welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information issues to the general public this is our website for our program of marine and environmental sciences and also as a professor in the school of public policy and urban affairs dr held with received his ph d from the university of washington in one nine hundred ninety seven he had a post doc at stanford university afterward and in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine he joined the faculty of the university of south carolina he'd become a full professor there before moving to northeastern university  massachusetts in twenty thirteen in addition to his dual academic appointment at northeastern he's the director of the sustainability science and policy initiative there he also serves national climate assessment the focus of dr hell most research is on the effects of climate change on sea coast marine ecology this research as we're going to learn tonight is a key component of climate studies dr hellmouth has developed innovative tools and mathematical models that set a standard for monitoring temperature changes in sea coast organisms and his work has produce some unexpected and important discoveries in ecology and climate science in addition to his research leadership dr hellmouth has demonstrated a long and deep commitment to science education for example science teachers are regularly included in his projects for his scientific work and his work with public officials and his efforts in science education dr how much has received a number of awards and some include be named a google science communications fellow in twenty eleven for climate change a ray lankester fellow in the marine biology laboratory plymouth england and explores club national fellow it is a very great honor to welcome dr brian hellmouth welcome thank you and i'll start off with asking you what is a coastal ecosystem what is it there are so many and a lot of cases we drive right by them here and don't even notice them so in this region we're talking about everything from rocky coast to salt marshes to the subtitle systems of support fish like lobsters and crabs and fish but it's also is exactly the same as the microorganisms that is that entire function ecosystem and how they interact with one another that drives their stability and what they do for human society i say and why is this system so important to the health of the world of the planet yeah coastal ecosystems are really kind of on the frontline of how humans interact with the national environment i mean just as an example if you look at coastal counties in the u s is about eighteen percent of the land in your area but it holds more than fifty percent of the population of the u s more than twenty percent of the people around the world depend on the oceans for their runoff from the the environment we may put them out there sewage routes something has to happen to those this is where it's processed on top of all this this is where climate change is really having a big impact probably a lot of people don't know a bit but here in new england the gulf of maine is mormon faster than ninety nine percent of the large bodies of water on earth so this is this is really ground zero this is this is where all the human natural environmental interactions go on why is that the gulf of places this happens to be one of the areas that's warming really rapidly the coast of china is another one the middle east is another one so there are just these kind of hotspots that are really getting hammered even more than other places and in the world since you have a global reach in terms of your research and stuff does this surprise you that these why are these hot spots where it doesn't seem to make sense to the to us yeah this is where it gets really complex and  into the field of physical modeling and in a biologist as i rely on physical modeling colleagues but basically removing heat around the globe and whenever you have heat it's taking up more so places that are drier getting drier places that are it's less predictable yeah how i mean we know about the poles but we sure this is this hot spots on coastal regions seems strange a little bit strange before we move on you mentioned this problem i'm sure most of us are not aware of we the runoff from farms so the smell of the chemical runoff urban runoff from sewage and so forth guess where it goes first the coast right can you give us any background on that just what's happening there yeah the old acronym used to be the solution to pollution is dilution right  what's cycling these these nutrients and so as long as the ecosystem is functioning well enough and we're not getting huge amount of nutrients flowing into the ocean we're doing ok but you know guess what on top of climate change which is changing precipitation patterns we're getting these these heavier rainfall events so even if average rainfall isn't changing in some places it's coming all it wants all means it runs in the ocean and we're paving everything i was in softer line as you said and charleston south carolina is starting to see salt water in its drinking water like florida yeah exactly because there's no place for that water to be absorbed it's all running off the pavement and to the ocean where  it's carrying everything from that surface into the ocean with it in view of the fact that a lot of this is toxic do you have any information about that this impact you know there are toxins going into the water and one of my colleagues that northeastern rather fernandez's is blooms if you've heard of the dead zones that happen a lot in the gulf of mexico now we're seeing many other parts of the world as well you get these nutrient run offs that feed the phytoplankton the tiny little plants in the water  they suck down the oxygen they die and then they decompose which causes an oxygen drop and so we literally start seeing these die offs where there's no oxygen in the bottom the ocean you know the the one of the gulf of mexico's is now huge and it's persistent and we're seeing  other places in the world as well so it's no longer unique to that and it doesn't revive any time soon apparently it doesn't bounce right away you know so he's impacts are lasting for a really long time right ok so then we get climate change and it's having quite an impact yeah what kind of an impact can you give us some ideas there yeah one of the insidious things about climate change that is it often is we think of as a trigger the fires the b the way that the pentagon thinks about this is that it's a threat multiplier so oftentimes it's not you know climate change is is the causes climate change interacting with something else so it's climate change interacting with something like overfishing or interacting with development in the shoreline that's causing all the sediments around and or pollution stress and so it's generally climate change is making bad things that much worse and so just about anything you can think of that has kind of a negative impact has a climate change aspect to it now that being said i mean climate change we say that they're winners and losers and so there are some species that are responding very positively to this they oftentimes tend to be things we don't like that and you know is that it's not always an ivy loves but in some cases they actually can increase the growth of some crop species and so we try to do is look at even how this is going to hell in a handbasket can we can we try to find some sort of bright side to this and capitalize on it as a way of adapting until we can find while ago first of all they have impact of urbanization on the sea coasts and the other was the gates that would allow the salt water in and out so i want to take that up to the mar university wide initiative and it takes the view that we can learn a lot by looking at what may be pristine environments where the very few left earth but realistically there's almost no place no corner of the earth isn't touched in some way by humans so if we can understand not natural ecosystems as something that's separate from humans but this what we call couple human natural ecosystem that will provide a way forward to looking for solutions  so really that's what we're focusing focusing on is is urbanization but urbanization within the context of the natural environment right now we often tend to think of those as very separate things and you know we have the ocean coming in with storms and so will build sea walls to try to protect ourselves but then the sea walls will cause problems that we don't perceive that we have the mental effects and sometimes the solutions that we come up with create problems that are worse than what began and you mentioned that the tie gates is a really good example where over one hundred years ago there were tide gates that were built between the ocean and a lot of the near shore marshes and the idea was that you've got these big gates that when a storm comes and you close them and it prevents storm water from coming up into the marshes and flooding it well over the years they've either got stuff shot or people have stuck them shut so that they won't have to deal with them well guess what now the sudden you don't have all that salt water coming in you don't have that natural flushing you get a lot have a fire you have to basically cut a break to revenue so why down and hope for the best because it moves so quickly that's amazing him and where did this grass come from it's i mean is that a native just it's found in fresh water is normally but it's invading into the saltwater environment because of this yeah exactly exactly yeah so it's a probably in its home range it wasn't causing a lot of damage but it someplace was not supposed to be yeah so our tampering with things that we had put up as protective devices and what that showed an inclination to work with nature to let that we have begun to alter and we're in a little bit of trouble there but we'll come back to this you're working with community and so forth in you just a minute i'd like to ask you about the ways you do your investigations you've had  number of very innovative approaches to the kinds of analyses you do and you've developed a number of tools i think can you tell us how you what do you measure how do you do it sure  so a lot of what my group does is called ecological forecasting and it's this idea that rather than sitting around and waiting for climate change to have these negative effects that we know were going to happen much like a disaster service or paramedics can we trios can we figure out where the worst problems are likely to rise so that we know where to mobilize resources we know where to start first basically so  example we're funded by nasa we use satellite data we use weather station did a data from around the world we put these into models that tell us something about how the environment how weather ecosystem to change or might tell us something about the growth rate of the species i'm here about because it's commercially important ecologically important so really it's going all the way from changes in weather to changes in the physiology of the health to what are the implications of that for society and you develop models and so on since we have some students in the audience tonight can you tell us a little bit because everybody does models and they are pretty tricky and  i would like to know how it works so to say some models we have these mathematical computer models in the way of physical models and my graduate advisor once said something very wise to me that the model was a very explicit hypothesis that we go on test and so that's really what we do is we take our understanding of how the system works so again you know we talk about climate change but it's it's the phrases that climate trains the weather but weather throws the heat we get too warm and we perspire we cool ninety nine percent of organisms on earth are like that they have heat this driven by their environment so driven by things like air temperature and the amount of some they receive even the wind blowing over surfaces we can keep track of that we have very detailed models that we can test in the laboratory and we've gotten really good at that we've gotten good at taking satellite data and making predictions now we also have to verify that so that's our so where a trouble spot is likely to be for something like an oyster it's really hard to determine from our human bias so we've got these little things that think that it was discover magazine sort of calling them robo muscles and so they record using these instruments and so one of the things i think later we'll get to the international collaboration is but we've tried to find low cost ways of doing this so can we work with developing nations to provide them with this instrumentation so they can go out we even and that organisms are quite sensitive to this but their temperature differences that we would find very difficult to adjust to actually is that correct yeah absolutely is and and that's why you have these little yeah so we get we get a fever of a couple degrees and you know if that last for a couple days you really start getting worried i mean one of my daughters used to spike a fever of one hundred four and we put her in the bathtub because it would be exactly these are animals that have temperatures in fluctuate by thirty wide temperature fluctuations but probably not a lot more and so that's where we're starting to see some of the initial dials well on that i think you discovered or brought to the attention of the public that  in fact you know you think well i'll just monitor the temperature here in the warm water rat seems like it's logical but in fact there were temperature spikes farther north is that correct it was unexpected somehow yeah that's that's why nasa was interested in our work is that they want to use nasa instrumentation to look at problem spots worldwide it's really you know the only one we're going to do this is through things like satellites but if you just take the world from the eyes of a human by measuring something like air temperature water you missed that very local level and so in this case what we found is that  in southern california for example where it gets pretty hot program hot it happens to be that when the low tides occur in summer the really good low tides are all happening in middle of the night or early morning so really gets hot there on underwater if you look some place like oregon or northern washington all the good summertime low tides are happening right in the middle of the day and so it turns out that there are places in washington where the animals are much more stressed than they are much further south and you know th mosaic of temperatures where it can be as bad in the north as it is in the south that's just quite surprising at least it is to me that yeah it is and if i mean more and more in other environments that these kind of local factors can partially override these these signals we're seeing climate and saying again if we want to solve climate change it's you know the freezer uses all climate change is local that which is very interesting because we're right we do think global anymore everything we're given is global average is as you said but you've turned the attention to local does that influence your international connection work that working with these different countries because their conditions might be quite  it broadens our perspective because we get to look not in this case temperature is one of the major places exist changing salinity is changing a lot in china the water flow to being sea river is changing a lot and  so i work with collaborators on the coast of china where we're looking at not this temperature but salinity ocean ph is changing out of place yeah so so getting all these these different combinations of stressors amongst different species that have evolved in different ways really important but the other side of that is that there are people around the world finding solutions to these and so a lot of what we try to do is say well how can we put our heads together so look at our own local scale but capitalize on all the solutions that people around the world in already sort of but do you see this as ultimately it is kind of the local solutions and somehow you put this together in a kind of mosaic but that people will have to take so it's how do we for example if there's a population that we know is is very stressed if we over harvest that population is that much more likely to crash or if we allow development to occur at a location where there are distress to the temperature that will send him over the edge so it's again this kind of tree i should be of that if you find a place that the animals might make it if you just give him a little bit of help  that prioritizes that type of research there are other places where they may be doing just fine that may be a place you want to protect and serve as kind of a seed source and frankly there may be some that get the black toe tag if there's nothing we can do  to save them in to be throwing good money after bad because they've gone so far over the edge that they were not be able to you mention the you know working with people in borneo in iraq a lot of places that we don't hear about in this kind of science every day can you give us some examples of the kinds of things that you have discovered that people are up against in some of these different cultures yeah it's funny you mention iraq i mean that's if you exactly exactly it's a very famous area so this is endangered now absolutely in fact it's already ninety percent of it is gone all real increase damming of the tigris and euphrates there's even less water flow they join to form the shuttle arm which was in the persian gulf so there's a huge salt wedge is moving up into basra we think the marine species are starting to follow them and so trying to figure out what's going on in that part of the world has been a real challenge and again you know our the role of the group that i'm involved in is trying to help the scientists there to do the real what they can do with what they've got is i'm mad which is pretty meager i'm sure you know  i mean that brings up another interesting point i mentioned military before yeah you're probably aware that for the the last couple of years and for quite a while now the department of defense has issued its called have an awful lot of areas that are are threatened by by sea level rises through and your operations are threatened it is thought to be a threat multiplier for civil concerned like this that's a good question i don't know i know ours gets it into everything but and yes it's all over the place it's interesting that we can get the military to think about and if you will forgive me a lot of politicians will not interesting news i'll say i'd like to ask about your extensive work with education and that you have been very committed to engaging teachers if you'll explain how you do that and students and so forth where did it come from how did you get involved in this and what's your story about it is a pretty simple reason why i got involved as i have two young kids there an old daughter molly and a thirteen year old more of them and work with with their teachers as they were growing up this expanded into larger and larger scale programs where  if you're only talking to other scientists know what you're you may be making an impact in the field but really if you want have an impact on society it's starting with that generation me and they're the ones that are really going to feel climate change yeah true and so it's helping to prepare them for what's coming helping them to face these challenges and find solutions has absolutely key so we've taken teachers to the field a lot with where they've done research we regularly go into classrooms right now one of the things we're working on with other colleagues is developing video games that ironically actually will hopefully get kids to want to get out in the field more so how do we not certainly not replace many kids and yeah and to see the excitement of their faces and we have to broadcast a lot of this back to boston the museum of science is a museum of science and so we're working with them to figure out how do we how do we continue that yeah develop a lot of underwater  and lately we've started playing around with virtual reality glasses this oculus rift where you can put on a set of glasses and look around you and it will be as if you're underwater so i imagine that out of planetarium i think it would be very exciting yes yeah absolutely it just reminds of that your area is probably a productive one for like citizen science that people can get involved in it do you do that grant we just to get simple baseline data yes i bet it is yeah i mean a lot of cases we have no idea what normal is and so it's again what's normal now isn't normal what was twenty five years ago and  so one of the things i love to do is go back through people's photo records and stories and i live in marblehead and there are families that live there for the general absolutely and to hear this kind of inner generational conversation about what was normal fifty sixty seventy five years ago compared to now is fascinating in austin for her scary yes it is i betcha especially for beautiful kingdoms on the sea shore like that relate yeah where people thought they would live there forever a generation after generation was the whole idea but how since that is a local thing can you tell us what's the situation there what about marblehead so so far there hasn't been any kind of systematic survey it's all kind of  octopus yeah and it's stories like that that a love to sue put together but it's in some cases it's hard to see the change because this idea of shifting baselines that phishers who tell you what they've been catching where they've been catching at the depth they've been catching and that's a tremendous record that really tells us about what's been going on so again that's a great resource that's well side of the scientific community but yeah but there are limits on the water every day it's amazing how scientific they weren't aware but i've course it was very important i suppose for fischer's to keep records is that the case did they keep them over years is that what you're telling yeah yeah in a lot of cases they  colleagues who i work with in the u k you mentioned i was in plymouth they run a modern program from scotland to france and have done so at that institution for over eighty years now and so they can see all these changes that are sometimes hard to see from one year to the next like generations yeah yeah and i mean there was a cold winter night can sixty three and they're still seeing the impact that so it's it's tough and i think this is this is part of our issue with communicating these changes because it is very complex and you need to look at a large scale view even though it's on a very local level that it's i mpacting so in order to get the answer you can't just look at your backyard you have to have everybody else right own backyards around and make that as a party shop yes as a general public how can we get our how can we develop a knowledge of this best because as you say this is extremely complex and there's also a time factor you can't look at this week versus last week and you know you need to have a stretch of time having a sense of place knowing what your own environment is like i think a lot of that is just getting kids out to the sea shore and having maybe some adults yes exactly but then also looking realizing that every place is somebodies backyard and starting to have the realization that you know we're part of this global society and climate change and other impacts plays on a local level but we're part of this anything anything we can do to facilitate those kind of discussions and discussions from from people from wide sections of society because the solutions have to come from well i hope that we will measure up as a general public and i will stop here to let you talk we have some students in the audience tonight and i know that they will want to talk with you and i will step aside but i really thank you very much for giving us all this great information thank you very much  she talked a little bit about mr conceptions about climate change we're going to find some credible information about climate change denial that's a great question so there's a really neat study that's been going on for a couple  years by yale and george mason university that looks at the different kind of categories of people in the in the u s and there's a spectrum of those all the way from people who understand that climate change is real and that it's really a present danger to those who no matter what you tell them are just simply not going to buy into it and there's kind of that middle ground where people are still open to ideas and so what makes somebody in one of those categories or another one depends on so many things unfortunately lately it seems to be really linked to political affiliation with is really unfortunate because it really wasn't that long ago that republicans were leading the charge on climate change in some cases it is linked to religious affiliation but again there's a lot of diversity in that there's a large carry for creation movement so in terms of understanding where people are coming from that's a great place to start in terms of kind of getting the real scoop on what information is accurate and what's not there a couple of good websites or there's one called real climate dot org that i recommend  where it looks at a lot of these kind of common statements that are made that well you know climate has been changing naturally for the last million years and this is just a natural cycle you know i point out that yes that is true but normally the change we're seeing the past hundred years take about twenty thousand years and so that's that's the issue is that a lot of these statements on the surface seem like they make a lot of sense but my case is that is partial truths and so when you  at where those are coming from from the real scientific literature and how they been kind of twisted it gives you some sense of where we're at ok i am curious about a couple things one p to this point a lot of the climate talks have been very disappointing and the central issue is that the problem has been caused by developed nathans and so essentially we're asking developing nations to do is enjoy a lot of the benefits that we've had from fossil fuels i mean we are as many fossil fuels have done a lot for us and we've got electricity if it increases transportation and so it's it's not that fossil fuels are evil it's just that we're at a level that we can't support anymore that there's putting so much stuff in the atmosphere so it's a giving of that discussion about how do we find a solution that's equitable that allows development in places like india  is has been a major sticking point so so recently mean this is this agreement with with china the the details are still coming out but china is one of the major players right now so for the u s and china to come to agreement i find is  very encouraging i mean even if the details are hammered out yet the fact that there's an open dialogue is moving forward i found very encouraging in terms of drilling in the u s i'm sure you've heard of the keystone estimates are anywhere from fifty to seventy five percent or more of what's left in the ground we have to leave there that does not sit well with fossil fuel companies what i find really fascinating is that countries like saudi arabia are seriously looking at alternative energy right now so they see how they're certainly not stopping drilling either but i think they see in the long run that this is where things are going to go and so i again i try to stay hopeful that they prevent erosion to removing huge amounts of nutrients and earlier we're talking about all the stuff in the water column they can basically vacuum cleaner douses like a filter in your fish tank they remove a lot of that stuff  places where there aren't other contaminants that's a good food source the problem is they also take up heavy metals and i mention mike my colleague wrote a fernandez who who looks at that so there are potentially a great natural source of doing a lot of things that right now we wind concrete in really expensive filtration systems for sensor question ok great  in the greater boston area i live in quincy we have twenty seven miles of coastline we have lots of marshland and and some and a lot of it dead in and so we would love to on one a but but it's you know those kind of natural patrols are worth looking into right now we're looking at the area in reviewers a case study and so absolutely that's why we really want to work with local communities throughout the  great we love to work with so you know you talked about how fishermen are really like a key factor in this because they are the ones out on the water every day are you working with like a specific group of fishermen from a certain area just getting records from fishermen all over the place yeah so a colleague of mine has worked a lot with fisheries and gloucester so he works with the ground fish fishery works with  with lobster fishers a number of my students have started going and sitting in some meetings and so my lab group is new enough in this area that we can't this kind of margin and so we're still at the stage where we're getting to know people and a lot of this is just establishing mutual respect and trust and so in terms of groups we tend to work with with people who have connections to a number of and i was wondering like what kind of actions like you would suggest for students to take action so like we can like kind of prevent like kind of climate change really kind of at least like take action because like a lot of the ways that you suggested were friendly government only kind of like big  and i was wondering like if there are any other way that like clubs that schools can do or like any other way yeah it's a great question about how can you work locally locally to solve a global problem and made a second a surprise anybody here that there are federal level it's to shut down nobody talks to anybody else so really i think a lot of the the hope right now is out the community and city and state level and thankfully we've got a lot going on here in massachusetts i mean so there's there are a lot of action committees i would suggest the first thing is just figure out what other groups have stuff going on in the area seem if you can come up with them it's it's great to start something on your own but if you can build on other connections and solutions that other people are exploring i think that's that's a great way to start i had a group of students that started building community gardens and  in the boston area and that was building on the existing program a lot of it is just raising awareness and talking to people about the changes that they're seeing in the ram it so i think again it's go it's my e mail address and phone number are there as well feel free to contact me about anything or