 My name is Peter Dorn. I'm an earth scientist from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I'm a climatologist and a limnologist studying lakes and polar regions. My expertise is in polar regions, so I study Antarctic climate responsive ecosystems to changing climate. And so most of my work is in a place called the Dry Valleys in Antarctica, which is around McMurdo Station, which is a huge station the U.S. runs. And it's a remote environment. I'm right now responsible for the meteorological network in that area, which is about 15 stations. They're autonomous stations. They run by themselves through the winter. It's probably one of the best-maintained weather station networks on earth, really. I mean, we calibrate it frequently. Our longest-running record now is about 25 years or so, which for Antarctica is a pretty long record, to have a continuous record. But I also study lakes and how the climate's impacting the lakes and the ecosystem, so the ice thickness. As the ice gets thicker on these lakes, it's cutting out sunlight, and that's reducing photosynthesis in the water column underneath and that type of thing. So it's not just climate that I study, but I study climate and its impact on the environment. You go to some of the most extreme parts of the planet. Have you had any close calls? No, it's actually, you know, the areas I work, it's valley floor stuff, so I don't do any really dangerous climbing or anything. I think the most dangerous thing we do is get on helicopters to fly out there. It's kind of a decadal thing, you know, about every 10 years, there's some kind of helicopter incident. And so I always warn my students and stuff to make sure you're dressed properly because if you go down, you know, you want to be prepared. So I work in the Dry Valleys, which is one of the coldest and driest areas on earth. And it's called dry because there's no glaciers there, you know, but we get snow and the snow melts and glaciers melt and form lakes in the bottom of the valley. And so for years, I've been looking at that as a model for not modern Mars, but what Mars was like in the past. And so, you know, we have these ice-covered lakes that are probably the, you know, we imagine on Mars that they may have been the last vestige of life on Mars. You know, we have the saying that the last swim of life on Mars was an ice-covered lake like the Dry Valleys, you know. So as the lakes evaporated and Mars cooled, left behind deposits that now these rovers are going up to look at. And so it gives you an idea of what to look for and what's the evidence that life was there. The big thing now are these deltas, you know, that the rivers flow down into the lakes and leave deltas behind. And now the Curiosity rover that's up there right now in Mars, you know, they're finding these ancient deltas. And so, you know, some of the work I've done in the past on these deltas looking at carbon isotopes and whatnot could actually give some clues to what that evidence that they're finding is telling them. Mars is a lot colder. Not that much colder, actually. It gets way, way cold and it gets warm, you know. So the average is lower than Antarctica, but not that much lower. It's kind of surprising. But the extremes are much more variable, you know. It gets really, really cold at night and it gets above freezing in some places in the soils during the day. So, you know, not too far off, but there's very few places on Earth that are that extreme. You not only have to go to Antarctica, you have to go to Antarctica and go high elevation to get closer to modern-day Mars. In the polar regions, we're really on a knife edge between melting and freezing in these areas. I mean, in order to have lakes, you have to have melt at some point. And so the summers have to get warm enough for liquid water to form. So because of that, you know, a warm summer is a huge difference between a cool summer. You know, you get waterfalls coming off of glaciers and you get the lakes rising up because they don't have any outlet. So you do notice the climate quite a bit more because it's right there in front of you. You get these gushing hydrological systems that turn on with these warm summers and then you get cold summers where almost nothing happens. So you really notice the difference because of that shift between freezing and melting. So yeah, you do see over the long term there's a visible change that you can see. And here, you know, a warm summer, cold summer, they sort of blend together. You don't see the differences that much. You see the physical changes in the Antarctic because we're right at the freezing point. You see the difference. You know, I think here the problem, the big problem, is people don't see, you know, they can't compare year to year. It's all statistics and that gets above most people's heads. You know, I think if you could see something that was really dramatic that just, oh, it's a degree warmer this summer than it was last summer, people would start to take note. And one of my favorite, you know, that the movie by Al Gore, The Inconvenient Truth, one of my favorite scenes in that movie is the frog in the pot, you know, where he puts the frog on the pot and then turns the heat up and the frog just dies, right? Throws the frog into boiling water, the frog hops out, right? And I think we're sitting in the pot right now and slowly dying because that temperature is going up and no one really notices, you know? We published a paper in 2002, I believe it was, and it showed that it was, most of the paper was on our drive alley environment, so it showed that the drive alleys had been cooling over a period of about 16 years. And then we got together with a climatologist named John Walsh, who was on the paper as well, and looked at the continent, the whole continent to see how it was changing. And, you know, there's not many meteorological stations in Antarctica and they're spread out, you know, it's actually kind of ridiculous that there's so little, the very important continent, we have so little meteorology on the continent. But what we did was we mapped out where it was cooling, where it was warming, and what had been done previously was there was just a sort of arithmetic average of all the stations. It turns out there's a lot of stations in the small peninsula area up by South America and it's actually warming quite a bit there. So all those stations reporting warming compared to the whole continent ended up giving an average that was a warming continent. But when you look at the spatial distribution of the warming, actually more area of the continent was cooling than warming over a long period of time. So we published that and the response was pretty immediate. You know, Rush Limbaugh picked it up the next day on his show, Ann Coulter talked about it. It's in that book by Michael Creighton, The State of Fear, one of our figures is in that book. And they were basically saying, well Rush Limbaugh said if they don't understand Antarctica, if we don't understand Antarctica, how do we understand the rest of the world? It was saying that our study was actually disproving that global warming existed, which was really irresponsible. It's Antarctica, we weren't actually predicting the future. We were just talking about this trend in Antarctica. And actually what's happening now in Antarctica is it's sort of leveled off and the models are showing that it will start to kick in once the ozone hole heals. The ozone hole is actually, you know, ozone is a greenhouse gas, so having a hole over Antarctica is causing a cooling and it won't get into the details. But as you fill in that hole, you start the continent to warm like the rest of the planet. So it's going to happen. You know, it's just this little hiccup in between. How did you respond to the misrepresentations? For a while I let it slide off me. And, you know, you start to read blogs and stuff like that, and you see people misrepresenting your work. And there was one quote in particular that really got me annoyed was, it was a quarter-lane press article and this guy misquoted me. It wasn't even a misquote. It was a made-up quote that Peter Dorn, a climatologist from University of Illinois, says that global warming is not real, something along those lines, right? It was nothing I ever said. And so I started to wonder, how can I fight this? And, you know, you can't do it in scientific literature because those guys aren't reading the scientific literature. So one of the press people at my university convinced me to write an op-ed to The New York Times. And to my shock, it got accepted and it was very well read. You know, that day, you know, they have the little sidebar there showing who's reading what article and what's the most popular article of the day. And we were in number two the whole day on The New York Times. There was an article about yoga mats that beat us, but... So it got read. And it's nice to have that article. Now I can point people to it. You know, they write me and say something about that paper, which is now, you know, almost 15 years old. I can point them to The New York Times article. This explains the whole thing and what it really means. My main bread and butter is the actual science. But I'm really interested in the perspective and communication of science. So I teach earth science and I taught a course for a number of years to first-year students. And one day I read the statistic about the public opinion in the U.S. on climate change and how many people thought that humans were responsible and it was disturbingly low. I think at the time it was 58% or something like that. And so I wondered, well, how would my students respond to that? And I did a little anonymous questionnaire and they were up in the high nineties, mid to high nineties. And so there was this real dichotomy between what these intelligent young people understood and what the general public understood. And then I had a student who was looking for a... She was sort of pond off on me and she was looking for a project and I thought, hey, well, let's do this as a questionnaire. It's an idea I hadn't back in my head for a while. But the problem was coming up with the database of people. Because, you know, we're at AGU and at AGU you can't just ask them to give you their membership. You know, that would be a great way to do it, but they just won't do it. Although one idea I had for here was to have a booth maybe and have people answering the questionnaire. You get maybe 20,000 responses potentially. So our database for our survey came from this book. There was no digital copy, so we had to cut the back off the book and then feed thousands of pages through a scanner and do optical character recognition and build up a database that took a few weeks out on undergrad paid to do that. And then we send out the questionnaire and got the response back that way. There's a couple of key questions. One is the planet warming. And more people obviously agree with that than the second question, which is are humans responsible for that? And the overall numbers were only in the 80s for people, for scientists believing, and these are earth scientists. And it's all earth scientists, not just climate people, it's geologists, it's seismologists, you know, it's all kinds of different people. And the response was in the 80s for are we responsible, are humans responsible? And that was a little lower than I thought it would be. But then you start picking apart the data and you start looking at what's their expertise. And it turns out that the people that are publishing climate scientists, the real experts, that self-identify themselves as climatologists, that's 97, I think it was 90, 98%. You know, it's a small group. You get down to only about 100 people that are in that expert group, but they are overwhelmingly in support that humans are causing global warming or climate change. I try not to use that term, global warming. I like climate disruption as a new one that seems to be more descriptive. I think the wording was significantly ranking global temperatures. Yeah, yeah. So that was interesting. And there's a couple of little tidbits in there that were fascinating. So the meteorologists were largely against the idea that we were causing global warming. And that one I can't quite explain except potentially, you know, meteorologists deal with short-term phenomena and they're not climatologists and they'll have the argument, well, it's hard to predict the weather two weeks from now. How can we predict the weather 30 years from now? And it's the wrong perspective, right? We're not trying to predict whether it's going to rain in San Francisco on June 15th, 2025, right? We're trying to predict the global average temperature or the regional average temperature over a long period of time. The group that had the most doubt about global warming, and it was very low, I think it was in the 60s, was the petroleum geologists, the people that study oil and oil reserves. And that one, for me, is not too hard to figure out. They're getting their funding from the oil companies who are not really big supporters of this idea that we're causing global warming. What was the response after the paper came out? There was varied response. I went into this, it's kind of biased, but I went into it knowing that, yes, there is a broad consensus that science believes that we are causing this, right? I have no doubt of that, because I'm a scientist. I'm involved with this, and I talk to people, and I know there's a very small percentage. But there were actually, I can't reveal specific people that responded or names. There were a few names that surprised me within the community that were on the negative side. There was a broad response. There was overwhelming support from colleagues that knew what was true, that we are causing this, and that there's a broad consensus. There were people, and still today, many years later, there's still people picking apart the technique, the actual survey. They say it's a self-selected survey. And even some people that I respect their opinion would say, well, I'm not going to trust those results because it's a self-selected survey. You went out and you collected these names, and then you sent everyone on that list an invitation to respond, and they chose whether to respond or not. And so they're saying that bias is the results. But I don't know how else to do it, and our number, 98%, is very close to other surveys that have been done and other approaches using completely different methods. And it's all 97%, 98% is what it comes down to. So I think it's right, regardless of whether it's a self-selected survey, I think it's right. So the negative criticisms, there was the specifics of the technique. I think there's a lot of people that just didn't like the results, and so they wanted to bash it based on they didn't want to believe that there is this consensus. There was criticism that it was a small group of people. And the response to the survey, we got, I think it was, it was close to 30% response we got. And people that don't really understand these types of surveys say, well, that's nothing. Well, that's huge to get that kind of response. These are very busy people. I was actually amazed. We got so many people responding. And then when we broke it down to different categories and we get to our expert group and we only have 100 people, and that's been one of the points of contention is, well, there's only 100 experts. But it's out of tens of thousands of people we ask. So, and we're boiling down to finer and finer groups. So, and then the wording was the other one. The wording in our question was criticized. The word significant was big. And so we use this word significant. To scientists, significant is used all the time. You know, a significant response. It doesn't necessarily need to have statistics attached to it. It means overwhelmingly almost certainly true, you know. So people really picked apart what is this word significant mean. But I think everyone that responded to our survey because they're all our scientists, they knew what significant meant. I did not have much personal attack against me or my student. But like I say, it's still going on today. You know, I think what are we four or five years removed from the study? And I still get emails almost monthly, you know, someone picking apart the survey. I had one guy recently, he wanted to joint publish a paper in EOS because he found some errors in the study which were actually not errors at all. But he wanted to go to this length of having a rebuttal in EOS and he wanted me to participate in that. But I didn't even agree that there was any problem with the paper. So, yeah, it lives on and I imagine it will live on a lot longer. You know, EOS is not often a peer-reviewed paper. And I made a point of asking them to have it be peer-reviewed. And so it was a peer, our study was peer-reviewed. And I know who, you know, it was an anonymous peer review, but I know who did it now. And it was the review, the response, the review was published as is, this is fantastic, right? That was the review. So it went through scrutiny and that person is one of the most respected climate scientists on earth, you know. So I think that's important for people to know that it wasn't just, you know, it's not a newspaper article, it's a peer-reviewed paper. It went through scrutiny. I also sent it around to many colleagues for comment before it was published. And so, you know, it stood the test of time and there's still these questions about self-selected or not. But like I said, I think the number makes sense with all the other studies that have come out. In the Anderegg study, you know, they looked at expertise of people in the field and what's the background of people that are actually criticizing the studies and found that the people on the other side actually don't have the credentials, the scientific credentials to make judgment on climate change. But, you know, their result compared to our result and the Cook result, it was all using slightly different approaches, not necessarily surveys, and it all came out with the same numbers. So I'm pretty confident that they're all good results. We're all agreeing. I never know when you see someone say a 97% of climate scientists agree I never know which study they're referring to because they're all sort of around the same ballpark. I don't know about Australia, but in the U.S., there's a machine. There's a machine, a right-wing machine. It doesn't just be blunt. It's disinformation, you know, and for whatever reason, and I believe that there is some incentive behind oil industry funding to certain parts of the right, and it's a cultural thing too. It's almost become uncool in the Republican side to believe in global warming. That's their party line. They've decided that's their party line and they're sticking to it. They want to argue, and they just want to win the fight, regardless of the truth. The truth has been lost. So unfortunately, those people have loud voices and they have outlets for their information. They have radio shows, they have books, they have a whole television network in the U.S. devoted to this disinformation. And so their message is getting out there and a lot of people get that and they read it and they view it. So I think it's a lot of confusion and it's being intentionally put out there by certain factions of the right wing. There's certain arguments that humans aren't causing the CO2 as one argument that is so easy to disprove. You know, that we have chemical signatures in the CO2 going in the atmosphere that are clearly tied to humans. The Carbon-14 in the CO2 is caused by fossil fuels being put in the atmosphere. You can actually do a budget to get them up there. And so that's easy to disprove. The one that's harder is that CO2 is actually causing the warming. But again, you know, you look at the IPCC report recently, it was actually the one before last where they showed a modeling of what the temperature would be with and without the CO2 and it clearly is having a huge impact. You know, and those models are done without any preconceived outcome and they run multiple ways and they always come up with the same answer that greenhouse gases are very important, you know, and we can show it. I don't know how much more we have to do to prove that there is a consensus. It seems like a silly argument at this point, you know, that we've proved it over and over and over and clearly there is a strong consensus. It's time to take the next step whatever that is.