 Right. Well, I've got 1103 and particularly because we are really going to do our best to limit this to an hour. I am going to dive in. So welcome everyone to our first new online climate spotlight series where we're featuring some of Maine's most innovative thinkers, businesses, and conservationists with an aim to help Maine people understand how climate change impacts Maine as well as information to take action. My name is Eliza Donahue. I am director of advocacy at Maine Audubon and like I said before, I'm so pleased to have so many people joining us today. We are moving towards 100 participants right now and I know even more registered. So I'm sure folks will be dropping in throughout the hour. So we'll be hosting these free discussions every other Tuesday between now and late September on topics such as community and rooftop solar, natural climate solutions, transportation, and home energy efficiency. You can register at mainaudubon.org slash energy and also get a little bit more information about the topics that we'll be covering in the future. So why are we hosting this series right now? Well, in 2019, the state of Maine committed to among the most ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in the nation. The law that set those reduction targets in place also created the Maine Climate Council made up of business people, lawmakers, municipal officials, tribal representatives, and other stakeholders and tasked them with creating a plan for how to reduce our emissions as well as prepare Maine for adapting to climate change. That updated plan is due in early winter and climate policy and now it's natural overlap with economic recovery and equity concerns is front and center in the mind of Maine people and major decision makers. In this series, our aim is to give you the information to take action on climate in your own home and business and day to day life as well as inform you on how to engage in creating a strong, actionable, Maine climate action plan. So we're really excited to kick off our kickoff event this morning featuring two of Maine's top climate scientists, Dr. Sean Burkle and Stacey Knapp. We're calling this event the state of Maine's climate and we'll hear about what Sean and Stacey know about how Maine's climate has been changing over the past decades and what we've done to address it so far. Dr. Sean Burkle is the Maine state climatologist and a research assistant professor at the University of Maine. He received his PhD in earth sciences from University of Maine and his research focuses on climate and ice sheet modeling, environmental change, paleoclimatology, and data visualization. Since early 2012, he has been building the climate reanalyzer, a website that provides access to climate and weather models and historical station data. Stacey Knapp is admissions inventory section manager in the air bureau of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. Her team assists with the implementation of systems utilized in the collection, tabulation, and dissemination of air emissions inventory data for the Maine Air Emissions Inventory Reporting System. Sean will give his presentation first followed by Stacey and we'll wrap up hopefully by about 1145 or so to take questions. And I know that Stacey plans and I'm so thankful for the Stacey that she'll also end with a few notes on how to engage with the work of the Maine Climate Council. So before we get started just a couple quick tech notes. This is a Zoom webinar which means that participants are all muted with their video off. Again each presenter will share their screen for their presentation and you can type questions in the Q&A box found at the bottom of your screen and we, Nick London and I from Maine Audubon, will collect them and roll out some questions at the end. So big thanks again to Sean and Stacey and let's get started. Well thank you Eliza and good morning everyone. I'm happy to be here. I wish I could be in person. I really do miss giving in person presentations but those will return eventually. And I'm going to switch my screen over to the slideshow. There with me. Oh Eliza I see that I'm unable to share my screen right now. It says host disabled attendee screen sharing. Sorry about that. Let me go see if that's something Nick can address. I'm fixing now. Try now Sean. Great thanks. Okay. I assume everyone can see my slides now? Yes. Okay thank you. Okay well again good afternoon and as Eliza said in the introduction I'm the Maine State Climatologist and I'm based at the University of Maine as a research assistant professor and so what I like to do today is give you an overview of climate change in Maine, climate impacts and I'd also like to note that I have been serving on the scientific and technical subcommittee of the Maine Climate Council and I was lead of the climate subsection of that and this presentation today is an adaptation of presentation that I gave in June to a full meeting of the climate council and towards the end of the of the talk I would like to show a couple slides of Maine's climate future 2020 which is a document that we produce here at University Maine in cooperation with the between Climate Change Institute's Maine Sea Grant and also the Skoodick Institute and a lot of helpful information and perhaps many of you have seen that document and I'd also like to just very briefly show you some of the tools available on climate reanalyzer and also the Maine Climate Office website that I've been developing for about a year now it's now moving on presentation outline and I see I I may have aired in this I meant to I'm going to set a full screen because I think you probably see the slides on the left and you'd think by now I would have mastered zoom but sometimes I still goof yeah Sean either the view or the slideshow should work okay okay this should be better there we go now you should see full screen okay so I like to go over Maine's historical temperature record that is since late 1800s and also discuss projections for how the climate is expected to warm over the next century I discussed the the significance of changing season lengths and how that impacts many sectors of the economy and also the environment and both plant response animal response precipitation and drought of course most recently we've experienced what's sometimes referred to as a flash drought that's a storm drought that emerges somewhat unexpectedly although in some parts of state the conditions have really alleviated some especially in western Maine and I'll try to put a that into climate context and that leads into extreme weather we've been experiencing extreme weather particularly over the last 15 or 20 years extreme weather being increased frequency of both heat waves and cold waves and also extreme precipitation events which of course leads into the previous section and then I'll show you a couple slides on changes in snow and hydrology how the snow season is changing and how that's impacting stream flow and also groundwater supplies okay this figure here shows Maine's statewide mean annual temperature since 1895 and it shows that on a linear trend there's been a three degree Fahrenheit warming and you can also see that there's some structure to this there's what we would call inter-annual variability that's year to year fluctuations but also multi-decade changes for example the early 1900s you can see that there are three very cold years in there and then it got warm in the 1930s into the 1950s then a relatively moderate period for a few decades right up until about the late 1990s or so and then things started to get really warm and so the of course we've been experiencing many a unique climate in the history of Maine since the late 1990s that's both in terms of the summer climate winter climate and many of the changes that we have seen it really emerged in the last 20 or 30 years and I'll also speak to the variability on multi-decade timescales because that is important because it's something that we need to consider and in these future projections which I show here in this slide overall over the next century how much Maine warms of course will depend on on global decisions on socio-economic decisions in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and how the international community cooperates but this slide here shows using the latest generation or the available models that have that project climate into the future for Maine we show three particular scenarios ranging from the low emission scenario in which there's a dedicated dedication to halt greenhouse gas emissions and eventually reduce them to zero and then the high emission scenario which we'd call RCPA 0.5 that's one that in some cases it's considered as a business as usual but it's actually taken more of as an extreme case where there's heavy coal use and no real international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and we don't know which scenario will play out in the future I mean we can guess and as it turns out all said the world seems to be trending towards something a little less than RCPA 0.5 one there's been a push towards cleaner energy sources and the assumptions of high coal use into the future may not pan out so that would be that would be good but there's still a spread of physically plausible outcomes between now and the next century and it's up to us and in this country in our state as well because we of course can do things right at home to contribute to how we shape the future but there's a spread of physically plausible outcomes and ranging from a climate warming that is not not too much more than what we have already experienced ranging to something that's much more extreme would be very impactful now getting back to the key variability that I had mentioned in the first slide I like to show this because many people have questions about well isn't the climate warring because there are cycles and there is variability in the climate system and climate scientists understand very well what factors are involved perhaps the most significant in terms of natural variability arises from major volcanic eruptions such as mountain Pinatubo that erupted in 1991 and early in the 1900s as well but this figure here shows a comparison of observations of global temperature in the heavy set black in comparison to model an ensemble of models that project into the future but in this in this case this is the historical overlap interval which the models are compared to see how well they do and what we find is that in simulations in which the the climate models have greenhouse gases and human impact held constant that's what we see in blue and you can see that the signal departs that in the in the recent climate would be cooler than observations if greenhouse gas emissions had not been increasing now alternatively in the red line we see the simulation in which greenhouse gases increase in accord to the historical record over the past century and I like to highlight that the the emergence of when it really appeared to become apparent or measurable that that the the greenhouse gas warming and impact that started in the 1800s with the onset of the industrial revolution that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in the manifestation of a changing climate appears to have emerged from the sig from the noise of natural variability sometime between about 1930-1950 and then since then there's been a a significant departure and it's always important to have a historical perspective and also to validate models of projection to the future validate them against observations and and data and that's one of the reasons why I showed that slide now in terms of the changing climate and changes in the future one of the major impacts in Maine and elsewhere is how the climate warming which is somewhat abstract when we look at a time series of say 50 years from now might be three degrees warmer well what does that mean and how does that impact ecosystems and and forest migration and also how does it impact agriculture we can think of that in terms of how the seasons change in terms of the length and so this figure here shows the temperature annual cycle for three periods in blue is a period that's for the interval between 1895 and 1914 and the brown indicates the climate of 1995-2014 and then in red is a is a projected climate for roughly centered on 2050 from a projective model and you can see that with each step there's been an increase of the length of the warm season which also translates to an increase of the of the growing season and a reduction of the winter season and so over the past century Maine's climate has changed such that the growing season is now about two weeks longer than it was a century ago and it's projected to be likely another two weeks longer by about 2050 and again depending upon the emissions choices that that we make and the climate realization that emerges from what the emissions are in the future precipitation one thing that has been readily apparent over the past couple decades is a shift towards more intense extreme rainfall which I'll talk more about in a moment but the historical record of annual precipitation has also increased over the past century and in particular since the mid-2000s or so there was a what interval that has had a is a significant feature in this curve but over the past century there's been a six inch increase in total annual accumulation but this figure itself it does not speak to the delivery in terms of what season of the year and whether or not the precipitation is being evenly distributed or becoming in more intense events and I will mention that much of the precipitation increase that we've experienced in the last 15 years or so has been occurring in the summertime and that's despite the the drought of 2016 into 2017 and then this most recent so far temporary abnormal driedness to what is now ranked a moderate drought extreme weather as I've as I mentioned extreme weather is becoming more common and that's in in many places if not most places across the known the hemisphere and it's due to changes in atmospheric circulation imagine or picture the jet stream that you might see in a nightly news forecast the jet stream which is a current of fast flowing air in the lower stratosphere that has a linkage to the track of storms lower down near the surface and certain patterns can can get locked into place for several days or even a few weeks or season and these blocking patterns are part of what causes extreme weather to develop whether it's a cold wave or heat wave or even extreme precipitation because when there's a strong blocking pattern when that pattern finally breaks down the very steep contrast that develops between warm and cold on the other side of the wave that can fuel an intense storm and so one thing that we've noticed has been an increase in in terms of extreme precipitation about 50 percent 55 percent increase in annual heavy daily precipitation across both main and the US northeast and in main we found that there's been an increase in occurrence of high precipitation events of different ranks so two inch per day three inch and four inch I mentioned jet stream and here's a what I what we would call a temperature anomaly map that's the departure of temperature from baseline climatology in here it's 1929 to 2000 that's the shaded background map and then a schematic of the jet stream over printed and I say schematic but this is that the general track of the jet stream for this particular day this was Thursday October 31st 2019 which was the lead up to a major windstorm on November 1st which many of us may remember but there is a strong blocking pattern that had developed and I had mentioned the the contrasting temperatures on the other side of a particular feature and so part of the intense windstorm that we experienced at links back to this blocking pattern and you may recall I know it's been several months ago but at the time California was experiencing severe wildfires and they're being fanned by what are called the Santa Ana winds well those winds were being fanned by this pattern as well this blocking pattern that was driving circulation and driving intense dry winds off the continent from the interior of the continent into California and so it's interesting that there was an extreme event on the west coast same time as extreme event on the east coast and they're linked by this circulation pattern I remember this very clearly summer and march 2012 I think this is a textbook example of an extreme event this was a heat wave in the third week in March which temperatures got into the low 80s across the state northern Maine most places got into the mid to high 70s but central Maine southern Maine so temperatures as high as 83 I think in Bangor got to 84 and this picture is several years old now for my my son March 18th and no snow on the ground which was just for me it was a pretty new experience because I remember as a kid growing up in the Bangor area March was always the snowiest month pretty much late February right into mid mid March and well this event occurred because of a major blocking pattern that developed and heat and humidity built over the eastern half of North America you can see this it's depicting a blocking high pressure and and that when that pattern finally broke well then temperatures went started to blow normal but this was records the first 80 degree measurements in most places in New England by three to four weeks in terms of and there were records in Maine set by 17 degrees daily high temperature records beaten by 17 degrees Fahrenheit typically a high temperature record is beaten by half degree or one or two degrees and so this was truly an extreme event and it's what we would expect in a warming climate in which the summers are getting longer and the winners are getting shorter it means that summer like circulation can happen earlier in the year likewise it can persist later in the year and I'll just give one more example that I don't have a slide for but the warmest fall in record domain was 2017 and it was an example of the summer season extending into the fall now likewise there are impacts that major environmental impacts including earlier snow melt and this slide here shows that there's been a documented trend towards earlier winter spring melt runoff so melting snow by seven to 14 days and that's since 1950 and these trends are projected to continue as the climate warms now there there can still be some years that seem to buck the trend and and recently just in the past four years or so there have been a near record setting snowfall in the northern part of Maine caribou I think two winners ago there was a record snowfall and even this season the snowfall was well above normal I think it was probably the second or third snowiest winter that persisted well into spring in northern Maine so there are exceptions and if we were to look at the statewide distribution of some of these records we find some interesting patterns ice out on main lakes is occurring earlier earlier I think we've all experienced this and again it follows the changing length of the seasons lakes are now tending to ice out anywhere from one week to even close to two weeks earlier and this is projected to continue as the climate warms again in association with the changing length of the seasons and likewise there's been an increased magnitude frequency of small floods and the stats here show the relative increases over the past 50 and 75 years and some of these floods can come from extreme precipitation events or a fresh out that happens early and really fast because of a jump in temperatures but when these events do happen they're extremely impactful and can it can cause a lot of damage and the 100-year three-day peak flow so that so that that would be the spring fresh out those are projected to to decrease and again with linkage to decreasing late winter snowpack now the some of the complexities could be that some years or as we've seen particularly in northern Maine there may there could still be some record setting years in terms of snowfall that affects a one part of the state or it may we it won't be that every single year the these peak flows decrease but over time we we do expect that this trend will continue but it's always important to be aware some of the exceptions that could emerge I list a summary here with a lot of bullets and I don't think that I'm not going to read through each one you can take a look in terms of how the statewide annual temperature has changed about three degrees Fahrenheit over the last century and models predicts anywhere from two to ten degrees warming over the next century again depends on the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions it's been changes in annual precipitation overall increase for the past century about six inches and but there's more complexity when we look at how that's distributed seasonally and also whether or not it's it's coming in throughout the year or in more extreme precipitation events separated by periods of dryness extreme weather such as heat waves droughts heat waves cold waves small scale droughts and also storms wind storms those are things that we've been experiencing and expect them to continue and systems are responding to these changes responding to the the warming in terms of how it impacts the the temperature annual cycle the length of winter the length of summer and so looking into the future there are significant just likely ahead and again it'll be up to us here locally on the decisions that we make and how we contribute to the overall landscape of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and then of course something many things are out of our control which in in terms of international agreements and how the internet international community proceeds and now very briefly being mindful of time here i just wanted to show you a couple i'm going to switch i'm going to switch my screen here to a web browser just so i can show you the main climate office website and also climate reanalyzer okay here we go okay the main climate office website i have been building this as part of what i do is to say climatologists to provide a a place where people can have easy access to main based climate data and the website address is mco.umain.edu and on this you can access daily data and for example here on this page it shows station data from the bangor international airport and you can select the year the bangor record goes back to 1953 and let's go to 2012 here was the the 2012 heat wave in march for example you can export the data that you see here as a csv file they can open up in spreadsheet software you can select from these stations that are here on the map so say if you wanted to see data for portland that comes up there's also i've put together selected the wrong one monthly seasonal and annual temperature and precipitation time series and maps and also by climate division across the states we can look at the northern climate division central and coastal or statewide average and you can choose from the temperature anomaly it's departure from in this case i use it a 1901 to 2000 100 year long climatology average monthly temperature maximum temperature minimum also precipitation and i've added just recently just in the last couple weeks a page for Gulf main temperatures and i've also included bio regions right along the coast i haven't added a map to delineate those yet but i will soon you can also look at a north Atlantic wide average of sea source temperature you can go on a point in the chart and that will bring up a map of either sea surface temperature or the anomaly of departure from normal and then there are other resources on the page hourly weather forecast maps and climate outlook maps from NOAA and the climate prediction center including drought information and temperature outlooks for the coming week month and season and also a list of publications and one publication I'll mention is at the top here mains climate future 2020 which we released this in early march this year and if you haven't had the opportunity to look through this document I recommend it there's a lot of information summarize I think in a pretty comprehensive manner an update to our understanding of climate change in Maine and a lot of this information has or much of this information has been delivered to the main climate council and the scientific and technical subcommittee has assembled a report that will soon be made public and so that will also be a resource that I think that you will find quite valuable and then the last thing I just want to mention climate reanalyzer website where you can access global data sets from both station data climate models weather forecast models and in the interest of time I don't want to be labored this but I'll go to the site index where you can get an idea of the content on the website and this is climate reanalyzer.org and I thank you very much for your time and I look forward to answering questions and now I'll turn this over to Stacy. Stacy you're on mute just so you know and actually before you begin I just want to say very quickly first of all thank you Sean second of all speaking of extreme climate events or extreme weather events there's a huge storm over my house right now I don't know what happens if we lose power here but to the folks watching at home please just check your your inboxes we will get back to you as soon as we can with new information if that were happening it's 2020 so I assume that the worst is is going to happen but we're good so far and Stacy thank you very much go ahead okay so what do you see right now see the start of your slideshow progress toward greenhouse gas reduction and you just see a slide a single slide yes okay excellent all right cool um get this out of the way so first thank you Nick and Eliza for having me I was really excited to be invited to present we in my group work with emissions data all day every day and it's it's rarely of interest to a lot of people and so we've been really excited since the release of earliest report that so many people have had some interest so I am safe enough as Eliza said I head up the emissions inventory section at main DEP and as you probably already know in January we released our eighth biennial report on progress toward greenhouse gas reduction goals and so this is a biennial report comes out once every two years so the next one will come out in January of 2022 but this last one released in January 2020 has received a lot of attention and we are just thrilled that so many people are interested in our data um so my plan for today is to walk you through some of the results that we presented in the eighth biennial report and then hopefully we'll have some time for questions at the end now before I get started um because you may not have read the eighth and the seventh and the sixth and the fifth biennial reports um I just want to remind you that where we were before the latest report if the when we released the seventh biennial report we had actually seen a slight uptick in emissions and so we were very nervous um about where we were um in regards to meeting our 2020 goal and then the more lofty goals that were just set into legislation um so I am very pleased to report that advance here that with two more years of data added to this series that we now have a decrease in emissions again which is hugely exciting so what you're looking at here are our gross emissions that is the blue line at the top so you'll see two lines there's the dark blue line at the top those are our gross emissions and that is everything okay that's all greenhouse gas emissions that's carbon dioxide that's methane that's nitrous oxide that's our sf6 hfc the works the green line just below is the co2 from burning fossil fuel so that is just co2 and as you can see that is the lion's share of our emissions right so co2 from burning fossil fuel accounts for 90 percent of our gross emissions and then that remaining 10 is the additional greenhouse gases um so what you see here this is a time series from 1990 to 2017 now in 1990 our gross greenhouse gas emissions were at 21.2 and these are in million metric tons of co2 equivalents and the co2 equivalents just means that it's all of the greenhouse gases and not just co2 um you'll see that those gross emissions right they rose until about 2002 so we see an increase from 1990 to 2002 and then we see this nice steady decline and here's this little uptick that I was telling you about in the last report that we were nervous about but now we see a decline again which is great so we are now as of 2017 at 17.5 million metric tons of co2 equivalents now conveniently and I triple checked this because this was too convenient um that is exactly 17.5 percent lower than the 1990 levels now you may remember that our goal for 2020 is to be 10 percent below the 1990 levels so we needed to be at 19.1 in 2000 and we are currently at 17.5 so we are on track to meeting our 2020 goal um now we do have a few more years I know that for you and I it is 2020 today um but the the data do lag a little bit so it takes some time to accumulate that data and to do the analysis um so we have a couple more years before we know if we have met our 2020 goal but I am optimistic which is great all right so let us talk about these goals a little bit before we go any further um many of you have probably seen this but um the solid line here over on the left that is what we know right that is the data that we do have so that is the 1990 to 2017 data and you can see um this peak up here in 2020 excuse me 2002 and then this nice steady decline through 2017 um so our 2010 goal was to simply be at the 1990 level so that's this dot right here and we successfully met that goal which is great um now our next goal is the 2020 goal and that is to be 10 percent below the 1990 level and we are on track to meeting that which is wonderful news now the next couple of goals the 2030 goal is to be 45 percent below 1990 levels and the 2050 goal is to be 80 percent below 1990 levels and if you follow this green trend line here that kind of slopes down that is sort of a best fit between our um the 2002 data and the 2017 so if we follow this line and we can realize the declines we have seen since 2002 then we are on track um but it's going to take a lot of work to realize those emission reductions so we've got our work cut out for us which is why we have the climate council so let me back up a little bit and talk to you a little bit about where we get this data like how we track our greenhouse gas data um so at DEP we use EPA state inventory tool which we call the SIT now this is a publicly available tool anybody can go out to the website and I've listed here on EPA's website and download this tool it's an Excel tool it's got a series of modules and within each module there are gosh like 50 tabs so it's a it's a very involved model um but the beauty of that is that it is populated with default data from government databases from federal data um but it allows a lot of tweaking for states so we can go in there and try to make sure that that data is as accurate as possible and really reflects the emissions that we see in Maine so the foundational data set for the SIT comes from the Energy Administration Information Administration or EIA and they receive lots of reports um on fuel data and that is as we saw CO2 from burning fossil fuels 90% of our emissions right so that fuel data is enormously important so they pull all of that fuel data into a giant database and they run a model and it produces what's called the SEDS it's a state energy data system and so that is this massive database of the consumption data it's fuel consumption data and that is a national standard and it's it's by state and by sector it's broken down the different types of fuels so the EPA pulls all of that SEDS data into the SIT along with a number of other data sources and they create models of our emissions by state by sector by fuel so then states can go in download this tool and tweak that data so for Maine we have some data that we know that the federal government doesn't necessarily have and we believe that our data is better in some of these areas for example we submit specific vehicle miles traveled for Maine we update the solid waste landfills we go through and edit some of the industrial processes so if we don't have the production of some material we go through and remove that industry from Maine because it doesn't exist in this state so we were able to really hone this tool and make it very Maine specific which is why we are so confident in the data now you're going to see data presented in this in the report in two different ways two different units so you're going to see million metric tons of CO2 and this is just CO2 primarily from fossil fuel combustion and this is presented in the SIT by sector by residential commercial industrial transportation and electric utility so that's where you see the breakdown in those sectors that is for CO2 only but again that's 90 percent of our emissions right you'll also see things reported in a million metric tons of CO2 equivalents now when you see that little e at the end when you see the equivalents that means that we're talking about all greenhouse gases not just CO2 but we're adding in the methane the nitrous oxide the HFCs the SF6 all of the greenhouse gases so that is reported by source category so that's where we get our energy and our agriculture our waste and our industrial process categories so you'll see they're reported a little bit differently i'll point that out as we go but i just wanted you to have a little bit of a background so let's jump into the data so first we will look at gross emissions for 2017 by source category real quick you can see there's a winner here right so energy makes up 90 percent of where our emissions come from it's our demand for and consumption of energy it's the clear majority of mains greenhouse gas emissions now industrial processes agriculture and waste all added up contribute about 10 percent now that's 10 percent that we need to look into for sure but you can see energy is a bigger piece of this pie so might get a bit more of attention so let's take this big blue piece of the pie and break it down a bit further so here you can see mains energy consumption over the whole time series not just 2017 this is from 1990 to 2017 and this is going to be by fuel source right so you see all the different fuel sources over on the right hand side now the biggie at the bottom is petroleum so in 2017 petroleum products accounted for 49 percent of all of the energy consumed and 84 percent of the CO2 emissions so that's why there's so much focus on petroleum products is because it's a lion's share of our CO2 emissions now the good news is we have seen a reduction so you can see in this blue segment if you just look from 1990 to 2017 you can see the 2017 point is lower right so we have seen a reduction in petroleum products and the big piece of this is actually our residual fuel oil so that's the really dirty fuel oil and that consumption has decreased 95 percent since 1990 and I'll show you that in a minute but that is a huge piece and that is a massive success so we're really proud of that so that has been a big driver in the overall decline of greenhouse gas emissions now I do want to point out while Maine does rely pretty heavily on petroleum products at this point to meet our energy demands we have seen significant reductions in CO2 emissions due to things like switching to lower carbon fuel so switching to natural gas right you can see on this figure this green segment here that pops up right around 1999 2000 that's natural gas so we've seen a huge increase in the use of natural gas and that is a lower carbon fuel so it's going to emit a bit less than residual fuel oil we've also seen decreased emissions due to increased energy efficiency so things like the cafe standards for vehicles and we've also seen an increase in renewable resources for energy so that is amazing now you can also see in this figure our renewable resources such as I just mentioned so see this turquoise segment at the top over on the right that's wind the point being you can actually see it right you can see that there's a turquoise segment now which is awesome and that turquoise segment is getting bigger so that is wind just one of the many renewable resources that we've been focused on using more of for our energy okay so let us take this blue piece right down at the bottom here and break that up a little bit more and let's look at petroleum consumption by fuel type so you can see exactly what types of petroleum we're using because you can kind of guess at what we're using them for right so the two biggies at the bottom here again this is the time series so 1990 to 2017 distillate fuel and motor gasoline those are the biggies but I also want to point out this orange section at the top so this is the residual fuel oil I was talking about and you can see how we have a 95% reduction in the use of residual fuel oil and that is a huge success now some of that is switching over to natural gas some of that is switching over to renewables okay so let us move from fuel type to sector so let's look at petroleum consumption by sector at quick glance you can see again there's a winner here right right at the top is transportation transportation has been in the lead since 1990 all the way to 2017 and unfortunately they are also the only sector that has seen an increase in petroleum consumption all of the other sectors have seen a decrease not necessarily a huge one but they have seen a decrease but not transportation transportation is up so let's switch gears a little bit and look at co2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion by sector again transportation is in the lead here you can see this large purple segment that's transportation and transportation has produced over half the 54% of the co2 emissions in May in 2017 so that's a big chunk now I also want to focus your attention a little bit on residential the residential section is at 19% so that's a big piece of the pie that's definitely something that we need to be looking at I know when I go to emissions inventory conferences I'm always frankly a little embarrassed because we go and they're like gosh why do you guys have so many emissions from the residential sector and it is because we use fuel oil so the national average consumption of fuel oil for residential is only about 8% and in Maine it's over 50% so we use a lot more fuel oil in the state of Maine than other states do so just an area that we need to look at obviously our infrastructure is set up so that that is very convenient but we do have natural gas coming in we do have a lot of wood burning homes so there are other sources of energy and we just need to kind of look at that mix and see how we might do it a little bit better all right so now look at let's look at the same data this is the 2017 data let's look at the same data over time I think there we go and you can see this is the right one yes this is the right one you can see transportation in the lead as well right so these are the emissions we just talked about in 2017 transportation made up 54% of the co2 emissions well you can see that they made up the majority of the emissions dating all the way back to 1990 as well right there at the tippity top and again all of the other sectors have seen a reduction by one strategy or another since 1990 there's been a reduction in their co2 emissions but transportation has gone up so even residential has gone down you can see they scrape by just by 0.3 reduction but hey the start commercial is down 24 percent industrial is down 58 percent and electric utilities I want to point out so take a look at that turquoise line right electric utilities since 1990 are down 50 in their co2 emissions now more importantly I want to put up if you look at the 2002 peak in electric utilities so that peak in the turquoise line since 2002 we have seen an 83% decline and so that is in large part to us switching our energy fuel sources our electric utility fuel sources toward renewable energy sources so that is that is a huge success and those are the sorts of successes that we need to build on to be able to meet our goals okay so in summary I know that was a lot of data but let me give you the highlights here so in summary gross emissions in 2017 were 17.5 below 1990 level 17.5 below 1990 level so we are on target for our 2020 goal right so our 2020 goal is to be 10 below 1990 level so as long as we can keep on this track we're going to be good to meet our 2020 goal now 90 percent of those emissions are the result of energy consumption we use a lot of energy we demand it and that is mostly from combustion of petroleum products 54 percent of main co2 emissions in 2017 were from the transportation sector with residential being a close second right at 19 percent co2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the electric power sector have decreased by 83 percent since they peaked in 2002 so there are successes here and the transportation and residential sectors have both the highest consumption of petroleum and the highest emissions of co2 from burning fossil fuels so those are just the highlights again let me just remind you of our goals right so we're we've met our 2010 goal we're on track for our 2020 goal things look really good but our 2030 goal and our 2050 goal those are going to be harder you know so if we can realize the emission reductions that we've seen since 2002 then we're on track but to realize those emissions we are going to have to make some changes right so we have kind of already taken advantage of the easy wins the the switching from higher carbon fuels to lower carbon fuels we've already done that so we need to find some new innovative things to do to cut our greenhouse gas emissions so that's why the governor formed the climate council to figure out how we're going to do this right to get the right people in the room talking to each other and figuring out a plan now you probably know the climate council has been working very hard for the last six months or so the different working groups have been meeting together to come up with proposed strategies so ways they think in their area we can get the the biggest bang for a buck in terms of greenhouse gas reductions and they just presented these findings last month so I know that that meeting is available online you can go ahead and actually there's two meetings they split it up into two days so you can go online and you can watch those presentations everything from the climate council by the way is is recorded and available online for you to watch after the fact but what I want to talk to you about here is that the main climate council is really trying to get stakeholders involved they want as much public participation as possible and unfortunately due to COVID-19 they've had to cancel a lot of the public stakeholder meetings that were planned just because it wasn't safe so they're trying to find ways to engage the public more ways to get more people involved as many people as involved as possible so you can see here they have a website climate council dot main dot gov and there are a number of different ways that you can get involved okay I urge you to go to this website and take a look if you have even the slightest little bit of interest go in and take a look there are a number of ways that you can get involved that you know range from very little some energy to more participation and for this group I'd specifically like to point out the option to invite the climate council to present to your group so you can do that you can say hey I've got a group of stakeholders that are really interested in learning more can someone come and present to us and they can make that happen so this series seems to be a perfect fit for a presentation like that and I'm happy to get the ball rolling if that would be helpful reach out to my contacts at the climate council and see what we can do about setting up presentation so think about it here is my contact information if anyone has any questions that we don't get to today here's my email and my phone number and feel free to reach out to me I think that's all I've got great well thank you so much Stacy and thank you so much Sean I think before we get to a couple questions maybe I'll just say you know a particular thing thanks to you Stacy for pointing out the telling folks a little bit more about the main climate council and showing folks opportunities that they can engage in the climate council's work main Audubon is really excited about everything that's happening with the climate council I served on one of the working groups the natural working lands working group our director of conservation Sally Stockwell is on the scientific and technical subcommittee with Sean and we're really invested in as an organization in implementing a successful actionable climate action plan so I would really encourage folks to go to the website that Stacy just shared and then also to stay in touch with main Audubon so we it's our aim to bring additional attention to the to the various opportunities that will continue to arise to get people engaged with the climate council because this is going to work or is going to work best when people give as much input as possible this is about making a climate action plan that works for all main people and that means that we need to socialize this plan and get as much input as possible so please let be sure to follow those lengths and stay in touch with the great mailing list that the climate council has that main Audubon has and and stay tuned Nick what do you think should we dive into some questions how you let's let's dive in we're nearing the end of the hour but I want to make sure we get to these questions um uh Sean and Stacy do you have if we go a little bit over is that okay or do you guys have to run okay let's fine with me let's dive in we'll go quickly uh Sean a question for you so what current state would main be equated to for a growing season by 2050 would you say that's an excellent question and I I haven't had time to to uh find out precisely where that would be but in general I would in I would expect probably Massachusetts Connecticut uh with the caveat that there's a pretty steep there's a very steep temperature gradient across the data as we're all aware so the climate of northern Maine is not the climate of southern Maine and there's also Maine's geographic position and northern New England in particular uh it's impacted by it's at a convergence of different air masses and the dynamics of that is not the same as it is to our south um and so even in a warming climate for example northern Maine will still have the greatest potential of getting say for example air coming down from Canada cool dry air from Canada and um and so but it is useful to try to identify analog so long story short Massachusetts Connecticut it also depends on the emissions trajectory and how much warming there is between now and 2050 but great thank you and I should say that was a question from Jamie Jamie Willie uh here's a question from Susan Parks uh to you Sean again she said she's read that the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming oceans in the world is that true and if so why is that happening well the uh let me give you some of the the historical context in terms of the Gulf of Maine warming the uh the Gulf of Maine has it warms significantly between about 2004 and excuse me between about 2004 and 2012 and during that interval the warming was faster at a rate faster than any other part of the ocean um and that's on an annual mean over the past several years so the annual mean temperature has leveled off uh but uh there's expectation that the Gulf of Maine will continue to warm and so um so yes during that particularly steep rise in temperature it was the fastest warming ocean body in the world but there is variability that will likely impact the the future trajectory so there may be some cool years or relatively speaking but the overall trend will be upward and so why the Gulf of Maine is warming it links to both oceanic circulation and also atmospheric circulation and as example 2012 the first really big marine heat wave is what they're now called occurred in 2012 at the peak of this several years of really extreme warming there was both can folks do hear me uh i can hear you uh anybody hear me out there it sounds like that it froze up a little bit well the um the circulation entering the Gulf of Maine it's a it's a complex story of ocean water coming up um coming off the Gulf stream and eddies that mix in the basin but also uh cold water that comes down the Arctic um and then flows along the coast of Nova Scotia and enters the Gulf and so that's a cold low salinity water source versus a much warmer higher salinity source but there's a battle between these two different types of water masses and um there's also atmospheric circulation that provides the wind stress that that can propel an ocean current one way or the next so it's a complex picture but the warming the Gulf of Maine has largely reflected the warming in the larger scale North Atlantic region and so as the North Atlantic warms the Gulf of Maine is also expected to warm as well and um now it whether it warms at a particular rate that's a question because again it's it's it depends on there could be a regime where a little bit more cold water flows into the Gulf that moderates temperatures for a while but does that answer your question great yeah thank you and I so I I just lost power for a moment um it looks like it didn't screw everything up which is good but I did lose the questions um so I don't know Eliza if you have the questions those are all gone so maybe you could take over asking yeah happily uh and the the worst happened but I guess it wasn't that that so right on nick for prepping us for what a power outage in zoom land is like let's see um it's a question for Stacey from David um he asks that uh folks sometimes overlook the importance of energy efficiency in reducing emissions um and asks if you could break down the role that energy efficiency has played in uh producing emissions to date yeah um so I don't have specific data on this topic um but where we're going to see that obviously this is a huge strategy and one that everybody can implement immediately um obviously in the the bigger sectors this is something that the manufacturers and automakers will be working on increased efficiencies but um there are a lot of federal regulations related to this like the vehicle cafe standards those are all increased efficiency focused strategies um where I see this in the greenhouse gas data in the SIT is in the reduction of fossil fuel use right the reduction of well all fuel use really so the primary database the foundational database for the SIT the state inventory tool that we use is fuel consumption right it's fuel consumption data in btu that's the British thermal unit so that's the amount of energy required to raise one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit so it's um kind of an effectiveness number um and so with increased efficiencies we are going to see those numbers reduced because people will be using less fuel so while we might not be able to pinpoint other than with with fancy models um that kind of guess at where different strategies are affecting our fuel use um we will see that overall fuel reduction with energy efficiency strategies um unfortunately I don't have the specifics um there are a lot of models out there that look at um various strategies and the expected impact on fuel consumption but none of that is incorporated into the greenhouse gas report at this time thanks Stacy so I'm going to do two two more questions um the first one being um and anyone jump in uh this is from Jeff he asks about wood burning compared to fossil fuel um and emissions and kind of what's heat provided between um uh fossil fuels and uh burning wood was he a plant because this is this is what my day-to-day work is looking like right now wood is a primary focus um so as you may have noticed in the current greenhouse gas report in the eighth by end of the report there are no renewables mentioned so in the back if you get a chance I encourage all of you to grab a copy of the greenhouse gas report it is on the the DEP website and in the back you will see a number of tables and it will show you the consumption of energy by different sources and that does include a breakdown of the renewable sources that we use for energy obviously there are no emissions from some renewable sources other renewable sources do have emissions like wood but with this eighth by end of the report as well as all of the previous greenhouse gas reports we have sort of ignored the emissions from wood because we are assumed that they are balanced by the sequestration of our growing forest and in Maine that's that's a fairly valid assumption for the most part now with the governor's promise for carbon neutrality we need to start looking at those numbers specifically we can't just make an assumption that renewables are balanced by the sequestration we need to quantify that so what you will see in the next greenhouse gas report which will be released in january 2022 but we're already working on now um you will see emissions from wood and you're going to see emissions from all of the renewables that produce emissions things like ethanol and wood are the big two um so we don't have all of those data sorted out yet um I would say that there are a lot of emissions from wood it's it's right up there with some of the fossil fuels it is but you also have a sequestration of the greenhouse gases so you have to make up your own opinion of what is better or worse but there are emissions from wood burning it is not a hundred percent neutral and so for the next greenhouse gas report we will report on that and so what you will see are gross emissions with and without renewables for the first report we're going to do it both ways so you can see the difference and then we're working with University of Maine to come up with that sequestration piece so they are coming up with a sort of time series of sequestration but they are trying to figure out where we are in terms of our carbon neutrality goal and so their piece includes the gross emissions that we report on as well as all of the different sinks all of the different sources and sinks of carbon in our environment to try to figure out where we are and so their piece will include the sequestration from the forest and you can then kind of balance and see where we are in terms of emissions from wood and it will be reported separately so it's not just lumped into gross emissions you will see the emissions specifically from wood over time since 1990 as well as by sector so you'll see emissions from wood in residential in transportation in industrial commercial etc and then you can kind of balance that with the sequestration that the UMaine team has found I hope that's helpful it is thank you Stacy and I think you know as you've referenced a number of upcoming reports and there's been some great sharing of well actually maybe now this has not been seen by the by audience members or participants but there's a lot of great resources out there and I know we'll be doing a follow-up email that will point folks to many of the resources that both Sean and Stacy have mentioned so folks can dive into this even more and I'll I'll finally take a question from Jocelyn who asks about solutions that are being proposed to decrease transportation emissions and I'll punt that to say that that will be the topic of an upcoming talk within this series that we'll be talking diving even more into transportation emissions and some of the policy solutions that have been proposed for reducing those emissions you know as Stacy shown very clearly and the the graphs that Stacy shared transportation is our biggest source of emissions and is also perhaps our most challenging problem if that's what you want to call it to fix and so that is something that you know to be actually perfectly honest as we were putting together this climate series transportation was kind of number one in something that we wanted content we wanted to deliver to folks out there transportation is not an area of expertise for main Audubon but we do know that it is essential to an essential component of our what's going to be our updated climate action plan so it was really important for us to deliver more information to folks on that topic so so stay tuned with that and I will push it over to Nick for for final thoughts and don't wrap us up I the only final thoughts is that this was great I'm so glad that nothing collapsed under the storm I just put a link in the chat to where folks can register for the upcoming climate talks in two weeks from today we have a talk about community solar and how folks can get involved and then following that with about rooftop solar so really great practical information for folks who are looking to cut down on their own carbon footprint and so I just really wanted to thank Sean and Stacy for joining us today this was absolutely fantastic and a perfect way to get started on this series and I also want to thank Laura Craver Rogers for putting so many great links in the chat she was really on top of things so thanks to all I will be stopping this recording and putting it on main Audubon's website as soon as I can so stay tuned for that and keep an eye out for the email that Eliza mentioned and thank you so much for joining us today oh thank you