 Good evening, folks, and welcome. It's my pleasure tonight to introduce our speaker, Professor James White, who is a fellow of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. When we were looking for a good speaker as part of our NSF Sustainability Grant, Professor White stood out as the obvious choice. Fortunately, we were able to arrange for him to visit and deliver two lectures. Tonight's Sustainability Climate Change Review. And tomorrow evening's more technical talk, ice core stories of rough climate change and future sea level. He is also visiting several classes tomorrow, as well as meeting with students and faculty. Dr. White earned his PhD in Geological Sciences from Columbia University in 1983. He currently holds three titles at CU, Professor of Geological Sciences, Director of the Environmental Studies Program, and Director of the Stable Isotope Lab within the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Professor White's specific areas of research include modeling the global carbon cycle, development of techniques for measuring isotope ratios and atmospheric gases, reconstructions of paleo-environmental conditions, reconstructions of past environments, and tracing of groundwater flow and recharge. He has been a member of several deep ice pouring projects in Greenland and Antarctica. His ice core research has helped to show that large climate changes tend to occur in the natural system as abrupt and rapid shifts rather than slow and gradual adjustments to changing external conditions. We're very fortunate to have him here with us tonight to talk to us about sustainability climate change and you, Dr. White. Thank you very much, Chuck. Thank you all for inviting me. That was an embarrassing and good introduction to it. I didn't do all this next week. Thank you very much, my dinner partner over here. Where's Jake? Jake, Jake, it's been an hour and a half from the Department day with Jake. It was really a great hour and a half. I have his cell phone number if you've been a little too shy to ask for Jake's cell phone number. I've got it. Just ask afterwards. Is that OK, dude? All right. All right, I've got to press a button on this thing to get the sucker to go. So check it out a little bit. There you go. Yeah, power point. You didn't know this. If you crank up a power point presentation and then press W, the screen goes white. You crank it up and you press B, the screen goes black. All I have to do is press that same button again. You have to remember with button, you press it. This I just found out. So this evening I'd like to talk to you about sustainability and climate change to me is a subset of sustainability. Sustainability is the challenge we have in providing for a lot of people living really high on the proverbial hog. And we don't really know how to do that. But climate change is one part of that problem. Because climate change, it turns out, is related back to energy. And energy is one of the real struggles we have in terms of providing for the future. But I like to start with climate change because it's a problem that we face right now. It is something we talk about today. It's very obvious that this is a subject that's in the news. And hopefully get a chance tomorrow to talk to some of the students about what it's like to be a climate scientist and some of the fun parts and some of the not so fun parts. We're talking about some of that this evening at dinner. So what is our role and what is our responsibility? I'm going to come back to this responsibility right here. Because I think it's a very important word. And I don't tell this story very often. I think I'll tell it to this crowd. I was invited once to give a talk at a university in Denver, Colorado Christian University. And it was pretty obvious at the beginning that this is a pretty fundamentalist place. And they were, they had invited someone from I think it was the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise, the Institute of something, a conservative think tank to come and speak. I was supposed to talk and they were supposed to talk. I told them I'm going to debate these people. Not work debate. But I will come and talk. So that's what I did. So I was the first to give my talk. So I gave a talk. I had parts of which you're going to see. I have changed some of this stuff because it works. I want to change it. So anyway, the last slide that I showed is a big room, about 400 people. Beautiful place. I'd say maybe out of 400 people, five people in the room were amenable to the message that I was giving. The other, 395 were amenable to the message. The other speaker was about to give, which is kind of changes the whole board of garbage and you shouldn't throw it out. So anyway, I'm cruising along. I give my talk. I end on the word responsibility. And I will do some of that to you today. And I think responsibility is the key word. I raised two kids, tough word with them. It's a tough word with adults too. So when your parents, when your parents give you grief about responsibility, give them grief right back. Because your parents' generation isn't doing a very good job of being responsible. So the word responsibility is the last slide. It's a big red light. There's an A-B switch for my computer to this other guy's computer. So they switch it from my computer to his computer. He starts giving his talk to the first slide and the whole bunch of kind of changes and bumps and all that stuff. So he's cruising along. And at most inoperative time, for some reason, technology steps in. And the word responsibility, my last slide, but pulling right on the screen, is responsibility. And I'm sitting down at the front row. So it's not me, right? And so he hits the A-B switch and gets back over to his computer. He didn't touch it, just happened. He keeps talking five minutes late, responsibility. Now the irony is starting to get dripping if you follow my finger. It just happened three or four times. The A-B guy got up and ended up just disconnecting my computer, getting it out in order to keep this from happening. Responsibility, that's the key word. So we'll come back. I'm going to start with simple physics. I get asked a lot, is climate change real? Yes. Are human beings causing it? Yes. Is that equivocated? Do not give all sorts of maybes, this, that, and the other. Just say yes. Now the reason why we can say that is because basically if you just take a step back and you look at the planet as a whole and ask the question, what controls climate on our planet, it turns out to be relatively simple, actually very simple. There are really only three things that control climate on our planet. How much energy we get from the sun? We're a sun-driven planet. There's energy that comes out of the ground, but not a whole lot. How much of that energy gets reflected back to outer space? So this is not our planet. This is a planet that looks like our planet. But without any ice or snow. So today, there's lots of snow out there. Sun's energy comes in, bounces off the planet. We're much colder here today than we would be if the snow had melted off. And meteorologists know this. Weather forecasters know this. They know that once the snow falls, you can just drop the high temperatures by a good 5, 10 degrees for the next few days until the snow melts off, if it ever melts off. I am speaking of a crowd here in Minnesota. How much of that energy gets reflected back to outer space? And third is the amount of greenhouse gas. The greenhouse gases are those gases that do not absorb the sun's incoming energy. They absorb the energy that the Earth re-radiates to outer space. And if you sat through introductory physics, you know that all bodies, except at zero degrees, and nothing is at zero degrees, radiates energy. And it's related to your temperature. And so the Earth radiates in the infrared. And it's a different temperature. The Earth is clearly a different temperature than the sun. If that's news to you, then we really do need to talk to you later, not just Jake's phone number. Here comes the sun's incoming energy, strikes the Earth, and it radiates in the infrared. So greenhouse gases have just happened to be those gases that absorb any infrared. Water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and gas is like that. All gases, all molecules, spider. All molecules, gaseous molecules, let's say, I'm a carbon here in the middle of two oxygens. I vibrate. And if you give me the frequency of my vibration, I will absorb it. And if you don't give me the frequency of my vibration, I will absorb it. My favorite example of that is being an older brother, my younger sister's two years younger than I am. It was my job, my duty, my responsibility to torture her, which I would do. And when she wanted to be pushed on the swing, if I was a good brother, I would push her at the right frequency, and she would go higher and higher. She absorbed the energy I was pushing at the right frequency. If I pushed her at any other frequency, she couldn't absorb it. As a matter of fact, it annoyed her, which is more than likely what I did. But the important thing is that gases will absorb that energy that they want to absorb, that is their frequency. Now, they also rotate, and they translate, and do all this thing. But what we're interested in here is the vibrational energy. So those greenhouse gases that do that, a special group of gases. So the Earth's temperature, you can take it, you can take our Earth's temperature by a number of methods, but if you go up to the top of the atmosphere, you figure out how much energy are we getting from the sun, and what would our temperature be, given the amount of energy we're getting from the sun, we would be about negative 18 degrees Celsius. In order for us to be a warmer planet, we would have to be closer to the sun. So you'd have to get out the big engineering structures and move the planet closer to the sun in order to make it warmer. Now, I would argue that's too cold for advanced life, that's probably gonna be frozen over oceans. There probably would be life on the planet, but because we still would have liquid water under that scenario, but we wouldn't be here at negative 18 on average. The actual temperature of the planet, if you go out with a bunch of thermometers and measure it's about plus 15 degrees Celsius. The different, and that's as I put up there, that's a nice temperature, it's cozy. Not too hot at the equator, it's too cold with poles, but you don't have to live with poles. And the difference between those two is because of greenhouse gas. The amount of energy we get from the sun will only get us to negative 18. We've got to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to get us up to plus 50. That's what greenhouse gases do for us. They raise the temperature of the earth by about 33 degrees Celsius, 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and take us from a frozen world to a liquid world. Take us from a planet that probably wouldn't support us, who, a planet that clearly does a wonderful job of supporting us if we would do a wonderful job of that, of being nice to the planet. So greenhouse gases are your friend. Greenhouse gases, without them, we don't really have a habitable planet. So if we add lots of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we will change climate. And climate is very simply defined as the energy in the lower atmosphere. And the distribution of that energy is the climate system. It can be a sensible heat, the heat that we sense, about 50% of the energy in the lower atmosphere is the energy that we sense. It can be water evaporation, about 30% of the energy goes into water evaporation. It can be leaves moving, winds, in other words. It can be all sort of synthesis. It's all sorts of ways in which energy's expressed in the lower atmosphere. But the expression of energy in the lower atmosphere is the climate system. So if we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we will trap more of the earth's outgoing radiation. We will increase the resonance time of that energy in the lower atmosphere and we will change climate. That is simple, that's simple physics. In order for that not to happen, molecules gotta quit absorbing energy. So, simple physics. I give a little example in a class I teach on energy and environment where I try to get people to understand what it would take for us to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and not change climate. So I put a chair in front of me. We have a chair here, it's a pretty tall chair. I'm gonna have somebody stand on this chair. Normal demonstration, so high. Should we do a try? Okay. Anyway, I have somebody stand on the chair. And we talk about, what would happen here, if I would put Jim on? Jim, you're not on the chair, but you're mentally on the chair, okay? This is my thought experiment. Thought experiment, you're mentally on the chair. So we put Jim mentally on the chair here. And we talk about what would happen if I walked over and I pushed. And I just saw Jim ride his bike back from the restaurant. By the way, I really thank you for the wonderful walk. Jim would probably be able to leap off land deftly on both feet, and he wouldn't be hurt. So what do we do? We tie his ankles. So we tie Jim's ankles. And now we push. Now he's still pretty deft, so I'm a little nervous about his ability to handle the situation, but so he'll tie his hands behind his back. So we tie his feet. All right, so this isn't a class full of 18 to 22-year-olds, like you guys know this. So we start talking about what's gonna happen to Jim here. And we get into all sorts of stuff. Broken nose, you're wearing glasses. Oh my goodness, shattered glasses, stitches, perhaps, maybe even death. Really quality, quality moments we have talking about Jim. And the students are free to speak to. I ride on the board and I say, what the heck happened? It sounds like an ER story by the time you get to the end. Not once in the 25 years I've taught that class and not once in the multiple times I've given a public lecture. As anybody raised their hand and seriously said, Jim won't fall. Today, gravity does not apply to Jim. Now think about that. We all know how absurd it is that Jim won't fall. We know physics is physics. We know you cannot deny that. We know you cannot pass a law against gravity. If we could, Congress would pass a law reducing the gravitational constant by 10%. We'd all lose 10, 20, 30 pounds in a heartbeat. You can't do it. We know that to be the case. You can no more deny the reality of gravity than you can deny the reality that molecules when they vibrate are gonna absorb it. So this is simple physics. When somebody says to you, is climate changing? That's an easy one, because that's just reading a thermometer record. Are human beings causing it? Yes, because we put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that will change the climate. You don't have to get any more complicated than that. Doesn't take a whole bunch of complicated models. Doesn't take a whole bunch of complicated arguments. It is that simple. So the real question then is, so what? What are you gonna do about that? What are the implications? What are the ramifications? What's the economics? What are the ethics? What are the morals behind it? So for the rest talk, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the ramifications of climate change. We'll talk a lot, hopefully, about the other aspects of this, the economics side, the moral side, the ethical side. Because this is where it gets really interesting. So we live on a relatively simple planet when it comes to the relationship between temperature and sea level. I'm a paleo climatologist and when I look at the history of the planet in terms of its temperature and the history of the planet in terms of sea level, this is one of the most robust relationships we have on the planet. And it's because, again, simple physics reigns. When our planet warms, sea level rises, when our planet cools, sea level drops because of two things. Number one, thermal expansion of water. Can't get around it. When you warm water up, it expands. When you warm the ocean up, it expands and sea level rises. The other thing that happens is when you warm up the air and when you warm up water, you melt land ice. And tomorrow night, I'll talk more about that. But tonight, very, very straightforward. You warm up the air, you will warm up the water, you'll warm up the water, both of those things start to melt land ice. Land ice goes in the ocean and raises sea level. And again, sea level and temperature is one of the most robust relationships we have on the planet. So we can expect sea level to rise. It is rising today. It will continue to rise in the future. And it's not by small amounts. If you come tomorrow, we'll talk about the history of sea level. But we live on a planet where sea level goes up and down by large amounts. 20,000 years ago, sea level was more than 300 feet lower than today. Russia and the US were connected via Alaska. Sarah got it right at that point. Indonesia was connected to Australia. So different looking world at that point. 300 feet lower. Sea level's been much higher in the past. Sea level's been 50, 60, 70, 80 feet higher than today. And we just happened to have populated and industrialized the planet at a time when sea level has been pretty constant. And so when we built big cities on the coast, because this reports where we populated the planet by ship, we ended up, we thought, uh-huh, sea level's level. And indeed, it's not. It goes up and down. Sea level estimates by the end of this century are about three feet higher. That's conservative. And again, we'll talk about this more more, but it could be higher than that, probably not huge amounts. But what does three feet look like? This is what three feet looks like in the city of Miami. This is no longer a city that functions. This is a city in which the power lines are in trouble. This is a city in which the gas lines are in trouble. This is a city in which the sewer lines are in trouble. This is a city in which the infrastructure doesn't work anymore. And this is the key to the big city, the infrastructure. The goods and the services that you're delivered and the services that you give back to the system. I asked my class, for example, what's the physics behind the flush toilet? Gravity. Without gravity, it goes downhill, folks. The bottom of the gradient here is coming up on. The flush toilet does not work so well in this system anymore. So when the flush toilet doesn't work so well anymore, and when you don't have electricity, you don't have gas, and that makes this is not a city that's going to fall in trouble. It's not going to stop there. This is Miami with six feet of sea level rise. This is a city that you go visit in a glass bottle boat. This is a city where you go fishing. This is going to be really good fishing down here. This is artificial reefs like no one's business. And you might chuckle, but this is reality. In 100 years or so, your grandkids, your great-grandkids, are going to go bone fishing down here, because it's going to be fantastic. Assuming we clean up the buildings before we turn these. Now Miami's not alone in this. There's a whole bunch of cities that are problematic around the coast. And we'll talk, again, we'll talk more about sea level rise tomorrow. Why do I pick on Miami? I pick on Miami for a very simple reason. Number one, it's a city that is built on sand and coral, both of which can't stop water. Basically, water goes right through. So you could build all the dykes around Miami to one. You won't stop it. The water will come. You'd have to basically build a dyke and then concrete over Miami, at which point you go, why am I here? I've done a whole lot of engineering to stay in the spot that God does not want me to stay in. All right. There's more simple physics. Warmer air holds more water. So we expect there to be more precipitation globally in the future. Ironically, also, warmer air evaporates more water from the surface, which dries the land. So the key to keeping a continent nice and moist is to have plants. And if you dry out a continent to the point where the plants turn brown and dry up, like the great plants where I just came from, then things can get very dry and things can get very hot. We know this is a whole bunch of good examples. How many people saw the PBS special on the dust bowl? Was that depressing? Wow. That was six hours. Was it six hours? It felt like 20. A really good television, but very, very depressing. And I mean, what folks did at that time, farmers were, wheat prices were falling. And when wheat prices are falling, what did they do? They figure, all right, if I make a certain amount of money on an acre a week, I'll plant two acres and that'll give me the same amount of money if wheat prices drop by 50%. So I mean, for those of you who have taken economics, you know, this is not going to end well. And it didn't end well. And basically, they plowed up a lot of the prairie. It took away a lot of the ability for moisture to come from the land into the atmosphere and keep things cool. And numerous modeling studies since then have shown that the severity of the dust bowl a year were increased dramatically by the fact that we even plowed out the vegetation. We took away that feedback, that ability for the land to feed water to the atmosphere. Another thing that happens on a warmer planet, and we don't have time to go into this, but basically the large scale circulation of the atmosphere changes. So we, the big cell where you evaporate water along the equator and it flows north and falls about 30 degrees north today, that big heavy cell that circulates and chunks away and brings moisture from the tropics up towards the temperate region. That's, that gets bigger. And for us, what that means is that the dries on, so I'll go back up for a second. So think about it, so if you have moisture rising at the equator and it starts to go north, once it's risen in the atmosphere, it squeezed out most of its moisture. So dry air falls at about 30 degrees north. If you take a map of the world, if you take 30 degrees north across, you'll find the Sahara, you'll find West Texas, you'll find Mexico, you'll find a whole bunch of deserts stretch around. And that's in part because of this large scale of circulation in the atmosphere. So what we're predicting is that that cell will grow. And what that means is if you're at 35, 40 degrees north, like we are in Boulder, we see New Mexico basically coming up towards us. And New Mexico's pretty dry. That also means that if you go a little bit farther north, it actually gets wet for the same basic reason. Now, I was about to say, so the bottom line, what does the past tell us? Actually, we read this. I don't recommend it. Many people had to read Samuel Taylor, okay? Let's commiserate afterwards. The US is warming. All right, so this happens to be Colorado from 16 general circulation models. In black here, you see this. So continental regions are warming up. So we can expect continental regions some ways to dry out and in total, actually globally to get wetter. Oh, by the way, Jeff Lucas, the Western Water Assessment, I give a lot of credit for stealing a couple of his time. So the US is warming up. And I was telling you, these large scale circulation systems, basically the models generally agree that the drier parts move north and get drier. Here's the summertime drying out of the whole continental United States, spring, winter, fall. And the wetter parts, you guys are actually sitting up here, you get in almost all the models, you get wetter in the spring and in the winter, but dry out in the summertime. The same basic reason we all dry out here because once this continent starts to dry out and everything is out. Now, I threw this slide in because I'm sitting on a committee now where we're actually revisiting the issue of a proper climate change and we're working hard to try to understand where are the thresholds in our climate system. And as continental regions warm up and dry out, one can ask the question, okay, what about food? Can we continue to grow the crops that we've been growing? And so we've been talking to a whole bunch of experts on food and those experts tell us that when we have droughts, we have two adaptations to deal with that from a food point of view. One is to stockpile food. So if you're a farmer, or if you're a co-op or if you're a government, you stockpile grains. And so when you have a drought, you can bring those stockpile grains back into the market and you keep people fed and you keep the price from going up through the roof. That's strategy number one. Strategy number two is you pump water out of the ground. And strategy number two is by far the most used strategy global. So when the Southeast, for example, has a drought, which Southeast has been in a drought numerous times in the last 10 or 15 years, the adaptation is to pump water out of the ground. We've quit stockpiling food here in the U.S. sometime ago, or something like that, same sort of just in time mentality that we have in manufacturing, we have in food. When I was a kid, when I was a kid we used to have stockpiled cheese and stockpiled our sorts of stuff to show up in the supermarket one day. It wasn't very good, but it was stockpiled. We don't do that anymore. Interestingly, what's happening is we're approaching in many parts of the world an interesting threshold, an interesting tipping point, where we won't be able to take water around the ground anymore to backstop us from droughts because the ground is no more completely full of water than it is full of oil or natural gas or anything like that. This was a fascinating figure that they showed us. This is a map of the planet from a gravity point of view, and it turns out that the big difference in gravity that you see on land is how much water's in the ground. The more water's in the ground, the more mass is there, the more gravity there is, the more you weigh, unfortunately. But what's been happening in the red areas here, you see a depletion of groundwater over the past 10 years. Also in the ice areas, you see a depletion of ice, by the way. But you'll notice here, the southeast has been pumping water for the last 10 years. And you see in red here, the decrease, centimeters per year, the decrease in the groundwater activity. This is an unsustainable situation. As this area continues to have, basically what's happening here is that this area is taking money out of its bank, taking water out of its bank account. And this is an unsustainable situation because eventually you find the point where you can't take the water out of the water, and you're gonna have... Now note that there are some areas, you can see far in the north here where you start to see, where you see an increase in precipitation and an increase in groundwater recharge. But unfortunately, we grow most of our food here in the red areas here. Russia is looking at some big problems here. The Indian groundwater depletion is here. We can go on and on about this. But basically that message of where it's dry, if it dries just to the south of you, it's gonna creep up on you. A little bit about the US Heartland drought, the recent drought. This was, as you all know, a record drought in terms of many categories here. So I was talking to Jeff Lucas about this at the Western Water Assessment, and he says, yeah, it was pretty rare. This was a pretty rare drought. And that's good news, bad news. The good news is, since it's a rare drought, you might say, okay, maybe this won't happen again. The bad news is, well, maybe, you know, if we're pushing into a new climate regime, maybe this is something that's gonna happen more often. So, just some indices here. This is something called the Palmer Drought Severity Index where it's just basically showed the US in 2012. Summertime, dry, dry, dry. Now, how can we determine what it was like in the past? I have to give props to my tree rain folks. This is a plot of percent area that has drought from 1900 to 2010 showing what we observed and what the tree rings reconstructed. They do a pretty good job. So going in and touring trees across this area, people like Ed Cook and others put together these tree ring indices and they can do a very good job of saying, yep, the trees are gonna tell us about drought. So then you can say, well, how far back in time can the trees go? And this is the answer, we can take it back to about 1,000 AD. And here we have the same plot where about 60%, this is the 2012 observed level here. And you see that 2012 was indeed rare. In the last 1,000 years, maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. 13 out of 1,000 years were like 2012. So if that is a sign of things to come, which is the climate scientists who are telling us, then this is not good news. If this was just a random shot, cling to that. Interestingly, there are a number of ways we can see this has occurred in the past. This is, actually I flew over this today. If you fly from Denver to Chicago or Denver to Minneapolis, you fly over a good chunk of Nebraska here, which is the Sandhills. When a lot of them, and settlers were coming across the United States, the European settlers, they found areas of this that they called the Great Sahara. It was basically sand. At that time, it was a bit drier and the dunes were activated. And this area has been activated in the past. This whole area was one big sand dune. Basically, about 1,000 years ago. Also activated about 500 years ago. And it's activated many times in the past. We live, the U.S. Central United States lives on pretty much a borderline between grassland and sand dunes, right? So it's, again, the message, the reinforcing message is you gotta watch out for those plants. Those plants are absolutely critical. When they dry up, when they blow away, the whole system can go to something. Just a little bit about sea ice. I wanna say something about that because this is something we've been working on quite a bit lately. This is actually a movie. What I'm gonna show you is a movie, or Arctic sea ice. And what's interesting about this is that we've now gotten sophisticated enough that we can, in white, tell you old sea ice from, in dark blue, young sea ice. This is all sea ice, even the dark blue stuff. But the dark blue stuff is about one year ice, and the lighter ice is multi-year ice. Now, it used to be that this area was cold enough that multi-year ice built up all the time. And what you'll see here as time goes by is, once it's actually, all these icebergs get flushed, you also see how the Arctic circulates, by the way. So ice is constantly flushing out here along the coast of Greenland. This is what sunk the Titanic by the way. Time ago, watch 2007. 2006, 2007 was a banner year. A lot of the old ice got flushed out by a threshold type event. It was a meteorological event that kicked in. So here we are in 2012. Now, mentally compare what this, to what I started with, which was this was all white. So we've now gone from a system, a Arctic system, that had multi-year ice that would not melt out in the summertime to a system that has one year ice that pretty much can melt out to maybe like 78% now in the summertime. For years, already people have been sailing ships along here. The Russians charge a fortune for sailing through their waters. So companies are waiting for you to sail across here. And that's becoming reality. It's cheaper. Cheaper distance-wise, and you don't have to pay the Russians anything. From a climate point of view, this is interesting because you go from blue, you go from white ice, unfortunately, bad color choice here, white ice to blue water very quickly. And remember that second thing that controls global climate is the amount of reflectivity of the climate. So when you go from white ice which reflects the energy back to outer space, it keeps you cold. The blue ocean that absorbs that energy, you fundamentally change the climate of the Arctic. And we can now, we're set up to be able to do this every year because we're basically down to one year ice. And you folks here in Minnesota, you know very well, legs will freeze over, very large legs can freeze over. And then a relatively short period of time can melt out. As a matter of fact, Lake Erie did its study once at Lake Erie. Lake Erie is about the size of Eastern Colorado, which is a pretty large chunk of land. And Lake Erie historically would go from a total 100% ice cover to 0% ice cover in a short time. Anybody care to guess how quick that was? You folks should know you live in ice country. How quickly can Lake Erie go from 100% ice to 0% ice? A couple weeks, yeah. But I asked that question to Carl Rodens, they go, I don't know, a year? Come on, dude, pay attention here. Ride this again, all right? You know that typical ice out can happen very, very quickly because you get melting from the top, you get melting from the bottom, and you get wind coming along, stirring it up, and you can go from ice cover to no ice in a matter of 10 days, two weeks, something like that. So there's a whole bunch of far-ranging impacts that come with this, right? There's something called the Arctic Paradox. Have we heard of this? Has this made the news yet, Arctic Paradox? The Arctic Paradox basically says that the way that climate works on our planet is you've got warm tropics and you've got cold poles. And when you do that, you've got a whole bunch of energy that wants to go from the equator to the pole because nature does not like it being cold in that side of the room and warm in that side of the room. So there's gonna be motion, air motion, in order to try to balance that out. And that's what happens on our planet. We get lots of heat flowing north all the time. Things like the jet stream happen because we live on a spinning planet, then you end up with things like the jet stream that go circulating around. And the colder the poles is and the warmer the equator is, the stronger the jet stream is and the straighter the jet stream is. Like a mountain stream that comes flowing out of the Colorado Rockies, they're straight and they're fast. When they hit the planes, the energy starts to make them meander and wander. So what's happening to our jet stream today is that instead of being strong and going around in circles, it's beginning to slow down and meander more. And ironically, meanders means that you can bring cold air down farther south than you used to. So we've got a nice dose of cold air right now. And I don't know whether that cold air is there because the Arctic is warmer than it used to be or not. But that's the general pattern you can expect in the future. But you're gonna get these interesting paradoxes where yes, overall the climate's warming up, but we get more of these cold air incursions coming in and they stay longer because the jet stream is movier and slower and storms move more slowly and all sorts of things. So all sorts of other things that happen in an ice tree Arctic. There's politics. The Russians planted a flag at the bottom of the North Pole. It's the bottom of the North Pole, it's the bottom of the ocean. It's the top of the bottom of the North Pole. Why? I don't know. It's politics. Like I understand politics. There's more ships. Shell tried really hard to build a oil and gas extraction system out in the Arctic Ocean this year. They got beat up, had to retreat, but you'll see more of that. You'll see more resource extraction, you'll see more ships like that. And one of the more interesting problems here and something that I have studied is there's a lot of carbon up there. There's as much carbon in permafrost frozen in soils as there is in all cold oil and natural gas. And there's even more carbon in what's something called methane class rates which are frozen methane ices than there is in all cold oil and natural gas. This is a map of permafrost showing you the permafrost regions of the world. There's a lot of carbon up and it's warming up and that carbon will melt and come out into the atmosphere. Now fortunately we don't think this is gonna come out rapidly like in 20 or 34 years. It'll come out over hundreds of years. But this is a big positive feedback and it has big policy implications because as we think about finally what are we gonna do about greenhouse gases and what are we gonna do about fossil fuel emissions? By the time we actually get around to this we're already starting to see carbon come out of permafrost. By the time we get around to this the permafrost is putting carbon in the atmosphere and just sort of chuckling as we try to ramp back our carbon emissions nature starts to pump carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Hopefully it won't be that ironic. Hopefully it won't be that nasty of a situation. But that is exactly where we're heading right now. We're already starting to see signs that this carbon's beginning to decay. Warm up, style decay coming into the atmosphere. A lot of it is up. Okay, let's go off in a different direction. This is a hard problem. It's gonna take many of us to solve it. Why is it hard? Well, it's political. No getting around there. It is political. Number two, there's a lot of money at stake. We spend about one and a half trillion dollars on energy in this company. And it's about 85% coal oil and natural gas. So there's well over a trillion dollars a year that's going into the fossil fuel industry. Now you know, and I'm not, thank you, oil, coal and natural gas because we wouldn't have the likes out of this. We wouldn't be doing what we're doing. Maybe we wouldn't have the heat wind, all this other stuff. Thank you, right? But also know the way that our political system works is when you got the money, you are the lobbyists. So it shouldn't be a surprise that climate science is a beat up on a regular basis. I don't think it's a surprise at all. I think it's a natural outcome of the way the system is set up in our country. It's just the way it is. It's also hard because the problem is global. It doesn't matter whether we produce the carbon dioxide or whether China produces the carbon dioxide or whether India does it or Brazil or Europe. It all goes into a common atmosphere, which is why I say climate change is training wheels for sustainability. If we can actually solve the issue of climate change, we won't have solved the problem of how do we get a whole bunch of individual nations together to solve a common problem. If we can figure out how to do that, get all bunch of nations together to solve a common problem, we will have taken a huge step towards solving a whole bunch of other problems like food and water and population and mineral resources and really stuff that gets much gnarlier and nastier than climate change. Right now it's about economics. In the great decision bus of life, the economists are driving. And you can see that this is a plot that shows the fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions versus time. It goes up, we burn more carbon dioxide, burn more fossil fuels produced in carbon dioxide today than we have in any other year in the past. So we haven't, what we're talking about is basically trying to turn the corner, bring this down here, we have to turn the corner now. Now note that the only times on here where things have slowed down are economic. The oil crisis is OPEC. OPEC's formed, they decide, hey, we're gonna try to control prices, the United States, Europe, everybody goes, hey, can't do that. My dad used to drive an old mobile that a family of 12 could live in, bought a Volkswagen. That's like, dad bought a Volkswagen. That was a crisis. US savings in home crisis does not get enough credit for being a big economic hit. Any of the economists have. This is, I went to Florida State University, this is when we collapsed, that's actually former Soviet Union. Asian financial crisis. And interestingly, the rules changed somewhere in here. Note that the pace of this increases. This is China and India beginning to ramp in as industrial powers over the last 10 years. And note that the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, which is still lingers with us, did not really bother the system for more than a year. Went down by one year, and then back up we go. And that's China, that's India, that's Brazil, that's other countries of the world, continuing to perk along while the, what we used to call the industrialized world tries to deal with the situation. Grow is what we do. I'm gonna skip that. It's also a problem because we live on a water planet. Now, I think we all know that 70% of the surface out there is water, and this is an easy, I have my class do this experiment. You take two identical pots, you put it on the stove, you put water in one, you both put water in the other, you turn the heat on exactly the same amount, you'll wait a certain period of time, and then you take the temperature of the bottom of the pot or what's in the pot. And don't try this at home. The pot without new water, you'll scorch your finger on because metal's heating up very quickly. The pot with the water on it, even after five inches so that water hasn't changed temperature very much. We've all done this. I watched pot never boils, classic. It takes a long time. And what's happening here is water has a large heat capacity, it takes a lot of energy to pump in the water to get the water warm. That's what's happening on our planet today. We put green house gases in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is warming up, the atmosphere warms the ocean, and the ocean's basically slowing it down. So the ocean's always gonna keep us about 50 to 70 years behind what the atmosphere wants us to be because we live on a water planet. As long as we keep putting more green house gases in the atmosphere, the ocean will keep slowing down. Cause and effect are not immediate. It's hard to get action when you don't have cause and effect and this creates a classic intergenerational problem. My generation is handing off to you guys a problem that we've already put in the atmosphere today. And tomorrow night we'll talk about how big that problem, that's a big problem already. But it hasn't expressed itself because the oceans have warmed up here. Now the flip side is just as bad by the way. So imagine now you've got a pot of boiling water and a pot of very hot air, a very hot pot. Turn the heat off. Within a relatively short period of time, the pot on the right, my right, cools off. Bottom of the left with the boiling water stays hot for a long period of time. So even if we start to try to cool the planet off by taking green house gases out of the atmosphere or by reducing our emissions to the atmosphere, the ocean says, uh-uh, you've already warmed me up. I've actually already banked a whole bunch of carbon in the ocean, that's another story. But you've already warmed me up so it's gonna stay warm longer than you would like. So adaptation and mitigation, in two words we hear a lot of, it's not just about energy, you're gonna have to adapt. Methane and nitrous oxide are basically food greenhouse gases. Methane is produced by ruminants, cattle, belching away, produced by rice cultivation. Nitrous oxide is produced because we fertilize to grow food and fertilizer is food for bacteria that when they eat that fertilizer they produce nitrous oxide. Both of these are very strong greenhouse gases. Both of them are on the rise. Together they're equal to about 60% of CO2. So even if we work burning fossil fuels and producing CO2 in the atmosphere we would still have a greenhouse gas impact because food production. We have alternates to energy and we're trying, believe me, to have alternates to food but we haven't gotten there yet. On the other hand, don't go silently into the night. Don't just say, ah, it's all horrible. We can't fix this. We're smart, we're resourceful and we are fundamentally good. This is sort of like self-affirmation time. We are smart, we're resourceful and we're fundamentally good. Those are three great things, right? We can do a whole lot better than this creature right here. Bearing our head in the sand saying, no, this isn't happening. Because where's this creature gonna get shot? Is it surprising who things are causing carbon change? No. This is really the key to sustainability. I've just told you for the last, I don't know how many minutes, we've altered the Earth's energy balance and changed climate but we also do all sorts of things that are big, big, big, big, big on the plane. We move 10 times more dirt through mining activities and building chalk mullet stuff like that than all natural processes. The end of all the mud, dirt flowing through the rivers and through atmosphere every year, we move 10 times more dirt than nature does every year. I'm impressed with that. Usually. This is my favorite. We live on a planet that feeds us and gives us oxygen because of photosynthesis. Because green plants take carbon dioxide, water, nutrients, forgetting one. Carbon dioxide, water, nutrients. Sunlight. Thank you very much. And sunlight and make sugars. And by the way, make oxygen and feed the world. Where do plants get the nutrients? Some of it comes out of the ground by weathering, but nitrogen, a very important nutrient, has to be taken from the atmosphere as nitrogen and made into a monionitric by bacteria. So without those bacteria working away every day, taking nitrogen out of the atmosphere and making nitrate and ammonia, green plants don't exist and we don't exist. In about 50 short years, we went from not even being a part of the nitrogen cycle on the planet to the point we're at today, we make more nitrogen fertilizer than all of the bacteria on land. And we're very, very close to making more nitrogen fertilizer than all the bacteria period on the planet. That is huge. In less than one generation, we go from nothing to running the show. You can make the same argument about a whole bunch of other things. How is all this possible? Two very important factors. One is there's a lot of us. We are here, we are going this direction up here. And that's a very important curve. Giving people to understand the exponential curve is not an easy thing to do. But this is a very, very important curve. The other big part of this is, however, what I call the nasty dilemma. This is the amount of energy per capita used in various countries. This could also be water, this could be calories, this could be the amount of lithium used in batteries, a whole bunch of other things. You get about the same plot. There's a certain amount of energy that's required to run a show if you're gonna have an industrialized society like Austria, France, UK. We're up here, but that's a whole different story. Look where, this is an old plot. So China's actually come here closer to the world average. But I like the colors, so I use this one. India's still down around here somewhere. This is where a lot of the world is. Here's the world average down here. So you basically got a whole bunch of people out there. China's a good example. China's got 1.2 billion people. About 300 million of which live like we do. About 900 million of which want to live like we do. Today, China already produces more CO2 than we do. China uses more energy than we do. This one kills me. China consumes half of the world's bacon. Bacon. Bacon, thanks. Bacon. I'm a huge bacon thing, right? I worry about the price of bacon. China's allowed to, you know, yank the truck, make this scary stuff. They want to live like us. That 300 million, there's another 900 million sitting around going, I want to be like that 300 million. If they get there, it's not a factor of 10, 20, 30%. It's a factor of five times increase for China to get to Europe. Eight times increase for India to get to Europe. And you got to multiply those by two to get to where we got to. So these are huge increases in the amount of energy we need, in the amount of water we need, in the amount of bacon we need. But these are fundamental, fundamental parts. Just a few, I'm sorry, I'm running out of time. Scientists knew this was coming a long time ago, said so. The world has done a little about it. I laid part of that problem at the feet of climate scientists. What I said in the beginning when I talked, human beings are causing climate change. Yes, period. 20 years ago, I couldn't get a climate scientist to say that. You'd get a whole lecture. Two, three hours of lecture. About 20 to 25% of all fossil fuels ever burn, or burn since the, the only time we've actually tried to do anything about it, which is a key of the protocol. That's that power of the exponential. About a quarter of all fossil fuels ever burn, or burn since 1997. You guys, how old were you? 21. 21, what year were you born? 1991. 1991, you were alive in 1997. You're part of this, okay? You don't get a free ride throughout the entire election. I don't think I need to go off here. I'd love to talk about the fact that I think education in this country is under attack. I think what you guys are doing here is fantastic. Keep doing it. An educated populace is our best defense against the ignorance which really drives the folks who would like to tell you that climate change is easy. So keep educated. It is our responsibility. And sustainability, as I said before, is the big problem. It's not just a question of climate change. Every problem we face is a step towards sustainability. And we've got to face these things successfully. We've got it. Recognize we have a problem, deal with it, and move on to the more adult questions. So I want to end with this. What I told you for the last, I'm sorry, too much time, is not terribly uplifting. Unless anybody here wants to argue with me and say, no, I'm fine, I don't know how bad this can actually get. I'm gonna tell you three things that make this actually a really uplifting story. And it has to do with my three simple rules of sustainability. Number one, everything must cycle. You can't go throwing stuff away. You gotta cycle stuff and bring it back in the system. Because eventually you gotta, anything you throw away, eventually you gotta go back to the garbage heap to find it, to get more of it. Otherwise you're gonna run out of it. Second, population must be controlled. The number one factor for population control on our planet is the value of women in society. If women have value, economic value, if they have societal value, if they have political value, they have less children for women than they do if they do not have that value. So the number one way to control population is for men to treat women better on this planet. And we have a very, very bad situation on the planet. We in the US, we sort of say, okay, we're okay, we're not like Africa, we're, it's really bad, right? And then I like to ask my class a question. Okay, fine. Name the first female president of the United States. I will actually get people raising their hands. How do you want, I don't know. My third is equity must be considered an act upon. You can't have two billion people living high on the hog eating bacon all the time and five billion people not. Because a couple of billion people are starving. And they will get what they, they will do whatever they can do to get food, to get water. They'll cut the trees down, they don't care about the environment, they care about feeding their kids, they care about survival. You cannot run a planet that way. Everybody's gotta have a minimum level of participation in the economic growth of the world. Or else you're gonna have people outside the system and they are not gonna care. So you gotta have some level of equity. Now the third, so I've mentioned two things about equity here. Sexual equity and rich, poor equity. The third one is one I already mentioned, and that is intergenerational equity. If one generation values its children more, then you start to address this problem of the water problem, the 50 year lag time that we are living in. All right, so if you're following home here, if you're following the home game, there are three things that we can do to help address the issue of sustainability. Number one, men treat women better. Number two, rich treat the poor better. Number three, one generation treat the next generation better. I can't see anything wrong with either of any of those three things. I think doing those three things makes us better people. I think doing those three things makes us a better society. And just think about it. If we, to get to sustainability, had to be real jerks, that'd be tough. But indeed, we just have to be nice. We have to be better to each other. We have to be nicer people. And actually, think of a more uplifting message on which to end this lecture than that. Thank you all for listening. Question, yeah. I didn't say any controversy over something else. No, I didn't say anything. It's just a good, I mean, I'm a Christian, and I love God, and I'm surprised, first off, that why would anybody do unmanable to that message? Because that's like three things that are. Politics. I just don't understand how you could do that and be like, nah. No, I think it's politics. Yeah, no, we can have a whole discussion of this, but. For example, just recently, the whole bunch of fundamentalist groups decided that immigration was something that they wanted to patent. That it was not right to have a whole bunch of Hispanic and poor folks who were off, you know, and weren't being taken care of and were in poverty and were being shoved out of the system and et cetera, et cetera. Those Hispanics had been there for a long time. They were there 10 years ago when that same group was saying, no, we don't want to have anything to do with these folks. So their morals, their ethics, their religious values did not change, I think, between that and that. So what did change is politics. You saw what happened in the last election. You can't win an election in this country without reaching out to minorities. I hate to, so what I'm telling you is a real bubble worser, right? So, you know, it's not just about what you believe, it's how you express that, right? Yeah. You're talking about populations, so don't get out of that way when I push Tom at your question. Have you ever seen numbers USA, boybex, dumbball demonstration with populations? No. He didn't know one, but it's really, really interesting because he tries to stay out of politics, but he, in simple mathematics, doesn't stay out of the world with what comes to population. And with that also, you're talking about equity relationships. I want to say that in the US, we've been a very sexist nation of, we say we have women's rights, but when you look at relationships, whose responsibility is it for both control? The women. You give them appeal, hey, we liberated them. I want to challenge all of the college students here, start with thinking that in a relationship, should it be the male responsibility as much as the female or boy's soul? But see, we let the man get off free hand because there's no risk of that. I did not expect this, a question. I did not expect this, a question. I did not expect this, a question. You get back to comments. Yeah, I like your population. No other questions? Yeah. In your garden strategy, the comments, outlines a bunch of different ways to tackle systemic problems, like to which being like legislating temperance or using government to sort of regulate people's actions and then also privatization so people feel like they have a bigger stake in the problems at hand? Yeah. So how would you basically enforce these, the three rules of systemic over your favorite ways of doing it? No, I do think we have to have common ownership of common goods. And I think we have to have crazy grave mentality. You can't take coal out of the ground, burn it, put CO2 in the atmosphere, leave it there and think you've done your thing. All right, that CO2 has got to cycle back to the ground in order for that cycle to be clicked or you have to pay for what you've done to the comments. So I think we have to have very much more of a common mentality. You can't just, there is no else out there. There is no other place where your waste can go. It is our air, it is our water, it is our plant. And also after that, there are a lot of cultures around the world that believe that their resources fall under their right to culture. So I was asking if you're giving this lecture to a culture from India or parts of Africa that believe that part of there are either spiritual beliefs or cultural beliefs that they need to have as many children as possible to let their family name live on. How would you convince them that, I don't know, because what you do about the population conference of the 70s and 80s, a lot of people of formerly colonized nations believe this was just another attempt for the West essentially to sort of restart the imperialism on marginalized nations. How would you sort of change them or talk to them about this issue? Well, you know, if I anticipated that issue to come up, I would bring along an Indian scientist, a demographer, hopefully a female. There have been any number of studies in India of women's rights and participation of women in the economic system and in the political system. And in those places, as a matter of fact, there was one because the canton's have what they call their political, like county level. And one, they just threw out all of the government, replaced it with a 50-50 men women government and population dropped in that county. So it's not just about having kids, it's about the culture, right? And if people from that culture stand up and say, no, no, no, no, there's a different way to do things. Then you have impact. I mean, I, you're right, me standing up as a, you know, white male from the United States ain't gonna go very far. I gotta have, it's gotta be a global message. Yeah? Just going back to what you were saying about the cradle to grave cycling. How do you see that economic transition happening? Ooh, I'm not an economist. And I don't play one on stage. My gut sense is that change will come when we have political leaders who are willing to lay it on the line. I think we got very close in the past, but we really haven't had, you know, a political leader who made, climate change has made sustainability his or her message. And they're not gonna do that until we, the people, tell them, this is our number one priority. If you think that sustainability is your number one priority, and believe me, you ought to be pondering that. Then you let your, you let anyone you want to promise, know that? And you say, I, you know, here's my laundry, it's the things I care about. Sustainability's at the top. And you let them know that every time somebody runs for office, this is what I'm gonna worry about. And eventually, they get the message. Your power of voting is extraordinary. Use it. Yeah? For the last 20 or 30 years, we've used a lot of this data as environmental scientists. And that's obviously not working. How do we approach this as environmental scientists and get to these three goals of sustainability and educating students? Well, I think we're beginning to do this right now. We used to approach this from a science point. It's not just science, right? It's not just physics and chemistry and et cetera. It's sociology. It's economics. It's religion. It is ethics, philosophy, et cetera. You gotta put those things together. I think you guys do that here. We do that at the University of Colorado. We started in 95, environmental studies, not just science and environmental studies, with the express goal of seeding as many parts of the US in the world as we possibly could with these little seeds of sustainability. I think that's what we have to do. You have to approach it differently. My education, no. No education in politics. No education in economics. No education in communication. How do we speak? I mean, for those of you who are on the faculty, you know this. You have this wonderful education. You have PhD, you're a master's in it. What do they do? They parade you in front of a classroom. The first time you've ever spoken in this profession. A room like this. And your students don't even know this, but we're scared. I was gonna use the word here by all means. That has to change. I'm sorry, I got a lot of change in it. But basically what has to change is you have to, we have to think of these things far more realistically than we do. At that meeting that you were, you had 5% with you. Did you change any hearts or minds? Oh, you know what? I got a very nice email from the president of the universe. Thanking me for coming. And said that he was rethinking. What do you know? I don't know. I haven't talked to him since then. But I got mobbed at the end. A whole bunch of people came and stuck cameras in my face. A whole bunch of people, what? Stuck cameras in my face, pretty ugly. Oh, oh. But hey, you know, I'm just sitting there watching the word responsibility pop up on the screen. It's like, thank you God. Goodbye. God, yeah. This is kind of anecdotal, but I was in Hawaii in January, and I ended up, I just picked up double snaps in tennis. Yeah. It turned out that my opponent's were, one guy was a retired surgeon, and the other was a farmer from Krypton, Minnesota. They spent most of the match explaining to me that organic foods were poisoning the world's population and that the future rested in hybrid crops and gene-managellated products. How does one discuss these things with people representative? Mind, mind, okay. We were talking about, there's a wonderful study called Six Americans that takes a look at how Americans think about climate change. They've done this for other, for GMOs, et cetera. What you're gonna find is about 15% of Americans, you're not gonna change their mind. They are, it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter what happens. They're, they believe rather than have a science, scientific thought about it, it's not gonna change. So, maybe you're tennis folks, you couldn't do anything. But they believe me, for every one of those, there's a couple of other people out there who are curious that you can talk with and you can change your mind. Focus on the ones you can change your mind. We're gonna have one last question, sir. I was going to mention that, because I went through these discussions, the same thing, and like you say, it's a belief. I actually wanted them to come along with me tonight. I don't believe in that climate change stuff. And I didn't even argue. But I feel that, you know, often times, even if you talk to your legislators and representatives of Washington, St. Paul, and even locally, you often times can't have too much of an influence of what you do yourself. I mean, I heard somebody go on their bike, I looked outside, how many bikes were here. And I, when I was walking up, I'm looking at the lawns and then how we use fertilizer and the silly ways we do it. I mean, you can use bacteria to fix your nitrogen or you can use fossil fuel. Or you can, you know, all these little things you can do, even when it comes to water, your green water collection system, you know, these little habits that you can change a little bit at a time. And it's just, and I often times, tell people that, you know, I can convince people. I'm asking people, you can have a garden this year, you know, this type of thing, because just the little things that you do, I mean, Brandon, you're thinking that there could be a little bit of therapy when you just got out of the discussion. Somebody said, why that climate change is so much, political stuff. Maybe it is, but you know, I'll get out a little bit of therapy. And I think that's what we can make the most effective is what you do in your own life. And hard to argue with that. By the way, climate change is all a bunch of bunk. Thank you for listening.