 So we will get underway. So I'm supposed to talk about weather and climate extremes, attribution and risk. There's an example here of one that was in the news just recently about wildfires in Fort McMurray in Alberta. And they're probably still going on. And so we're often asked by the media, is this particular event, is this global warming, or is it natural variability, black and white? No shades of gray in those kinds of questions. And so my comment is that these are not the right questions because it's always a combination of both nowadays. Oh, do we have a pointer here somewhere? Don't see one. All right. And so this is just a brief overview of the fact that, as Jim said, that climate change is happening. Thanks. It is due to humans, 97% of the scientists agree. There's a few who, for one reason or another, ideological reasons, religious reasons or other, seem not to agree. And the data are certainly of mixed quality. Does this pointer work? Nope. Try this one. Ah, there we are. The data of mixed quality and length. So you can all end this lots of variability. There's lots of weather going on. So you can always point to things that don't seem to agree. But together, they actually tell a very compelling story. And this is what we do as scientists is to put them all together. And they leave no doubt whatsoever about the human role in climate change. But what we do about this problem depends not on scientists. Our role is to advise you as to what we think will happen, what the consequences will be so that you can make informed decisions. But it's up to the public at large and, in particular, politicians. Unfortunately, politicians, some of the ones in Washington, as to what we actually do about this. And it relates to value systems. And you can have lots of discussions about that kind of thing. So here's my quick summary of the overall problem. The planet is running a fever. So if it went to the doctor, the symptoms are the temperature and the composition of the atmosphere is changing. Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. The diagnosis is that these two things are actually related to one another. And the human activities are causal. So that's an attribution statement. And then prognosis is for more warming at rates that can be disruptive will cause strife. The treatment, then, is for mitigation to reduce the emissions, to cut down on the problem. So these have special meanings, these terms, mitigation and adaptation, as I mentioned before, which is really planning for the consequences. And we're not doing enough of either. And so the alternative, of course, is that you suffer the consequences. And too much of that is happening already. So here's a very brief background on the overall view. This is the global mean temperature from NOAA, starting off in 1880 or thereabouts. And you can see there's a certain raggedness to it, certain up and down nature to it. And I've also got the pre-industrial level indicated on here. And so we're already well over one degree Celsius above that. His degree Fahrenheit, multiplied by 9 over 5 to get from one to the other. And then this is the annual values of carbon dioxide. After 1957 and 1958, records were begun in Mauna Loa. And that's the Mauna Loa record with the annual cycle taken out and added up to the results from bubbles of air that have been trapped in ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland to take this back in time. And so the pre-industrial level is down here, around 280 parts per million by volume. And you can see this overall increase. And I put these two curves together to indicate that they're related to one another. Because one of the things that we can show here at NCAR, this is the attribution aspect, is that these two things are related to one another. But obviously, there's a lot of wiggles up and down which are not related to this. And this is the sort of things that denies of climate change can easily point to. So the last value on here was the calendar year 2015. It was 0.9 degrees Celsius above the 20th century record. And then this is the value for, actually it was at the time I did this, the last 12 months. We could update that now by another month. And it's about the same value. It's a wonderful degree C above the 20th century. So the last 12 months are the warmest 12 months on record by quite a substantial amount, in fact. So this is a jump of about 0.2 degrees Celsius that's occurred in the past year or so. And a key part of this is related to the El Nino phenomenon. But also it's related to the global warming that's going on. So with regard to attribution of climate change, one of the neat things about being a climate scientist is that we can actually play God. We can run climate models with and without human influences and see what the difference is. And so an example down the bottom right is the result from the IPCC 2013 where a whole host of models were used. And there are two different versions of these, some older versions called CMAP3 and some newer ones called CMAP5. And then the observations are on here, which have a lot more raggedness to them. And then we can run these experiments with so-called natural force, which includes volcanoes and changes in the sun. And so this is what we get then. And here's what the results from the model suggest. These shock downward decreases in the temperature are related to volcanoes. And so they're present down below here, maybe not quite as evident. And you can see that it's after about the 1960s, after about 1970, that these are clearly separated from one another. And so this is the global warming signal. This is the result of the changes in the composition of the atmosphere. In particular, the increases in greenhouse gases, the heat trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and others, methane, nitrous oxide, and so on. Jerry Meale is going to talk to you a bit more about this a little bit later. And so I'm not going to dwell on this particular aspect. This deals with the average climate. And what we're going to deal with here is a lot more about the consequences of this with regard to extremes. And so here's some things about extremes. The extremes may or may not be rare, depending on how you define them. But they often break records. There are values outside of previous experience. And they may not, therefore, be planned for. And so things break. Thresholds are crossed. Often, there are high impact events. And they have high costs. There may be loss of life and limb. And some examples are given here about things that we'll talk about a little bit later. And so one of the ways in which climate change enters into this, it's not that we don't have these kind of events from weather and from natural variability and from El Nino. There are always droughts and floods and extremes around the world that occur naturally. But climate change is typically making a lot of these things worse. We cross some of these thresholds. We break records and things break. Some of the more complicated ones, people say, all right, global warming, it's an increase in temperature. Maybe it's associated with heat waves. What they do not understand adequately is how it affects storms and rainfall and floods and droughts. So I want to say a little bit about this. If we've got extra heat, where does that heat go? Well, in the human body, we sweat. Water plays a role. If you go up in the mountains here, not today, but maybe yesterday or the day before, without a water bottle, you can end up, perhaps, with heat stroke if you don't keep adequate water going in. Out here in the West, we can use evaporative coolers, swamp coolers, to moisten the atmosphere and take up the heat instead of increasing the temperature. And this works quite well for the planet Earth because 70% of the planet Earth is the ocean. And so the increasing heat actually goes into evaporation of surface moisture. Of course, that has consequences because it gets into the atmosphere and then it has to rain somewhere. So that's what we're actually talking about here. Another example, what happens if there's been some showers that's been raining outside, as it will later today? And the sun comes out. The first thing that happens is that the puddles dry up. And then the temperature goes up. The temperature doesn't immediately go up because all of this water lying around. And one of the ways in which you can keep cooler at home is spraying water around on the roof and so on. And so water plays a key role. It's the air conditioner of the planet. This is one thing you might remember. If it's the only thing you remember out of this talk, is that warmer air can hold more moisture. And the rate is about 4% per degree Fahrenheit, 7% per degree Celsius. So this has consequences. This is actually why we have weather systems. It relates to the fact that if you have a parcel of air, it's got some moisture in it, and for some reason that air parcel rises, it moves into lower pressure and therefore it expands and therefore it cools. If it cools, it can no longer hold all of the moisture and so it rains. This is very fundamental to why it rains. And of course, the air rises for various reasons. It might be because of a cold front or a warm front or a storm system of some sort or the other or because the wind blows up against the mountains. But this is one of the reasons. This is why it rains. And so with global warming, there's a bit more heat. Firstly, there's more drying. There's more evaporation. There's more moisture that goes into the atmosphere. And that has consequences. Firstly, in places where it's raining, there's more rain. But if it happens not to be raining, that extra heat means there's more drying. And so there's more potential for drought. So here's a particular thunderstorm. A key thing about rainfall events is that I don't know whether you've ever thought about this kind of thing. But the moisture that falls out is much, much greater. The rate at which it falls out is much greater than the rate at which it can evaporate. And so the way in which you can get heavy rainfalls is not because it's evaporating like crazy and all of the moisture is going right up into the cloud. Instead, that rate is typically about a factor of 10 or much larger. It can be a factor of 40 larger for the rainfall rate versus the evaporation rate. And so the only way we can get heavy rains is by having a weather system that reaches out and brings all of the moisture from around the area into the storm. And then it dumps it down in the form of heavy rains. And of course, this is why it cannot rain everywhere at once. And so in the summertime, often, if you're out on the golf course or something, you can experience some gusty winds. Oh, what's going on? There's nothing around here. But then you look over in the distance and you can see, oh, there's a thunderstorm over there. This is a thunderstorm reaching out. And it can reach out quite substantial distances as a part of the circulation of the storm to gather the moisture and bring it into the storm and dump it down. And so one of the consequences of this is that if there's more moisture in the environment, it rains harder. And there's a greater risk of flooding. So now, turning to the attribution science, the traditional now hypothesis and approach for dealing with this is that there is no human influence on climate. And we have to prove that there is. And we've done this many times for certain kinds of things. But for some variables like precipitation, it's much trickier to do this. So is it sufficient to say, well, we know there's a human influence on climate from temperature. I showed you that before. We can show that with our climate models. But what about precipitation? Well, as I've just shown you, there are effects on precipitation. But they're fairly complicated. So scientists make two kinds of errors when they're dealing with this kind of thing. The little diagram on the bottom right here is that they can make a statement that turns out to be true, and they can make a statement that there's no human influence. And that may also be true. In other words, the false, false category. But scientists lean over backwards to not make false, positive statements, the type one errors, wrongly concluding that there is a human influence where there isn't. And typically, we use this 95% confidence limit. And as a result, many scientists make what is called a type two error, which is down in this box here. In other words, there's a false negative, and they wrongly conclude that there is no human influence when there really is. In other words, the scientific community has been very, very conservative with regard to statements that say that there's a human influence on climate. I think it's very unfortunate, but I think it's beginning to change. Here's an example here. So here's a so-called bell-shaped curve. Let's suppose this represents reasonably well at the climate at some place where it starts off with this distribution called A. This is the mean value, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then I've warmed it up artificially here to be where it's been warmed up by 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And I've just kept the distribution around the mean the same in this case. And so those of you who know about this, the standard deviation or the spread about this is the same in both of these sets of curves. So here's what is called the 95th percentile over here, or the 5th percent significance level. And the way in which scientists have worked to say, if the climate, if stuff is happening out here, then we regard it as being significant at this 5% significance level or the 95% confidence level. Now in this case, you can see what would happen is that in B, all of the stuff that's out here, I don't know what it is, 10% or 15% of the time, you would conclude that, yes indeed, there is a climate change. But all of the place where you're in here with B, even though there really is a climate change, you would say, oh no, we cannot prove, we cannot say clearly that there's been a climate change because this is, this still could have happened, it's still within the previous realm of variability. And so we make type two errors most of the time. And this is a relatively large climate change. The only way you can avoid this is to have a climate change so large that these two distributions are completely separate from one another. So what are the expectations with regard to climate events, these extremes that we're dealing with? Well, the changes in atmospheric circulation with climate change turn out to be relatively small. We can show that with our models here at NCAR. And they vary quite a bit from one run to another. And you have to average over a large ensemble to really identify the changes in the atmospheric circulation. And in any event, also, there is individual character. There, every event is unique. Think about that, I mean there's an infinite variety of weather events outside. It's actually remarkable. There are some events that you can look at and say, oh, that looks a little bit like what happened three years ago. But you don't have to go very far, you go 10 miles away and something quite different is happening. And then the subsequent evolution is quite different. And so, as a result, it's statistical forecasting of the weather has not proven useful. That's why we need to use dynamical models for numerical weather prediction. So studies that have tried to attribute events have nearly always concluded that natural variability dominates, and they should. But they're really asking the wrong questions, in my view. And so what we have suggested is that it's essential to distinguish between the small, noisy, chaotic, and unpredictable dynamics in the atmosphere from the thermodynamic effects. And I'll explain a little bit more by what I mean by that in just a minute. And it's more useful to regard the extreme circulation regime or the weather event as being largely unaffected by climate change because the effects of climate change are usually relatively small. And then we ask the question of whether the impact of the event was affected by the known changes in the environment in which this particular event was forming. And as I've mentioned to you before, in general, it's warmer and it's moisture in the environment. And this affects all of the storms that we're dealing with. And we've got a lot more confidence relating to climate change in these thermodynamic aspects. And so dynamical aspects deal with the phenomena. The individual cloud or weather system, its movement, the development, it tends to be chaotic and unpredictable. And chaotic has a special mathematical meaning nowadays. And so you can look that up. I don't have time to go into that. And every event is unique. But the environment in which the phenomena is occurring deals with the overall temperature, the water vape, how much moisture is available, perhaps the sea level if we're over the ocean. And these aspects tend to be very robust and predictable. And so the key thing is that the environment for all storms has changed. It's warmer by, this is a very conservative number now. It's closer to one degree Celsius, perhaps the air is typically moisture by five to 10%, closer to 10% probably now. The ocean heat content is much higher. The memory for the system in terms of climate change is in the ocean. The oceans are warmer. The sea temperatures are higher. The ocean heat content is higher. As a result, sea level is higher now by about 19 or 20 centimeters by eight inches. And this is the sea level record here. This one here is the two meter temperature record since 1979. This is the water vapor record. This is global values of the total column water vapor in the atmosphere, showing that these are relentlessly going up. And the main support comes from the oceans and the thermal inertia in the oceans. So there have been problems with many of the current practices. There's often been, I think, misleading and erroneous statements. Some of these have been published in the literature and some of them which have been very visible, I've mentioned here. Many misleading statements in the literature and I think the result has actually been disastrous for public understanding because there's a lot of events that have occurred. In fact, all events that occur nowadays have a component of climate change in them. And the question is exactly what level is it? And maybe you can guess from the things I've just said is that it's at least the 10% level and it could easily be double that. But it's not 100%. So we've suggested that there are more useful ways to approach this. And this is called a conditional approach. And so we suggest that we can ask these kinds of questions. Given the weather pattern, how were the temperatures, the precipitation and the associated impacts influenced by climate change? Or given the drought, the drought itself, let's assume the drought was caused simply by natural variability, but given the drought, how was the drying, the evapotranspiration, enhanced by climate change? And how did that influence the moisture deficits and the dryness and thus the wildfire risk which typically goes along with drought? Did it lead to more intense and perhaps longer lasting drought as likely? Given a flood, where did all the moisture come from? There's not enough studies of this kind of thing. Was it enhanced by the changes in ocean temperatures that may have had a climate change component? Given a heat wave, how was that influenced by the drought that often exists, the dry conditions around, which means all of the heat goes into raising temperature instead of into evaporation, as I mentioned before? So those kind of factors come into play. Given extreme snow, I'm gonna talk a little bit about snow, where did the moisture come from? Was it related to higher than normal sea surface temperatures off the coast or farther afield? Or more generally, given an extreme storm, how was it influenced by the anomalous sea surface temperatures in the ocean heat content? The anomalous moisture transports into a storm and the associated rainfall and then the heating that goes on with that in the atmosphere that can help to invigorate the storm. And was the storm surge worse because of higher sea levels? So we can talk about those kind of examples and I'm gonna give you a quick run through of a few of these. The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on the attribution of extreme climate events earlier this year. I think this was March, yeah, March this year. And from their website, they say that, well, scientists have cautioned in the past that individual events couldn't be attributed to climate change. But now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. Very understated, what they're really saying is using the approach that we have identified here, in fact, we can often make very clear statements that there is an influence, a human influence on climate, on individual events. And so the strongly conditioned approach, the thing given that we've got a storm, what was the impacts, is becoming much more acceptable and this seems to be catching on with a number of scientists. So the first example, it's not John Travolta. Superstorm Sandy, my family was very much involved in this, my daughter and her family live in Hoboken, New Jersey. My wife was visiting them at the time and they were all evacuated, but I gave them six days notice and they were well prepared, they had all of the things they needed, they cleaned out all the drains and everything, but the whole area was evacuated and they lost power for 10 days or something like that. So here's this big storm, it started off as a hurricane, it came up and the outstanding thing was this, was not so much the real intensity or the depth of the storm itself, but how big it became, it became a hybrid storm and so this is a picture of it. And there were over $70 billion in damages and over 110 lives lost in that. And so here's a few things about it. I mean, it caused tremendous damage when it made landfall on the New Jersey coast in the New York area. It began, it got up to a category three hurricane, but it became this hybrid storm and some of the worst damage was on the Jersey shore. But there was heavy precipitation farther inland that was also a major problem. And so that's the sort of quick summary and the thing about it was that the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts made accurate forecasts of this about six days in advance. National Weather Service didn't quite catch up until about four days in advance. And what they have done subsequently was they re-ran all of their forecasts for this and they made about over 50 forecasts using an ensemble of forecasts. So they run it all over again and they test it to assumptions about the data and the uncertainties in the data. And they changed, in this case, the observed sea surface temperatures off the coast for the climatological values that were typically one to 1.5 degrees C cooler and a swath about 1,000 miles off the coast or something like that. But only very small changes occurred in the track of the storm. In other words, the weather situation, the synoptic situation, where the highs and low pressure systems were pretty well locked in place and they weren't affected by this, but the storm itself was. And what happened is that the observed sea surface temperatures led to a much bigger, more intense storm with stronger winds and greater precipitation. So here's the result of this. In the background here, you can see the observed sea surface temperatures. That's the colors and you can see the 26 degrees Celsius isotherm. This is the Gulf Stream up here. So the Gulf Stream is coming up through here. And then this is the climatology. You can see it's much more smooth. The 26 degree isotherm is much further to the south. And this is the storm that was forecast under these conditions and this is the storm that was forecast under those conditions. And so you can see the impact. It was substantially weaker and it was smaller. This is the change in the winds that occurred. So the winds, these are actually in meters per second. And there was overall a 3.6 meter per second increase in going from here to here, 3.6 meters per second. You can roughly double that about seven miles per hour or something like that. But if you have 21 versus 19, so that's only two meters per second difference, it turns out that's a 35% increase in damage because the damage actually goes up about the cube of the wind speed. And so very small differences convert to quite large differences in the damage. And so this is what I showed you before. And then the average depth of the storm was increased by about 7.6 hectopascals, millibars. The wind speeds increased by 3.6 meters per second. The precipitation in the storm increased by 35%. And the sea levels also of course along the coast were higher because of global warming. And so climate change was not responsible for all of these changes. It was probably responsible for perhaps a third of this. And they could have done another experiment just looking at the climate change aspects. But I think it's very likely, one of the biggest sources of damage was the fact that the subway tunnels in New York City were flooded and also the tunnels between Manhattan and New Jersey, which is Hoboken, which is where my daughter lives, and also to Brooklyn, probably would not have flooded without climate change. And so the flooding occurs because of the highest sea level plus the high tides, the big storm plus the storm surge. And that damage alone was probably worth $40 billion that you can attribute to climate change. Then in June of 2013, there was some major flooding just north of here in the Northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta. This is, this runs right up, this is the Rockies here, this is the edge of Alberta here, and this is where all of the flooding occurred. And where did all the moisture come from to produce this kind of thing? This is the overall picture for the month in which it occurred, June of 2013, showing the overall temperatures average for that. And so it was relatively warm up through here, but in particular off the coast, this sort of reflects the sea surface temperatures. It was very warm out here in this region here and maybe slightly above normal in the Gulf, but that's probably not the most vital place. This is a bit of a funny projection as looking down from more of the polar region. And so here's where all the rains were occurring. The green here is the rains. And so it was raining out here and raining in here. And there was a high pressure system here and a high pressure system, low pressure system here. And so because of the juxtaposition of this high pressure system and this high pressure system, there was a flow right up into here of moisture coming out of this region here. This is the actual moisture. This is the water vapor channel that's on one of the satellites showing the moisture distribution. So very high levels of moisture down in here in the green and the blue in general. So you can see the moisture flowing right up into this region here. And so there's sort of the pattern of where the moisture was coming from. Some of it was coming out of the Gulf, but a lot of it was coming out of the tropical Atlantic and out here the sea surface temperatures were substantially above normal. And so there's probably a climate change related to this aspect related to this plus the fact that the temperatures over the land are warmer by a couple of degrees and therefore the atmosphere can hold more moisture and that's a very important factor because it means the moisture didn't rain out here or here instead it carried all the way up into this region here. And then in September of 2013, shortly after this, we had a major flooding event in Boulder and since you're in Boulder, I thought I would have to include this. How am I doing on time? I've got plenty of time at the moment. And so these are some of the statistics. You know, we had a record daily amount. What was it? A factor of two more than the previous record on any day and the monthly record for September was smashed by a factor of three and the previous record for any month was only 9.6 and so there were all kinds of records broken with this. There were eight fatalities and certainly over $2 billion in damages. This is some of the damage that occurred around here close to downtown Boulder. And this is what it looked like not too far away from here up in some of the mountains, some of the erosion that occurred was incredible. This is the biggest setting for it and now we're looking again at this water vapor channel and with some enhancements in this case, looking at the basically, you know, half of the northern hemisphere. And so if you sort of step back and look at this, you can say, well, this is where all the action is. This is where all of the heavy rains are occurring down in this region here and now here's this river of moisture going right up into Colorado and it's emanating from down in here and there was some moisture that came up into Colorado out of the Gulf at lower levels but in particular this was very special down in here. So what was going on down in this region down here? You know, so if we look at this little box down in here this is the sea surface temperature distribution. It turns out this was quite warm and this is the sea temperatures in that particular box and you can see there's lots of ups and downs here. The main ups and downs tend to relate to El Nino events where it's not just warm here but it's warm all over the eastern Pacific. The exception was in 2013, it was only warm in this region here. It turned out that was the warmest spot in the western hemisphere. And as a result, that's where all of the low level flow tended to go towards this warm spot. That's why we saw all of that activity in the previous slide. But you can also see when you look at this, oh look, yeah, we can see evidence of climate change. There's certainly a lot of spikiness in this but there's very clear evidence of general warming that's been going on in that particular region. And so this is the Water Vapor Channel showing this picture and this river of moisture coming right up into Colorado at that time. So it was an unusual weather setup. It was probably unique, well, it was unique. The models have generally not been able to replicate that kind of thing. But the amount of moisture that was in the atmosphere down here was an incredible amount. It was as high as 75 millimeters, about three inches of moisture in the form of water vapor in that region. The normal is about one inch of water vapor in the atmosphere. And so after that river shut off, the storms in Colorado ceased, there were two tropical storms formed, Manoel and Ingrid on both sides of Mexico. And it, whoops, and it doesn't say on here. I thought I had some details but there were hundreds of lives lost in Mexico and there was hundreds of millions of dollars of damage that occurred in Mexico. We didn't get any of that in the news here because we were so focused on what was going on in Colorado but it was not disconnected at all. And recently the DOE has run some experiments where they used the approach that we suggested. So given the storm, let's use a model that can simulate things like this as a forecast model and they use the WRF model, the Worf model and they ran it under what they considered to be pre-industrial conditions and then they ran it under current day conditions and they got this distribution of rainfall, seven day rainfall over the Colorado region, northeast Colorado region and in general you can see the overall increase was about 30%. And so they conclude that the anthropogenic drivers which was the biggest factor was the fact that the atmosphere was moisture and the atmosphere was warmer and it can hold more moisture and therefore it rained about 30% of the rains in Colorado was probably due to the anthropogenic climate change. So this is just a quick summary of what I've already told you in this regard. Let me not dwell on it. And so the warmer conditions allowed the air to hold more moisture. Or here's the notes on Mexico down here that subsequently there were hundreds of deaths in Mexico and over 10,000 were evacuated with billions of damage. So turning quickly to drought, the other side of the coin, weather or when there is a dry spell is largely caused by natural variability and it tends to be dominated by ENSO which is El Niño Southern Oscillation or La Niña. La Niña causes droughts in certain parts of the world and in completely different parts of the world occur in El Niño events. So in El Niño events it's over Australia, Southeast Asia, Northeast part of Brazil and so forth. But given a drought, global warming tends to make it worse. There's increased drying. Where does the heat go? We've got increased heat from the increased trapping of energy by greenhouse gases. And one of the things it does is it increases the drying, it increases the heating and the heat waves and it increases the wildfire risk. And so one example is the wildfires at Fulton McMurray which caused tremendous horrendous damage. These are just some pictures of that and some of this generated its own weather in fact. These were all the wildfires around there at that particular time and we can look at that from satellite and see this. And one of the troubles is that some of the ground there has a lot of peat in it and so the flames get into this peat and it just keeps simmering away, burning away and that's what's keeping these things going and it's very, very difficult to put out. This is the 30 day accumulator. One of the annoying things in the US is they tend to cut things off. I found this slide which went a little bit into Canada and so we can actually look up here and we can see that over this period it was actually very dry all through this period here and it was from rains down here and it was also very warm all throughout the west at that particular time. But this is what it looked like in the Calgary region in Alberta for the previous year and so this is sort of more normal kinds of rainfall and for five months they had had very depressed rainfall amounts, about 20% of normal and so very little rainfall, very little soil moisture, very little evaporative cooling so all of the heat goes into drying, raising temperature, increasing wildfire risk. That's what set the stage for this kind of transition here and that's generally true in the west. There's longer wildfire seasons. In this case the El Nino was probably partly responsible for the fact that it was dry in that region and tends to be what happens but it makes for tender dry conditions and so I put together the slide with a whole bunch of microwave ovens and the idea here is that you have one microwave oven, these are small microwave ovens and they go in every square foot, one every square foot. So currently the energy imbalance, this is the net energy imbalance with all the feedbacks included is about one watt per square meter. This is what causes global warming. This is the increased trapping that we've got. Now it's a very tiny amount. It's like having a Christmas tree bulb in every square meter or something like that. In a drought water's playing no role and so over one month the extra accumulated energy is equivalent to running a microwave oven at full power, small microwave oven which is about 720 watts over every square foot. So there's 10 square foot in every square meter so if you wanna do it for every one microwave oven every square meter multiply this by 10 so that would be 60 minutes. Every six minutes for six minutes, no wonder things catch on fire. That's the extra accumulated energy from global warming. So that's what happens in drought. So what about snow? This is a picture here, we had a meeting here actually and we went outside and took this picture when there was snow dealing with attribution and this was the storm called Jonas by the Weather Channel and so on. It was an east coast storm off the east coast and it was in exactly the right position to produce tremendous amounts of snow in Washington DC you may recall. And so there were pictures of the panda having fun in the Washington Zoo. These are some pictures of what was going on weather wise and these two pictures are in Hoboken and this is my grandchild in Hoboken, New Jersey having fun in the snow. So this is what it looked like in that situation. The sea temperatures off the coast, this is where the Gulf Stream lies. There were pockets of water that were as much as seven degrees Celsius above normal but there were also little cold pools but in general it was two to three degrees if not more warmer than normal all the way off the coast. In other words, there was substantially more. Think of the number, seven percent per degree Celsius times three, 20 percent more moisture lurking off the coast waiting for any storm to come along to pick up and then dump it down in the form of, will it be rain or snow? All right, there's plenty of cold air over the land at this time of year and so that what happens. This is the bigger picture. It was very warm down here. There's an El Nino down here and this is the overall smooth version of this if you like and this is relative to 1981 to 2010 so it's already got quite a bit of global warming built into the background that this is subtracted from and so this is what two degrees C in that region up here above there and so it's closer to three degrees C over a lot of this region above normal in that region but it was within 1,000 miles of the coast. It's not unlike Superstorm Sandy in that regard and then this is the water vapor channel. Your eye tends to be drawn to the yellow here but you should be looking at the storm itself. This is all of the heavy rainfall that was occurring and the water vapor that was occurring and flowing into this particular storm coming off of these very high sea surface temperatures off the coast so that's sort of the flow of moisture and the flow of moisture, the typical rule of thumb for just about all weather systems is that the flow of moisture occurs about four times the distance of the radius of the rainfall. So if you've got an individual thunderstorm and it's raining over one mile say the moisture is flowing in from at least four miles away. If you've got a big extra tropical storm where it's raining over 500 miles then the moisture to supply that storm is coming from 2,000 miles away. In other words, the moisture that's going in here is coming out of the Gulf of Mexico and out of the tropical Atlantic typically to get into that storm in order to account for all of the moisture that's occurring. And so there's a Goldilocks effect with regard to these storms. If it's too cold, the air gets freeze dried because of this 4% per degree Fahrenheit. If it's too hot, it's rain. If the conditions are just right, Goldilocks effect, that's when you get the biggest snowfalls and so the highest snow actually occurs when the temperatures are about 28 to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Now in winter in the US, in Colorado, it gets cold but it's a bit warmer than it used to be. What does that mean? It means there's more moisture in the atmosphere. In the middle of winter, we actually expect and we actually observe that there's more snow in the middle of winter now than there used to be and sometimes we even get a bit of rain in December and January. We never used to get rain in December and January here. So this is the relationship, the 4% per degree Fahrenheit, the one degree increase in temperature increases the water vapor by 7%. The sea surface temperatures are at least one degree Fahrenheit higher and therefore there's more percent. Okay, I got to speed up a little here and so this is what has happened on the Northern Hemisphere basis is that in the middle of winter, in October, November, December and January and probably February if you updated it with recent statistics, there is more snowpack around the Northern Hemisphere. Most people don't know this but in the middle of summer from March on there's a lot less snowpack. That's because more of the snow falls as rain and it melts a lot faster because of global warming and the biggest changes have occurred in the eastern parts of the United States in particular and so one of the consequences of global warming is more snow in the middle of winter but a shorter snow season. All right, so this is, we can wrap up at this point. I'll tell you what I've got and I'll go through it extremely quickly and you can ask questions about it but this is the sort of thing that a general conclusion, while we cannot say that these events were due to global warming because that's a poorly closed question, it's highly likely that they wouldn't have had such extreme impacts without global warming. All right, so what I've got here and I don't have time to go through this is a whole bunch of things on sort of what's happened around the world in the last year or so and so there's the big typhoon that went through or cyclone that went through Vanuatu. There was the flooding a year ago in Texas and Oklahoma which had an El Nino connection. There's the widespread heat waves that occurred last summer all around the world and the wildfires galore throughout the west including Alaska and Western Canada last year and probably more again this year. They're already underway and these kind of statistics. There were record breaking typhoons and hurricanes in the Pacific, the largest number of category four and five storms ever. We had this nice picture where we had three of them all together and Kilo, Kilo started off as a hurricane and then it went across the dateline which is very, very rare and so transitioned from being a hurricane to a typhoon. That's just the terminology, west of the dateline they call them typhoons but it was exactly the same thing. There was major flooding in South Carolina, October three to five that was very much related to an atmospheric river coming off of the coast and there was a tropical storm at Yokun out there somewhere and major flooding in India, the drought in Indonesia, this was very much El Nino. These are all wildfires, those aren't clouds, those are wildfires in Borneo and major drought in South Africa, the driest ever terrible conditions and that's again partly close by El Nino as to where the drought occurs but again it's made worse by global warming and then November, December last year record breaking flooding in Missouri. Previously the values have been running along about five inches, previous records 10 and this year time 15 and at the same time the Southern Hemisphere record breaking flooding in Paraguay. So the strongest hurricane ever in the Southern Hemisphere hit the Fijian Islands in 2016. We've had a number of episodes of Houston flooding in April and May and even more recently and again you can see this kind of characteristic of these atmospheric rivers that come in and the atmosphere just holding more moisture. So here's the summary, all right? Let you read this. And the Paris Agreement is designed to address this and this is our paper dealing with this. You can access this at my website so I'll go back and leave it at this and thanks very much.