 Well, what do you think? It's a little past noon. Should we go ahead and Yeah, it started. All right. All right. Here we go All right. Well, welcome students to another installment of the science circle panel discussion series I'm very excited about today's topic climate change The intergovernmental panel on climate change the IPCC is the United Nations body for assessing The science related to climate change it recently issued a report Which looked at the effects of a 1.5 degree warming which is less than previously modeled I think they had Really been looking at a two-degree rise so and they wanted to see what the effects of a slightly Lower amount of warming would do and they discovered that The effects even with a small amount of warming are alarming and will be noticeable soon So To discuss this and all the other things global warming we have with us today an outstanding panel We're Smith jarvin in I think may be familiar to some of you here in second life I'm Keith Grant holds a doctorate in engineering and applied science from the University of California Davis, UC Davis of the UC system Dr. Grant was attached to the Atmospheric Sciences Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he helped develop atmospheric chemical radiation transport models and climate models He also worked at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing on developing massively parallel numerical solvers So word Smith is Is a climate scientist and I think we'll be able to Really inform us in an interesting way Vic Metulac filled young blood founded the Computational Information Systems and cyber security degree programs at a karnat word University He is a trained biochemist He's visited 40 countries and it's been a popular science circle contributor since 2008 including a recent presentation on the Anthropocene era and Then we also have with us Cisogy asymptote Is a working astronomer currently at the National Institute of Astrophysics optics and electronics In Puebla, Mexico and has a doctorate from the University of Texas in Boston So I'd like to for each of our panel members to also make some opening remarks So Vic, why don't you say a few words about the topic or about yourself and we'll get started Okay, sure welcome everyone here My role on the panel is not as an expert in the field But as an educated responsible concerned world citizen because in the end it doesn't matter who we are what we know Or believe it the people that make the decisions and people worldwide Really are the people we need to Talk to I Did do the I've been concerned with about the impact of humans on our environment since the 60s when the issues were Pollution and how to feed an overpopulated world and I've been following climate change for about 20 years And I gave the first presentation on the Anthropocene epic Which is the concept that humans could or are affecting the earth as much as natural sources So I expect the other panelist to supply the science, but I'm here to kind of dispel some myths that For example the idea of global climate change versus global warming climate deniers the causes the kind of so what thing in other words one to two degrees so what and lasting effects So I'll hand it over to our other panelists and we'll get started Fantastic that was a great opening Sissi, would you like to make some remarks? Yes, thanks. Thanks. Very good. I Thanks for accepting my offer to be on this panel This is a vital subject for me and for all of us as Vick Said that yeah, I'm not a I'm not an expert on the subject either being an astronomer Of course, I'll understand the basic physics of climate change But as in any field the devils and the details and I keep informed on the subject because as I said before it's vital for all of us Keith is going to explain the mechanisms Global global warming or climate change I nonetheless offer my own explanation, which will be probably from a slightly different angle Starting with something that Very simple very simple things that we observe in everyday life can have profound consequences One of those is that we can see the Sun On a clear day and there are many clear days and many places on the earth as we can see the Sun Which means that the atmosphere is not really absorbing the light sun very effectively That means that the atmosphere which is warm must get its heat from elsewhere And it gets it from the earth beneath our feet which is opaque So it does absorb the light of Sun it scatters some of it away, but it absorbs the light of the Sun and heats the atmosphere above us and The way the atmosphere cools the only way the atmosphere can cool across the vacuum of space is by radiation and At the temperature of the earth that radiation is infrared radiation So if the infrared if the atmosphere is Opaque at infrared wavelengths, then it's like wrapping a blanket around the earth and It slows the rate at which the infrared radiation leaks away until the temperature rises to compensate for them and This is called the greenhouse effect and the greenhouse effect existed long before human beings were on the scene But we human beings are messing with that greenhouse effect. We're adding greenhouse gases It's like adding other blankets or thickening the blankets that already exist and that is an absolutely insane thing to do as we Ask a couple decades Because we can already see the consequences Animals are dying plants are dying human beings are dying not to mention entire ecosystems Our entire worldwide civilization is at stake. We don't change our bad habits billions will die We must do something. I'm hoping panel discussions like this will be at least a tiny step in the right direction And I'm at sure a note. I can Thank you Very good and sobering and I have to say it brought to mind the the clip from Futurama About global warming where the The greenhouse gases beat up on the on the sunlight And Finally wordsmith would you please? Lead us into the science of Global warming and climate change and Kind of make your introductory remarks, please I'll be happy to and You know, thanks to the other panelists for bringing different perspectives to that Vic has that biochem background, which is not where I'm as strong on but Global warming slash climate change is going to have a profound effect on the biochem world and this is G's comments on from the Astronomical side Or along lines that I'll add to a bit so Global warming Is basically a pretty simple measure. It doesn't tell you a whole lot tells you that Average over the globe and over the year What the temperature is and It doesn't tell you anything about Where it's heating where it might be cooling. It doesn't tell you anything about How circulation might change Another effects of the warming and in fact, it's simple enough that It was estimated to be three degrees centigrade back in 1967 by suki minabi and ikweather all in it They estimate the direct effect of co2 was about one degree warming and the effect of the Atmosphere warming and being able to take on more water vapor was another two degrees. So a total of about three degrees so You know, that was a simple global average annual average model All it had was radiation and convection So that's a starting point you would expect based on that that Increasing co2 would warm Climate change on the other hand Includes all the effects of that adding heat to the earth and global warming is basically just a measure of Adding heat to the earth in a manner that affected the surface temperature not all heat coming into the earth does Both the climate change includes all the feedbacks that the change in reflectivity of the earth the change in Surface of agitation the season length and Rainfall and where it occurs. So a lot more that it takes a lot more complicated model to figure out You don't need a full climate model to estimate global warming, but you do just start dying effects down to local regions for both global warming and climate change There's what we can call the the natural part and the Anthropogenic or human-caused part The climate has varied You know over millions of years and we'll keep on varying Right now We have good measurements of the total solar radiation From orbit and if anything the Sun is at a bit of a minimum right now So it's not going to be causing Any warming and the orbit of the earth which changes over time Is approaching is small in eccentricity meaning non-roundness and is approaching a minimum So there are estimates that this is going to be a very long interglacial period Because the forcing to create I I Sages just won't be there with the eccentricity is so small and that could be 10,000 to 50,000 or more years So The natural part of climate change is basically not in the loop right now and some of the considerations from that don't apply With mankind greatly increasing CO2 the some people have said well Ice ages or the end of ice ages preceded the rise the Feedback to CO2 well that doesn't really matter because we're not talking about a natural I say Natural change in the cloud As the global warming We live in a world and always has humans always have it much lived in a world With natural global warming the surface temperatures it would balance the sunlight absorbed It's about 255 Kelvin or minus 18 centigrade degrees If we were living on that planet and the atmosphere didn't interact with the infrared radiation It would be a far different planet. There wouldn't be any moisture in the air It would be too cold And it wouldn't be a comfortable place, but because of that natural CO2 and natural methane That's moved that radiation to space up to a higher altitude and That higher altitude has a creates an effect of radiation temperature of The 255 Kelvin, but the surface temperature average is about plus 15 degrees centigrade, so we've got a 33 degree difference just in terms of nature and There's no a priori reason that increasing the CO2 won't keep increasing that separation between Surface and the level that's radiating to space. Am I making sense so far? Yes, so the the The strata from that is radiating heat from earth is getting higher So the It's the amount of heat being radiated diminished by that or yes the rate of radiation slowing down Yes because of the CO2 By the way The effects of CO2 on warming have a signature. So, you know, we know that it's due to a greenhouse effect because The troposphere warms and the stratosphere cools. That's not true for other types of radiation changes like incoming solar radiation So we have a signature and we also have that the Fossil fuels are depleted in carbon-14 because they've been Down under the ground a long time and the carbon-14 hasn't been exposed to the Cosmic rays and has cated away You know, we can understand Global warming fairly simply It doesn't take a climate model to understand it Think of a bucket a bucket with water and You have an LED light in a little waterproof case and on a String or rope and you lower it into the bucket. Well You can see the light from the LED From above the bucket. No problem. Water is transparent Start adding ink and The water is no longer transparent you have to If you add enough ink You're going to have to raise that LED off the bottom until you can see it And if you add more ink you're going to have to raise it higher in the bucket until you can see it and if you look at from the other side When you can see the LED the LED can see out of the bucket into Open space and that same thing is happening in the atmosphere in the infrared with Co2 that as you increase the co2 the effect of altitude of radiating to space gets higher and you know conversely the altitude that a Satellite could see down into the atmosphere at a given wavelength gets higher because there's just more opacity now the atmosphere the upper atmosphere in the troposphere is tied to the surface via convection and It decreases the temperature decreases in general as you increase in altitude So that increase in altitude in the effect of radiation altitude Means that it's happening at a colder temperature what you were just saying and the Radiation of infrared is strongly dependent on the temperature if you think of integrating for a black body It's the Stefan Boltzmann constant kind of temperature to the fourth power So that means we're now radiating less energy to space But the same amount of energy is still coming in from the Sun and getting absorbed and so now There's an imbalance more energy is coming in than is going out and that means the earth is taking on heat That heat can go to multiple things it can go to melting ice It can be transferred into deep into the ocean or it can be Used to heat the surface of the planet Only the last one Helps bring things back into balance because it's the surface temperature that determines the temperature at altitude so It's not all going go into surface heating, but sooner or later it will the other aspect of the heating is that Due to the Clausius-Claferon equation the Atmosphere can hold more water vapor as it warms up So basically co2 is like a control knob on the water vapor in the atmosphere If there were no co2 and no methane We'd be living in a snowball basically And it wouldn't be any moisture in the atmosphere so In order to get Things back into balance the surface temperature all the way up to the Effective atmosphere of radiation to space has to increase And that's what we call global warming and it's that simple. I mean you just have to have Something that absorbs the infrared radiation an Atmosphere that is not isothermal meaning it it cools as you go to altitude and The physical facts that the radiation depend amount of radiation depends on the temperature May I just interject here if you don't mind of course? I am curious about the Mechanism for the ocean warming. I think I had sort of thought that the oceans warm directly from sunlight But it sounds like what you're saying is the oceans also warm because of the warming atmosphere And is that just a matter of sort of convection at the ocean atmosphere interface or is there something more interesting? Partly Yeah, what Vic just said air and oceans exchange heat If ice melts on the ocean you've also got Lord the Reflectivity of the ocean and it's going absorb more heat Now when you think about how do you get? Warmer water to sink It's often a salinity thing they talk about Density Salt will increase the density of the water. So if you have a Warm water that's being evaporated You're increasing the salinity of the water and sooner or later that's going sink down And so there's a mechanism to get it into the deep ocean and away from the surface Oh, I see And is it also the case that The oceans are not able to radiate heat as efficiently because of the sort of the blanket of co2 in the atmosphere of it Yeah, I mean basically the the surface is radiating heat and that includes the oceans Radiating heat in the infrared and anything that's in a temperature range will radiate infrared radiation We radiate infrared and that's used medically Yes, so I let me then if you don't mind why don't we give our other panelists an opportunity to chime in Vic would you like to sort of give us a little commentary on what words Smith is? Sure. Okay. The first thing I mentioned was misunderstanding which words Smith How familiar it is basically the idea between climate change which is Occurring that is places are changing in different ways and it's not just the climate that's changing Which is affecting us in the rest of the world, but and then the idea of global warming, which is an overall trend another Misunderstanding I said myth earlier what I really mean was misunderstanding was that Humans are not the only source of change. There's other natural causes, but the fact that we are impacting the world Much more quickly than Would be naturally. That's what the idea of the anthropomorph or yeah anthropomorphic Epic is and so for example, we're largely responsible for release of so-called greenhouse gases beyond what they would normally do And also methane for example with cows and termites and such and if we go on to warm the Arctic permafrost and ocean bottom, then we will release other Methane methane's a much more efficient greenhouse gas. So we're going to get kind of a greater effect If I can also mention this Scissor G was talking about climate deniers One of the things about that of course is that we have a huge capacity to deny anything. I mean people Some people deny the earth is round. So other people say that we didn't go to the moon We can deny death. We could deny things we're doing to ourselves that contribute to Problems, so it's easy to deny things when It affects others rather than ourselves And especially when it's going to cost money and time and effort it's kind of like the inconvenient truth truth that Al Gore mentioned Another Thing I don't know whether the other people Will touch on this but there's several effects of the kind of what I call the so what in other words every day There's a lot of temperature fluctuations during the day So one to two degrees if you haven't studied what that means Globally is nothing Over the course of the day or the season so people who have not studied this may say well So what one to two degrees the problem with that is that where humans are very adaptable So that we can just move places or take shelter or whatever But there's a lot of animals and plants that can't do that and so and they're also dependent on each other So if you have a change for example in migration by a week it may affect Two different species if you have Plants and animals that can't go anywhere for example in the ocean ocean acidity Carbodoxy isn't just a greenhouse gas. It also affects the acidity of the Water what that means is that marine plants which like reef builders in plankton who need to build shells of calcium carbonate Here's the biochemistry part is that if they can't build their little homes This is going to affect or This is going to affect the food chain up and down tremendously which also impacts Human population which is growing right now. We're trying to worry about how we're going to Increase food production because we're going to be adding two billion people in the next 30 years The other thing that happened is that even above melting is that you get sea level rises and that's simply because Liquids don't tend to expand much, but if you're talking about over the course of the ocean You don't have to have much of an expansion to get sea levels to rise Promoting a danger to low-level communities which actually can affect hundreds of millions if not a billion people and their economies and also more energy for destructive Storms as I mentioned methane the Gulf Stream The Gulf Stream is what keeps Europe relatively Cool. I give me warm. Otherwise. It's far enough north that it would be a lot colder than it is if we didn't have it the last Misunderstanding is the lasting effects. I mean let's say for example. We all came to our senses and stopped things right now is that even right now it's like Kinetic energy things are not just going to stop We can't just for example like reducing chlorofluor Chlorofluorocarbon emissions and seeing some quick change in the ozone Is that right now we need to stop everything we would still see effects increase and last for centuries and if Hordesmith or scissor G would like to expand on any of these or Verify what I'm saying I'd be pleased For the scientists to say something Yeah, yes, please go ahead. Yeah, I'll jump in there what I've What I've learned is that the effects of the Rising temperature the oceans becoming warmer is and Keith can correct me on some of these points But one is that the storms become stronger. So you have stronger hurricanes I don't know if it means necessarily more hurricanes But there's do seem to be more of them and especially in the Gulf each year, which may be a statistical fluke or maybe that's Climate change another thing is that because the oceans are warming they warm the air above it More and the air as the air gets warmer it actually Becomes more stirred up and it causes higher ocean waves. So ocean waves are becoming stronger Another thing is that you have the ocean level the sea level is rising and apparently There are at least three effects one is that you have more tons of water falling into the ocean from melting ice melting glaciers on land melting Greenland ice cap the melting Antarctic ice cap this shelf for the part that's on land anyway more tons of water go into the The ocean the sea level of course rises, but there's another effect I think it's called the thermometer effect or the mercury effect like the mercury in a thermometer Expands as the temperature goes up as the ocean warms it expands So a given number of tons of water will have more volume as they warm up That's apparently something like a 40% effect in rate of Sea level rise right now Sea level rises apparently something like three millimeters per year. So something like 40% of that currently is Expansion due to rising temperature and there's another effect Which can actually go a little bit either way is the effect of the gravitational field of the ice of the ice sheets So on Greenland for example if you have the ice sheet melting it pulls on the water less because there's less ice on land Pulling the water towards it. So that water moves away from it So you have melting ice near Greenland actually causing the sea level to drop at least locally Out to as far as the British Isles apparently but beyond that Causes the oceans to rise a bit because the water is not being pulled towards it by gravity And that's an even bigger effect for the Antarctic ice sheet So there are all these effects that are occurring and they apparently have an effect. It's something like I don't know like a centimeters Okay, that's pretty nuts. I had not really thought about the effects of a gravity or on gravity You know, Suji one thing I am a little curious about is Does global warming affect the performance of Earth-based telescopes in your business? Maybe I don't know infrared telescopes or our ability to you know look out through Through the sky from earth Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean Keith can address this better than I can but there's of course the difference between climate and weather As as they say climates what we expect what is what we get The weather has been a little bit strange Certainly around here. So we've been having unusually Large numbers of clouds which are making it difficult for certain observations even at millimeter wavelengths Which is where I do my observations. So we've been having strange weather on the mountain Which which can make things worse sometimes, but I imagine there are Well, you also have more water vapor in the atmosphere. So if you're talking a Wave length in the near infrared or infrared Where is the water absorbs fairly strongly? the more water you have in the atmosphere because CO2 has warmed it slightly to begin with The less visibility to space you have Hmm, very interesting one of the topics that We were considering talking about That I'm a little bit interested in exploring now Is this notion of you just the sheer amount of energy? That is involved in a even what might seem a small First temperature of one and a half to two degrees Would any of you like to just comment on sort of that? Just just just to sure about the energy that we're talking about Let me jump in real quick just to put it in kind of layman terms is that you know how much energy and what it costs to Heat your house Okay, even by a degree or so now Try to heat something the size of a large building and think about what your heat bill would be for that now Open up the doors and see if you can heat your city by one degree and how much energy you're talking about that and then Extended on to the earth and you're talking about an enormous amount of energy that's not going away tomorrow and So even one or two degrees is an incredible amount of energy that's been injected into our Atmosphere that's not going away simply by Trying to correct things It's the famous dad complaint. What are you trying to cool the entire neighborhood when you leave the door open? Where Smith would you like to also maybe comment on what kind of degrees of energy or what the Sort of I guess give us a sense of the amount of energy that we're pouring into the atmosphere from the release of Carbon that has been trapped for you know hundreds of millions of years and we're finally it's been sequestered And now it's being released all of a sudden in just a matter of a few generations well, I just a New skeptical science had a page on that and let's see they're running climate is accumulated two billion seven hundred four million a hundred and eight and Thousand and One hundred and eight Hiroshima atomic bombs of heat since 1998 And I actually thought they had the thing somewhere in cat snareses, but But that's a lot of energy and that isn't just the surface temperature increase but ice melt and When the Heat a fusion of ice and then whatever warming is done to the resulting water, so a lot of energy coming in every day Basically the the forcing of doubling co2 Was four watts has been estimated to be about four watts per meter squared all over the surface of the earth man the The causes of climate change Initially had we're sort of hotly contested I do get the feeling that most climate deniers have sort of finally come around That there is a contribution from human activity But you know for a while there were all sorts of Explanations offered that it was you know that we were in some kind of intense period of solar activity or sunspots or You know that it you know are but was our Proximity to the Sun or the other thing too is that you know cycles and climate are natural And that this is just another instance of a natural fluctuation in climate That last one has always particularly bothered me because it You know natural climate variation occurs over geological time periods You know not within the span of a human life for or a couple of human and the I always felt it that Deniers Were just turning a blind eye to the rapidity of the energy that we're pouring into the climate Is it am I off base that for the most part deniers have sort of given up on those kinds of Explanations or what's your sense of kind of what the state of the debate is? If I might say something here There's something called willful ignorance and as as Vic mentioned like people who believe in a flat earth for example a willfully ignorant and Climate change deniers are among those They're they're right that there have always been variations, but the science on that and Keith can collaborate on that There are a number of reasons why the science shows that strongly supports One of those is that if you look at the ice cores that I go both the North polar north polar regions and the south polar regions that go back like 500,000 years They show the amount of carbon dioxide in air bubbles in the in the ice cores and they show that there's a Reflectuations in the But it's only during the last hundred fifty years or so industrial revolution During the industrial time of the industrial revolution that it has risen by an unusually large amount Well, that's one one piece of evidence that this is a genics Of course, some will say that that's just a coincidence Another point is that the amount of carbon the amount of carbon in the atmosphere the amount that has been added and the amount That has been generated since the beginning of the industrial revolution by human beings is the same number Certainties it's another supposed coincidence another is that you have you have the carbon isotope ratio I thought it was 13 carbon to 12 carbon, but maybe it's carbon isotope ratios you have a certain carbon isotope ratio that you find in the in fossil fuels But these were from living things and ones that you get from volcanoes for example the natural level of the natural ratio you expect in the atmosphere and Well, it's been shifting over that time over the last especially over the last hundred fifty years has been shifting towards the ratio that assistant with burning fossil fuels Plus that isotope ratio is yet another piece of evidence that this is anthropogenic Or Keith can vibrate further on this right the I Think you had there is a isotope ratio with carbon 13 to So you have carbon 14 Depletion and also some sorts information of the carbon dioxide originally or the fossil fuels originally There seems to in a denier camp Be a reluctance to realize that a lot of things have been looked at over the last hundred years and Many of them have been found not to be Not to be supported by the actual data For instance, there was the idea that cosmic rays would create Cloud nucleation particles But those particles are very small and there's a threshold between what will grow and become a cloud Particle and particles below that threshold Just don't grow They're not large enough. It's kind of like they're too small a target for an extra water vapor to bump into compared to the much larger particles and Particle size is not just a stable. It's a continual exchange between different particles In terms of Traditional climate change forcing it's often felt that When the northern summer When the northern hemisphere summer isn't receiving enough sunlight that that can Then the snow that falls doesn't completely remove during the summer and starts accumulating but That isn't going happen now and isn't happening now because the eccentricity is too low the the orbit just doesn't go out far enough and then Be in sync with summer So that we start accumulating ice and snow on the North American continent We're actually measuring the Sun output the total solar radiance above the Earth's atmosphere and since 1970 or so and that isn't showing a sufficient increase or decrease To drive what we're seeing in the climate So you have to ask You know, what is there else and you also have to since the physics supports Heating from CO2 and that even in that simple model I described a little bit earlier You also have to explain why we wouldn't be saying that, you know, what's that we're doing? What's the earth doing that would negate? that source of warming and then What's the other source of warming that you would expect and there isn't any right now? It's the old Holmesian expression once you've eliminated the impossible whatever is left however improbable must be the truth We're Smith another Argument that deniers make is that our global warming policy making is Too dependent on modeling. In fact, I think when the recent IPCC report came out Sarah Huckabee Sanders the press secretary sort of Be a little bit saying well, it's all just all just dependent on Models and we have different models and you have or something to that effect I Not to put you on the spot too much, but can you talk to us a little bit about how climate change is modeled and sort of maybe end the science of modeling Sure You know, I would say climate models Which increasingly get better because we can we have the compute power to Compute the At higher resolution and we did even just a few years ago and The nation's moving to access scale Computing above Head of scale now One of the claims deniers make Can you hear me? Yes, I hear you Okay, because my my visual froze for a minute one of the claims deniers make is that the models aren't Proved and that's a very hard thing to do with the planet because it doesn't just willingly go back and Replicate and let you try something different. But what we can do is Verify all the pieces and parts the the core of a climate model is really a weather model in terms of Transporting it may not be as high resolution and we have to run it for up to 30 years of modeling time to really assess the climate but that core and the fluid dynamics is well known and It's considerably used. I mean we're using it in weather models. We're using it in other physical models that involve fluids What is added for a climate model? It's what it's called column physics. So what happens to the surface a weather model doesn't have to do with Effects like ice melting over time Change in vegetation a climate model does and so These things are part theory and part comparison with measurements There are people out there and in fact in 1989 it was a start of a program called the atmospheric radiation measurement program which has a site in Oklahoma and went up at Barrow's and the the whole idea is to be able to measure the components of the atmosphere the sunlight The radiation in a vertical Profile going up and then see if we can connect those two Via a model and if we can then we feel for different kinds of settings then we feel we have some Reason to trust what the model that part of the model outputs and A lot of that has been done Inter comparison of models has been done looking at statistics of the climate model With is what we'd expect for the current atmosphere and the records we have Where's the precipitation? How much does it vary all that kind of stuff has been done though? It's not like the models are just you know spun together in somebody's imagination and that really is the difference between the science models and you know the denier quote models I think You know if anything the recent IPCC report Suggest that if anything our models have been too conservative And I think that part of the alarm was to sort of a realization that Things could happen quicker than we had kind of been thinking they would be And something else to touch upon what you said. It's my understanding that over the last maybe five or ten years a New science the science of attribution Has emerged And that scientists are now able to attribute specific weather events To global warming with much higher confidence than they could let's say a decade ago I don't know too much about You know how that confidence has come about But there is enough confidence in attribution For a discipline to have arisen around it. Would anyone like to speak to that? Before we get into that I would like to Expand a bit on what Keith said earlier. Now. This is a question. I received In one form or another all the time. Well, you have these scientific models. I mean populations But what this is just something you do on paper or something you do on a computer Because as already mentioned, but I'm going to emphasize here is that these models are not in a vacuum in a particular case Climate models they're compared with data. There are observations all over the channel. There are Paramets machines or satellites that are observing from orbit So there's a lot of data that are used to check the reality of these models Another thing to keep in mind is that if you have enough evidence that something is happening If this were for example, CSI these CSI shows have been very popular Free runs now, but for crime scene investigation if you would compile a certain amount of evidence and you never never Absolutely prove Suspect committed the crime. There's always, you know some uncertainty, but it's something like, you know, 90% certain that this person Committed the crimes any reasonable person will say send that person to jail But when you have that same standard for climate change or for evolution, for example First people who don't believe in evolution suddenly every tiny little Imperfection they seize upon that to prove that's in their own minds that this science is wrong And it doesn't make sense because if they suddenly looked at data that said this person Evidence that this person committed a crime. They say yeah, a person should go to jail So it's just a change in the way they look at things. It's very biased huge science, it's it's Willful ignorance is well. Yes, I agree and to some extent. I think the models Even though, you know They're kind of like a hypothesis And the hypothesis is tested by sort of how well the model is able to predict what we experience over time and You know, I think especially over the last decade or so The our models have proven to be, you know, pretty good predictors But that gives you a lot of confidence that we're that our models are on the right track it might be that Wednesday say not predictor, but projector and there's a Difference that a weather model can predict about two weeks out and It's not that its prediction Then looks like nonsense. It just doesn't match the real world And in fact in doing weather modeling these days, they're doing ensemble modeling where they run many Runs with slightly different initial conditions There was a case Palmer can't remember his first name Talked about it AGU, you know, maybe seven years ago About a severe storm in England that at the time all the weather forecast missed and they've gone back since then and done this it's sample models and our ensemble runs and a few of those Actually predicted the storm and the conclusion is, you know, some things are fairly easy to predict Weather-wise and some things are very difficult because they Depend on some small difference and yet the results are greatly different Climate models run in a slightly different state and I mentioned 30 years before and it's statistical in the sense that The model captures the features that the Actual earth goes through but not necessarily at the same time It's like you're modeling in infinity of different earths and they're slightly different But if you look at the weather the climate model is producing at any point It's a it's a parallel earth. I mean if a person were on The planet that matched that prediction you wouldn't look around and say, you know, this weather is really strange for the earth So things like Ocean oscillations which can last a decade or El Nino Won't necessarily happen at the same time in a model as Happens on earth, so you can't do a wonderful in comparison at that point But you can look at the 30 years of statistics that the earth and the model reduce Yeah, I think it's might be also useful since we have a climate scientist here to actually do something to ask some basic questions Keith could you just distinguish for us between weather and climate? Yes, thank you There's the old saying that Climate is what you expect and weather is what you What you get but even a weather model you could start saying, you know, what are all the possible models if we start our possible results if we start Predicting the weather up to two weeks out Today and they'll vary and the current state of the art is to come up with some synthesis of that Now, I mean some of those as models don't match what we actually get So Climate has to average Over You know decadal ocean Oscillations and there are some there's a Pacific Oscillation and the Atlantic Oscillation where there's sort of Two different modes the ocean can get into or and so off the West Coast of South America where You either have upwelling Water you're bringing deep nutrients up or you have Water that's more or less laying on the surface and staying warm so the the climate really has to average all be long enough to average Overall of that kind of thing, which is why they they basically say 30 years that's part of my climate runs are costly because it Takes a lot of computer time to run 30 years on a High-resolution scale If you don't mind Just to change gears a little bit and to try to get through our topics I just like to raise one of the Comments in the IPCC report is how Enduring the Changes to the climate are going to be That is even if we were to stop Pumping co2 into the atmosphere today It could take millennia for the earth to sort of You know Establish an equilibrium. I guess comparable to what we have today So So the changes we're going to be seeing on the planet are You know in a certain sense all for all intents and verbs are going to be permanent So we're going to be looking at you know changed habitats perhaps for example perhaps the permanent loss of of coral reefs You know entire, you know, we're going to go through a sort of mass extinctions Now no doubt we will see the and perhaps I guess I would shouldn't say no doubt But perhaps we will see the emergence of of new species That will be adapting to these new environmental Eshes and so forth Would anyone like to kind of expand on that? One thing I would like to say is Life itself is is is extremely Is extremely resilient in the long term so In the news I saw something which is absolutely horrible that since the 1970s Like 60% of all animal species have gone extinct and now coral reefs are going extinct But in the long term will coral reefs actually go extinct some fraction of those will be resilient to the asset acidification of the oceans and Maybe they will eventually spread around the world that'll take a long time so In the long term They say that mother earth is dying mother earth is not mother earth is maybe having a fever That for a while, but mother earth will do If you look at world Okay, if you look at the history of the earth over the long period of time There have been like times like wordsmiths was saying where the earth literally was Snowball, I mean it happened long ago, but it was several periods Before the atmosphere that we have now, but do we really want to for example the carbon dioxide right now is similar to what it was 30 or 40 million years ago Do we really want to live in that time period because it would essentially Affect all the plant plants and animals that we have on earth. Sure. Of course the earth's going to Rebound and stuff to but do we want to be there when it does Do we want to have the population that we have when it does? What's going to happen in the interim with trying to feed the number of people we have or I? Mean every the whole ecology of the earth could change dramatically if the earth warms too much or Ocean acidity and reef's die and such like that sure of course the earth's going to be around for a Billion years, and then of course the Sun's going to get too hot and it's going to boil everything away anyway So, you know, but a billion years is the idea is do we want to be there? Do we want that kind of earth? there's enormous Problems with what we're doing right now Well Well, Vic, I just wanted to touch on Well this notion that in the past Snowball earth and other long large-scale climate changes did occur You know from our point of view over gigantic swaths of time geological time periods and those kind of Low changes I'll give biology a chance to adapt You know, I think part of the Terror of what we're confronting now is that the change is happening so fast It's happening faster than biology can adapt. So now no doubt We will see populations that survive and they will endure and then they will diversify But again, that's going to happen over sort of evolutionary time scales. So, you know, we are really looking at At You know a profoundly different earth and So what I was going to say is that the slow changes, you know, the nature is so adept at Creating life that sort of occupies every possible niche from which life can extract energy and So, you know, we just see this incredible abundance of life on earth Primarily due to the fact that the earth changes slowly that habitats are stable And that you know, this gives sort of this in a sense gives life the confidence to expand into niches because it is stable and in an unstable environment, you Know life might be more cautious about expanding into new I mean, I'm sort of anthropomorphizing here as you can see, but I think you get the idea Yeah, I Well, I have optimism in the long term that life will survive that doesn't mean I I'm happy with way things are going now I don't want human beings to be suffering. I don't want to lose our world-wide civilization if we can avoid it I want us to be better stewards of the earth There's there's still hope There's also the the worry that You know, we're playing with things that we don't really know the results of for instance if the Gulf Stream shut down because the Difference between the tropics and the Poles got small enough that the forcing Just didn't create a Gulf Stream Even if we went back, what would it take to restart it? There's The effect called hysteresis Where you have one path in but it takes a different path out One of the fairly recent papers Explained the 100 million year or no 100,000 year cycle in Ice sheets and That isn't in the solar forcing The explanation was partly as the ice gets further south but also there's a hysteresis and compression of the crusts underneath this tremendous weight of ice and As the ice goes This doesn't just spring back. So there's a actually a tipping point that could go through several You know solar orbital cycles Before it tips and goes the other way just because things are changing like compression of the crust Yes, you know, that's kind of fascinating to me the fact that climate and geology interact Like that. I think that's a little bit counterintuitive for a lot of people that that and Particularly, you know the the in a sense the You know the crust of the earth is part of its geology the ice the polar ice caps part of the geology of earth affected by the climate So you do have this kind of very subtle interplay between geology and it might not always be so subtle in in the sense that Climate change can actually Cause earthquakes there's there's evidence that that could happen because as the ice is melts into the sea it releases the Releases the land below it which which rebounds as Keith has mentioned those rebounds can stress Well, all right. This is all very sobering We're a little bit over our period. Maybe we should think about wrapping it up Does anyone else have some? Additional thoughts that you didn't have a chance to express and maybe we'll try to Just mention a few things that you didn't get a chance to and then maybe we can Bring this question to an end Sure one real quick point and somebody mentioned his dinner time Agatha, I guess they live where it is dinner time, but I Take the National Geographic and the entire issue lately was on changing food. I mean we could I Think we've gone pretty far as far as Temperature rise and such and there are going to be effects, which we're just not going to be able to Wish away, but on the other hand just changing the way we eat globally could make a lot of difference If you look at the amount of land which is pasture land or which for example just to raise meat and how much of our food production goes into that and the effects of cows and you know clear clearing forests and stuff could be if we just change some habits we could at least Push some of this down in the future instead of Having it visit us at a really awful time when the earth's population is getting larger So yeah globally and even in places like the United States which uses a lot more energy and a lot Than other places if if everybody just said yes, let's do this then of course we could make an enormous difference So I guess I'm an optimist in that respect whether we do it or not. Hey Well on that note there apparently is a way to do that There's a way of actually converting desert at least some parts of deserts back into grassland head talk on that case that Alan savory who's had experience with this where he's actually moved the herding animals because some land grassland was turning To desert so he removed the herd animals and even had to kill a number of elephants to do this was decades ago tragic killing And the problem got even worse But he found that if he were introduced Raising animals into the edges of deserts that slowly the grasslands expand and if you have enough grassland you can make an impact global warming one thing I wanted to Just make a note of is the topic of migration You know in the distant past if the climate changed a little bit and the rainfall didn't come And people were more nomadic Then you could Sort of counter the climate changes With moving locations at this point Moving locations you you have these things called borders and people with guns that like them at you and Shoot you if you try to migrate or try to build walls to keep you from migrating So it's the historical way of countering changes isn't going to work very well Unless we become a lot more sociable and forgiving species So I think it was in the sedan that drought aggravated interactions between nomadic people and Farmers who had settled down and suddenly there wasn't the water and Food to support both and that gets very quickly into conflict Yes, I'm really glad you raised the issue of migration It seems to me that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change migration Notably in Europe and discouragingly but predictably You know rather than The response being you know open hearts and open arms What we are seeing is the rise of right wing Nationalist politics arising That is anti-immigration This political shift is threatening The post-World War II order that was established specifically to suppress Nationalism after our experiences in the century And this is a in my mind a horrifying Development and partially a consequence of climate change Yes, well that brings up a very important point. There's a documentary I saw which lays itself very nice It's called Age of Consequences. I strongly recommend that everyone see that Documentary because the effects of climate change are already killing people and I can give easy examples one is the Syrian civil war that started with the Drought in like 2005 2006 there were years of drought and Farmers had to move because they couldn't they couldn't survive on the land so they moved into Damascus and Of course people will point out Conservatives will point out. Well, there's there are historical problems there historical political tensions There are their cultural problems and the answer is absolutely right. That's what I call the gasoline Climate change is the spark The the conflicts it can actually cause the conflicts based on all the other problems It can be the spark that causes those conflicts and that's what happened in Syria without climate change Maybe the this conflict would have happened it anyway eventually Then there's Arab spring and there's a refugee the refugee crisis in Europe as as peregrine is playing In these conflicts, especially in a civil war people are dying So climate change is causing people to die and directly from excessive heat from droughts We must do something So this actually makes an excellent point and if you look at some of the projections Is that it's not far from now that we'll have what are called water wars Uh Go ahead word smith. It looks like he might be um What you were saying on water wars Just reminded me that um Not all water gets transferred as quote water, but we have um a virtual water transferred in import and export of um Things that are grown for instance that take water um Or things that are manufactured That require water in the manufacturing and so You not only have The water that falls and the water you see but you have this whole virtual transport of water and if drought changes that um Whole economies in a sense could go south um There's also a feature that If the um Water and sunlight or rainfall change And migrate slightly north or south you're dealing with different soil conditions now The soil may not be the same and the same crop that you had before may not grow well Another issue that used to be when okay, I'm showing my age, but um when I went to college in the 70s One of the issues was population and we don't like to say that anymore It does come up But back when we had fewer people. I mean when I was born there was half the people that there are now and we're adding Whole cities every day pretty much worldwide and looking at another two billion in the next 30 years Uh, but this is an issue. I mean there's more people more Crop production as I mentioned Asher geographic has a great Issue on food production. They don't they don't mention mentioned population Say directly is the major cause but they basically say that we're going to have to increase food production doubling it Then the reason we don't mention population much. I guess it's because there's no real good Way to address it That that is politically correct or sustainable or whatever, but that that definitely is Underlying the whole problem more people Yeah, vick. I appreciate you raising that issue. It is a sensitive issue. I think you're right it It is an important factor. It is hard to believe Barely sustained the population we have now much much less More but It is You know very challenging to come up with Pollutions that aren't cruel back here again when I was in school There was a Paul air like about the population boom then and a book called famine 1984 And the issue there that we could see again if due to either sea level rise or changes in Like we've said where There is arable soil and good climate and such like that is the issue that there are certain countries that are going that can actually Help in other words, they have more food and Money and then there are other countries that can sustain themselves And then there are other countries which it's going to be very difficult for them to be a live period And that was the that was the premise of the book famine 1984 and we could face that kind of problem again. It's not a Good prospect Yeah, and um, you know, I think one reason population isn't discussed more openly is that there have been Um, sort of population hysteria scares in the past, but somehow we see it managed to Keep producing enough food or making enough shelter that you know, we've somehow been able to adapt to this large population and I think that has Made policy makers a little bit A complacent about the population issue thinking well, we'll just figure out some way to adapt to it the population issue is is is Is is key to a lot of these things as as vick has said If there were a smaller population then we wouldn't have the problems with climate change um, if you indulge Go ahead. Is that something to say berga? Oh, well, uh, actually just to kind of backtrack a little bit. I felt like I should acknowledge um Some commentary in our nearby chat Typically with respect to migration because I had said that european migration was driven in part by climate change Um, but but my statement is being disputed Um, and I just feel like I should acknowledge that that I'm certainly no expert on Sources of european climate change Although I have heard that you know that the that Migration out of the middle east in syria is in part driven by climate change I don't know how much of that is making its way into europe And I do think that european migration is also related Um policies in the european union, I suppose and things like that. So I just wanted to go back and correct Yeah, but I would also again I recommend seeing that documentary age of consequences some of the european migration is from the middle east and africa And that's because of drought in those areas. So that's been that's been driving the population away. They can't live anymore in that same area Um Yeah, but the question is what can I mean, this is something. What can we do on a personal level to? You know climate change I actually want to challenge that a little bit because um I I've been hearing more and more often that these calls for Personal action on climate change are really just Sort of feel-good initiatives to make to sort of empower people But that do have real You know effective change on Carbon globally What we really need is you know systemic Changes by the you know gigantic global corporations and um and energy produced on the planet That's what is really going to be required that Personal changes are really just um The way to sort of pacify the pop That might be controversial. That's that's both true and false. That's a very good point I mean, how much can individuals do and how much corporations can do But how are the corporations going to change without grassroots movements? One thing I'm I'm suggesting is get involved with demonstrations For example, I was involved. I played a very small part in this demonstration But it was in vancouver where we're protesting the trans mountain pipeline from the alberta at tar sands They call it oil sands, which is just spin the tar sands to to the coast We are protesting that pipeline the government is being very wrongheaded about this They claim to be very serious about climate change The opposing party the the conservatives will be even worse. They want even more pipelines And this is absolutely insane more pipelines. We don't need more pipelines. So It's only with enough demonstrations enough letter writing with enough resistance from the public that things will change Right on brother I'll say Well, that actually might be a good a good spot to wind this up. We're we're almost at an hour and a half I can't believe we We've uh, we're able to fill up so much time and I don't think we're finished talking But we could go for hours. We could go for hours I can't believe the audience is still here. I know And that's the interested in this topic Well, uh, thank you guys so much for um, you know devoting your time out of the day to join us here in science circle for this Um wordsmith and a busy g Dick, uh, you guys were all fantastic and I also want to Thanks to our loyal audience of science circle students who Um, you know, uh are just always great and contributed a lot to this discussion um and with that I will uh bring this uh, this, um installment of science circle panel discussions to an end and Bang my gavel. Good night everyone Good night everyone. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks everyone. Thanks. Thanks to my panel. Thanks to matt Thanks for coming