 Welcome everybody to our talks tonight. My name is Jeff Jamison, I'm a professor of chemistry here and environmental studies. And we're very pleased to have Dr. John Abraham here. He's here a couple weeks later than we planned on because of a cancellation. So he was ideally would have been here before the building bridges conference. But we're happy to have him here today. And Dr. Abraham is a professor of mechanical engineering at St. Thomas University. And he's gotten into climate science. And he's been doing that for the last seven or eight years. He's been fully involved in climate science. And he's going to talk to us today about global warming. There's lots of information you can get on. Dr. Abraham has a new blog now that's been out for about a year. He just told me and it's linked to The Guardian. So if you do a Google search for...actually all you do is do John Abraham's blog on The Guardian. Lots of good information there. And if you want further entertainment, I'll look for his video. Do a Google search for John Abraham and Lord of the Month. And John has some prominence for making a YouTube video. I'll just post a video on YouTube. Kind of addressing a climate skeptic's points that they made in a talk that they gave at a local university in Minnesota. And John did an excellent job of pointing out each point and how this was being misinterpreted. So we're very pleased to have Dr. Abraham here. So let's give him a warm round of applause. Much more savvy than I and my colleagues are. And how many of you are science students studying fields of science? Okay. Well, you know, scientists have a reputation of not being very good communicators. Being nerdy. You know, pocket protective kind of approach. And in real life it's not that way. As the introduction, thanks for that great introduction, the very generous introduction mentioned, I'm a practicing scientist. I publish on oceanography, climate sensitivity, paleo-climatology. I've published on all these areas, which are really boring. And if you have trouble sleeping, I'll send you my articles. But there's more to being a scientist than just that. You can take a career that is really actively engaging the public. So I write a blog for a major newspaper. I was on radio today in California, California Public Radio. I'll give it a public talk today. And so there's more to being a scientist than just crunching numbers and making friends. There is telling the story. What does your science mean for our lives? And you know, when we do studies and we learn about the world, I think it's our obligation to tell people what it means. How does it impact you? How does it impact the future? And how can we use science to make better decisions about where we're going to go? So I'm going to give a talk today about global warming, talk about what we know and what we don't know. And I'll be very frank about what the state of knowledge is, where we're going to be, where we think we're going to be, and what are some of the things that we need to know to make decisions and what kind of decisions are basing us. Feel free to ask. There's going to be a Q&A period afterwards. I think feel free to ask questions if they arise or write them down and we can handle them afterwards. But I want to mention some of the highlights of a recent report. Every five to seven years, a big group of scientists write a report which summarizes all climate science. And these are a bunch of unpaid scientists, hundreds of authors, thousands of reviewers. I was one of the reviewers. The report was released last fall. It actually comes in three parts. The next two parts are coming up. What were their conclusions? Warming is unequivocal. Each of the last decades was warmer than the prior decade. It's warmer than it's been in probably 1400 years. Some extreme weather events are increasing. Heat waves, droughts, heavy precipitation. That means heavy rainfalls and heavy snows. So think about the Duluth flood. Did anyone hear about that? Wasn't there a polar bear in the street or something? Am I getting the story wrong? There was some kind of polar animal, maybe a seal going down Main Street because of incredible floods. Percades. Percades are becoming more intense. Those have increased. Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice. Decrease snow. Not this year. By the way, this is the hardest time of the year for me. Because it's the end of winter, right? We're all wishing for global warming. You're shaking your head, yes. Actually, my first talk was postponed because of a snowsuit. So I'm going to talk about the difference between weather and climate. And talk about how the weather is being felt all the way around the world, even if it's cold here in Minnesota. Sea levels are rising faster than previously thought. It's about the poles in the North and South Pole are warming. Glacier ice loss. And the ocean is becoming more acidic. This is a really interesting one people don't often recognize. It's often called the evil twin problem of global warming, or sometimes called the worst twin. We're actually changing the pH of the ocean. How many of you... Anyone have a soda here? Let's pretend I have a soda. If I took a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi, I shook it. And then I opened it. What would happen? I hear the sounds, right? It would fuzz, fizz. What is different about a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi than water? Carbonation. Yeah, carbonation. It's a carbonated beverage. There is carbon dioxide absorbed in the liquid. While we're putting so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is changing the chemistry of the ocean. Why are we changing it? Well, we might care if we're an animal that creates a shell out of calcium carbon. It's going to be harder to create and keep shells. So if you are concerned about food chain, the oceanic food chain, you might be concerned about oceans indication. So these aren't just problems that affect other people. We don't live near the ocean, but this still affects us. And so connecting these things to our experience, I think, is important. But I am a scientist, but I'm also a human. And in 2007, I began getting a talk and I was captivated by this photo. This is a photo of a small child holding a globe. And what's great about this is the skin color of the child and the continent, which is basically the photography. It represents the fact that different people, different cultures, different continents and countries will suffer more than others. One of the continents which will suffer disproportionately from climate change is Africa. Even though they are largely not responsible for the emissions. So I used to include this just because of that interesting social argument. But recently, this finger has taken on a bigger significance to my family because the finger ends on a country called Uganda. And I do cleaner, renewable energy development in Africa. And I've gone to Uganda. Well, I can't remember how many times. I've gone to Uganda and in our most recent trip, my wife and I adopted Uganda in child. So the country that my adopted daughter is from is going to be one of the countries on the vanguard of climate change. And so this started as just an interesting photo, but now it's taken on a personal significance. And then I love this photo. This is a photo of Earth from Apollo 17. And this photo is great because this thing's cool. I mean, this is where we are, right? This is where our hopes and our dreams are. Our pasts and our future, our families and our friends, people we don't like so much. This is where our bracket winners are, right? So we think about this. This is a great thing. And we sure want to make sure that we know where this thing is headed. Because it affects us and it affects the people around us. So let's talk about the science. John, why are you so certain climate change is caused by humans? How do you know? Why do 97% of the most active climate scientists agree that humans are significantly causing climate change? Four different studies have shown that. Well, it's not just the Earth could walk. The Earth could walk for a bunch of reasons. The Sun could be getting hotter. Maybe the orbit's changing. Well, it's not just that the climate's changing. It's changing in the right way. We call that fingerprinting. The changes of the climate have the fingerprints of humans. Let me give you an example. The upper atmosphere, which is called the stratosphere, is cooling. And the nights are warming faster than days. Now let's think about those two items. A lot of people think the Sun's getting more active. The Sun's getting hotter. That's what causes climate change. Well, if the Sun was getting hotter, the Sun rays pass through the entire atmosphere. You would expect the entire atmosphere to heat. That's not what we're observing. We're observing the top get colder, the top part of the atmosphere get colder, because we're holding heat down. It's like a blanket. So the pattern does not fit Suns. Another example is nights are warming faster than days. If the Sun was getting hotter, you would expect days to be getting hotter when the Sun shines. But we're observing the opposite. We're observing nights getting hotter more than days. So it's not just that changes happen. It's that it's happening with the tell-tale fingerprints of humans. And this is, the fancy word for this is called detection and attribution, but really think of it as fingertips. So what are the basic physics of the greenhouse effect? By the way, the greenhouse effect would exist if humans weren't even here. The greenhouse effect is something that makes life possible in this planet. If there weren't the greenhouse effect, life would be, the Earth would be so cold, there may not be life. So the question is, are we having the greenhouse effect? What happens if we make it more potent? The way it works. Sun might pass us through the atmosphere. The atmosphere is shown by that blue ring around the Earth. The Earth sends out its own energy. It's called infrared energy. How many of you watch cops? Come on, in a minute. Okay. It's cops, right? Don't they have scenes where a helicopter is going around and they've got this special camera that can see people at night? It's infrared energy. They're detecting the heat of the person. In the same way, the Earth is emitting heat. But what's interesting about this heat is the atmosphere can absorb some of it. And if the atmosphere absorbs it, it sends some back. So it's this piece that's coming back, those red and blue lines. There's more of them. And they're changing the energy balance of the planet. So, John, is carbon dioxide really increasing? Come on, how do you do that? Well, you're looking at one of the most famous graphs in all of science. It's called the Keeling Curve. It came down to our guy named Charles David Keeling. He began it in 1957. He was crazy. He would take his wife on family vacations along the coast of California just so he could stop at his little instruments that were measuring carbon dioxide. Honey, let's go up to eat at this place. Oh, by the way, let me check my instrument. He was checking data when his son was born, Ralph Keeling. I met Ralph Keeling, nice dad. But meticulous dad. And what his data shows is this red, bumpy line. The data shows that every year the amount of carbon dioxide goes up. Now, each year there's a little bump. The reason why there's a little bump is part of the year, plants grow, and they suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So they lower the carbon dioxide. Then in the fall, they decay, leaves fall down. They emit carbon dioxide. So there's an annual up and down, but each year that up and down gets higher. Before the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at 280 parts per million. That means if you take out a million molecules out of the atmosphere, 280 would be carbon dioxide. Now we're at about 400. So 40% increase entirely due to humans. Entirely due to humans. Greenhouse gases. Well, this is a graph that goes back 2,000 years. This is 14 years ago. This is the year zero. And these are three of the most important human-emitted greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. They're more or less constant until the 1700s and 1800s when they rise precipitously. So it's not just one greenhouse gas. It's all of these that have been increasing. Where's it from? Well, we know carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are increasing. If we want to stop it, we should at least know the sources. Electrical sources. Coal is one of the most major sources of carbon dioxide. It's also one of those major sources of energy. It makes about just over 40% of our electricity, a third of our emissions. Huge. Coal produced electricity, I think it's the number one single source. Each kilowatt hour of electricity is two pounds of CO2, which is 18 cubic feet. How many of you have an electrical bill that you pay? Some of you. And it's measured in every month you get the amount of energy you use, and it's in kilowatt hours. Take every kilowatt hour multiplied by 18, and that's how many cubic feet of space you have filled with carbon dioxide. Transportation. Each gallon of gas is about 20 pounds of CO2. So, can you imagine that? That's heavier. Now, this is mind-blowing. There are chemists who are taking chemistry. So you balance chemical reactions. Okay. So you know this, but it's still mind-blowing. Every gallon, which weighs about seven pounds, liquid, results in 20 pounds of emissions. The CO2 coming out of your tailpipe is heavier than the liquid you put in your gas tank. That's amazing. Each gallon of gas is 173 cubic feet of space. Now, I drove here. I drive a car that keeps about 50 miles of gas, but I still drove here. We're using electricity. I am not suggesting that we turn off all power in the back of the stone age. The reason why I show this slide is if we're going to make good choices about how to reduce emissions, we should better know where they're from. Because if we are going to make choices, they better be good choices. And they better be choices that work. And they better be choices that work cost-effective. So, great, John. You've shown that carbon dioxide is going up. All these other things are going up. Is the temperature increasing? Well, this is the temperature record from NASA. There's three organizations. There's actually four that keep temperature records. And this is one of them. And this is a graph you can get from their website, NASA GISTEM, G-I-S-T-E-M-P. Search it. You can get this graph. This graph goes back to about 1880. Each black dot is the yearly temperature. The red line is the smooth curve. Now, you get a hot year and a cold year and a hot year and a cold year. We're not worried about that. You know, weather changes, things happen on short-term basis. Well, I want to know is, are the temperatures increasing? Here are the hottest years on record. Back to 1880. Number one, 2010. And here's the rest of the top 10. This is the record back to 1880. Is there a trend? I think so. Now, some people say global warming stopped. They stopped in 1988 or it stopped in 2005. But you have to be careful when people say things stop or start a certain year because what people often do is they'll pick a hot year and then a cold year and they'll say, help, climate change has stopped. No problem. What we want to do as scientists is we want to look at the long-term trend. We don't care about the ups and downs of the wiggle. We want to know what is the long-term trend. But we can go back further than 1880. It turns out 1880 is the furthest back. We can go with good thermometer measurements. But there are other ways of knowing the earth's temperature that don't need thermometers. How many of you camp? Okay. Have you guys ever been to the boundary waters? Yes. Okay. Let's say you go to the boundary waters this year. And first, what's your name? Jordan. Jordan. Jordan, Dartmouth, you brought a shovel. How would he bring a shovel camping? But you brought a shovel. And when everyone else is sitting around a fire, you just go out in the woods and you start digging. And we made fun of Jordan for a while, but then he comes back to the campsite and says, guess what I found? I dug down three feet and I found a crocodile skeleton and palm fronts. Well, let's see if that happened. What would we conclude about the weather back in history when that birth was formed? Just answer. It's not a trick question. It was warmer. It was warmer. Right. Now, this kid's 11. We cannot let him, we've got to not let him be the first to answer. It was warmer, darn it. That's called a proxy. It's not a thermometer, but it's a signal from nature that tells you what the climate was like. There are other proxies. One of the best proxies is pollen. Let's say that you dig down into the ground or go down into the sediment of the oceans or lakes and you discover pollen of warm plants. Well, then you would conclude it was warm. Tree rings are another proxy. Ice cores are other proxies. The point is we can go back in history and we can get reasonably good temperature measurements even when we didn't have temperature stations in airplanes. And if we do that, we can get temperature, by the way, this is in thousands of years. So this is today. This is 400,000 years ago and the red curve is temperature. Now, it's sort of a saw shape. It goes up and then slants down, up and slants down. Those are what are called glacial into glacial periods, commonly known as ice ages, although the correct term is glacial into glacial. And on top of that, I've plotted greenhouse gases. I actually didn't do this. James Hansen did it. Greenhouse gases on top of the temperatures. Look at that. Is there a correlation? Yeah, that's pretty darn good, actually. What we've seen, in fact, you can go back 800,000 years and what you see is if you plot the greenhouse gases with temperature, wow, that is hard to explain unless you attribute it to greenhouse gas. So I am not saying dinosaurs, and by the way, I know dinosaurs were not around for... I'm not saying cavemen had coal plants and they were emitting carbon dioxide. All I'm saying is that over the past hundreds of thousands of years, these two things have been linked together when one moves the other moves. What would make us think that today, in 2014, we could increase carbon dioxide and the temperature's not going to respond? We have hundreds of thousands of years of data which suggests other ones. How do we have information that far back? Well, I talked about proxies. There are sediment proxies, there's Jordan's shovel proxy. One of the best known proxies is ice corns. Scientists can actually dig down two miles into an ice sheet. Now imagine you're in Greenland. Every year it snows a little bit. So it snows and then the next year it snows and the next year it snows on top and snows on top and it compresses the layers and you get the sandwiching. And as you compress the snow it turns to ice and you can actually drill an ice core. This is a photograph of a one meter long segment of a Greenland ice core. You see the stripes? Those are rings, just like tree rings or annual bands. So scientists can pull out this two mile long section. They can count the rings back in time so they can date it. Then what they can do is melt some of the ice and when you melt it, the air bubbles in the ice open up. And what comes out? The atmosphere from when the snow fell. So now you have the greenhouse gases because you get an atmosphere and you can get the temperature by looking at the isotopic nature of the snow. So you get temperature, time and greenhouse gas levels and that's how you get this curve. This is an ice core. So all of what I've talked about has been in the past. Where are we going in the future? Well this is temperatures over the last thousand years. That's likely the next 100 years. The summer of 2012 will be a very regular occurrence once we hit about 23. 2030 to 2050 will be every two to three years. I mean this stuff has, the stuff we're seeing now is going to become common. Remember in the summer of 2012 it was hot. Minnesota actually wasn't that bad. Here's the drought monitor. US drought monitor, you can just type in Google US drought. How many of you are online? You're online? Type in Google, I hate to do this, tell people to Google something while I'm talking. But when you go back to your apartments or dorms or your homes type in US drought monitor and see the current drought monitor. Look at it. This is the drought monitor July 2012. This drought cost $35 billion. There it was in February, middle of winter 2013. Then what happened? Went from hot and dry to super wet. We had a huge swing of weather. The fancy term is weather whiplash. We went from having a huge drought to having one of the wettest springs ever in this section. But California had one of its driest years. So we had parts of the US that were flooding. They went from drought to flooding and then the West Coast went to this terrible drought. The drought in California right now is unbelievable. If you've been following the story, you know how bad it is. I pulled this just about a month ago. California, it's the deepest drought color that you can have. Why do I care about California besides almond prices are going on? We pay for this. We pay for the cost of extreme weather. We pay for the Duluth flood. We pay for Hurricane Sandy and we pay for the drought. So if it didn't have an impact to us, it would be hard to motivate action. But this stuff affects us. It affects our pocketbook and our lives. 2012, every red state was the hottest ever on record. Orange were just much above average. Now a lot of people who deny climate change pointed to Washington and said, look, it's not that hot. But you want to look at the entire, the entire world. By the way, 2012, hottest year US record, it was cold worldwide. It was only the 10th hottest. So you can be crazy hot in one area but just moderately hot in another area. Why is some of this happening? Why are we having these extremes? Well, we don't know for sure. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. This is one of the most hotly discussed and studied topics in climate change right now. We don't know the answer to it but the evidence is emerging that this is what's happening. There's something called the jet stream. The jet stream is this super fast stream of air and it swings around the planet sort of like this. Goes around in a circle. If you're above the jet stream, you're cold. If you're below the jet stream, you're warm. What scientists think is happening is because the Arctic has lost so much ice, we've lost about 60% of the summer ice coverage. It's causing high pressure up here which is pushing the jet stream down in them. It's an undulating jet stream. How does that impact you? Well, if you're here, you should have been cold but you're hot. And if you're here, you should have been hot but you're cold. And by the way, these waves move. So if you're standing here, you get hit by cold and then this comes hot and this comes cold. It's this lip lash of weather. And so the current science is telling us that these undulations are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So let's just, do you remember last spring? Yeah, you, come on. You remember last spring. Now, what was the weather like in spring? It was winter, right? Snowstorms in May. Yeah, dear God, is this going to end? I mean, it was terrible. Now, let me show you something. This is the jet stream April 19th. Last April. April 19th, last May. That didn't make any sense. Check this out. Jet stream comes down, goes up. What do you expect the temperature of the U.S. to be on that day? No. Well, it depends on where we are. Let's say it's in the middle. Anyone? Cold or hot, above the jet stream. Cold. Cold. How about here? Below the jet stream. Right. Got it. Okay. And then warm over here. Now, let me show you the temperatures. Pretty good match. Cold. This was your terrible April. The question is, how bad is this going to be as we increase climate change? I was supposed to give a talk, was it February 20th? Something like that. And it was canceled because of snow. And I pulled up the temperature anomalies and this cold blob was moving into Minnesota. Oh, it's snowing. Snow emergency. Climate change is ending. But look at this. Northern Canada, Arctic. Super hot. Scandinavia. Super hot. And then all of Europe. Northern Russia. And then you got this cold blob here. Hot here. It was so hot in Scandinavia that bears came out of hibernation in December. It hit 70 degrees in Alaska in December. So what this goes to show is what is happening in one spot is not an indicator of what's happening in another climate. We just want to remember that. The same thing is true. When we get a heat wave, it doesn't prove global warming. No way it doesn't. Just prove it. This is, is this yesterday? Yeah. Or today, I don't know. Whatever. May 19th. Look at this. Look at that huge heat wave in Northern Russia. So you want to be cognizant of what's happening globally. So what are some of the other things that we've observed? Well, this image on the left shows Arctic ice in the summer in 1980. It was the equivalent of the continental U.S., continuous U.S. minus air zone. By 2005, we lost that much. 2007, we lost that much. 2012, we lost Texas. If you look at the summer ice in the Arctic, we lost 50% of the area and 70% of the volume. Now, this is what the graph looks like. This is summer ice in the Arctic, back to 1979. And look, going down one year doesn't prove global warming. Going up doesn't disprove it. What you want to do is look at the trend. There we were in 2000. There's also the potential that things could be worse than they are. Scientists didn't forget that we would lose as much ice as we're losing, especially in greenery. One of the reasons why is there are things that are occurring that scientists didn't know about. One of them is Mulan's. This is a famous photo. I think it's from the front cover of Science. There's a river of water that is flowing toward the photographer and then it dumps into a hole. And the water goes down to the base of the ice sheet. Ice sheets sit on top of land. The water goes down to the base and then it flows out toward the ocean. And it carries with it or lubricates the base and takes some of the ice sheet with it. So we're concerned, scientists are concerned that what we've observed is just the beginning. It'll actually speed up as these things speed up. This is a fancy word for this. That is a lake on Greenwood. That's the ice in the back and that's a motorboat on a mill. If we go to the south pole, we see Antarctica. There's the east and then there's the west. The east is huge and very stable. The west is not very big but it's unstable. And I've got a call out here at the Larsonby Ice Shelf, size of Rhode Island. Here's what happened in a month and a half. January 31st, by the way, those little dots are melt parts. February 23rd, March 5th, March 7th. Size of Rhode Island collapsed in a month and a half. Was it really the size of Rhode Island? Yes, it was. In 2009 we had another ice shelf. Wilkins Ice Shelf had a collapse here. And then of course there's land-based glaciers. This is Glacier, Alaska. A photo from 1909. Same location photo 2004. Other glaciers, 1941 and then 2004. Photo from the same location. And Alpine Glacier a long time ago and then more recently. And then Portage Glacier 1914 and then 2004. Has anyone heard of the movie Chasing Ice? Has anyone seen it? Fantastic. A guy, a photographer, James Ballog, set up cameras in the Arctic. And he had to take photos like every hour or every half hour. And he's got time-lapse photography of glaciers collapsing. Unbelievable. He's got a great book. Watch the movie streaming on Netflix or whatever. Chasing Ice. Fantastic visual evidence of the stuff. Well, why do we care? Well, this is a topological map showing Asia and how high areas are above sea level. We'll focus on Bangladesh. Bangladesh has 160 million people. The consensus is that we're going to have about a meter of sea level rise by 2,103 feet. So a lot of people living near the coast of Bangladesh and other countries. You know, we as a country have trouble dealing with hurricane Katrina evacuees, richest country in the world, a couple hundred thousand people. What do you do if you're Indian and you have 20 million climate refugees? How do you do that? There's the real concern that there's going to be social changes, countries deal with climate refugees, and the Pentagon has identified climate changes as their number one long-term security threat. So the number one thing they're looking at, more than Russia and Crimea, it's climate change. This is the southeast part of the U.S. Red shows what would be covered with one meter sea level rise, three meters, and six. Ami is gone, way before this. In some places you can build seawalls. Not Miami. The ground's porous. The water will come up underneath. So Miami is a lost city. New Orleans, that's a tough one. Now, maybe we don't care about Miami, but dealing with relocating or dealing with raising sea level protection, that costs money. New York is putting 19 billion into rising sea level and storm surge protection. These are real dollars with real costs, both financial and human costs. China, is the ocean really going to rise that much? Well, Greenland is 23 feet of water. West Antarctica, five meters or 17 feet. Those are the two scientists are concerned about. That's 48 of sea level rises. Now, the general consensus is three feet by 2100. Do we care about what happens after 2100? It depends. It depends on how you view equity amongst different generations. I can, if all of Antarctica melted 2700 feet, these are not, I mean these are shocking numbers. There's a lot of water trapped inside. Here are some of the other things that we expect. Lower crop yields, especially in subsistence farming areas like Africa, which is what I showed in that video, the photo, ocean acidification, water. The general, there's two things happening with water. First of all, the atmosphere holds more water as it gets warmer. We know that July is more humid than January. So we expect more rain. But things evaporate faster. So we expect things to dry up faster. So there's two competing things. What's going to win? Well, it depends on where you are. The general view is, if you're in an area that's dry, it will become drier. If you're in an area that's wet, it will become wetter. And the rain will happen in heavier downbursts. So the southwestern US will become drier. The central and eastern part of US will become wetter, but there will be bigger downbursts followed by drier interspersed periods between the downbursts. Increased extreme weather events, hurricanes. The view of hurricanes is there will be fewer but more powerful hurricanes. But there's a lot of debate or not about hurricanes, invasive species, migration of flora. I get so depressed by this slide. I don't mind putting the slide up. What have you done? Well, if I didn't think there was a solution, I wouldn't be down here. I mean, I'd like meeting you all. I hope you stay around afterwards. You're great. But the reason I come out and give talks is because I think there is a solution. What is it? Well, emissions are expected to rise over the next 50 years. There's no silver bullet, but there's silver auction. A lot of little things add up. Using energy more wisely, getting more out of a gallon of gas saves us money, and it helps improve the climate. I didn't talk about the same cloud and I was coming out of the talk and this lady says, well, you're a fancy professor. You can dry that Honda insect, which is, I told the audience, that's what I drove. The rest of us can't afford that. Well, first of all, she didn't know what professors get paid. We actually don't get paid that much, but I said to her, I said, ma'am, where's your car? And she pointed to a large-ish, old-ish vehicle, and I said, how many miles do you get on gallon? She said about 15. And I said, how many miles are in your car? $150,000, I said. All right, I pulled up my iPhone, and I said, I'm going to figure out how much extra you paid in gas. Let's pretend gas is $3 a gallon. She said, no, it's way more than that. I said, I know, but I'm going to stack the cars on your feet. I said, let's pretend gas is $3 a gallon. Over the 150,000 miles she drove a car, do you know how much extra she paid in gas compared to my car? Come on, throw out a number. So it would be great. 21 grand. She paid more in gas than my car cost to buy. Now, am I a better person for driving a car? No, but I have more money. And so there are some solutions that just make sense. Like using energy more wisely. I got a home energy audit from Excel and I insulated my house and they come in and they test your house and find out where you're using energy. I insulated my house and in the first year I saved the amount of energy the amount of money the whole energy costs. It makes sense. These things just make sense. What can we do? What else can you do? Well, first of all, talk to people. Talk to your elected officials. Tell them that this stuff matters to you. If an elected official gets a phone call about a topic it's just a crank. If they get three or four, it's a ground slope. Call them up. State or local official. Call them up. Let them know what you think. Talk to your friends. Let your family and friends know that this is important to you. Reduce your own energy use. Reduce transportation. And if you ever hear someone with a fact that this proves gold woman call me I've heard it all before and I can help you walk through the baloney that people get on line. Change is possible. I love this image. So Rusty OLL with beautiful wind turbines in the background. Texas. Texas is the number one wind power producer city. Does anyone here drive through Southern Minnesota? Like, Worthington? What do you see? As you look out over the skyline what big white turning things do you see? Wind turbines. I mean, they're everywhere and they are investments. You know, engineers manufacturers installers. Farmers get paid for wind turbines. I would rather pay one of you to help design and install and maintain a wind turbine than to pay someone else in another country for their energy. These things just make sense. There's this guy doing algae biofuel. Growing algae, which sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, making fuel oil. So, this is the second and last one. I also am a dad. Not many of you are parents but you've got family members. And climate change is one of the biggest issues that's going to, it's already going to be one of the biggest issues that will impact you and people around the world. And in the future your kids or your friends are going to ask you, you know like my kids are going to say, dad, you knew. I mean, darn it you are a climate scientist. What were you doing? They're either going to say how did you let this happen? Or they're going to say how did your generation have the courage to do something to maintain this environment for us? I desperately want my children to ask me that second question. And this is the daughter I adopted from Uganda in her home country. And I want to be able to tell her that while her country suffers disproportionately from climate change, we worked as hard as we could to reduce that. Climate change is going to impact us. The question is how much? What are the takeaway messages? Four things to remember. The first thing we know, I love it I say the four things to remember. Everyone starts writing their notes. There's going to be a test tomorrow. There's actually going to be an exit exam. You can't leave and go home unless you pass the test. Scientists know we've actually known about the greenhouse effect for more than 150 years. This isn't new. It wasn't invented by Al Gore. The first climate model 1896 Spontaneous If you're a chemistry person, Spontaneous is a giant in your field. We know, but we can solve it today. We don't need to wait for cold fusion. We don't need to wait for magic pixie dust to come from aliens. We can solve it today with today's technology. During World War II this is a stat I've heard. I think it's correct. Do you know how many... I got it from looking. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding about that. How many aircraft did the US military build during World War II? There's no way you'll know. 600,000. 600,000 aircraft during a short war. We were building bombers and ships and tanks and all this other stuff. You give me 600,000 wind turbines? We can solve this problem today. We've solved hard problems in our past. We can solve this one. And we can also make a buck while we do it. Not only can we solve the environmental problem, we can create jobs. How many of you would like a $70,000 engineering job designing the next wind turbine? I would. How many of you would like a $60,000 to $70,000 job wind fixing turbines, or developing the next biofield? I would. I mean, those are great jobs. We can solve the problem and create the new economy of the future. And if we don't, we're going to get killed economically. China right now has made it a mission to own renewable energy. They are killing us in solar panels. They're destroying us. And we're going to suffer economically. And together, export our intellectual ideas to the rest of the world and buy those. So let's win this. Let's make this a competition. Win it. We can diversify our energy supply. We can improve national security. The last thing is, some people will come in and say, John, it's too expensive. Solve this problem. As if Sandy at $65 billion wasn't too expensive. It's $12 billion. $35 billion wasn't too expensive. It is already expensive not doing anything. Doing nothing is a choice. It's a choice that has tremendous economic costs. Almost all economists that study this agree it is more expensive to do nothing than to do something about it. And so that's the message I'd like to end with. It's a tough problem. But it's a problem we can solve. And if we solve it, we're going to have all these other benefits. And fortunately, I truly believe this. We can solve the problem with today's technology. And some of the solvers are in this room right now. So I'm happy to take any questions that people have right now. And I do want to thank you for coming out. St. Thomas, you're getting this unfilled, so I'm stuck here. We have food, extra credit. I'm sure you're getting extra credit. I guess you're getting food, so... But even then, we would have a turnout. So thank you for this great welcome and the chance to speak with you. Thank you. I was wondering what research you're currently involved in. I'm doing a lot. I have done oceanography, so I help measure ocean temperatures. The earth is out of energy bills. We are gaining in energy every second. Approximately four hereshima bombs worth of energy. Now, what we need to do is figure out where it's going. And about 93% of it's going into the ocean. Now, let's say you wanted to measure the energy of the ocean, the temperature of the ocean. How would you do it? The U.S. Navy had this idea years ago that subs submarines could avoid detection. If they were beneath something called the thermocline, do you know what a thermocline is? Okay, I've got some head down. The upper part of the ocean is warm and the bottom part is cold and it's a real sharp break. It goes from warm to cold right away. That's the thermocline. The U.S. Navy licensed a pro, a really cheap pro called an XBT. Short for expandable bathy thermocline. And they threw these things over about 100,000 years. They throw them overboard and they're like little torpedoes. Are we on line here? Is there internet here? Yeah. Now I've got to figure this out. I should never do Google search just while you're giving a talk, but I'm going to violate that principle. Thermograph. Oh, here. Boom. Right there. These little probes. And as they go down, they have a hole in the back and a wire comes out. They're connected to a computer on the board, on a ship, and they rotate as they go down and they release this wire and they record temperature depth. And that knows how. Well, the Navy wanted to know within a couple meters how deep the thermocline was and they had all of this data back to the 60s. Well, climate scientists came around and said, oh man, we've got all this temperature data. We can figure out if the ocean's been warming. But the problem was the Navy didn't know how fast they were falling. They didn't have the required accuracy due to climate studies. But NOAA oceanographers to approve the data record of all instances. So that's the biggest thing I've done, but I've also done what's called paleo-climate. We dug down into the earth and you can measure the temperature deep in the earth and figure out what the past temperature was. Comfortable temperature sensing. And then finally, I do climate sensitivity. How sensitive is the climate as we increase carbon dioxide? Are we going to increase two degrees, Yeah, can you go back to the slide with all the individual steps that we can take? Yeah. Are you going to quiz me and like ask me a tough question? No, I was just going to copy it down. You can actually do more than this. These are just like, you know, basically it comes down to use energy more wisely, talk to people. That's really it. Use energy more wisely. Let people around you know this is important. Oh, and then maybe go into climate science or something. Change the world. 33% of CO2 is from coal burning electricity. How much is compared to that? That was... Yeah, yeah, you know what? I think that was just U.S. What are the big... I don't know the answer. I can't give you the percentage, but U.S. are coal electricity, natural gas, other electricity sources and transportation. Use of energy for buildings, residential and commercial buildings are a huge component, but that's a mixture of coal and it's a mixture of natural gas and other sources. So you can... There are multiple areas that break it down by industries and break it down and include that. It's right to me and I'll send it to you. My wife told me that every graph you have reduces attention spans by a factor of two. She didn't say that. She said it just makes people pay less attention. My original slide shows back in 2007 were just packed with graphs. We were great data and I used to have that charted it and I cut stuff out and put in more pictures as time went. Although with this smarter group it was about 2000. Any other questions? What is the expected cost if you do nothing about this? If you could answer that you would win a Nobel Prize. But I'll tell you the best source the United Kingdom commissioned what's called the Stern Report and that is the best economic analysis, STERN because I know you're writing it down, Stern Report and other consequences. But I'll also tell you what the IPCC group, this group of scientists that write a report every five or six or seven years they have three reports. The first one was last fall and it was on the science. There's two more coming out reports number two and three and they are on costs and they're also on adaptation because we've actually gotten so far that there's two things we mitigate which means stop it or we can adapt which means just pay to survive through it and we really are so far we have to do both and the question is where do we put our limited financial resources so we get the best bang for the market and those are dealt with in the IPCC reports. I think I Hello, scientific question I guess talking about the jet stream and differences in temperature between the Arctic and the lower latitude and so how does that play out in the winter? So we've had this jet stream going up and down this winter. You expect there to be more in the summer when the Arctic is warmer? Yeah, that's right and that's the area of active research we don't know when it's worse is there a lag from summer ice melt to the jet stream impact. The person who is sort of at the vanguard of this is named Jennifer Francis famous, you know scientists, we make a mark like Kratzen, didn't he do COCs or something you know Richard Feynman made a mark Einstein made a mark well Jennifer Francis was the one who brought this to the attention of the scientific community and it's hotly debated right now a number of other scientists say there's no evidence I think her data is solid Jennifer Francis her papers are very real Alright, let's thank you more. If we were to do these changes and sort of lower our CO2 emissions are we expecting to just sort of slow what's already happening or are they trying to look and see if we could actually reverse the trends? No we cannot reverse the only way you can reverse it is to suck CO2 well actually you can reverse it but it's crazy if we stopped admitting scientists we look at different scenarios like worst case scenario of emissions or best case best case means we get our act together and if we do a best case scenario we'll cut the problem in about a third maybe a half or a third so instead of three degrees celsius or maybe five Fahrenheit we would have a degree and a half two degrees so it's a big difference but we can't stop it just by cutting emissions but we make the cost a lot less and we give ourselves more time there is a way to reverse the action and it is crazy it is called geoengineering the main idea right now is to spray particulates into the atmosphere to mimic a volcano if there's a volcanic eruption a big volcanic eruption like pinot tubo or algae com the earth cools for about two years because there's all these particles in the atmosphere and it reflects some way well one of the ideas is to spray particles into the stratosphere that will reflect some way so basically you're polluting to offset pollution it's dumb but that's one of the areas another area and I know we got to go another area is to seed the ocean with iron to promote plankton growth the plankton will absorb carbon dioxide and then the plankton will die and sink and that hasn't worked very well in the test cases so geoengineering but it's just better to use energy more wisely and have more money right thank you very much, good pleasure