 Welcome to the afternoon's briefing on how climate change will affect the United States with a very talented and knowledgeable panel who are actually co-authors of the National Climate Assessment to discuss the National Climate Assessment and the IPCC reports. My name is Jared Blum. I serve as chair of the Environmental Energy Study Institute, and we are thrilled to put together this briefing for you with the National Wildlife Federation and the Union Concerned Scientists. It's wonderful to partner with them. EESI, for those of you who are not familiar with us, were the product 35 years ago, a visionary group, a bipartisan group of members of Congress, put this organization together to provide a fact-based science-based forum for the deliberation of solutions for environmental and energy challenges in the public policy space. Over those 35 years, we've averaged about 25 to 30 briefings like this a year, and I did even fundamental math. I think we're about around 1,000 briefings over that period of time, and if you see the people at the panel here, we bring in about three or four people at each briefing. So that's many thousands of experts. We've had the pleasure and privilege to bring to the United States Congress and to staff to give our information out, not our information, their information. The process we're going to use this morning, this afternoon, is sensibly. Senator Carper was going to lead off. We want to thank Senator Carper for arranging for the room. Unfortunately, he's going to be late, so we're going to move forward with the panel. When Senator Carper arrives, we're going to allow him to interrupt and give a few comments and then continue on with our presentation. What I'd like to do first is introduce Colin Almira, who's the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, who's going to make a few comments. It's America's largest wildlife conservation organization with nearly 6 million members. It's focused on recovering America's wildlife, improving management of and access to public lands and advancing environmental education. Colin led the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control as Cabinet Secretary from 2009 through 2014. Now there's a parenthetical, Colin, and I think I'm just going to use it. When Almira was appointed in 2009, he was the youngest state cabinet official in the nation, I assume that's no longer the case. Colin. Well, good afternoon. It's wonderful to be with all of you. This is a special opportunity, and I'm really excited that we're kind of standing room only and appreciate everyone coming from all the offices to be with us. We couldn't be more proud of our partnership with EESI and the Union of Concerned Scientists. And I think what we're looking forward to doing with all of you today is take the words off the page from the National Climate Assessment as well as the IPCC's most recent report and help you translate that into action that can actually happen in these hallowed halls. We have a great panel of experts and we'll be introducing them in just a minute. But this conversation comes at an incredibly critical time. I mean, how many of you have had your bosses come to you looking for solutions around resilience because your communities back home are facing inland flooding at levels you haven't seen before, intense precipitation events, hurricanes off the shore, typhoons in the Pacific, wildfires out west. The impacts are getting worse by the day and they're exactly what the peer-reviewed science projects. So the question is, what do we do with that? How do we take these words off a page off these reports and actually turn them into solutions? And as a wildlife guy, the impact is not just on people and on public health, but the impact on wildlife is absolutely terrifying when you're looking at thousands of species at risk of potential extinction years ahead unless we take action. So today we're going to be talking about two specific reports. The first one is the Fourth National Climate Assessment. This is that report that the administration tried to hide the day after Thanksgiving when everyone was shopping. But it's incredibly important. It was reviewed by hundreds of scientists, massive amounts of peer-reviewed data driving it, a comprehensive report that's required every four years by the US Global Change Research Climate Change Program as required by Congress. This fourth edition, as I mentioned, released in November, analyzes the impacts of climate across the entire country. And what's interesting is that it actually breaks it down, getting into regions and looking at individual sectors, looking at things like agriculture, energy production, land use, water resources, transportation, biodiversity. Looks at a range of impacts, so you can localize it for your individual senator or your House members, impacts it back home. And what you're going to find is that it matches directly with a lot of the concerns you're hearing from constituents as they're talking about not having enough water for their irrigation system, whether they're concerned about the impacts in their drinking water because all of a sudden more sediments winding up in the water column. The NCA applies these findings to the 10 regions across the country, breaking it down granularly, and then features recommendations for how to reduce the risks associated with each of these climate impacts to protect public health, economic sectors, and the environment. This report was crafted with policymakers, utility and natural resource managers, public health officials, and energy planners in mind. And again, if you haven't had a chance to read the executive summary, as well as read the part for your specific region, because it's incredibly important information. We'll hear more about it from the panel in just a minute. The second report we're going to talk about today is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC Special Report, which delves into the potential ramifications of different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. This landmark report, released in October of last year, is the product of thousands of expert and government reviewers, more than 6,000 scientific references and 91 authors and editors from more than 40 countries. And there was a comment the other day by the White House talking about how a lot of the science hasn't been held with scrutiny. I was talking to Bruce Stein, our chief scientist, a little while ago. For any of you that's tried to publish a peer-reviewed paper, there is no more rigorous process in this country going through data than going through that process. This is data that has been gone through with a fine-tooth comb by folks around the world to make sure that the UN had the absolute best information to share with countries around the globe. This report found that to keep global warming from crossing that critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, a rapid and far-reaching, that's a quote, rapid and far-reaching transformation of the global economy would be necessary, including land use and energy use, transportation, building, and energy. So we are absolutely blessed to have some of the nation's leading climate scientists with us here today to talk about the themes in these reports. We'll be discussing how climate change affects different parts of the US and how the federal government, states, local governments can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and help communities adapt to the rapidly encroaching risks over the next decade. And I know a lot of you are sent here by your offices to take copious notes. I think one of the opportunities is to take science and translate it into policy. Because back home, whether you represent a Republican member or a Democratic member, folks are feeling the impacts. And so I do hope you can glean enough lessons from here today and then think about practical applications. I know we're in a divided government right now, and it's hard to kind of think about big bipartisan things getting done. But we can make ourselves more resilient through water infrastructure, through a bigger infrastructure package. We can do things, reduce emissions in smart ways that are bipartisan across the entire country. And again, we might not get to the biggest solutions in the next couple of years, but there's absolutely no reason that all of your bosses don't make good progress in the next couple of years. So with that, let me bring back up Jared and I'll introduce Senator Carper in a few minutes. Thank you, Colin. And to your point about your ability, US staff, to use this information, let me remind everybody, we are, first of all, we are live streamed for a real-time audience. But in addition, what ESI has done for virtually all our briefings is it's put on our website. So if there's something you hear today that resonates with you or will resonate with your other staff or your boss, by all means check on our website, EESI.org, and you'll be able to find exactly what was said and be able to use that as a reference tool. So having said that, let me introduce the three panelists. Our process is I'm gonna do that seriatim right now and then let them speak one after the other and then we'll hold questions after the third presenter, if that's all right with you all, okay? Our first presenter is Dr. David Easterling. He's a supervisory physical scientist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. I ran out of steam on that title. He is currently Chief of the Observations and Data Records Section and Director of the Technical Support Unit for the US National Climate Assessment. Dr. Catherine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on developing and applying high resolution climate projections to understand what climate change means for people and the natural environment. She is a professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and has a BS in physics from the University of Toronto and MS and PhD in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois. Our third presenter, Dr. Brenda Equazal is a senior climate scientist and the director of climate science for the Climate and Energy Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dr. Equazal is a co-author of the Fourth National Climate Assessment as are our other panelists. She presents frequently at a range of audiences on climate science, educating the public on practical achievable solutions for climate. So David will start with you and then we'll move on. Thank you. Great, it's good to be here, especially after landing this morning at National Airport. So I'm based in Nashville. We used to be called the National Climate Data Center. We are the world's largest archive of weather and climate data. We have almost 40 petabytes of data. And one of the things that we do with these data is to do monitoring reports and we also look at the record for evidence of climate variability and change. So what I'm gonna do is talk about the observed climate change within the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Oops. So we're gonna start off with what we call the globally average surface temperature. So this is if you take all the observations of data from around the world at climate stations, as well as sea surface temperatures taken by ships of opportunity, all the freighters and everything that go out there, they take, they used to throw a bucket over the side, pull it up once a day. They would note where they were and what the temperature of the ocean was and record it in their logbook. Now a lot of this stuff is actually provided by satellites. But this is sort of a blended record that shows you the history of the one number when you average all these numbers, these values up into one number for the globe. This is all the climate stations, all the satellite data, all the sea surface temperature data into one number. So this would sort of represent everything from the tropics to the poles, all the area of the Earth's surface. So we start in 1880 right here and you can see this zero line is just the long-term average. So it gives you an idea. Instead of putting the true number up there, which would be about 58 degrees or so, we use what we call anomalies. So these are simply differences from the average. And so we can see the temperatures kind of went down actually to about 1910. Temperatures rose to World War II. There's a little bit of uncertainty in here because of the war. But then if you start to look from about 1970 to the present, you can see that it's very steady rapid increase in the globally-average temperature. This corresponds to the same period that we've seen a very rapid increase as the greenhouse gases. So where is it warmed? One of the things we expect knowing how the climate system works is we expect to see the greatest warming in the highest latitudes. The darkest reds here are where it's warmed the most. Since 1901. You can see here in Alaska, parts of Canada, Russia, and then down here in the southern oceans, it's warmed quite a bit. You see, almost everywhere it's warmed. The only places that really show any evidence of cooling are this little blue box right here off of the coast of Greenland where we have sinking of the ocean waters as a part of the ocean circulation. And then right here in the southeastern U.S., centered on Alabama, there's a little bit of cooling, okay, which, depending on how you look at it, if you look at the record from 1960 to the present, it's warming. So the 1930s and 20s were actually very warm in that part of the country. And so as a consequence, when you fit a line to it, you actually get slight cooling. That's the only place in, those two places right there are pretty much the only places in the world now that show any kind of cooling. Everywhere else is showing either warming or very little trend. These very light boxes are very little trend. And the ones where we have gray down here we simply don't have the data. We don't have much data for Antarctica, for example. Okay, what about greenhouse gas trends? Okay, this is from NOAA's Earth System Lab monitoring at Monteloa on top of the mountain there. They've been monitoring CO2 since about 1957. And you can see that CO2 has made a very steady increase. You can see the stair step, oops. The stair stepping is just, you know, the green up and green down of the mainly in the Northern Hemisphere. But we see a very rapid increase. CO2 now is over 411 parts per million. Other greenhouse gases, methane, has shown an increase. This is from about 1980. Nitrous oxides all have shown an increase. And this increase is due to the burning of fossil fuels. Okay, other indicators of climate change. Okay, Arctic sea ice decline. Okay, this is from satellites. This is 1984, September. You can see how much ice cover there was in the Arctic Ocean. This is 2016, same month, September. You can see how little there is now. This whole area right here is gone in terms of ice cover. This shows you the actual time series. And you can see a very steady decline for about 1979, 1980 to the present in the Arctic sea ice. And as a matter of fact, ships are now starting to be able to, in September or even earlier, to sail through the so-called Northwest Passage because it's ice free enough that some freighters can actually get through there. Okay, what about sea level? This is one of the indicators that we expect to go up as we have warming of the climate. Some indicators would go down like Arctic sea ice. Some indicators would go up like sea level. This is USC level. And as you can see, this is from 1920 to the present. And it's gone up somewhere around eight inches from the 1920s to the present. Okay, and that has major impacts, beginning to have major impacts. If any of you have ever been to Charleston or Miami or Wilmington, some of the areas along the east coast where they have this kind of coastal flooding, what happens is when you get a very high tide, very often the tide then begins to spill over into the streets. And that's what's happening here. This is in Charleston. This is just what we call sunny day or even nuisance flooding. And it simply is happening when you have these very high tides and the fact that we've had already eight inches of sea level increase, you then begin to get this spill over. This has increased five to 10 folds since the 1960s in a lot of these coastal cities, especially along the east coast. And it's beginning to have major economic impacts. Charleston is spending many, many millions of dollars on systems to be able to drain this water away from the streets. Miami, I think, is doing the same thing. Probably Wilmington, Norfolk, all the areas that are beginning to see this sort of impact. Okay, let's drill down to the US. This is Observe Temperature Change 1901 to 2015. This was in, so the Fourth National Climate Assessment had two volumes. But a lot of what I'll show you is from volume one, the Climate Science Special Report which lays out the climate science and was released about a year and a half ago. Volume two was more on the impacts. It does have some of this stuff and that's the one that was released just after Thanksgiving. This shows you where it's warmed in the United States. And again, you remember I mentioned Alabama down here, one little blue spot down here. Everywhere else you can see is warming. In some of these places, especially Alaska up here, it's warmed quite a bit. The darker the red, the more it's warmed. And it's having impacts on things like the growing season length. This has changed in the growing season length since 1895 where it's green, the growing season length, basically the difference between the last spring frost and the first fall frost is getting longer. So we're seeing a major increase as much as 20 and 30 days in some areas. Very heavy precipitation. So this is another thing that we expect to change and increase as the climate warms. So as the climate warms, you end up with more water vapor in the atmosphere because the warmer air can hold more water vapor. That water vapor is then in the air available to come out in these heavy rainfall events. And we are indeed seeing increases in heavy rainfall events. These are observed changes. The Northeast is seeing a very large increase. The Midwest, the Southeast, Puerto Rico, all the areas in the continental US and including Alaska are seeing an increase. Only Hawaii, sort of a tropical subtropical climate is seeing a decrease. And again, this is having major consequences. This is a picture from Houston right after or during Hurricane Harvey. And in some of these areas, it was unbelievable when we started looking at how much rainfall has actually fell over this four day period. So in these areas got almost 50 inches of rain over a four day period. And you can imagine the flooding that would happen when you have something like that. Okay, and I just wanna finish up here. So we've seen the increase in temperatures, the globally average surface air temperature that I showed you right at the beginning. And we are confident that the increases in greenhouse gases that I showed are the dominant cause of that warming. Well, why are we confident that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the dominant cause? One reason is all the indicators we expect to go up such as temperature, water vapor, heavy precipitation events, they're all going up. All the things that we expect to decrease such as Arctic sea ice, ice sheet mass and Antarctica and Greenland are all decreasing. And so that's one of the reasons. But the other reason is what we can do. This is the only little bit of modeling I'm gonna show. Catherine's gonna show quite a bit more. So this is the observed record. If you remember the red and blue graph I showed at the beginning, this is just a black line version of it. So this is the observed globally average surface temperature from 1880 to the present. You remember it kinda went down up to World War II to decrease a little bit and then it's been steadily rising since somewhere around 1960, 1970. Okay, well, if we take climate models and we try to replicate this, we have to include what we call forcing factors in the model, changes in greenhouse gases as the model runs, changes in land use, throw in where we know the volcanoes have gone off on any change in solar output or orbital forcing from the sun. And that's what all these other lines are. And these are the same thing as simulated by climate models only showing just all natural drivers which would be the volcanic, the solar and the orbital doesn't really show this upper trend. So just the natural forcing, the sun, volcanoes, things like that, do not cause the climate to warm. Now if we include the human factors, okay, greenhouse gases, that's this one. We have, let's see now, land cover here, aerosols. Ozone, right, I could read. Ozone, all these drivers here, you can see the only one that really shows warming is greenhouse gases, okay? And actually, if you look at this, this is the observed record here. If we just had greenhouse gases and not these others, Ozone, land cover and aerosol changes, we would actually have more warming than we are currently observing, okay? But if we include them all, so if we include everything in the models, include all these forcings and all these forcings, we are actually able to do a pretty darn good job of replicating the globally averaged surface air temperature for models, okay? So the only way we can get this to work like this is by including all these drivers, okay? And that's one of the big reasons why we're pretty confident that the greenhouse gas emissions and other changes, human induced changes are why we're seeing this warming, that's it. Thank you, Dave. So the National Climate Assessment was divided up into two volumes as Dave alluded to this time. The first volume was released a year ago last November. So not this past November, but a year before that. This one is available online at science2017.globalchange.gov and there's a really nice short two page summary you can read. So don't feel like you have to read all 450 pages. This volume currently is, at this time, the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the state of climate science, not just in the United States, but in the world. It included more than 50 authors from 12 federal agencies. It's almost 500 pages long, and this is really important. It was very thoroughly reviewed by anyone who wanted to provide input. It was reviewed twice by all relevant federal agencies and approved by those agencies before publication. It was subject to a review by the National Academy of Sciences that compiled a special panel of independent experts to review every aspect of the document and their review was over 100 pages long. We had to respond to every single one of their comments and then it was open for a full public review where anybody could register free of charge and provide comments, and we as the authors had to respond to every single public comment that we received and all of this is public record. If you go to the download page, you can actually see every comment we got and every response to it. So this is one of the most transparent processes you have ever seen for producing a scientific report. But if you could summarize those nearly 500 pages in just one sentence, it would be this. Climate change is real, it is us, it is serious, and the window of time to prevent widespread dangerous impacts is closing fast. I was the lead author on the Scenarios chapter that talks about the future. And what we know is that the future at this point in time depends on two things. It depends on, first of all, the amount of heat trapping gases that we humans continue to produce because we have now elbowed natural cycles out of the driver's seat, so to speak. We are driving this planet into the future and it is our choices that determine the future of our planet along with how sensitive the planet is to this unprecedented experiment that we are conducting with it. And I will show you just how unprecedented it is in a minute. But what you're looking at here is you're looking at the full range of scenarios that were considered in this report. It has been said that this report only considered a most extreme scenario. As you can see, that is false. This scenario considered a broad range of futures to a future that really almost cannot even happen anymore because we would have had to already start massively reducing carbon emissions five years ago and we didn't. And emissions on that lowest scenario, I know it's a bit hard to see, they actually go below zero before end of century. So in other words, we become a net sink of carbon, somehow sucking up more than we produce, two scenarios where we do continue to depend on fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. So throughout the entire report, volume one, volume two, all the regional and sectoral impacts, we look at this full range. Yes, go ahead. Okay, sure, thank you. On the right hand side is temperature. The temperature changes in the global average that result from the different choices we can make. And you can see that what is coming in the future is likely to be much more significant than what we've seen in the past. What is the colored range there? The colored range is due to the uncertainty in how the climate system is going to respond to what we do. And if we have one more minute, I will finish up this section, which will be perfect. How unprecedented are the changes we're seeing today? Well, the last time CO2 levels passed 400 parts per million, it was at least three million years ago. And since we published this study, a new study came out saying, no, it's more like 15 million years ago. Why is that unprecedented? Because there were not humans at that time. The planet has seen more extreme conditions. Human civilization has not. And that is why we care. If carbon dioxide levels continue to grow over the century and beyond, we would see levels that we haven't experienced in tens of millions of years. And for me, this personally was the kicker. The present day emission rate of nearly 10 gigatons of carbon from digging up and burning coal and gas and oil suggests no analog as far back as we can go in the data of this much carbon going into the atmosphere this quickly. And that is why this is a truly unprecedented experiment that we are conducting with the only planet we call home. But despite what we hear, most people don't genuinely have a problem with the basic thermodynamics and non-linear fluid dynamics that explains how climate is changing because that's what we use in our stoves and fridges and airplanes too. When we look at polling data, this is polling data from the Yale program on climate communication. I highly recommend it because they break out the data by congressional district as well as by county. This is asking people, do you agree with the results of the first volume of the national climate assessment? Global warming is happening mostly caused by human activities. Blue is less than 50%, orange is greater than. And you know, there is some blue, but the overall average is more than 50%. What question does this ask? Do you think it will affect you? No, nobody thinks it will affect them. This is the real problem we have. And this is why we have a second volume of the national climate assessment that doesn't just talk about polar bears or people who live far away, but it also talks about how climate change is affecting us in the places where we live. And this is a good place probably to break, right? Yes, excellent. So I have a real treat for everybody. For those of you who don't know, Senator Carper, senior senator from the great state of Delaware is a ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. There's no one that works as tirelessly to try to reduce air pollution, to try to make vehicles more efficient, to try to reduce cross-state air pollution, and to make communities more resilient. One of the biggest bipartisan accomplishments of the last Congress was the Water Resources Development Act, which has an entire section around making communities more resilient, investing in natural infrastructure, trying to make sure that we're making those really smart investments. And so he's a busy man with a lot on his plate that I could talk a lot more about all he's done for the great state of Delaware. That's obviously gonna face some incredible climate impact, giving that we're sinking a little bit and facing some pretty big storms. But let me introduce you to my friend, mentor, in the senior senator from the great state of Delaware, Tom Carper. Thank you, Collin. And to our panelists, thank you so much for joining us today and for everybody else too. How many of you remember, how many of you have ever been to Ohio? How many of you? How many can spell Ohio? If I say OH, oh, thank you very much. How many of you have ever been to Cleveland? Cleveland. They used to be saying there's no there, there. And I like Cleveland and they have a rock and roll music, and I like music. But they also have a river that flows through Cleveland. That's pretty famous. I've been at a Navy, a Rotsman Shipment, Ohio State from 64, 68, a year or two after I graduated and ended up in Southeast Asia. There's a river in Cleveland caught on fire. And I like to say an adversity lies opportunity. And one of the things that came out of the fire on a river was the idea that we ought to do something about conditions that create rivers of fire. And also to create terrible air to breathe. I was stationed at a bunch of places in San Diego, Long Beach, Moffett Field up in the Bay Area, and then a lot of time overseas. I used to, I like to run. And there were times I ran in California that I knew I did more damage to my lungs than I did good for my body. And we're going to the first Earth Day in San Francisco. My speaker was a guy named Ralph Nader, who was famous for a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. Anybody ever read that book? Anybody read that book? I bought the car that he wrote the book about. It was a Corvair Monza. Corvair Monza had a rear-engine, air-cooled engine. It was very cool before its time. The only bad thing is it used to go around a corner, really sharp turns. It was like swap ends, which was made of a lot of excitement. And the other thing is sometimes in the winter you turn on the heating and carbon monoxide would come out. I had the car when I was at Ohio State. It was hard to get dates in the winter with my car because of the carbon monoxide and the heater. But you learn by your experiences. And Ralph Nader made my car famous. And I learned from that to buy more safe cars and more environmentally friendly cars. But at a fairly early age, I was excited about the environment. Learned to live in the Bay Area. And we were all pumped up on this stuff and how important clean air, clean water was. Guy named Richard Nixon was our president. I found last night, in some place in my house, I don't gather a lot of campaigning the buttons. But I found a campaign button that somebody given me years ago. It said President Nixon. It says that President Nixon now more than ever. And I thought that's interesting. Because when he left, he didn't leave with a lot of applause. But he wasn't too bad on the environment, was he? Wasn't too bad on the environment. And retrospect, it looks actually pretty darn good, doesn't he? And what he signed into law, legislation creating EPA. Signed into law, legislation creating the Clean Air, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. And I think most people say, if you look back the last 50 years, it probably has as good an environmental record just about any president. We've had all of the last one that wasn't that bad either. I grew up in West Virginia, grew up in Virginia. We had coal mines in West Virginia. They still do. And a lot of people depended on jobs. And we moved away from fossil fuels, including coal. One of the key things to remember is what I was taught when I was a little boy growing up in Grace Gospel Church in Beaver, West Virginia. And they were real big there on the Golden Rule. Treat other people the way we want to be treated. You're a coal miner. You made your living all your life of mining coal. Make sure that at the end of the day, when your job is displaced, your job goes away, that there's an opportunity for you to do something else and to provide for yourself and our families. We ought to always remember that. Always remember that. The other thing that we learned at Grace Gospel Church was that this planet is the work of our creator. And we have a moral obligation to take care of it. It's our responsibility, as President Macron said two years ago, when he spoke at a joint session of the Congress. He talked about no planet B. This is the only one we're going to get. And we have, if we're smart, we'll take care of it. And eventually it can take care of us and generations to follow us. I just drove over this morning from Southern Delaware. And actually, a place called Harrington where we have our state fair. But we're not too far from the beaches of Delaware. We have, believe it or not, more five-star beaches in the state, I'm told, in the country. We're very proud of that. We also live in the lowest lying state of any state in the country. Our state is sinking and the oceans are rising. That's not a good combination. That is not a good combination. I don't know that our farmers would care a huge amount about that, although we're a very low lying state. But if you talk to our farmers, they'll tell you that they spent a lot of time last year plowing undercrops. And the reason why they plow undercrops is because when they plant them a couple of weeks later, it rains so much that nothing would grow. And eventually, they would give up and plow the crops under. Our friend, I said right up here, Nexa John Barrasso, who's the chairman of our committee on my left side, is Ben Cardin on my left side further, is Chris Van Hollen, both from Maryland. They'll tell you there's a place in Maryland called Ellicott City that got to be pretty famous. Not 1,000 years ago, but since in the last two years, they've had 2,000 year floods in Ellicott City. My wife was actually there with some other women from Delaware. They went to, as tourists, after the second 1,000 year flood, not immediately, but they went there to provide solidarity and to say, we're going to support the community here and come as tourists they did. But in Southern Delaware, the reason why they plowed the fields undercrops under is because it rained a lot, like twice as much as just about ever. It's good to have enough rain, but it's not good when you have way, way too much rain. We have two sons of the oldest ones out in California. He goes to graduate school, starts with an S, I forget, a business school, I forget something, Sacramento State and so on, if there's no Stanford. He's a lot smarter than his dad. But a couple of months ago, the air was so bad in Stanford, in Palo Alto, that they couldn't breathe. And we always liked dangerous to even go outside and to breathe in a little bit north of there. They had all these wildfires, and as somebody may recall, they were huge, like they were as big as the state of Delaware, so you know they're huge. They had them just in Northern California, but they had them in Oregon, they had them in Washington, they had them in Montana. And now I'm told that they got more rain, more snow to do in some parts of the West Coast, Northern California, then they frankly know what to do with. The other thing I would mention, I think when you look at category five hurricanes, we've had category five hurricanes for, you know, 100 years more than, probably a lot longer than that. But for some reason we had a whole preponderance of them, here just of late. And when I was a naval, I was a midshipman. I was a midshipman once, and we were stationed at Long Beach Naval Station. I was on a big jumbo oil that was back from the Vietnam War, and we used to do the training missions out of Long Beach Naval Station. And we would have like weekends off, and along with the crew, they were like, they were home from the war. And I don't know if anybody like music, anybody like music, the great music in California, then just really great music. And I remember going by a place called Golden Bear, Golden Bear was a nightclub, and they had like the marquee on the outside had said Buffalo Springfield. And I'd heard of Buffalo Springfield. Anybody here ever hear of Buffalo Springfield? And they had a couple of people went off to do pretty good. One guy named Stephen Stills, who did pretty good with the Cosby Stills National Young. But Buffalo Springfield was an up and coming act. One of the songs they sang in that club that night was, something's happening here, just what it is, ain't exactly clear. And I have said these words in this hearing many times, many times from the day. Something is happening here, and I think for most of it's perfectly clear. And in the last six months, we had a couple of good reminders, one from 13 federal agencies. Another one from an outfit that goes out of the United Nations saying something's going on here, and we don't have forever to respond to it. That's the bad news. The good news is, if we look at adversity, and I like to quote a lot of people, besides Stephen Stills, but I like to quote Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein said a bunch of really smart things, like, what is the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again, expect a different result? He also said these words. He said, an adversity lies opportunity. An adversity lies opportunity. There's real adversity here. I mean, it's the kind of adversity that could change our planet, and it may not affect all of us in his room, it'll affect our kids, our grandchildren, those that follow, if we don't do something about it. The good news is if we do something about it, we can actually create jobs. Think about that. We can sort of make sure this planet's gonna be around for the next generations to come for hopefully thousands and thousands of years, but we can create jobs at the same time. The kid I mentioned now, he's not a kid anyway, he's 30, out at Stanford Business School, he's an MIT mechanical engineer, and for a twain of time, working at going to school at MIT in Stanford, he was, he worked for Honeywell, and what'd he do at Honeywell? Large building energy conservation projects, and he worked with hundreds of people on projects, really big projects, big buildings in places like Manhattan, all up and down in the Northeast, and a lot of people got jobs. One of the great places to go, to turn to address climate change and the creation of too much carbon in our atmosphere is frankly energy conservation, and the wonderful thing about it is to create jobs for people that are maybe engineers, but a lot of people who are like seal craftsmen and folks who are doing and working the trades, and they're good jobs, they play good money, and they provide the same money in energy efficient building, and we end up producing less carbon. There's one of the bills we considered here in this, and this is the chamber a couple of weeks ago, was a bill, well actually it was more like a hearing, but the focus was technology that could actually suck carbon right out of the air. Not right out of like the talk top of Smugstack, coal planters, but right out of the air, and I don't know that it's ever gonna come to full relief and full scale, but it might, and it's one that's worth pursuing. Another idea we're looking at is we have nuclear, not everybody's crazy about nuclear, I spent a lot of time in the Navy chasing nuclear submarines being on ships that had used nuclear energy, but we have spent fuel rods around the country, a lot of them, but the idea to somehow have nuclear technology maybe advanced nuclear actually could take, spent fuel rods, and use a lot of that energy as part of a reprocessing, downscaling process for spent fuel rods. There's all kinds of, all kinds of stuff. Cars, cars trucks and vans, the greatest source of carbon emissions in our plant right now is our vehicles. And I was at the Detroit Auto Show, this is what February, last month in Michigan, and you know what, they had all the major auto producers of the world who were there. You know what they're building now? They're building more energy efficient cars. They're building vehicles that don't provide any emissions. Think of hydrogen, they have fuel cells, creating electricity, providing propulsion, and the great thing about it were the, can I have a glass of water right here? The great thing about it, the only emission out of the vehicles that use hydrogen, fuel cells to create electricity is water, water that you can drink. The other thing we saw a lot of is battery-powered vehicles. Electric, we saw hybrids, you know, combination of electric and bioelectric. 11 years ago at the Detroit Auto Show, I'll close with this. 11 years ago at the Detroit Auto Show, car of the year was a Chevrolet Volt, VLT, VLT. Anybody here ever ride in one? They were a lot of fun. It's a hybrid, about 38 miles on a charge and then you're on the gasoline engine. Last year, the car of the year was the Chevrolet Volt, VLT, follow on. It's a pure electric and as they introduced and unveiled it a year ago at the Detroit Auto Show, they said unlike the Volt which got 38 miles per charge, the Volt at that time got 140 miles on a charge. Pretty good. And when I was at the Detroit Auto Show last month, I saw a bunch of vehicles by different manufacturers, electric-powered that get as much as 250 miles on a charge. So 38 miles, 130, over 250, 250 and over. And the auto industry in this country knows where the market's going. They want to be able to build a vehicle or vehicles that'll actually be marketable in demand by consumers. Not just right now, but 10 years from now. And that's where the market's going. Have any of you ever driven a battery-powered vehicle? If you have, then you want to make, they are fun. They are fun, but great kick, great torque. You feel like you're going to go to Dover Towns and win the monster model. I mean, that's good. The other great thing about electric-powered vehicle is that low maintenance. You don't have to worry about emission systems and combustion and all this stuff. I mean, it's just, it's a great thing to do. And if we're smart about it, we'll harness the wind off of our east coast and provide electricity really to, most of our people live within 75 miles of the coast. And the idea is perfect. Take that air, turn it into electricity and use it to power vehicles that run off of electricity itself. It's kind of a natural. And we create jobs by building the windmills and deploying a lot of them. That's a lot of investment, a lot of money, but actually a lot of jobs. And frankly, we're going to put a lot of people who work building the vehicles too. So the last words, I learned this from Colin. Where's Colin? I learned this from Colin. It's possible to have clean air, clean air, cleaner water, better public health and create jobs. And some people in this, in the state, in this country, I actually don't believe that. They think it's, you have to choose one or the other. Uh-uh, that's a false choice. We can have better air, better water, better public health, and we can create a lot of jobs. And today, when the sun came up in America, we had 157 million people go to work in this country. Last time I checked Colin, about three million of them going to work in the kind of jobs that I'm talking about here today. And there'll be more to come in the years to come. So it's sort of in our best interest economically, and in terms of our bodies, and in terms of our future as well. I want to thank all of you for joining us today. People say to me, you must hate your job. I wouldn't want your job for all the tea in China. You must not, how can you stand it down there? Last week I was in Honduras, Guatemala and Salvador, focused on root causes, why all those people trying to get out of those countries to come to the US. And one of the reasons why is because we make their lives miserable by our addiction to drugs. And we have a moral obligation to work on that and to help them. And you know what? It's working. We adopted an alliance for progress, for progress and it's working to help make the conditions better, more work to do. But they just elected in Salvador three weeks ago to replace a 76 year old leftist guerrilla president who's really cozy with Venezuela, China and Cuba, among others. They just replaced him with a 37 year old former mayor of San Salvador, two million people in that city, who is hip, smart and speaks better English than I do. And knows, has great ideas on leading the country forward. He swept the country, used social media in his campaign. And this was generational change, but people say, you must hate your job. I love my job. How lucky can a guy be? And part of it is just to see the sort of changes we can affect in other countries and meet a moral responsibility and do the right thing. And it's good for us in the end too. But there's a lot of good that can be done and the stuff I'm talking about here today that we work on in this very room. So for those of you who are involved in that, thank you. I hope you're as fired up about as I am. I've been working this field for like 50 years as a midshipman and later on as a naval flight officer out in the West Coast. And the fire burns just as strong as it ever did. And I feel privileged to be able to work here and try to find common cause and do good things for our country and for our planet. Thank you so much for letting me come by. And thank you to our panel for being here. God bless you all. Thanks so much. Microphone? I would drop it. No, I would drop it. I would drop it. I once did that. I once had a microphone before a farm bureau crowd. And they were a pretty cool crowd with Democrats. And I came in to speak. They introduced me to speak. You know you're in trouble when you're introduced. I've been serving these people forever. Nobody applauded. I mean I worked for this state for 40 years. Nobody even applauded. And I thought, oh, this doesn't look too good. I just told my staff they're not in a good mood. And something about the waters of the US or something. And I had the, there was a microphone. It's one of these microphones. You pull out of it. Like pull out of the stand. And so I thought I'd just get fired up and pumped up. So I walked up, the previous speaker had spoken. I walked up and I just pulled the mic right out of the stand. And it flew out of my hand and hit the floor. And it went into about 100 pieces. And I picked up the biggest piece. And it still worked. It still worked. And I knew it was going to be a good day. And it turned out to be a very good day. All right, have a great day. God bless you. Thanks so much. The last one out, please turn off the lights. That was fantastic. Can I just say, as a scientist, we spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about, analyzing and diagnosing the problem. And that can get kind of depressing. We need to focus on solutions, like the solutions that the Senator just mentioned. And so I want to show you one thing that is not in this presentation, but for you to go back to. Remember this map. This map is the question that we hear people talking about all the time. Do you believe in climate change? Do you agree that climate is changing due to human causes? This question is the most politically polarized question that we have. The number one predictor of whether we agree with this is simply where we fall on the political spectrum. And so when we focus on this, this is what divides us. But I will tell you two things that unite us. The first thing that unites us is that none of us think it matters, no matter who we are, where we are on the spectrum. And the reality of course, that it does matter to us in the places where we live. And then the second thing we agree on, and I don't have this map here, but I want you to go to the Yale Climate Communication Program yourself. If you just Google Yale Climate Opinion Maps, this will pop right up. What we agree on, the second thing we agree on is solutions. Because they've asked people about 20 questions. And when they ask people, do you support funding research into renewable energy? You know what color this map is? Dark red. Dark red is between 80 to 100% of people saying yes. When you ask people, do you support continuing subsidies for people to buy efficient cars, like the one the Senator mentioned, or solar panels on their home, like the ones my husband got me for Christmas? That's dark orange too. And here's the crazy thing. When you ask people, do you support putting a price on carbon and making the fossil fuel companies pay for it but then giving the money back to people? That is actually a much darker orange than this map too. So I would encourage you to check this out because what we disagree on is much less than what we do agree on. And on that note, I wanna talk specifically about the impacts now. About the impacts that we think don't matter to us, but which do. They matter to every single one of us in this room today. This is the second volume of the National Climate Assessment. This is the one that was released on Black Friday this past year. You can find it online at nca2018.globalchange.gov. This report is the most, that's supposed to be a 2-2, not an I-1. This report is the most comprehensive assessment, not of the science, but of how climate change is affecting the United States and how we are responding. We as humans, as people. It's over 1600 pages long, so I can't summarize it in one sentence, but I can summarize it in three sentences. I think I have about one sentence per 500 pages. Climate change isn't a distant issue anymore. It is affecting every single one of us in every part of the US, across almost every sector. And the more climate changes, the more serious and even dangerous the impacts will be. This was also the conclusion of the IPCC report as well. Like what? Dave already mentioned how heavy rain events and also high precipitation events are increasing. So our extremes are becoming more extreme. And as someone who looks to the future, I'm concerned by the fact that the climate models we use are biased. They're biased in the direction of underestimating the change. We know that atmospheric rivers, you know about this if you live on the West Coast, atmospheric rivers that bring enormous amounts of water vapor to the coast and dump it are getting more intense and more frequent. We know that hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. We don't see any changes in the numbers, but they are stronger, bigger and slower and they have a lot more rainfall associated with them today than they would have had 100 years ago. We know that nuisance or sunny day flooding is increasing by a factor of 10 in many new England towns. And Dave talked earlier about what's happening in North and South Carolina, what's happening in Florida where they're raising the level of some streets by two feet and installing huge amounts of expensive pumping equipment. There are already refugees in the United States who are having to leave their land like this Native American tribe in Louisiana because due to a combination of subsidence and sea level rise, they may not have anywhere to live. We know in the Western states that wildfire is a natural part of life, but we also know that since the 1980s, nearly twice as much area has been burned by wildfires as would have occurred naturally. Up in Alaska, what used to be permanently frozen ground is thawing and crumbling literally under people's feet under towns, villages, buildings, roads and pipelines. In the islands, cultural resources, important infrastructure like airports is all built within a few feet of sea level and it's at risk of inundation. The bottom line is wherever we live, we are being affected by a changing climate even down in Texas where I live, where we are seeing longer, stronger droughts, heavier rain events, and this figure shows the projected change in the number of days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Why do we care about a changing climate? This is my favorite map from the organization that Dave works for. It is a map of the number of events that have occurred since 1980 that have caused at least a billion dollars worth of damage. So it's not just about the climate and the weather events, it's about us. Are we affected by it? Texas is number one, 102 billion plus dollar events since 1980. These are naturally occurring events, so why do we care about climate change because climate change is loading the dice against us? We always have a chance of rolling a double six, a record-breaking flood, a crazy drought, an incredible hurricane. In Texas, we already have three sixes on our dice, but decade by decade, climate change is coming in and taking another and another of those numbers and turning them into sixes too, and then all of a sudden one day we roll a double seven and we say, what is this? We've never seen it before. That is how climate change is affecting us in the places where we live, and so the reason we care about a changing climate is because it takes all the things we already care about. Agriculture, food, water, energy, natural resources, the economy, national security, hunger, poverty, disease, civil conflict, refugee crises. It takes all of these problems, all of these challenges, all of the issues we already care about, and it exacerbates them or makes them worse. It is, as the military calls it, a threat multiplier. Thank you. So thank you, everyone, and thank you for the great National Climate Assessment Volume I and Volume II presented in a wonderful, compelling way by David Catherine, and right now I'm gonna transition to reducing risks through emissions mitigation and adaptation. I'm going to, again, focus on the Fourth National Climate Assessment. I have the opportunity to be on the Reducing Risk Through Mitigation chapter. I'm also gonna touch upon this special report on global warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial. So first, it's really important to understand that mitigation relation-related activities are already occurring in every state in the United States and at the local and city level and private sector. So there's a lot of activity going on. Also, since the Third National Climate Assessment, a growing number of states and businesses have pursued a portfolio of options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You can see these are caps on carbon. These are energy efficiency, transportation policies, looking at forestry, other non-CO2 exacerbators of climate warming. So a lot of options. The other thing is that in the absence of more significant global mitigation, climate change is projected to impose substantial damages to the U.S. economy. The health. 3,900 deaths per year just looking at these cities under a low emission scenario versus 9,300 deaths per year in these cities projected under a high emission scenario and the environment. These are changes in fishery catches within the large marine ecosystems. So under scenarios with high emissions, and please note, limited or no adaptation in this set of analysis, annual losses. So each year on average, the damages to the U.S. economy are in multiple sectors. They can grow to hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the century under the high emission scenario. Now we can talk about a lot of these sectors, but right now I'm gonna focus on the top three. Let's look at the scenario. So again, as Catherine and Dave showed you, we looked at all these scenarios and under a high emission scenario, we get to four over four degrees Celsius or a lower emission scenario. Notice how it goes up and down. Okay, and we're not, that's what these top three sectors. First, we're gonna look at the labor sector. This is the top sector. So there's a range of damages, but on average it's approaching almost 150. It's over $100 billion. However, if we went on the low emission scenario, we could cut into these damages by nearly a half. Let's look at the second top sector to be impacted annually. It is extreme temperature mortality. On average, every year, we would have over $100 billion of damages, but we can take nearly a 60% chunk out of that if we went under the lower emission scenario, RCP 4.5. Coastal property damage, on average again, over $100 billion per year. We could take, under the low emission scenario, 22% damages, reduce that. Now there's a lot of climate science reasons why this is the case that in coastal property, global emissions reductions can reduce at 20%. This is, all sectors need this, but especially in the coastal, we can do a lot by adapting to the climate change. So here's an example. Cumulative costs of sea level rise of storm surge without adaptation gets over $3 trillion pretty quickly. With adaptation, we could shave it to under a trillion, maybe a little over half a trillion. It's still a lot of damage that we have to design better, even with adaptation. So the effect of near term emissions, global emissions mitigation of reducing risks is expected to become apparent by the middle of this century and then grow substantially afterwards. And that substantial growth is why near term action is so critical. The other aspect is the interactions between mitigation and adaptation are complex. They can lead to benefits and they can also lead to the potential for adverse consequences. For example, you might do a nature-based coastal solution and protect one community, but you may create a problem in a nearby community. We have to have equitable solutions, as well as learn. You'll see there's big advances and since the 2014, now we have the 2018 assessment where we've done assessments, we've done planning, we're starting to implement some adaptation. We need to speed this up, our adaptation and our iterative learning. We're really being slow on this. When you look at the damages we could avoid in the U.S. economy. And we're not just talking coastal property. We're not just talking labor hours loss. We're talking human lives, people. It's really important. So for example, adaptation can complement mitigation to substantially reduce exposure and vulnerability to climate change and sub-sectors. This is an example from one of the NCA4 chapters showing desalination plants in Texas, helping with water issues in that state. But this complementarity is really especially important given that a certain degree of climate change is due to past and present emissions is unavoidable. The case in point is the legacy of sea level rise. The ice sheets are melting. The ocean is expanding. It's heating up. We have a lot of legacy due to our past emissions that we have to adapt to. Now let's switch a little bit to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Paris Climate Agreement says keep global emissions to a point where you can keep the global average temperature which Dave showed is going up. We gotta hold that below two degrees Celsius and have an aspirational goal of really, let's try to keep it below one and a half degrees Celsius above pre-industrial. And somebody say what's a half a degree Celsius? I'll show you just one example of the consequences. But let's first start where are we in the world right now? Since the pre-industrial time, human-induced warming, as Dave showed you, we're about at that one degree C world right now and the impacts that we're experiencing already. So when people talk about future generations, as Catherine said, we're already here. We are already experiencing the damages of climate change. Now, you can see just a straight, let's keep that rate going. Okay, by one and a half degrees 2045 around. Likely, we would hit it there if we keep that. Two degrees 2065. Now 2045 is not that far off. The middle of the century, you put down money now and get a 30-year mortgage. And we don't do anything. All right, we're now in a one and a half degree world. I guess I get upset about that. And I want to avoid it. Why? Because even today, we have some coral bleachings, you may have heard about the great artesian, the great Australia barrier reef, losing some, getting bleaching from warming events. But in general, there's a lot of coral reefs you can still visit today and see a lot of beautiful fish, beautiful, colorful corals. However, in a one and a half degree sea world, do you see many fish? This is a present day example from the movie Chasing Coral. It's worth seeing. And that's white bleached coral. Now, at one and a half degree sea world, the IPCC report says that we could use substantial amount of coral reefs, maybe as high as 60, 70%. Two degree sea world, nearly gone. And this is still reaching the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement. There are many other impacts, which I don't have time to talk about today. Just wanted to give you a taste of one of them outside, you know, the Key West, the Keys. Okay, so today, the vertical axis, we are on average 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, being emitted globally. Now, we have to reduce that to net zero by the mid-century in order to hold to one and a half degrees Celsius above pre-industrial. And lots of pathways, we have to get a little bit below carbon, as Catherine alluded to. So what does this mean? So deep decarbonization, electrification of end uses, power your electric car, that's really fun to drive with renewable energy. We have to invest in storage, batteries, compressed gas, all sorts of water being pumped up a hill by wind and let it flow downhill at night. Wind, okay, we know this story, that's emissions mitigation. Also, people are looking into ways to remove carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide removal. All sorts of ideas need a lot of investment in science research, engineering research, get these costs down. And there's planetary boundary limits to some of these. How many trees can we have? How much blue carbon, coastal marshes, mangroves, seagrass, how much of this can we have out there sucking up carbon? We need to do more, we need to do investment. But there's a lot of solutions and as the Senator Carper said, lots of jobs associated with this. And it's worth it. So if you wanna learn more about this, I really highly recommend the short summary for policy makers for IPCC Special Report 1.5. And I'm very biased, but I think the National Climate Assessment has a lot of information and all those pages about impacts to your states, your constituents. And there's huge amount of information. Just look up the full report, type in your state, type in a city, you will find stories in there all throughout this report. At NCA 2018, at globalchange.gov, it's really worth it taking a peek. Thanks a lot. Well thank you, all three of you for kind of giving us a little bit of a historical perspective, a present perspective, and indeed a future perspective. And I know there are questions out here, but I'd like to take the prerogative of starting the questioning on this issue of the melding of mitigation strategies with adaptation strategies. And I think it was an excellent example of how the desire to have a mitigation strategy or adaptation strategy might interfere with mitigation. The question is, to what extent should, what's the role of the federal government in trying to combine these two efforts? I know the business community has already taken a hard look at mitigation through their own economic analysis to determine the role of renewable energy. And we know that the building environment community is looking at changing codes and standards. Indeed, my understanding is that architects and designers are being looked at from a professional standard liability perspective if they're not designing to anticipate in the kind of damage you're talking about. So to what extent should the federal government get engaged in this issue of adaptation, mitigation balance and standards setting, et cetera? What is the true role for the federal programs? Well I think there's a huge role, first of all, the natural science-based agencies that can give better early warning to the first responders and the planners of communities to get people out of harm's way. NOAA and NASA working together and many other agencies, especially USGS, StreamGages, satellite storm surge modeling, very, very important. Secondly, it's also very important to work with the federal Department of Energy really doing research into storage for batteries for the electrification of end uses because what happens if a storm happens and we need our fossil fuel supply lines that are disrupted, which has happened, and people are waiting in Bridgeport, Connecticut after Hurricane Sandy, they don't have power for three weeks. If you have more community-based energy supply that's locally produced, maybe as soon as the sun comes back up after the storm and the winds are blowing and other opportunities, you can have energy locally generated. When you have disrupted supply chains, how do we have investment in research in the Department of Energy to help with that? Also carbon dioxide removal and some of the solutions for emissions mitigation and the equity dimensions, our social vulnerability index is really important research that the EPA conducts as well but through state partnerships as well on local and city public health departments. Gaffer and David, do you have any thoughts? My answer to your question was simply yes and that is that everyone needs to consider this because the reason why we care about climate change is not because it's number three or eight or 15 on our priority list for our city, for our state, for our district or for our region. The reason why we care is because climate change is interacting with and affecting what's number one, two, three, four and five on our priority list today. And so because of that, we need to be taking this into account at every level of decision-making that we have because we all want to be resilient. We all want the future to be better and not worse than what we have today and we really are heading towards that common goal. Questions? Yes, Colin. So in just one of the other kind of evolution I think in the thinking that could be helpful for some of the staff is looking for solutions that have co-benefits, multiple benefits. And so I'm gonna make the plug for nature because I can't help it as the National Wildlife Federation but natural defenses that make communities more resilient while at the same time sequestering carbon solve both problems. Think of renewable energy systems that are also kind of resiliently built and locally based so they're more dynamic and less impacted by extreme weather events. It's those kind of intersectional solutions that we're gonna need. And frankly those are some of the most bipartisan things because there's a kind of a famous writer that talks about a lot of resilience measures being more kind of self-interested and kind of emission reductions kind of a little more altruistic. Everyone wants to have a resilient community. And so if I could focus on the solutions that do both there's really a great sweet spot to start on. Thank you. Question over here. We'll get you a microphone. Thank you. So my question is you spoke about all of the different ways that we can, all of these different sources for energy. One of the ones that I didn't hear you mention was nuclear energy. And I've recently heard about companies that are trying to develop smaller nuclear reactors that can basically be used in place of generators and they are proposing these because they will be responsible for their own waste as opposed to fossil fuel companies. So I was wondering what your personal takes on those on those are. Sure. There is a nuclear supply within the US and there are, it's very important to have it be safe and to have solutions that are in the place. What's really important too is not just the United States because a lot of times nuclear, if you compare that to the cost of some of the renewable or nature-based solutions for resilience, nuclear is quite expensive. And so it's in the self-interest of the United States and our economy to have global emissions reducing. So the more we do research on energy options that are lower cost, the more we will help the rest of the world as well as ourselves and communities and states that are resource constrained who can't afford a lot of the nuclear options. And we do need to look at nuclear and we have released a recent report if you want to look at www.ucsusa.org on nuclear and what options there might be because a lot of these plants are looking at extending their life cycle, getting extensions. Any other thoughts on nuclear? We don't leave that alone. Yes, ma'am. I edited applications for nuclear reactors submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and especially given Fukushima, I think we should have learned. In his last book, The Human, the Orphan and the Octopus, Jacques Cousteau said that there is so much sun it would take a million nuclear plants to equal what we could get from sunlight without the exorbitant costs or the risks. But my question is, as an individual, I have tried to transition residents from turfgrass to rain scapes and conservation vegetation. There is a lot of people underestimate the CO2 coming out of lawnmowers, leaf blowers and trimmers. It's huge. So my question is, how much can we make a difference if we were to make those changes? I was actually attacked by the landscape industry, which happens to be very politically connected in Montgomery County, Maryland. So that venture has come to a halt temporarily. And my other question is that I've been trying to encourage some of my neighbors and housemates to compost their food scraps rather than put them in the garbage. One last question. Your question has to do with personal choices, it seems like. Well, I'm wondering though the personal choices could be on a larger regional scale an APA 2013 report entitled Green Infrastructure Corridors incorporates making every yard a carbon sink. But you can't do it with turfgrass. And that's my question to what degree can these individual choices and then trying to make them a regional choice make a difference? Do any of you have a response in terms of the role of personal choices for in terms of turning this around, in terms of mitigation efforts? So personal choices are important. As a climate scientist, I feel very strongly that it's important to not just talk the talk but walk the walk as well. But when we look at the stats, the fact is that our personal choices control less than 50% of emissions. Depending on who we are, what our lifestyle looks like and what country we live in between 30 to at very most 40% of that country's emissions are personal choices. Some of which we can't make any differently because we don't have the ability to do so. We need systematic change because the main reason that climate is changing is because of our energy use across multiple sectors. We've got industry, we've got transportation, we've got heating and cooling our homes. And then we have a quarter of it's coming from agriculture as well. So it really is a systematic problem that we have to look at holistically. There is not a single silver bullet that will fix this thing but there is, as they say, a great deal of silver buckshot. And one of the resources that I appreciate as a scientist is something called Project Drawdown. Some of you may have heard of it. I like them because they listed the top 100 solutions. And number three, for example, is food waste. We throw out about a third of the food that we eat. Then they've got education of women and girls in developing countries. They've got stopping refrigerates from leaking from old air conditioners in fridges. And then yes, they have solar, they have wind, they have nuclear, they have the food industry regenerative agriculture putting carbon back in the soil. There's over 100 ways that we need to fix this problem. And I love that there's that diversity because we all have different abilities and interests. And so I think it speaks to the range of solutions that are out there. There's not a single solution that everybody has to get on board with. There's a whole plethora, many of which, as Colin pointed out, have fantastic co-benefits. Other questions? Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. Thank you all for being here. My question is really to do with the equitable solutions because just from my knowledge, I totally agree with adaptation and mitigation, especially when it comes to infrastructure. However, it's obvious that it's not as equitable as it could be, especially when it's pushing lower income communities out of those type of infrastructure ways. So could you elaborate more on your equitable solutions? Thank you. Sure, there are two sides, I think, that are really important with equity in climate change. First of all, the climate change impacts are inequitable in the United States and globally. So those on the front lines of climate change impacts can have greater exposure and vulnerability and less resilience. And a lot of that is historical decisions, and a lot of that is baked in based on institutional decisions. And then with the solutions to climate change, it's very important to see, especially in capital investment of infrastructure, who are we exposing to possible toxins, possible airborne toxins or other water toxins, as well as transport, for example, of fuels through pipelines, and are they going over cherished places and lands that might cause harm if there's release. So as we go forward, we cannot make the mistakes of the past. We have to take all these into consideration. The best way is to make sure we hire engineers and scientists and social scientists and artists and people who are from all walks of life and all different communities to make sure we don't make the mistakes of the past. In fact, when you have communities that are more exposed and more vulnerable, we need to do more research into that and how to better protect and better involved community choice in decisions about how to reduce your exposure to climate change impacts. And that means that there needs to be a lot more investment in social science research dialogue and having communities be part of the solutions that are proposed. And that way we all can reduce our exposure because if one part of our community is hurting, then all of us are hurting because economically, we all are on this one planet together. Hello, good afternoon. So my question is with respect to an incentivization. It is quite evident that the federal government does play a role as far as mitigating climate change. But clearly within the private sector, the incentivization of our survival as a species does not value into their bottom line. So is there a space or a forum for the federal government to provide some incentivization and as well as to promote that type of green industry, to allow to not only prosper, but to thrive in the future? Thank you. Thank you. One thing is that there are just voluntary interests in the federal government. There's a nice example in the National Climate Assessment, which my colleagues could also talk to. It's the case of in Thailand, there was an extreme flooding event that basically hit the hard drive production. And that meant that the cost for hard drives and components in products that consumers buy in the United States and around the world, of Dell, Apple, and Hewlett Packard, I believe, essentially for one quarter of that year, 2011, the price of hard drives doubled and that affected consumer prices. So businesses as well as farmers who realized that weeps going down to a major heat wave and peat fires of Siberia are affecting the need to supply wheat from, say, U.S. farmers. And so you are an interconnected world. It's global, it's important. There are federal ways to have incentives to increase the idea that there are gonna be better jobs, more incentives for having renewable energy, solutions, better storage, better ways to have just transition away from more harmful climate polluting types of industries. The federal government can do a lot of research into that as well as helping with the resiliency. It would seem just also in terms of negative reinforcement. Our whole flood insurance program in this country is backwards. I mean, we really, time and time again, if you talk to people of FEMA or HUD, we are paying people to rebuild in exactly the same place in exactly the same type of buildings that have been destroyed. So I think a fundamental disincentive could be made by reasonable programs that would say, hey, we're not gonna pay for you to do this again. I'm certainly not gonna subsidize your premium. I just thought I'd throw that in. Any other thoughts at this point in time? We're getting close to, yes, sir. Couple more questions right here. Hi, yeah, I was wondering if you guys could speak to the Green New Deal and maybe what you see is the value of that as a solution or a sort of way to get to a set of solutions. Well, let me speak as a scientist. As a scientist, I don't wanna weigh in on what is the best policy because it's really hard to say that. It depends on what our values are, what our priorities are. But as a scientist, I can say that that is the only policy currently on the table that contains the magnitude of actions that are required to avoid ultimately serious and even dangerous impacts. It is, of course, the not the only option. There's also a bill to put a price on carbon and that could be ratcheted up in the future to achieve similar reductions. As a scientist, I prefer to be solution agnostic. I am in favor of anything that works, anything that does not harm people in the doing so, and anything that actually has the support needed to be implemented. And that today I think is the biggest challenge. Other thoughts on that? Yes, sir. Granted, thank you very much for this. Granted, this is an existential threat to us in the United States, but this is, and it's a global problem as well. However, we're not the only culprits to create this condition. And so my question is, let's say we got our act together and we did reduce our footprint and would it be enough in light of what other countries are doing currently or are not going to do in the future? And has any study been done towards that? And then obviously within the federal government, there is pressure that we can place and that kind of consideration should be put out. But the question is, if we do get our act together, is it enough based on what the other countries are doing or not doing? Well, first of all, the United States bears the historical responsibility for the largest contribution to this problem. Currently right now, if you look at the annual emissions based on country emissions, the US and China are China number one, number two US, if you ignore that historical portion. And that doesn't include, just to be clear, if we buy products from China and while they're producing those products, those are emissions, but largely Europe or the United States are buying those products, we're not counted for that. So is it a true global accounting of our carbon footprint? There's research articles on that. There are other ways to slice and dice it. You can trace it back to major industrial carbon producers right at the extraction point of carbon and do those calculations. So just from a standpoint of the US is definitely can show leadership. We can show how we can reduce it equitably. We can show how we can promote, why not design things here in this country that we would be selling to other parts of the world how to help do that and make money in the process, hopefully in ways that are affordable around the world. In fact, I'd say there are, we're actually, it's quite a competitive landscape. I think China is investing heavily and that's part of the reason why we benefit from reduction in solar prices as well as other, Germany is really investing. Many, many countries around the world are investing. I'd say we're having to catch up in some respects. The more we ignore the problem then we will be left more behind. And so I think we have to invest not only federally but also in the private sector as well as in our cities. And those communities that are investing tend to have an economic engine and we see that where there are regional caps on carbon in the Northeast that the economies definitely show some benefit and reinvesting. We see economies that are addressing the problem. They're not suffering. California is still one of the largest economies in the world and it's one state. Your timing is exquisite. We are right at 330. I think that ends our session today. I want to, let's give another round of applause for our panel. Thank you very much for joining us. And I can vouch safe, this is not the last briefing we'll have on this topic. Thank you very much for joining us.