 So I'm Eric Rineau. I'm a professor of earth system science at the University of California in Irvine and consultant at Caltech's church population laboratory in Pasadena. I've always been interested in physics. I've always been interested in alpine landscapes and climbing stuff like that. But I came to glissology a little bit also by chance. Somehow was the right place at the right time with the right techniques and that worked out pretty well. I have a good job. I love it. Most of our job is actually done on the computer with satellite data. They have completely revolutionized the way we look at polar regions. They make the whole place accessible to scientific analysis. Once before you were limited to where you could go and how long you could stay and how long your food supply would last. So most of my field work involves things that I cannot do with satellite data. Measure the thickness of the ice with some special radar sounders. Or in the past seven years I've been very involved in looking at ocean properties. So we have to be on the boat and measure what's happening several hundred meters below the surface. You can't do that with remote sensing. It's always dangerous in the polar regions. We always have this false sense of feelings that if we land here we're going to be OK. But there's nobody around. We work in the ocean in Glacier Fjords in Greenland close to the Calving France. We've been in situations where if there had been a big calving event we would have been in trouble. We pushed the limit. We always try to have a safety margin. It's really important for the crew and everything else. Of course we don't want to kill ourselves doing that. You have to look at the ice up close. You have to peer down the crevasse. You have to be in contact with the ice. That's the beauty of being in the field is that you can collect measurements that would be very difficult to collect from remote sensing platforms. But you know I have more close calls when I cross the street in San Francisco than when I'm in the Glacier Fjords in Greenland. We have many. The prime time way is to look at elevation changes. It's not the best way but that's the technique that was most readily available from satellites. Because to do that you have to know where your satellite is in reference to the ground and measure that very accurately. So it's very easy. Now we have gravity measurements from GRACE which required technological advance. It was launched in 2002 so it's pretty recent. It's limited a little bit in resolution. We can only see big footprints or big changes. And otherwise we have what we call the component approach. We look at what's going in into making changes in the ice sheet. So there's the flow of the ice. There's snowfall. There's melt. So all the surface climate is actually reconstructed by models, by numerical models which are constrained by real data of course. They're not completely models. They just have the physics in there. And we do a lot of measurements of the flow of ice towards the periphery. That's what I've been doing for pretty much most of my career using satellite data. So this way you compare what's coming out at the periphery with what's coming in as snowfall and is dissipated as melt. And figure out if it's in balance or not. So all these techniques have to mature a lot. The technique I just described on the mass budget. We started using that in the mid-90s. But it took a good decade to get it up to speed and at the level of precision that we wanted. And it was not just me that involved a lot of other people to make this possible. So looking at all these different lines of measurement. What is the picture emerging about what's happening through the ice sheets? Oh, that's a long story there. But we've learned a lot of things, right? We started paying at these things. We started that in the early 1990s to see if there's anything happening. And I think we've been going through discoveries and discoveries each time going, wow. So in Greenland we see all the outlet glaciers changing a lot. The interior is not changing contrary to what models predicted with an increase in snowfall. We haven't seen any of that. The glaciers changes around Greenland are over the whole island, not just in the southeast or central west. Even in the north, we're going to report results this week of the collapse of an ice shelf and the formation of a new tidewater glacier in northeast Greenland. Way up there at 79 north, which most of us did not think we would see that happening maybe in our lifetime. And in the Antarctic, Antarctic is a big place. We've learned that it's very important to look at every part of a big place. Don't think that because you know one little place you know about Antarctica. Antarctica is a very big area. So there's the Antarctic Peninsula and the Pine Island Bay sector, which are changing very rapidly. We have very good observations for that. And I think we've developed a good understanding of why it's happening and how. So there's a lot of changes, very interesting stuff for scientists because these changes are happening fast, not over centuries, over decades. Well, a tipping point, I'm not sure what a tipping point is, but it's not as clear to say at that point in time we passed a threshold. It's probably very difficult to put your finger on it. But you can probably look, which is what we did back in May, at the past 20, 40 years of observation of one sector and say, look, we've gathered enough information in this area, understanding the changes and see what's laying behind to say this sector is sort of doomed. It's going to keep retreating no matter what the climate does. It might retreat faster if climate warming continues at this pace. It might retreat slower. We don't know that absolutely for sure. But the fuse is already blown. The idea is still probably a little bit of a shock for some people in our community. I've been looking at this area long enough to be quite sure about that. The time scale is the big issue. I think the community in general is very conservative with time scales. All the observations we've collected in the past decades are actually pointing towards shorter time scales at what the models are able to replicate. It's true for CIS. CIS decay, most of the models are not able to replicate that. It's true for the decay of glaciers and ice sheets. They're going on a pace faster than what the models projected and faster than even the present day models are able to replicate. So a lot of the changes we're witnessing, we actually don't have any reference in time to say, we know how it happened in the past. We know at what pace these things can retreat. For example of that, all the records of collapse of marine ice sheets have been bulldozed by the advance of the glaciers. These records don't exist. We know how fast some of the land terminating ice sheets can collapse and they can collapse pretty fast. So the marine ice sheets, they probably can do it a lot faster. We probably are seeing that today in several parts of Antarctica and Greenland. But it's still a bit shattering to say, hey, this is it. Even for the scientists looking at it. It's kind of a big step to say, I think this place is falling apart. I think the concept that East Antarctica is stable is a bit of a lullaby. There's actually large parts of East Antarctica that are submarine. They contain more ice than West Antarctica. They are probably not as closely exposed to warm water around the periphery. But at face value, I've never quite understood why there was so much emphasis on West Antarctica. So right now, most of the changes are in one part of West Antarctica and in Peninsular. But there's some places in East Antarctica in the marine basin where we see some changes that are a little bit of red flags. That some of these places may change in the future in a bigger way. They are changing in the way that you would expect if somehow more warm water is able to reach the glaciers. But the record is still a little bit short and the signal is still a little bit small there. It's more like a little flag. I don't know. But we're not doing a good job at that. I think most of the scientists are not trained for that. They are a bit taken by surprise. They don't have to deal with that very well. I'm trying to learn. I talk to people actually from digital media to ask them how do we reach the people. The feedback I get right now is you guys really suck at it. You're not doing it right. I can tell that you're not trained to do this. The message is not passing. You talk about these things like business as usual, these glaciers falling apart. Western Antarctica is going to be an irreversible state of retreat. And the people who listen to that may not click. They feel like, well, it doesn't seem so shattered by this. So why should I worry about it? We should be a little bit more vocal and direct about these things. You have somehow to take your scientist hat off and take a different hat to communicate that. You cannot communicate to the public the same way you communicate to your colleagues. It has to be a different level of communication. Another problem is that there's a slight distrust of science. There's a slight misunderstanding about how scientists do their work. I was at the panel recently and one person in the audience told me why don't the scientists release their data? They have all this information and they don't release it to us. And I'm like, well, actually that's what they do every day. That's their job to release the data and publish and make this public. There's a little bit of miscommunication there. I think the medias have a big role, the educational medias have a big role to play in that. The scientists have to get into gear and to be able to express what they know, express uncertainties and put that into a layman language that the public can relate to. It's not easy. Maybe we should all take acting classes or something like that. So you can communicate with your audience and read your audience. It's not just about making your spiel and hope that it works. You have to somehow see if you connect with your audience or not. And as a scientist when you make presentations to your colleagues it's not something you worry about. It's different. It's kind of a red herring. You can also say that I think more importantly the people that encourage distrust of science usually have an agenda. They are usually sponsored to create kind of confusion in the mind of the public. They come up with these arguments that these scientific facts are not accepted by the community when you know it's not true. They are sort of lying. The only reason they would do that if they are rather intelligent people, which I think they are, is that they are on an agenda. And they are sponsored to say those things by other groups of interest who don't really want these kind of stories to come on the front line. Because it's annoying. Yes I think so. On multiple levels I think we see some significant changes. I think sometimes I'm deconstructed even by my own community. I think we are very conservative in all of this. Maybe there's not a sense of social responsibility in that. And that can be understood from scientists. Scientists like to stick with the facts they know with the data they have. They don't necessarily like to project based on that. But that sort of slows down the process that makes the communication a little bit more confusing. You may hear a different message from different scientists. So the public is like well what should I believe here? Which one is reasonable? Which one is pushing it? And why is he pushing it? And probably the greatest concern is that we look at all these IPCC projections. I'm involved with IPCC. And they have different scenarios of climate change. Like burn as much as we can into burn more reasonably and don't burn at all. Which keeps a false sense that we are sort of controlling our future. But right now we are not. We are burning as fast as we can. We don't even have scenarios where we could try to burn even faster. Which would bring a little bit of balance in these scenarios. So in all I think it encourages status quo. There's no strong incentive to change anything now. When we talk about Western tally collapse I even heard comments saying well if it's happening no matter what then it's too late. There's nothing to do. Let's keep doing our business as usual. So I'm a little bit concerned about the lack of reaction to everything that we put forward based on science. And I think the concern down the line is that it's going to take a lot more dramatic changes before people say hey we have to stop this. You know we can make all the projections we want for the next 34 years. It's probably already written in stone by the way the climate is right now and the continuing emissions. Even if there's some major shift in global politics about that it's going to take some time to have an impact. The IPCC process is very rigorous. It involves the best scientists in the world. They dedicate their time to this. They don't get extra pay for working for the IPCC. A lot of people don't realize that. They don't need extra money to work for the IPCC. And for four or five years they dedicate a lot of their time to putting these reports. They have to bring all the collection of peer-reviewed publications that appeared and provided synthesis of that. So they have to be very well aware of all the scientific publications. They have to maintain some level of quality in the peering of these different articles. And they have to write the synthesis that is understandable by their colleagues as well as politicians and the general public. So it's a very large effort. One of the drawbacks of IPCC is they have to make projections as well. And for that they have to use physical models. And the physical models are not perfect. They have issues with them. And in the case of I-sheets they have lots of issues. We know that they are very conservative. But that's the best we have. But perhaps some of these uncertainties and the consequences of these uncertainties are not put forward well enough in some cases. In the case of sea level rise from I-sheets, I think the IPCC presentation is rather on the conservative side. Let's not push things forward because our models just can't. Even though a lot of us feel like they should do a lot more. The IPCC has been accused of being alarmist? Alarmist? Exaggerating the impacts of climate change? No, I think IPCC has always been conservative. I think it's the rock solid basis of what we know about climate change. You would have a hard time dispute anything that's mentioned in IPCC because it went through very rigorous review. It's a consensus. So a lot of the statements that I made in IPCC represent a consensus between the number of scientists. So it's a moderator. It's a natural moderator of opinions. You're not going to express extreme opinions in IPCC because the community is not going to adhere to that. They're going to say it's too extreme. We don't know. You have to like median filter all of that. The first thing about climate warming is that the physical basis we've known it for centuries. This is nothing new in the science of climate change today. You bring more CO2, more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it warms it up. It's undisputable. It's very solid physics, right? And the science is looking at the impact of that on the climate, the impact on humans, the impact on sea level, the impact on precipitation. It's going to be the impact on food production. It's going to be the impact on where people live. There are pretty serious impacts. It's going to be impact on biodiversity, which in my opinion is even bigger than sea level rise, right? The decay of species. In the end, what we're saying, what most of the science is saying is this changing occurring very fast. We are on a very fast train heading for the war and that's not good. So we have to change the way we live. And I often say it's common sense, right? We didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of stone. We have to leave the oil age because burning oil is not good for the climate. It's not good for us. But it's a huge shift in our society. It's a huge shift in the way we live. It's not going to take a few scientists raising the red flag to make this happen. It has to be a big social movement where everybody says, hey, we want to stop this. And my only hope right now that this is going to happen is the new generation. The young people from 20 to 30, because I think they're more sensitive to this. They don't want this kind of world down the line. And they probably are the first generation who can actually change it. They have the power to change it. I hope they take it. I hope they take it.