 This is ThinkTech research in Manoa. I'm Jay Fidel. And with me is Dave Carl, who is the director of the Center for Microbial Research, Microbial Oceanography Research and Education at UH Manoa. He is one of ThinkTech's oldest friends. And I don't mean that necessarily in age, but he's been with us for the longest times almost since we began. He's been with us and part of us and helping us. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for coming down, Dave. Well, Jay, it's always a pleasure to come down to the studios here at Pioneer Plaza to talk story with you. Dave is the director of ThinkTech Hawaii. It's really something for us. Dave is a member of the National Academy of Science, which is something for everyone. I mean, that is an important part of UH's role in the landscape of science. Well, I've been very fortunate to be here at UH for 41 years. I came with nothing but a PhD in my pocket, and I've been able to build a program through collaborations and support from the federal government and private foundations and a little bit of luck. And that was 30 years ago, and that was the beginning of the Hawaii Ocean Time series, which is microbial oceanography research out there, 100 kilometers north of these islands. Yeah, the Hawaii Ocean Time series is one of the collaborative programs that we started around 1988. It's a field-based program, and behind me you can see an image of the ship that we're currently using. This is the flagship of the UH Manoa fleet called the RV Kila Moana. It's a Navy-owned UH operated research vessel that just left Pier 35 at 9 o'clock this morning on its way to Station Aloha on its 311th mission in the last 31 years. That's a lot, because a mission is not just overnight. A mission lasts for several weeks, no? Well, a mission nowadays is four days. So we leave the Port of Honolulu. We have a beautiful marine facility at Pier 35. You're welcome to come down and visit. Maybe we can take a walking tour of that for your viewers. And it's our support facility. We have personnel stationed down there. We have beautiful laboratories. And then we have the research vessel, which is really our access to the sea. Now, this research vessel can carry 26 scientists and a crew. It's a very large ship. It's very capable. You can see from the design behind me that it's a SWATH vessel. It's a very unusual type of design. It's a small, water-plane area twin hull, acronym SWATH. And instead of having one hull, like a typical ship would have, this has two hulls. And as a result, it's very stable and very high sea-states. You want that for science. You want that for science. We take delicate instrumentation out to sea with us, laser-based instruments that need very fine alignment. We take a lot of electronic equipment with us. And all of this needs to perform well under the oftentimes inclement weather at Station Aloha. For those of you who don't go to sea and just maybe go to Waikiki and look out at the beautiful calm Pacific Ocean, Pacific actually means calm. And when Belboa named it, he was there at the Isthmus of Panama and looked out. And everything looked really calm. So he said, wow, this is a very Pacific Ocean. But in fact, once you get away from the shelter of the island, which is only about five or six kilometers, if you go south of the islands, you'll be outside of the shelter of the mountains. And then you get the full force of the trade winds, which oftentimes at Aloha blows 20, 30 knots with five, six, seven-foot seas. We have to study with you what the time series does and what science is out there. And what the United States of Aloha has taught you all these years, because these 30 years have been a way to look at climate change, a way to see how the ocean and the marine life changes with climate change. So after we present you with this award here, we're going to do that now. We're going to want to know more about what you've been doing out at Station Aloha. So December 5th was a significant day. December 5th, 2018, that was the ThinkTech end of year party and awards program. And one of the awardees was Seymour and you. And we have an award here that I want to sort of re-present to you, because you weren't there, you were in Washington raising money for research. New York. New York, sorry. Okay, so while you were away, we were presenting this to, well, we were holding it for you. This is an award from ThinkTech Hawaii 2018 for community service presented to the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education at UH Manoa. And I'll read the text, it's not very long. For outstanding service to science at the University of Hawaii for more than 30 years, advancing scientific research in microbial oceanography, in projects involving microorganisms, molecular biology, and global ecology, and through the Hawaiian Ocean Time series at Station Aloha. And it's signed by me and our Executive Vice President, Carol Monli, Honolulu, December 5th, 2018. Dave, I want to present this to you now, here, live on ThinkTech. Well, thank you so much, Jay. This is quite an honor. As you mentioned, our relationship goes way back to the formation of your great gig here at ThinkTech Hawaii. And I'm very proud to be part of it, be an underwriter and a member of your board. So I will display this in our beautiful Seymour Holley. And occasionally we'll take it out to Station Aloha. Oh, that'd be great. And show it to the crew members, because they are part of our collaboration as well as all the kindest shore side at the UH Manoa campus. And I'm really sorry to have missed the holiday party, but it fell exactly on top of our annual meeting for the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes in Ecology, the so-called SCOPE program, which is a program funded by Jim Simons and the Simons Foundation in New York City. And we have an annual science meeting, so we were there talking about all of these things that we're going to be talking about in a few minutes. And well, I guess I can only say it's better late than never. But never late is better. Absolutely. I'd like you to describe the relationship between Seymour and SCOPE and tell people how it works in science to fund these projects, to fund this research, and what do you have to do? You as an academician and as a researcher, as the director of the center, what do you have to do to keep it going and how you arrange the fundraising? Well, my particular position at the University of Hawaii is one of professor of oceanography. I'm fortunate to have state support for nine months of my salary. And the rest of the year is funded by writing grants and getting private sources of money, whether that be from the National Science Foundation or from private philanthropical organizations, in my case. And so when I came here in March of, I came at the end of March in 1978, and I immediately wrote a grant proposal because that's what young scientists need to do. And fortunately, my first proposal ever was funded for $4,900 for a three-year program. And now most initial grants are hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, because the cost of doing research is very high. So for the first decade at UH, I was operating in the mode of a single investigator. By that I mean I was building my own lab, I had my own students, postdocs, and technicians that I supported off my own grants. And there was what I would call a sea change in 1988, and that is when we proposed to the National Science Foundation the creation of the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program that you just mentioned. And this was a very different kind of program because it was one built on collaborations. We had several different principal investigators at UH. Roger Lucas, a physical oceanographer, and myself were the inaugural PIs, but we quickly invited others to join. We ended up with five or six different investigators, all bringing in different skill sets, different intellects. They would bring in their labs, so the total number of people involved in the program grew exponentially. And this makes science a lot more fun and it makes it more productive and it makes it more creative. So we've been doing this now for 31 years. And 20 years into the HOT program, there was an opportunity that the National Science Foundation advertised on their website for people to create proposals that would fund what's called Centers of Excellence. And that, you know, we were very attracted to that concept because we thought that we had created an initial collaboration, five or six people, that could easily be scaled up to a much larger and even more exciting, dynamic, and successful and important scientific program. So we proposed the Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education, the acronym CMOR. And that program was really built on the successes over the first 20 years of the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program. We wanted to do more. We wanted to bring in more different themes, research themes. We wanted to expand the number of people involved. And we did this by inviting six different institutions from around the nation, Columbia University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of California, Oregon State University, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. These are top research universities in the nation, but the leadership was here at UH. That puts UH literally on the map, I think, for this particular discipline. And after five years of doing the CMOR program, which was nominally a 10-year program, these Centers of Excellence are supposed to be accelerator programs. And the idea is that after 10 years of federal funding, that maybe somebody else would step up and support these forever, maybe, or at least for another decade or so. So after five years, we were already thinking about follow-on programs. What are we going to do at the end? And we went to the UH administration at the time, and we got very favorable feedback about building a new building, CMOR-HALA. And that's shown behind us on the screen as well, along with the research vessel. We were able to raise the money through the sale of revenue bonds. The university, of course, organized the bond sale. But the point there is that we had immediate money to build the building. And this is a very different model than most of the buildings on the UH campus, which are through the CIP budgets of the university. So the deal with building this building is that the revenue stream would be grants and contracts and proposals and that we would create a learning center. We would create a center of excellence that would be self-sustaining, at least for the payment of the bond interest. And we would have to raise five or six million dollars a year in extramural funds to do this. So it was no trivial matter. And of course, if I retired or failed, or worse, I had a motorcycle accident, let's say, or something like that, and couldn't achieve this, then the space would probably be reassigned to some other more productive unit on campus, as it should be. Well, we have been successful. The 10-year center IATIS came and went, and we were worried about a follow-on program. And as I said, we were able to get support from the Simons Foundation for even a larger program than a CMOR. It's a program called SCOPE, the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology. It's again a very large collaboration, this time with 16 institutions, not just across the nation, but around the world. And we do collaborative research at Station Aloha. So over the course of these three programs, the Hawaii Ocean Time Series, which is ongoing and has been for 31 years, CMOR, which was a 10-year program funded by the State of Hawaii and by the National Science Foundation, and now the Simons Collaboration, which is a nominally a 10-year program, but could go on longer, we hope. We've brought in an aggregate of well over $150 million to support oceanographic research in the State of Hawaii. And this helps with the general economy, but it's more than just the money. It's really the knowledge gained, the discoveries made, and the predictions we can make about the future as we're facing up to things like climate variability and climate change. We've been out to the center for microbial oceanography, research and education. In fact, we made an OC16 movie, I hope you recall, and we walked around, we saw the center. It's really beautiful, and you designed it, didn't you? Well, I helped. It's really a beautiful building. It's right near the east-west center, down the east-west center road. A lovely place. And if you want to see that movie, you can, you can go on our site, look up Seymour and our site, or on YouTube, our YouTube channel, and you can see that OC16 movie. We're going to take a short break now, and when we come back, we're going to unpack some of the other things that Dave has been talking about, especially the elaboration model, which is so important. We'll be right back. I'm Wendy Lo, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock, live from Think Tech Hawaii, and on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. I'm back with Dave Carl, researcher extraordinaire and the director of the Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education, and Scope at UH Manoa. So one of the things Dave was talking about, and which Dave and I were talking about before the show, is the model of collaboration. And I'm so interested in that because last night I was watching on Netflix a movie about the Mayo Clinic, which distinguishes itself from medicine as it is otherwise practiced in this country and many countries because it has a completely collaborative model where you can put a specialist together and when you put them all together you can have the benefit of all of their collective knowledge. This is very special in medicine, but it's also special in science. Well, you might say we are the Mayo Clinic of the ocean. Scope and Seymour and in fact the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program were all founded on that same basic principle that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when you collaborate in science. I don't think there's any question about that. Collaborative science is not for everybody, but it certainly is for me. I was trained at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California and when I was a graduate student I was part of a collaborative research effort funded by the Department of Energy called the Food Chain Research Group where we had we were trying to understand the marine food chain or what we now call the marine food web, this very complicated complex interaction of phytoplankton, zooplankton fish, viruses, bacteria and we were just getting the very basics of that when I was a grad student in the 1970s. But it took a village as Hillary Clinton would say to really attack these great problems of ocean science. So this collaboration was one of the few at the time and ever in the field of plankton biology, the so-called Food Chain Research Group. So I always wanted to build my own career around that same model. Early on in my career I did a lot of research in Antarctica. I went 23 times to Antarctica and believe me, when you go to Antarctica you don't want to be alone. You want to be with other people. You want to be helping each other because it's not only difficult science but it's a rugged environment so you always need people around for safety reasons as well. It's not unlike going to sea. When you go to sea you're out there 24-7 so it's not a job where you punch a clock and then go to your room and watch movies or something. You're always busy. If you're not busy doing your own work there's always somebody else and there's always things that need help. It's water sampling and water processing. It's equipment that might break, that needs repair out at sea. It's keeping underway systems operating properly and efficiently. It's sending data back to shore when we're out at Station Aloha 100 kilometers due north of Kahuku Point and back to shore even from the ship where people are shore are processing those data sets and sending initial results back to the ships so that we can tune our experiments or do new experiments use that to build on the knowledge gained. It's a lot of fun to go to sea. I know you're an old Coast Guard guy you've probably been to sea in your career and it's a thrill to be at sea. Especially when you're doing science and trying to understand the sea around you. So, you know, you've learned a lot about the sea but the sea has also changed in these 30 years. Microbial structure of the sea the composition of the ocean the effect of climate change. Can you talk about the kinds of experiments you've been doing and the kinds of lessons you've learned scientifically? Well, our program, the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program was founded on the principle that one needs to look at a complex environment like the North Pacific of tropical gyre for a fairly long period of time in order to separate the natural variability that occurs in all natural ecosystems from systematic or secular change whether it's due to anthropogenic forcing or not. So, we had designed the experiment to last for at least 10 years. So, it's going to be the time scale needed who start to see who certainly map the climatology of station aloha by that I mean how it changes season to season. And after doing 10 years you might have a good constraint on what the expectation is for the seasonal change so that if you see a very unusual year or you start seeing a couple years in a row that fall outside of these zones then you can start thinking more seriously about what impacts you're observing. Now some of the things we've seen at station aloha that were predictable but never before seen in the ocean is the CO2 in the atmosphere we know is building up from fossil fuel burning and manufacturing and just various industries around the globe. It scales on the on the world domestic production and it scales on human population. There should be no surprise about that if you plot human population my birth year there were 2.5 billion people on the planet now there's more than 7 billion in counting well with all of those people comes more resource use and more byproducts including carbon dioxide carbon dioxide has been building up in our atmosphere we've known that for nearly 50 years or more but we've never really looked carefully at the ocean to see how the ocean is responding to that so we're done at station aloha and at our sister station in Bermuda the Bermuda Atlantic time series program which was started on the exact same day really the 30th of October 1988 we wrote the proposals together we made the proposals to NSF together we got funded together and we've been continuing the research together but at both oceans the Atlantic ocean for Bermuda and the Pacific ocean for Hawaii we can now see that the oceans have absorbed a lot of the CO2 from the atmosphere but that is a buffer for the atmosphere it wasn't for the oceans there'd be even more CO2 in the atmosphere and the continents would even be warmer we'd be suffering from larger storms but the ocean has absorbed a lot of the carbon dioxide somewhere between 30 and 40% of the carbon dioxide that humans have released to the atmosphere has been absorbed globally by the oceans but with that comes a change in the ocean a very fundamental change called ocean acidification and I know you've had Chris Sabine on your show and Chris is an expert on ocean acidification and on what we call anthropogenic carbon dioxide which is the carbon dioxide that humankind is putting into the atmosphere but suffice it to say that the ocean is becoming more acidic it might reach a stage of acidity where certain kinds of plants can't grow anymore they can't photosynthesize that would be a devastating consequence for the whole food web we might get extinctions so that would probably be predicted under conditions of both surface ocean warming and acidification the intergovernmental panel on climate change this United Nations organization will look at the state of our planet was founded interestingly enough the same year that we founded Station Aloha in 1988 there were totally unrelated events but it took more than 25 years before the intergovernmental panel on climate change realized that the oceans should also be something that we should pay attention to most of their work before that was dealt with land use land management which because that's where people live people don't live on or in the ocean it was kind of Mara incognita I call it the invisible sea the one that cryptic ocean that we don't know much about and that's still the case but I was fortunate to be a member of the IPCC 2014 what they call the annual assessment 5 so this was the fifth of the assessments that they've made about the state of our planet and only in the assessment report 5 did we have two chapters on the oceans one of which I co-authored with a German colleague and the other was co-authored by some other scientists from foreign countries so we were able to set up a baseline for what the oceans looked like circa 2014 and future assessment reports will compare the state of the ocean to our baseline study but as I said this is a long term process it might take 30 40 50 years to start seeing really global effects of the deterioration of the ocean the trouble is once we see it it can never be stopped it's like moving a big ship through the ocean you can imagine a huge container ship one of the mats and ships or something and then a small kayak in front of it the kayak has no hope of that big ship stopping in time because it's got so much momentum it's the same thing with the climate system we're building the momentum of the climate system day after day and we're not doing anything to ameliorate the problem sooner or later it's going to reach a threshold it's going to reach some tipping point where there will be some catastrophic effect and then people will start paying attention and say oh we have to stop doing x, y, or z and I'm sorry it will be way too late for that the huge ship is on the way the huge ship is moving toward us and there's so much at stake here and the governments of the world need to pay attention to this some are doing it more carefully than others I'm sad to say that the US is lagging behind in our ability to think about these pending problems and I know there's very active groups at UH the state government Hawaii is one of the more progressive states with regard to climate change they have a climate commission the mayor has a climate commission and some other states California is very progressive as you know but our federal government is really not responding as they should this way we can know how fast the ship is moving and how pervasive these processes are and thus raise public awareness about the need to take steps to work on climate change and do things to slow it down and that's a sort of a side benefit of what you and other researchers at UH are doing UH is a leader in this area evaluating the ocean and the environment for climate change you're absolutely right and you touched on a very important thing Jay public policy awareness and scientists are not the best advocates for the work that they do it takes a village again it takes field professional journalists it takes communications experts and some scientists who can do all of those things are leading the charge because the general public I think has a fair appreciation for scientists but they don't know what they do to rate how the public feels about various professions scientists are always up there but if you ask the general public can you name a scientist they can't the national academy conducted a survey of this and 50% of the general public could not even name one scientist and then they lessened the question they said well the person doesn't have to be alive just any scientist in the history of humankind 40% of the general population could not name an Einstein or a pastoral it's all changed though Dave because now they can name a scientist it's Dave Carl the director the director of the center for microbial oceanography research and education and scope at UH Manoa we're going to come back we're going to talk to you some more we're going to visit the Kila Mahana we're going to visit the center again we're going to make some movies about this to help you and you can help us raise public awareness and the other thing is make sure you take your award with you today and hang it up in an appropriate place either in the center or on the ship thank you very much Jay and as the slogan for think tech Hawaii goes each day better yes absolutely thank you very much Dave