but the RCP 8.5 is greenhouse gas emissions continuing as they are getting higher and higher 2.6 is a much more conservative and if you take a look at the plot to the right, you'll see the gray is basically the range of temperatures up to the present this is based on the instrumental record. And then if you go into the red line to the right, that's the projection with possibly an eight degrees centigrade rise if we really let greenhouse gases go crazy and if we begin to mitigate and flatten out back to probably 1990 levels that's the blue plot here. We can really see a flattening out of the temperature at about two to three degrees centigrade by the middle of the 21st century. If we take a look at Maine based only on the climate models and let me go back one second. You notice that the climate models have a lot less variability in them so everything from today onward is basically rather linear change with not much variability because the models can't actually give you as much regional detail as we would like, to reconstruct the variability so easily if we go back in the instrumental record we see that there's a lot of variability, we know there'll be variability in the future. So we expect that by 2030 to 2050 mains temperature will rise by about three degrees Fahrenheit has much temperature rises we've experienced since 1895. And with this temperature rise, particularly since 2000, we'll see an increase in ticks in the state when my wife and I moved to the state in 2000, we left New Hampshire which was filled with ticks to Maine, no ticks. Obviously it's different today, the number of days during which the temperature will rise above 95 degrees Fahrenheit will triple by mid century. As it turns out, if you increase the temperature 304 degrees Fahrenheit, even in the mid 70s of Fahrenheit, the number of heat stroke related hospitalizations doubles. So, heat stroke and obviously disabilities related to heat will increase dramatically in the future precipitation is expected to increase another six inches by 2035 to 54 by 2050 we should begin to see some of the dramatic changes in forest biomes. But Gulf of Maine as we know is one of the fastest warming bodies of water on the planet. We know that the lobster industry has effectively failed to the south of us. And once we get to 68 degrees Fahrenheit which happens very rarely in the Gulf of Maine, but is beginning to happen for a day or two every now now and then that's the mortality number or threshold for lobsters. So as warming occurs, lobster industry will change well those climate models are great. They give you the trends, but we can actually do better on the local to regional scale and add a bit more variability. And why do we want to do this because we want to be able to understand not just it what the trend is to 2100 but we want to be able to understand much at a much finer scale maybe the next 10 to 20 years and we want to understand what's happening in Maine. So for the blueberry industry it turns out that blueberries obviously like warmer temperatures longer growing seasons, moisture, and as the Gulf of Maine warms, which it has already and will continue to it'll allow more moisture to be blown on shore. During the summer season the summer season will be longer and blueberries will probably be pretty happy in the future. If we take a look at the relationship between El Nino, and the quick answer to El Nino is it's a temperature fluctuation in the Pacific Ocean that has far reaching effects over North America turns out that during El Nino events, Maine tends to be dry. The waves very differently. Obviously you see the little pinkish spot over Maine compared to the bluer spot and the rest of North America, because of the jet spring in particular, Maine reacts differently to El Nino's and during the El Nino we had one not too long ago, three, four years ago, and the western Maine and North New Hampshire tend to be drier. If we had another volcanic event remember in 1991-92 we had the Pinatubo event it was a very large volcanic event. These usually occur every 20 years, we have not had one as big as Pinatubo. Long past that what happens in northeastern United States is that it gets colder and it gets drier for about one to two years. And if we look at the effect of Mount Pinatubo 91 to 93 on the Arctic, it resulted in a four degrees centigrade cooling. So we should expect the Arctic sea ice to begin to grow again for a short period one or two years, but if we're thinking about transporting things back and forth across the Arctic, if we're thinking about all the climate instabilities created by the Arctic, the Arctic has a dramatic impact on the rest of the northern hemisphere. So one volcanic event can have a big long term impact. So now, if we take a look at a very idealized view of 2020 to 2040, that gray dashed line is showing us what the models say. And the models are right, the trend will be warming, but superimposed on that warming might for example be an El Nino event, which would mean warmer and drier for Maine. El Nino, which is the opposite of that means colder and wetter. A volcanic eruption means drier and drier and colder, and the red arrow in there tells us that if methane is released at higher rates than it is now, which is certainly likely we'll have another abrupt climate change, which will potentially be not just confined to the Arctic, but to much larger area in the northern hemisphere. So there are a lot of plausible scenarios for the future. And we need to think about all of them, the ones that are just sort of the most minimal, which would be cutting greenhouse gases down and flattening out of temperature by 2040 to 2050. We also need to think about the most dramatic alternatives in our planning impossible planning scenario is all about how do you mitigate and adapt to as many plausible scenarios as you can. So now main, this is the this is the encouraging part of the story. We live in a good place for sure. We have a lot of potential other than El Nino events and volcanoes, we have plentiful water, and the expectation is that we will most years out of each decade. Our forests, we now know sequester about 75% of the carbon emissions that come from our very small population, but nevertheless that puts us in a very good situation. And we obviously have a remarkable marine opportunity, which if we manage correctly, and make sure that we understand which fish are there and how to manage them puts us in a very good situation. We're also in a great situation for wind and solar power but in particular wind power. If we were to install the field of wind turbines that are now being projected for the Gulf of Maine, it would be the equivalent of 10 to 12 nuclear power plants. We would become the Saudi Arabia of energy in the process that would make us energy independent. We would have tons of excess energy. It would reduce pollution because we are major sources of pollution are energy and automobiles. We would reduce toxic substance releases. In the process, as the Arctic continues to warm, obviously, particularly Portland by the coast of Maine, it will become the eastern gateway through the Arctic as ships go back and forth. Whether one likes it or not, the Arctic will open up significantly more. We already have the Icelandic shipping company I'm Skip moving to Portland, and we already have tremendous increase in shipping between Maine and Scandinavia. All of this energy with all of this precipitation organic farming will grow in Maine. We already have the highest per capita number of beer making homemade beer making in the country. And along with that will go organic farming because we'll have the energy and we'll have the moisture that we need. In the process, our economy will increase. There'll be more jobs and these jobs in the energy industry, particularly offshore wind will be very important in employing many of the people who might very well lose their jobs in the lobster industry but who are experienced in the marine environment and the pay for these jobs and the sustainability of these jobs is quite obvious. In the process, I've projected for the last few years that we'll see a doubling in the population of Maine. And whether one likes it or not, we should prepare ourselves for it and think about how in fact, when we think about expanding or not schools when we think about roads when we think about where we put things. We need to keep in mind that we might have an increased population. There'll be climate refugees coming to us and these climate refugees are not necessarily coming from other parts of the world. They'll be coming from other parts of the United States. And for, for those of us in Maine, our quality of life will most likely be sustained. Yeah, we have vector born diseases. Yes, we have more storms. Yes, we have instability and climate but quality of life compared to a lot of other places will be quite good. So climate change has tremendous impacts. It impacts health, economy, frequency of catastrophes, geopolitics. I won't talk about these in detail. I've already touched on them. Perhaps the most pertinent thing in terms of my presentation today is the are the geopolitical influences of a warming Arctic is, you know, Russia has already claimed the Arctic. Many countries are doing it, but there are amazing new inroads that are being made between all of the Arctic adjacent countries and many other countries for what the future of the Arctic will be. Finally, what can we all do to make this happen in and look for a brighter future. We can stay well informed. The main climate council report. I really encourage you to read it. It's a very impressive forward thinking report. And in the process, obviously the better educated we become the better, we will be at voting for the policies that will be projected as a consequence. Look at the climate change Institute. Our software climate reanalyzer and 10 greens so that you if you're ever interested in understanding what's going on today went on in the past, what our air quality was you can refer to these. So stay informed and inform others energize our legislators through voting support climate friendly activities like the Sierra Club adopt climate friendly solutions. We can always increase our efficiency. As you all know, there are grassroots organizations jumping up all over the state that are doing some very basic but extremely important things. They're creating wooden frames with plastic over them that can be put on people's windows to decrease their heating costs. Average manor spends about 10% of their income on heating their house and on energy. If you can, if you can drop that down to 5% or 8% makes a very big difference. And if we eventually begin to have our own renewable sources of energy will even be in better shape reduce your emissions, obviously driving less cars are the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. And then there's a very big movement for reuse in Maine and obviously many other areas to and obviously reducing what we have. So, we all need to insist on clean air clean water and resource preservation. It's the new Green Deal is exactly this. It turns out that the original Green Deal, promoted or put forward by Franklin Delano Roosevelt did actually talk about some of these things it was, they weren't the biggest issues in that, but this, the fact that we all deserve clean air and water and to preserve our resources ought to be in an edible right that we have as humans and for our ecosystem. We start to turn to the economic side if we had clean air and clean water, we would be much healthier than we are today, decreasing one of our most important or highest I should say costs and in the United States healthcare. So, here's the concluding statement, we've been making a journey into climate and humans. We've been impacting the climate system to some degree, and certainly our environment ever since we started hunting, running down forests, but the biggest impacts, and the ones that can actually be seen in the atmosphere start around 9,000 years ago with agriculture in particular, growing rice because as you grow rice, you grow it in a in a in a water environment, sort of a semi saturated state. It's exactly the place that you admit methane so we have levels of methane started increase about 9,000 years ago because of human activity, even that far back. We were also burning forests in order to go hunting. The most dramatic increase or consequence impact on climate change starts with the industrial revolution around 1850. It's in the 1980s that we really begin to realize, and also obviously with Earth Day 51 years ago, 1970 that something is happening and we began to see glaciers getting smaller and glaciers are an amazing integrator of what goes on in in temperature and precipitation and glaciers have no reason to be political to have no reason to tell anything other than exactly what's impacting them and we know glaciers have been getting quite dramatically since the 1980s, when we were working on Everest in 2019, we even found that that very highest glacier on Mount Everest, almost 27,000 feet had lost tremendous amount of volume, even at that elevation. Today, we've entered in my opinion the age of climate decision and how we move forward, the consequences, and even the opportunities for the future are really up to us and, although it doesn't sound very environmentally minded and I consider myself to be a very environmentally sensitive person, there are opportunities for the future. People who, for example, can figure out the right sort of crops. There is a scientist who works in Bangladesh, who's developed a salt resistant crop for coastal, for Bangladesh, because sea level is rising and they're obviously getting much more salt coming in. There's so many other things that we could be doing that will increase the quality of life and help us to adapt and in the process mitigate, should have gone back. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much, Dr. Mayesky. Just to clarify in question first, did you say or did your slides show that at 68 degrees Fahrenheit, lobsters begin to die? Yes, and I even checked that. It's a scientific reference that's attached to that, but I even checked that and then I checked how many times, you know, how often does the temperature go above 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the Gulf of Maine. It's not very often. It's a day every now and then, but the numbers of those days are increasing. So, yeah, we know the Gulf of Maine is pretty far from 68 degrees Fahrenheit right now. But as you begin to think, but the, you know, we will gradually get closer and closer to this, whether or not the Gulf of Maine will ever be 68 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the whole summer or not. I don't know, but it is enough to push the lobsters into a very uncomfortable state, not only because of their, their life cycle but also because of the parasites that impact them. Thank you. We have a couple of questions for from our chat. We invite anybody that's in the audience if you'd like to type into the chat a question you may have, or if you just want to raise your hand and ask, you know, ask it directly. That's also fine. The first question we have is how does Maine fare compared to the rest of the country in the world, in your opinion about the climate change issues and how likely is it that we can stop this or even reverse these trends. That Maine Climate Council report is very impressive. That isn't to say that there aren't countries, Iceland, Denmark, several others that aren't more advanced Germany aren't more advanced in terms of their approached understanding and mitigating and adapting to climate change but I'd say Maine, Maine's a real leader in the United States. I remember when I first moved to Maine in 2020, I could see that there was a lot of interest in obviously preserving Maine. But California at the time was really the most progressive in terms of climate change and I would always like to say that California is a very wealthy state, Maine's not a wealthy state. And yet there are plenty of things we can do about climate change that don't necessarily require money. They require activism, voting, conservation, resource development, not development, but preserving our resources. And I'm sorry you asked another question. There was another question in there too. It was kind of a double question I hate you with how does Maine fear compared to the rest of the country in the world and then also how likely is it that we can stop this or even reverse these trends. Yeah, obviously that's very important. Can we stop it. No, we've bought into what we have so far. And it will continue question is how much can we mitigate. And I think, you know, one of the approaches is, why should we do anything if in fact China isn't it turns out that now China and the United States are the biggest emitters. And I would say that if China and or the United States don't do enough then what's the purpose of even trying to think about the future is just going to get worse and worse. Well, I think that we all need to do as much as we can. And even if the warming continues, and we don't mitigate it as much as we would like to, by decreasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. We also decrease toxic substances that go into the atmosphere, and those drop out really fast. And imagine living in a world that was much closer to our world. 2000 years ago, when lead levels were almost zero in the atmosphere, when there was no cadmium floating around in the atmosphere, but we didn't have as much arsenic in the atmosphere when we didn't have all of these engineered chemicals. So there are plenty of things that we can do that will make the quality of our life and our health better for the future without necessarily having even the major countries decrease greenhouse gases we can make it better for ourselves locally and regionally. And with that, China, as of the last few years, for obvious reasons, has in many ways taken the world stage in terms of its interest in trying to reduce greenhouse gas warming. Now with our new administration, I think we will begin to take the lead back again. That's critically important and China and the United States together could be very, very powerful in mitigating greenhouse gas warming. And there are estimates coming out all all the time about how many electric cars will have by 2030 to 2040 to 2050 the likelihood of more and more renewable energy. Remember that there are more people involved. There are more jobs in renewable energy than there are in the coal industry now it's an absolutely rapidly growing field. And I think the Biden administration has been very smart when they talk about renewable energy, because they always talk about jobs at the same time so that it isn't a matter of taking something away. It's a matter of creating new opportunities. And even in the most perfect world. We are not going to be able to transfer to transfer into renewable energy in less than 20 to 25 years. So the infrastructure for energy that we have now we will need until the next 20 to 25 years, if not longer. The question is, should we take that infrastructure, which in the 1950s to the 1980s were probably the best energy infrastructure in the world, but which is now old, should we rebuild it. Is it still a source of energy or should we just jump into the 21st century, the way many other countries are, and consider the fact that we're going to have a 21st century infrastructure rather than the 20th century infrastructure. Thank you. Another question is, why is the Gulf of Maine warming at a faster rate in your opinion. Another question. It has a lot to do with the fact that there is more warm water that's moving its way northward is remember the Gulf stream divides basically divides warm water to the south and cold water to the north. It's not necessarily the Gulf stream as a stream, but it's not necessarily a confined stream it's got a lot of eddies that come off the edges of it. And as a consequence small currents can make the way farther north and into some of these subterranean regions of the Gulf of Maine and allow it to warm, but at the same time obviously the air has warmed. So that's part of more warm water getting in, particularly from the south and more warm air heating the surface. Thank you. There's another question that there's new evidence of pollutants found on Everest. Did these new pollutants, or new evidence of pollutants come from winds or the effect of the hundreds of climbers. So that comes from our expedition. And that is a very good question. And, and the papers do the scientific papers do state very clearly that it's from climbers. And as obviously should be expected anywhere people go, microplastics and PFASs drop off our clothing and, and they're everywhere. We had hoped to be able to show whether or not there were microplastics and various toxic substances in the snow during the non climbing season. But when we got to the highest site where we could collect an ice core, it turns out that the upper hundreds of years were missing. And that's because warming has impacted the top of the highest glacier in Mount Everest. So we could not, as we have been able to do in other places, be able to say, Well, here's what the levels are of, let's say lead today. And here's what they were a few years ago is just playing missing the upper part of the record. We'll go back again, and we'll try to find another place probably a little bit farther away, maybe slightly lower elevation where we can determine that. But we know exactly, I shouldn't say we know what we're going to find. We know that at a lower elevation on the north side of Everest, where we've been working closely with the Chinese for about 20 years now, where there where the snow is preserved from today all the way back. It's about 2000 feet lower that in fact, the levels of toxic substances are definitely much higher in the younger snow than in the older snow. But we don't know because we weren't measuring microplastics and PFAS is at that time is whether or not microplastics and PFAS are in at that lower elevation where we can get a better record. So we'll be going back to Everest. Once COVID allows us to and ideally we'll be going, we'll be able to answer that question. But that was very perceptive question. Thank you. Another question is do you or Sierra Club have reports like your presentation for each state. For each of for each state in the United States are not just main. Oh, that's a good question you'd have to ask the Sierra Club. I do know that we were the first state to do this. I'm guessing that they do exist for other states. I can tell you that there are reports put out by the USGS us your local survey, Noah, that covered the entire United States, and they'll show you they'll give you good information for where you are. They may not be quite as specific, however, for the state that you happen to be interested in. Thank you. And our last question in chat is that we have heard that the Gulf Stream might stall as a consequence of climate change. Do you see this real possibility. It's a very good question too. It turns out that in the past and we can see this not only from our ice core records but also from deep sea records. There are times when the Gulf Stream has actually moved farther north farther south, or slowed down. One of the things that determine the strength of the Gulf Stream have to do with the density of the water. The Gulf Stream is just one part of a literally around the world circuit of water that occurs. And it turns out that the water that comes from the south Atlantic makes its way along the east coast of the United States and then goes across to Europe. It starts to make its way across to Europe and actually begin to mix with some of the Arctic waters. By that point, it turns out that the water is a little bit saltier, which makes it denser. And it's saltier because of the wet of the fact that the in the tropical regions, the winds are very strong they blow from east to west and they, they take moisture out of the ocean, leaving behind making the Atlantic a little bit saltier. And even more effective is the addition of cold water in the North Atlantic. And as Greenland begins to melt, which it is, it obviously gives off cold, fresh water. And as you, as you add fresh water to the, to the Gulf Stream area, you actually decrease the density of the water, and the water is no longer able to sink as easily. And the less it sinks the member of that example I showed in the very beginning, as the winds blow over the, the, the Southern Ocean they drag surface water, bringing up cold water. Well, in many ways it's exactly the same thing here, the less wind you have blowing across the surface of the ocean, or the less dense by adding fresh water, the net result is that you, you don't have as much dense water. It doesn't sink and it doesn't pull surface water across under the circumstance in which more and more melting occurs off from the Greenland ice sheet. The Gulf Stream and that region will be the water will become less dense it won't sink as fast, and it won't drag warm air from North America over to Europe as easily. So it is not impossible that Greenland starts to melt, changing the density of the Gulf of the Gulf Stream water that the Gulf Stream will not move as fast, and that the net result will be that the eastern part of North America or United States will tend to warm because the heat will be kept on that side more, and there'll be less, there'll be less heat taken less often over to Scandinavia and Scandinavia will actually get colder under that circumstance. So, sort of weird to think about it, but the melting of Greenland could actually make Scandinavia colder. And there's a lot of information thank you so much. We have a quick last minute question has our ability to forecast weather events kept pace with changes in our climate. It's a really good question. Obviously, meteorologists and climatologists are very good at predicting over a few days, probably even up to a week or 10 days in many cases. And if you wanted to make up. So we're very good at that. We probably the climate models without a doubt are good at telling us what the trend will be. So we know 2030 years 50 years from now, if we continue as we are it will get warmer. It's in the shorter time period where it gets more complicated. Those climate models, and I showed you a little bit of the data about midway through those climate models are produced in the following way. You take a weather model, exactly the same way that weather forecasts are produced. And you take the physics from that weather model, and you now let it run, not just for days but you let it run for weeks and you let it run for months. The result is that you're actually creating a climate model in the process. When you compare the results of that climate model to what we know has already happened and you can do that by taking the climate model and seeing what it would have what would have guessed the weather was like. The climate models tend to under represent what's going on they don't have as much variability in them. And that's why the climate models are great for general behavior, but they, we don't understand the physics of the climate system. What's going to necessarily happen in the next 10 or 20 years, which is exactly why we're using these other tools, the possibility of a volcanic event, the possibility of of an El Nino and a variety of other things. So we can't necessarily say there'll be a volcanic event in five years, but we can say that the likelihood of having a big one in the next 10 or 20 years or if not less is very high. And therefore, we should prepare ourselves for a one to two degrees centigrade drop in temperature in a place like Maine, and a four degrees centigrade drop in temperature for the Arctic which is big implications for all of us. So, the answer is, we can't tell exactly what's going to happen in the next 10 years, but we can tell you what the likelihood is of having, you know, out of the next 10 years, probably one year will be dry. And maybe one or two years will be cooler than average but in general be warmer. Thank you so much. I think that brings us to the end of our questions. I'm going to see if I can share the last screen here. There we go. And I should say if anybody would like to, to look at this PowerPoint. I know it's recorded but I'll send it off to you for the Sierra Club and anybody likes it they can, or wants it, you can get it from the Sierra Club or you can send me an email I'd be happy to send it to you. Yes, thank you so much, and thank you to everyone for tuning in tonight. We want to make sure that you're aware of our offering tomorrow, I'm going to post that in the chat for people interested in signing up for on Earth Day will host a panel discussion on the intersectionality of racism economy and climate change. And I will include Josh Wood, who is the race and climate justice organizer and co organizing director for Maine strikes. Anya Wright, who is the grassroots climate action organizer for Sierra Club Maine, and Davis Taylor professor of economics and quantitative social studies at the College of the Atlantic. So just a major thank you to you Dr. Mayevsky and to everyone who tuned in tonight and an invitation for tomorrow. My pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you all so much.