line now it's good evening step for science for the public and i welcome you to our first talk in a very special series on citizen literacy the series is a joint effort by science for the public belmont public library and belmont media center and the purpose is to provide really good information and resources and opportunities to talk with experts on important science media and civic concerns so you'll be hearing more about this that will be announced on the library web page and so forth to the work is a work in progress and your import as concerned citizens is really important so this is a great opportunity and we certainly need this input at this time we start off tonight with a discussion on climate change one of the most important issues of our time and our expert by special request is professor dan said so of mit and in this talk hill first off are the important facts about climate change followed by the most effective ways for citizens to affect policy on the large scale and the most effective things we can do to mitigate climate change in our everyday lives there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion denson so is associate professor of atmospheric chemistry at mit where he also serves in the civil and environmental engineering group he's an expert on the relationship between clouds and climate doctorates it sells be devolved to major atmospheric missions for nasa and maybe he'll tell us about that at some point and he's received numerous awards he's a wonderful translator of technical information which was i life is why i was ordered to get dan back in here ok because he's such a good translator of this stuff and we are very honored to welcome him back to so what i was stirred up by saying thank you for having me back so it was a real pleasure to come out last fall and get a chance to talk about some of the science of climate change what i'd like to do today is is switch gears a little bit instead of just talking about the science will start out with that so as van mentioned i'd like to give you some of the background some of the facts but then we'll move on to policy a little bit about sort of the history of climate policy think of this is you know a quick brief history lesson of the last twenty years or so years and then we'll move on to actions which is i think something that a lot of folks are interested in nowadays you know what can we do citizens and where are we moving forward and there's a number of of answers to that along the way you know i hope you have fun with what we talked about i'll be happy to take questions at the end and what i'll do it i think given mention last time is to go ahead and repeat those so that the folks in the audience can hear and then we'll go from there bit but if anything's unclear you know job or no don't remember to ask at the end and i'm happy to stick around afterwards and we can talk about it in addition to saying thank you guys for having me back i have a few other thing you used to do before we get started these are the folks in my group and mit they're the ones that really make this worth doing so you know i have the privilege of working with some incredible young folks all the way from high school to graduate school to post doctoral fellows and they're the ones that do all of the hard work i'm going to do one shameless plug but but it has a reason i get a chance to teach a summer school on climate change from solutions from science to solutions and the reason that i wanted to mention that is that i have mined some of that for some of the stuff that we'll talk about today so i could teach that with no oil no oil saline there's a number of people that we haven't for guest lectures you guys would be welcome to sign up next year it occurs for about a five day period over the summer but it's really taught me a great deal so one thing that noel and i decided early on was that we weren't going to possibly know everything so we were going to try to bring experts in from outside to teach us what we needed to know and therefore the students and so i'll try to mention where i'm stealing data from those folks as we go through and try to give  proper credit to that so the first thing they talk about really is the science of climate change why is it that we're worried about climate change there's a lot of misconceptions out in the media you watch one channel and you hear that the sky is falling you listen to another channel and there's nothing at all wrong so you know we as adults need to make educated decisions about this and so what are those educated decisions and what are they based on and so on those this is one of my favorite quotes is from george santayana i don't think those who cannot remember the past condemned to repeat it and the reason i like to put this up about climate change is that if we don't understand the climate history of the planet we're going to be condemned to repeat it and so this is a climate history of the planet going back about a million years in time and on the y up there you can see the temperature of the planet and then years before present so you can think about this is being you know today it's got built a few years ago but this time scale it's completely irrelevant everything that's happening in our lifetime is probably happening under my now so you go back in time in the first thing that you notice is that there's these huge swings in the temperature of the planet that's four degrees plus or minus and that's degrees c degrees c is is a little bit more than a degree fahrenheit and so you can see that there's times that have been much colder for the planet and times that have been actually a little bit warmer than than present so those colder periods are what we term as ice ages the periods that are warmer the period that we're in right now are called periods of periods between ice ages and so most people will tell you well the climate of the planet has changed over time so we don't have to worry about it it's completely natural that has some truth to it humankind was not around changing the atmosphere for most of this record and yet you can see the climate has swung back and forth there's another thing that you'll notice though about those changes is that it's sort of periodic it's almost like you know looking at a metronome or something like that you can see that there's almost a rhythm to this and so the first person that figured this out was a scientist in the one nine hundred twenty s name along of it and so what maga vigil realized was that there is some period this is new to the earth's climate there's some repetition and it really has to do with orbital mechanics it has to do with how our planet moves around the sun is a little bit further away is a little bit closer it processes like a top where is that top is does it point towards the sun during summer or all of these things up and you can imagine this is an age before computers so he's doing this all with with pencil and paper and he realized that what you would do is you would add up all of those different factors and then you would come up with sort of a sum of all of those things and when you had more energy insulation coming into the planet the planet would be warmer it would be in one of those interstitial periods if there was a little bit less energy you would be in one of those ice age periods and the climate of the planet tracks this really well so his predictions on paper matched up with our understanding of the history of the planet so this is all well and good and if that was all the talk i would say all climate was natural and we don't have anything to worry about and you guys can all go home and it's only a quarter after the hour there's more to it than that so please hold on to your seats so the reason that we are all concerned about this is what happens if we zoom in on just the last chunk so instead of that million years what if we just look at the last few thousand years you can think of this is really the rise of civilization right i mean you know the action egyptians the romans were past this two thousand years but you sort of think about modern history and it's really in this time frame here and the first thing that you'll notice is that temperature bar on the left hand side is no longer plus or minus four we don't have big swings in climate over the last couple thousand years we have swings of a tenth or a few tenths of a degree and that's actually a little bit remarkable because when we go back in history we think about big changes in climate like volcanoes going out and blotting out the sun and these are very small on this scale they're not like ice ages they're not periods they're like tenths of a degree there's other things like the medieval warm period the little ice age again tenths of a degree shift there's one more thing that you should see on this figure eight here which is there is this rise in temperature that's been going on only over about the last hundred years since the industrial revolution that's a signal that wasn't predicted by malaki which it's a signal that there's nothing that has to do with orbital mechanics it's not the s being slightly warmer earth tilting in some way this is a very rapid temperature signal and it correlates with human activities and we'll talk more about what those human activities are in the next few minutes but there is one point that i'd like to hammer home which is if you think about human civilization it's not a coincidence that it's happened during a period of very steady climate humans didn't evolve civilization as we abruptly went from an ice age t period to an ice age humans in some anatomically modern form of been around for a long time a good part of that million year record that i showed you earlier but we only evolved a civilization in the last few thousand years during what just happens to be almost the most stable period of climate that we've seen in that time so just remember that those two things are very likely not a coincidence that our ability our ability to adapt to the world around us is really because it has been in a stable climate phase but that appears to not be the case anymore something else is going on so what is that something else one of the things that i've talked to on a great deal about and she was very kind to mention some of the work that we've done it m mean experimentalist i like to get my hands dirty i like to make measurements and build instruments and so my group is sort of set up around that and i'm also sort of a history buff and i like you know learning about where it is that we came to from where measurements were made one hundred years ago and so this is one of the guys that are responsible for that one of my sort of scientific yours this is john ten ten dele who is a brit and he was really interested in what it was about the earth's atmosphere that made the planet as warm as it was and so he he was another experimentalists he built this instrument right here it's called a comparative spectrometer that was a fancy way of saying that he would fill this to break here with different substances different gases from the  and pass different types of energy you can imagine one of them being sunlight through them and he wanted to see how they would interact and so one of the things that tindall did was he put material in there at the time they knew that the earth's atmosphere was largely nitrogen and oxygen he put it into this comparative spectrometer you pass sunlight through and it didn't do anything he passed the heat of the planet the thermal heat of the planet through it it didn't do anything it didn't absorb it it didn't didn't change it in any way and he sort of scratched his head and then he started going to some of the more trace components in the atmosphere and he was really the first one that figured out that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was responsible for catching some of the heat that was trying to come off of the planet trapping it and then  dioxide wasn't actually making heat it wasn't making energy it was acting like a blanket it was essentially covering the planet trapping some of that he and allowing that he to go back to the planet to keep it warm it's the same thing as us in a blanket blanket doesn't create heat i guess unless it's an electric blanket but think of a regular blanket and you throw it over yourself what does that actually doing it's just trying to keep some of your heat closer to your body instead of escaping to the room and that's why we cover up during the night or during the wintertime or something  same thing until figured this out and figure out some of the other components that were doing that as well in the earth's atmosphere some of the minor components i should give a quick shout out to eunice foote as well use what was actually from cambridge massachusetts she was working at the same time this was the mid to late hundreds there was a rule in place that said that women could not present at scientific conferences and so yunus had to pick somebody to present her work and apparently the only thing that she didn't do well was pick people to present her work at scientific conferences something that you would never worry about nowadays and so she was unfortunately largely forgotten until recently there was a really nice article new york times a couple years ago now that turned of talked about her and her abilities in what she did and she was really a contemporary of tyndall and now we start to realize that they were really working on the same problem at the same time doing almost exactly the quibble and work and she didn't get credit for a good lesson to us all moving into the future so you can't just be an experimentalist you also have to be a theoretician and to build sort of did the basic work of understanding what was possibly happening in in the earth's atmosphere why it was why it was keeping warm and why it might be changing over time especially an effect that humans could have but the person who put the pieces together was this guy he was a swedes find arrhenius and picked up this idea that there was this substance carbon dioxide that was completely natural when  tindall was working he was working very early in the industrial revolution but there was this substance in the earth's atmosphere that could affect the heat trapping capacity how warm the planet was and so tender was really interested in this thing this substance and  the planet he's the first one that we talked about as coming up with an idea of climate sensitivity so it's climate sensitivity is this idea that if you take the amount of c o two in the atmosphere and you double it what effect does it have on temperature and so you work this out and he said it was if you double the amount of c o two from before the industrial revolution and looked at the temperature of the planet that we would warm the planet five and a half to greese c he made a math mistake and so he published a second paper and revised his estimate downward to about four degrees c the first two estimates of climate sensitivity i always tell my students that this is not a good way to work that you make a mistake and then publish a second paper so i always tell the make sure that you do it right and get one good paper instead of two that people have to say but nonetheless it's what caught his mistake in the this the interesting thing about this is that he didn't do it for the reason that you would think most people would say oh spontaneous he was way ahead of his time he was worried about carbon dioxide from the industrial revolution from burning oil and burning coal and worried about warming up the planet that's not true at all scott was from sweden he actually writes in his papers about how much he hates scandinavia how cold it is and how long the winters are he wanted to light the coal fields of northern europe on fire to warm the planet so that he could make it nicer for him in scandinavia and he also was thinking about moving the greenbelt north in europe from you know germany into scandinavia and this is going to be great for the scandinavians i don't think i've ever seen him worry about southern europe and the effect that it would have down there he was very much a homer in that respect but he was already thinking about this ability to change the climate of the planet by putting something into the atmosphere namely c o two so what's happened since fontanne tyndall were around well this goes just back to the one nine hundred seventy s but what you can see is that these are the greenhouse gases the things that tendo found to be important and that's funded his theoretical studies on so mostly c o two from fossil fuel but other an industrial other human emissions and you can see that they're increasing year after year so this is the amount that's in the atmosphere it's also the amount being emitted every year is increasing and so what result is that going to have on the planet where the planet is now warmer than it was before it's just like that graph that i showed you early on with the little blue trace that was increasing since the late eighteenth hundreds that has continued and it's accelerating over the last few decades and so this is the temperature of the planet the difference between two thousand and twelve and one thousand nine hundred so over you know one hundred ten one hundred twelve year period and you can see almost every one of the blocks around the planet and these are measurements are warmer now than they were before the white parts are usually lack of data lack of stations there are a few places that are a little bit cooler and we think that we understand that the one off of greenland up there is probably melting of the greenland ice sheet and then cold fresh water being put into the ocean there's also the thought that some of this has to do with an increase in particles in the atmosphere and i'll talk about these in a few moments same thing over the southeastern u s if you look at the planet on average for an entire year and we think about what the temperature is then you can list the warmest years on record so the warmest year on record was twenty sixteen twenty fifteen twenty fourteen twenty ten this is going back into the eighteen hundreds anybody see anything on there outside of their lifetime  so when people ask me about well you know is climate change going to be different for the next generation my response is climate change is different for this generation the climate i was born into is not the climate that we have on the planet now the planet is already c or so a degree and a half fahrenheit warmer than it was when i was born i grew up in chicago they talked about the frozen tundra of green bay for football season the temperature in green bay now on average is about what it was in chicago when i was born the temperature in chicago now is about what it was in southern illinois when i was born and you can do the same type of thing boston is much more like what new york used to be in the early one nine hundred seventy s early to mid one nine hundred seventy s and so on new york is is much more like maryland and so i just stuff yourself down that's the kind of change we've undergone so how is fun doing well if you double c o two we've we've gone up by about fifty percent would say a doubling is about four degrees c but we're up about a degree and a half so he's only about half his estimate is appearing to be a little bit low the temperature hasn't warmed as much as as he suggested the question is well why is that and this is our specialty and  climate i will let you guys answer that this is a real picture of the earth it's actually a mosaic image from the japanese space agency they took a set of really perfect images of the earth they knit them together to make this beautiful poster and it's actually something that i had on the wall when i was a kid but what did they intentionally not take pictures of clouds clouds and particles so at any one time the earth if you took a real picture of it instead of cherry picking different spots on it should look like this it should be covered with clouds those clouds and the particles in it are very reflective they reflect some sunlight back into space just like that c o two is a blanket the clouds around the planet are like sunshades they reflect some energy back into space before it can make it down to the surface of the planet and so what i'm trying to tell you or what i'm trying to say is that we as humans are changing the particles in the atmosphere which means we're changing the clouds the condensation sites for droplets and for ice crystals at the same time we probably have slightly more clouds than we did before human activities took hold and so we've got this balancing act going on we're warming the climate with the addition of greenhouse gases we're putting more blankets over somebody but at the same time we're slightly changing the sun shade over their head and the balancing act between those two things is that the greenhouse gases are winning the planet is warmer as a result but it's not quite as warm as it could have been if we weren't also doing something about the particulate it's in the atmosphere and so if you don't believe me about particles changing think to that dirty truck in front of you if you're commuting to work this morning you know where that power plant or that factory down the street that's got smokestack in is spewing out particles you can also think about this this is singapore a few years ago and this is a pall of smoke that sitting over singapore so you can see it was smoke's and natural particle that was here before people not true this is smoke from land clearing so this is folks around singapore that are burning peat bogs and trees and vegetation to clear it so that they can do some planting so this is smoke that's there because of human activities and it's made this pall over the city and so what you can see is that this should have otherwise been a bright blue day but that sunlight isn't able to make it down to the surface because it strikes that smoke and it gets reflected in all kinds of general different directions so the camera here is seeing this diffuse late because of that smoke reflecting the sunlight away and some of it's making it back into space some like that would otherwise warm the planet more than it did if it wasn't there we call this by the way the direct effect of particles on climate that implies that there's also something called the interact effect of particles on climate and that's because particles also act as these condensation sites for clouds the site that droplets in ice crystals form on mostly we think of clouds as being ice clouds now because it's winter time but i guess it was raining pretty heavily over the weekend at the heart of every one of those droplets various crystals is a small particle and as we change as we argument the amount of particles in the atmosphere we get more clouds more droplets and more ice as a result so more clouds is one factor the other factor is that you can think of the cloud on the on the left there is being sort of a pre industrial pre human cloud on the right is the post human cloud what i mean by that is that there's less particles on the left than there are on the right but there's the same amount of water in the atmosphere between them so if there's more particles more condensation sites you end up with smaller droplets as a result the smaller droplets tend to be more reflective it's a whiter cloud right or more radiating it'll send more  sunlight back into space these smaller droplets also don't fall out as fast they don't rain as fast and so that cloud hangs around longer and so there's a secondary effect here which is that there's also a change in precipitation is probably different slightly different precipitation patterns from before human activities to post human activities these are the things in climate that i'm really interested in the things that we work on quite a bit you probably haven't heard about them on the news it's sort of the cutting edge thing that we're trying to do to understand uncertainty and climate change i often joke that i call it job security because as long as people who know it gives me something to do ok so let's add it all up greenhouse gases big positive warming some uncertainty on it other anthropogenic forcing anthropogenic is just a fancy term for human forcing  negative so these are the particles in the clouds that are spawning also a big uncertainty but you add these two things up and what do you end up getting you end up with a little bit less of a positive forcing a little bit less of a warming as a result of the extra particles and clouds and it turns out that the observations and what we understand of the changes in our atmosphere are almost identical we're doing a pretty good job about this this is important to mention because you often hear that you know we don't know anything about climate that we don't know what's going to happen that there's this huge uncertainty the certainly is uncertainty it could be small it could be it could be somewhat warmer than we think than our best guess is it could be somewhat cooler than that but we're actually doing a pretty good job and what we're working on now is trying to shrink these uncertainty virus as much as we so that's sort of the first take home message is that there's this interplay between greenhouse gases particles and clouds the greenhouse gases predominately c o two are winning so we're ending up with a warmer climate exactly how much warmer is still debatable it's still dependent on that uncertainty we've got a pretty good handle on it and can tell you it's going to be a good bit warmer in ten years fifty years and so on but exactly how much is it going to be three point one or three point two degrees warmer that's something that i can't tell you but i can tell you it's going to be three plus or minus a half i think that's that's that's pretty good at this point p the natural forcings on the bottom yeah it's a good question so i'll repeat that for the crowd just so that you guys can can hear in the back so that the question was what is the baseline for the earth can talk today natural forcings and natural internal variability so what that is referring to is how much has the natural system changed over the time of this measurement so this this measurement is from earth's orbital mechanics are not significantly different than in one thousand nine hundred fifty if we extended that time back to the last ice age that could be very large it could swamp all of this but since one thousand fifty there's almost no change in that and we have measured that and  we know that quite well so there's measurements over that whole period of time what that makes sense ok so that is the history that's the basic science and one of the things that i enjoy about giving these these types of lectures is that i think that this is rather complicated right i mean we all took science and we took biology we took physics when we were in high school but a lot of times folks haven't taken it since that time and yet there's these complex problems especially climate science since then and so sometimes we have to sort of reset ourselves we have to think about this problem in the complexities of it you know sort of go through the basic science of it before we can start making informed decisions and so hopefully in the last you know twenty some minutes we've been able to do that and we've talked about the basics and again i would invite you if anything doesn't make sense you know grab me afterwards or ask question so the next two parts of this are the policy aspect and then what we can do is sort of interested citizens in this and so the policy is no thanks to my co teacher for the summer school noel sally and one of noel specialties is understanding policy she's been working a lot in environmental pollution pollutants recently and we can think of carbon dioxide is being essentially one of those polluted so what is the sort of history behind this well again a lot of times if you listen to the news media you might get this sort of thought that we've only been doing this for a couple years people have heard probably about the accord and they might think of that was really where climate change started that's not true at all so we have been talking about the possible human effects on climate from greenhouse gases in a policy  least the one nine hundred ninety s it turns out that there are government reports presidential reports going back to the johnson administration in one nine hundred sixty s talking about greenhouse gases the effect on climate and  we could possibly do to offset some of that warming or to mask some of that warming one nine hundred sixty s that is not probably something that you're going to hear about climate on the nightly news but that's how long we've been thinking about this there's a whole host of things that have gone on since that point in time in the early ninety's and say in the late one nine hundred eighty s the i p c c was formed that's the intergovernmental panel on climate change so i p c c was this idea as people were just starting to think about the impact that climate might have on us because of warming because of addition of greenhouse gases how could we assess this how could we start to get a handle on it so way back then people grabbed together as many scientists as they could no numbers in the many thousands of scientists and they were essentially tasked with writing a report every four to five years these were called assessment reports a ours and those scientists would get together they would say what is the data telling us what is our certainty on it and how can we project that into the future and then every few years they would get together and say do we know more do we have more data do we understand this better can we say something more definitive than we did last time  would be really bad at our job if we couldn't do better than we did a generation ago well the first report came out in one thousand nine hundred so this was climate change the first basic report from the i p c c this is the last one this is a r five which came out a few years ago and thirteen we're about due for a r six they're working on it right now if you look at the one on the left and i'm old enough to remember when when this was coming out i had a copy of it when i was a graduate student to read the idea is is pretty vague you know they talk about what we think we understand the physics behind it you know a lot of it referred back to things like what font was doing but it was essentially saying that the increase was if you will enhanced the greenhouse effect resulting in a warming of the surface that's pretty wishy washy right it's not saying it's going to be this much warmer we really have to worry about it what's going on but you know this was pretty early on that blew trace that temperature increase really hadn't started out we're sort of still in the noise but what's happened in the intervening years will this is that increas greenhouse gases that i showed you in that figure and now we're sort of a degree and a half warmer than we were in one nine hundred ninety in the lady eighty's and so now we can say that warming of the climate system is unequivocal you would not believe the amount of discussion that it took to get to that word unequivocal it can't be argued with that the climate system is warmer now than it used to be this is not something they were comfortable saying in the one nine hundred ninety s in the one nine hundred ninety s it might have been variability unequivocal it is extremely likely that term came with a percentage ninety five percent certain that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warning since the mid twentieth century scientists hate to say one hundred percent so they were comfortable getting to ninety five percent but one of the things i would ask you is if there was a vote and it was five percent to ninety five percent which of those things would you end up thinking was the truth there another way to think about it two is in terms of insurance if i told you that something was ninety five percent probable you would probably take out insurance to guard against whatever that was if it was five percent you might still do that but certainly in this case if we're saying that there's a ninety five percent chance that something we're doing is having this effect you're probably going to go down one sort of path of reasoning and that's what the i p c c was really trying to get out with this want to acknowledge a few things we talk about this though the world has very much changed in that intervening couple of decades since one thousand nine hundred ninety so if you sort of think about this is being you know thirty some odd years in time what's changed well if you think about how the developed world behaves reeses the developing world there's been a state change the dominant source of c o two the dominant source of the greenhouse gases when these reports started in the one thousand nine hundred with developed countries the united states western europe at that point in time the soviet union what about now you can see that the areas of growth that curve at the latter part of it are really developing countries china india those are now the large emitters of  the other greenhouse gases that doesn't mean that there isn't a historical responsibility for what was put in the atmosphere before or that we're not per capita still putting in the most c o two but it is something that we need to pay attention to is that this is not a single country problem there's many countries that are involved in this another thing to think about is that we've developed on the backbone of fossil fuels our country was developed on coal and oil same thing for western europe can we really say that other countries are not going to be allowed to also develop their economy these are just things that i want you guys to think about that but this is a real issue how do you say well i'm sorry we aready burnt all of the carbon that can be burned and so now you're go g to figure out another way to do it that's one of the issues that there is with with developing countries they feel like now it's their chance to do this as well so where are we no well the last major climate accord the last major step in sort of intergovernmental policy was paris and this is now a couple of years old this is towards the end of twenty fifteen and as we all know a lot is james and the end of two thousand and fifteen but what paris try to do well paris tried to look at the temperature of the planet and they said well what are we really going after it's probably not an amount of c o two in the atmosphere it's probably not behavior so much it's that we need to have a target what is it that we can't really live with and so for what i am willing to admit are fairly arbitrary reasons they came up with this idea of two degrees of warming over pre industrial love levels so i've already said that you know in india greasy now we're already  about halfway towards that we're already about a degree warmer than we were in pre industrial time and they had some reasons for picking out two degrees one it's a nice round number but there are other reasons behind it and a lot of these had to do with adaptation mitigation sea level rise and they felt that it was a good round number that sort of encapsulated all of those things and so what they wanted to do was see if they could put in place policies that allowed for two degrees to be of the possible rise of the planet i want to give you guys some perspective on that if continue business as usual where are we going to end up we're going to end up at four and a half degrees by the year twenty one hundred that's more than two degrees by the way i mean all of us had enough math to figure out  three and a half to greese is actually as good as we've done with the current sort of proposals that are on the table for what we're going to do as a world so we haven't really hit this two degree threshold we've set the goal and that was one of the important things about paris that it gave us a target it gave us something to shoot for but i just want to be a realist about this and say that we are not meeting those goals yet our promises aren't and certainly our actions the yellow line on there are are not meeting that there's some hope that as technology comes online we'll talk more about these in a few moments that will be able to bring the carbon down the carbon dioxide down to try to hit that but i just want to give you some perspective on this so where are we as a country well this is this is good news and this is bad news during the obama administration when paris was brought out when it was ratified by the u s with a plan so the plan looked something like this thirty two point thirty two percent reduction by twenty  thirty generation about forty percent of u s missions down so this was approaching that three and a half degree number not the two degree number but but something better than business as usual that we were going to drop it down and then we had a little hic up in the way and so this was where the current president came in and said that we're getting up there has been a lot said and this is not to be a political discussion there is a lot of denial that has gone on saying that this is not happening i hope one thing that i've done tonight is tried to lay out the scientific framework for what we know and what we don't know how well we know it how well we don't know it that's just science that's physics that's math that's chemistry  denial saying that this is not happening is sticking your head in the sand it is happening there is no doubt we can go back to that unequivocal word nonetheless as a country there was a decision made that we pulled out of paris which means that we are not going to try to meet those commitments however and here's hopefully the good news is that this is doesn't seem to be where most of the countries that so again depending on where you get your news you may get different different thoughts on this but right now something on the order of about seventy percent of americans and it's always hovered in the sixty's six out of ten to seven out of ten americans think that global warming is happening they're not sticking their head in the sand so this sort of denial movement you can think of as being a minority of americans maybe a little bit less than a third so how does this breakdown will just saying that i believe in it or i don't believe in it isn't great there's a spectrum here and so the hardcore sort of dismissive folks in this that don't want to hear that science that don't believe in it are really sort of on the order of one in ten there's another one in ten that are are doubtful of this but are not ruling it out and then you sort of have something on the order of you know disengaged they don't want to hear it another one in ten and so so this is really that thirty percent that we talked about anywhere from cautious to alarmed really alarmed about climate change  is in that seventy percent number and i would highlight the concerned as probably something that you know that's probably a good word to use for this anywhere from alarmed to concern depending on how you think about it but you can see that sort of solid the majority seventy percent of americans sort of fit in that category so it's not quite as dire as as you would think what have we been trying to do since pulling out of paris well you have to remember that not all policy is made at the federal level and so california is always sort of the poster child for this but you know when you think of air quality in the movement of air quality in the united states towards better air quality that has been done at the state level in particular california you think about the small i lived in l a in the early to mid ninety's it was a horrendous place i mean there were times that you couldn't see sort of a mile because of the smog that is largely been cleaned up and that wasn't sort of federal that was an e p a that was california saying we can't have this anymore what do we have to do about it and so this is state level action on climate it's probably not a map that's that surprising you sort of look at the west coast you look at some of the more progressive central states you know sort of look at the upper midwest and then of course where we are in the new england states and these are the places that are going to be leading the way luckily almost without exception these are really where a lot of the population is there's obviously two southern states that have a lot of population that are not on there but i'll try to show you the moment that the situation isn't quite as dire there as you would think either this is one of them so this is florida and again no pun intended if you're in florida you can't stick your head in the sand about climate change because this is only up to twenty sixteen but it shows you this change over a period of years in the mindset of floridians right i suspect they don't have the data on this but i bet that's even more pronounced now after the hurricane season last year is one of the things that we've been able to show is that hurricanes pick up more steam they're somewhat stronger because of global warming because ocean surface temperatures are warmer the fuel that feeds hurricanes so kerry emanuel of mit is one of the experts behind this i will not do it justice but i would encourage you to see him talk if you have a chance you can tell you this so this is not say that there's going to be ten times as many hurricanes in the future because of global warming that's not true but the storms that we have are going to be somewhat more powerful so forth become five threes become fours and so on that's the thing that we have to worry about that's the thing that's where floridians are worried about and so you start seeing these changes going on over periods of time and it might be a slow stick change but it is a steady change in the direction and so again you know just to sort of back this up with a little bit more data this is sort of you know how this this belief changes across the u s the average here would be white the places that don't believe it versus the places that do believe it again the places that believe it more are of course the new england states where we live  pacific the pacific northwest and so on one of the things that i will tell you though is that again i come from this area right here and it's hitting average there's a lot of folks that we've had a chance to work with in the farming community farmers we think of as being fairly conservative folks right that's not true when it comes to climate change folks in the midwest are already changing their planting strategies they plant somewhat earlier because it's warmer earlier they harvested a different time because the plants are ri earlier as a result they've changed the seeds that they plant they change the types of of corn that they plant in the midwest they go to warmer weather varietals there's also talk in places like the upper midwest of changing things for example from wheat to corn because it's going to be more viable tabio and i have talked about wine in the past my family is in italy they've already seen the change in harvest season historical record so they harvest three weeks earlier they do the trimming of the vines three weeks earlier everything has moved up in time in the pacific northwest they're starting to plant different varietals that used to only be possible further south there's groups that are making huge bets by planting grapes in british columbia things that used to only grow in oregon and southern washington state as a result so even groups that we think of as being conservative are hedging their bets and they're starting to do things based upon projections of climate change in transitioning to the last part which is sort of the what can we do about this are the things that you should be paying attention to hopefully is that you know making that transition what are the big emitters where is it that we're creating as a society because we all use these products where we creating the most carbon and so you can see at the top of this oil and gas oil and gas electric utilities and so on so one of the big things is that transportation is causing a lot of the c two so for us the thing that we can change is personal cars i drove today so that i could get here i try to take the bus and the t to get into work i see people shaking their heads i feel your pain i mean i've done this now for years and there's there's real problems with that nonetheless this is one of the things that we all have an effect over more efficient cars or one of the things people go oh great i can use an electric car no no no if the electricity that's powering your car is coming from oil and gas and electric car is not a benefit and so then you have to search thinking about these electrical utilities which are creating a lot of that if the electricity for your car is coming from solar panels on the top of your house now you've got to win if that electricity is coming from a nuclear power plant not a popular choice in some circles and i understand that but if it's coming from nuclear if it's coming from renewable now that's in that wind it's not a carbon atom that you're producing to to do that you can see the other things that are on here though i'm in addition to this steel construction that type of thing concrete features prominently on here building new buildings building large buildings building non green buildings is a substantial amount of the c o two that we have in the atmosphere we can think of the things that we can do about it these are the things that we can reduce and so we'll just use that as a quick transition seas and so i just think that this is a nice little quote all human and natural systems are sensitive to climate this is climate change is their services will change therefore we must consider how we will adjust to the changes the process of adaptation and so i think that this is really important because it acknowledges that climate change isn't going to happen it has happened and it's going to continue to happen no matter how much we might want to the coal fired power plant down the street is not going to turn off today they may have a permit for the next fifty years how do we adapt to that how do we mitigate what the change is that's in place and that's an important part of what we have to talk about so one thing is don't ignore the problem so if we acknowledge that that coal fired power plant is still going that's ok if we start bringing on line more and more and more coal fired power plants with lifetimes of fifty or more years that is sticking our head in the sand that's the type of thing that we have to be cognizant of and try to change the other thing is that we then have to adapt to what is in place so how can you do this we live in a great place for thinking about this we're in a very coastal region and so it's very real to us what happens the planet gets warmer the oceans x band there's more water in the oceans you get sea level rise you get stronger storms you get larger storms search you have to accommodate what's going on you have to protect or you have to retreat from it and you can think of all of these in the sense of a coastal zone right the retreat is that you know i've got a house right next to the ocean coming up i might have to move that house back or i might have to move that house that's what happened in new orleans katrina you can protect yourself you can build sea walls you can build dikes you can build levees you can do that type of thing that's a strategy that's been employed in places like houston there's talk you probably saw this in the boston globe after the big storm that we had in early january about that we might have to think about doing this around the boston area that there's plans in place for that a comedy it really means this idea of you know accommodating the change that's already happening and it sort of folds into the other two but can we deal with some of that flooding can we set aside more land that we understand is going to flood and not try to build on it not try to develop it or try to create places where that water for example can go you can think about this all in terms of temperature as well right i mean if you have a higher temperature can you can you sort of retreat from the worst temperature areas there's a lot  of there's a lot of studies that suggest parts of the persian gulf area will become uninhabitable without air conditioning by the that you're twenty one hundred and you protect against it can you build shelters can you build things that are going to allow you to adapt or take care of the heat folks that might not have air conditioning at home older folks younger folks people without protection or can you just accommodating can you change the plants that you're planting and deal with it that way i think in the interest of time and i'm going to start to wrap up because i know that we'd like to finish by eight o'clock and i'd like to make sure that we have time to do that i will just remember mention a few other things as as we start to close out in terms of energy i'm i'm a realist in the sense that civilization runs on energy this idea that we can sort of turn off all the power and still have things work is not realistic i have good friends in germany where they didn't turn off their nuclear power and i said well what are you going to do and they said we're going to increase efficiency and i said ok but where is the power still going to come from you're turning off all this power they said we're going to increase efficiency and you know what they're doing now that they turned all that nuclear off they're buying power from eastern europe which is all coal fired power plants and gas fired power plants oil fired power plants so they feel better about having gotten rid of their nuclear capability but their carbon footprint has gone up as a result and so we have to be realistic about this can we do at least partial renewables can acknowledge answer to research and put more nuclear into our portfolio it's a question finally can we sequester carbon the temperature of the planet is already a degree and a degree or on the order of a degree warmer we've said that we have this target of two degrees but the business as usual and even the promises we made have a sun sort of a three and a half or even a five something degree what can we think about doing in terms of pulling some of that carbon dioxide out well it turns out that people smarter than i am have already thought about this and so this was a report that was written a few years ago by the national research council the national academy of sciences in the us and the idea was can we try to remove that carbon or the different ways that we can do this and again in the interest of time i'd be happy to talk about this later but there's a number of strategies for trying to do this to try to draw down that c o two you know can you burn fossil fuels capture that carbon and drive it back down into the earth system into those wells that you pulled gas or something out of this is called carbon seaquest duration there are other ideas like you know burning plants using plants to capture c o two grow from the c o two in the atmosphere perhaps use them for some energy but then take that carbon maybe charcoal and bury it back in the earth and so this is given this is been used a lot this this this thought process of sequestering carbon one thing that i wanted to leave you with is that this isn't science fiction so if you hear carbon sequestration it's not something that's going to happen in fifty years it's happening now so this is a project in scandinavia so it guess we've come full circle in a way we're going back to scandinavia this is an extraction site for natural gas this is natural gas that happens to come out of the earth with a substantial fraction of c o two in it so it's not c o two is being burned it c o two that's in that natural gas in the old days this is quite common that you get natural gas with a lot of c o two in it and the old days what they would do is they would do a separation of those two things normally chemically you would pull up the natural gas that you want to burn and then you would just let the c o two go back into the atmosphere thereby increasing when this project was put together the norwegian government said no no no you're not going to just let that c o two go you've got to capture it and sequester it and so they took it out and they they drive it back into the earth system back into the wells which actually helps improve the extraction of natural gas but also takes out the c o two from the city so this is something that is now being thought of in terms of power plant generation you've got your coal fired power plant your gas fired power plant you take that c o two out and you drive it back into the earth system at some point we really need to think about doing this you know we're going to go in that business as usual trend there's going to be accessed c o two that we're going to need to draw out and it's going to have a penalty it's easier to do it now when we're burning it than it is some time in the future when it's floating around as  molecules in the atmosphere it's much easier this point that it is to sort of try to pick it out of the atmosphere somewhere over norway and so that's why the norwegians have put this in place and it's still a viable technology they're still extracting the gas it's still economical and it's still working for them and so it's just the price that we're willing to pay so with that i'm going to see thank you for your guys time i'm going to give a quick explanation of my question slide which is that i had a chance a few months ago to do a n article for popular science and so the the person came out and yvonne has seen me do this before she she hosted this but we have a little experiment where we make a cloud in a jar and we talk about all the particles that are involved and so on and so i did it for this author it at popular science and along the way somewhere i told him that i was an avid fisherman and so he apparently sketched this out and submitted it and a friend of mine was flying around an airplane i didn't even know they had written the article and he came home and he handed it to me and said did you know that you're in popular science this month and i said i had no idea and i had this cool little cartoon so i called kelsey up and got a copy of it and so now i'm going to use it for my questions like every every time from here forward but i think this is a nerdy kid this is like you know everybody's dream is to end up in popular science i guess i