welcome to the science for the public lecture series the science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public this is our website for our program for the opportunity to marine environmental sciences and also is professor in the school of public policy and urban affairs at any new he's also the director of sustainability science and initiatives there and also serves as an advisor to national climate assessment and the list goes on so i'll just continue on the website and here i'm going to skip so that we can get directly to the presentation he's a world leader in research for those coast environment which is very critical for ocean life for real life but in addition to th and a little bit about how that may have gotten this into the political mess we're in right now and hopefully how that can get us out of it so that the first things i didn't start off as a climate scientists mean most of us didn't i never grew up as a kid you know loving to study trying to just catalog death and destruction is to try to figure out how we view this in part of this kind of coupled human natural system so i mean there's really no untouched your very few untouched environments on earth and we're finding in polar bear fat right now i mean really we all live in this couple human natural system and that's not necessarily a bad thing i mean what that means is recognition that how we impact the natural environment comes back to us i mean everything we do the national environment affects things like ecosystem services which then turn around and affect us so we really can't study the natural environment and certainly not climate change without looking both at human systems and and going to quote unquote natural systems which means you have to start getting into a lot of communications and psychology as well so what i want to start off with is kind of this exploration of how we think of the world and how we view the world around us so humans are really good at recognizing patterns i mean we can look at this and i think we all see this is a version of the mona lisa right i've got young kids and so i like that the release of my little pony the best but you know there's something that cues us i mean there's something about the smile that the hands folded maybe the color scheme  there's some combination that tells us that what we're looking at is some artist's rendition of the mona lisa and that doesn't take us a long time to to do that and we really don't have to analyze this very deeply and that's a really good thing i mean over evolutionary time if you're being attacked by a predator you don't want to be sitting there analyzing its call trying to figure out if it's the eastern subspecies of the western subspecies of saber tooth tiger that's about to jump on you you want to see this pattern you want to respond really fast and so we have evolved to take  elementary school the first thing you learn as we go out in nature we do we recognize a pattern we've got we look for something that we need to explain and then we kind of conceptualize it so we make a look at a mountainside for example and see that you know one plant species is  replacing another one if we hit a certain elevation and that replaces another one we can conceptualize that in something like a textbook the same well here we see this kind of the nation and i work in title systems and we do the same thing we see the difference are in the higher type on the lower title and this is what we go back and we kind of redo the hypothesis and this is backwards and forwards between what we observe in nature and what we test understanding mechanism in the lab where this runs into difficulty then is what if we're not talking about just objective reality so  this picture before as well you are you seeing a young woman where that's your nose that's her chin that's her ear or this is an old woman with that is her nose that's her eye inventor mouth and chin but again it's the same objective information in our brains but our brains are processing it at a very different  levels this happens to us a lot where we recognise it or not so you know if i were to show you this catch this is in two thousand and seven and that looks pretty reasonable right i mean if we went out and we spent a day fishing we caught that that might look reasonable intel i put that in context so this is a picture taken exactly the same place in one nine hundred fifty eight now look at the whale cobb look at the size of the catch compared to two thousand and seven something shifted better idea of what is normal has changed and so the idea of shifting baselines that what we consider normal often is driven very much by very recent conditions even in the past couple of years so we can do things like lining up photographs like  fundamentally very different their idea of normal is very different i take my daughter scuba diving out of coral reef today and she sees this one little coral has so excited about it because it's a coral and i want to cry because i even i've seen these beautiful coral reefs twenty years ago when i first started diving so our perception shifts so the way we get around this and as scientists obviously is we generate data we try to make this is objective as possible we collapse it down the data but even here we end up having some subjectivity so just compare these two and see if you don't see a trend in this versus this i mean it probably this one all done here is put in these these quadrants now you can see kind of a clustering down here and clustering up here so maybe this suggests some sort of relationship between whatever x is and whatever y is so we then run statistics that tells us whether there's any independent verification of this and so this is something called the goodness of fit the r squared this is whatever the x is in the weather the y is a really good relationship ninety seven percent of the variability is explained by this right until i show you what the axes are so this is a great web site it just has these databases of this random stuff that you can plot against each other is the number of fresh lemon support of the usa from mexico and the total u correlation is not causation so you know it's not necessarily cause and effect right where this can get us into trouble then is you know this last one is that ok with us common sense right i mean we know that really there's there's no reason to expect a relationship between these things so we can this going use common sense where does common sense come into play where understanding those relationships really becomes complex so if we want to solve climate change this is a mechanism we understand really well i mean this is a plot showing temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last four thousand years we understand very well why in some cases the temperature actually increases before common carbon dioxide because there are other things and problems like it cycles that drive temperature change in the in the past we understand why often increase in c o two leads to an increase in temperature and so it explains why we see these these changes i mean should point that you know these are huge changes but these are happening over the scale of about ten thousand years so what we see today is about ten times faster than what we've ever seen in the past so why if we want to solve climate change do we then reduce carbon dioxide rather than subsidizing the number of pirates there's also a really good correlation with the inverse correlation between the number of pirates and climate change so the more pirates we have the lower the temperature and you know again you know how is it that we know to base policy on this versus this when common sense really becomes more and more difficult we're now you have to trust somebody like me that i really you know we really do understand this and i'm not just making it up and kind of drawing pictures and then making stories about it so it's complicated and the details matter and trust matters and the source matters to understand what policy should be based on the data so what i want to get into tonight is this idea that we  tend to talk in generalizations about climate change we talk about overall warming in earth's atmosphere in the average surface temperature we talk about things like shifts in zone so some one kind of well known paradigm is  generalizations because it's easy to talk in sound bites is easy to communicate what we see as scientists to the community but in reality we know that it's a lot messier than that and we go and we look at the data so for example this is a plot from the e u th shows whether species are actually shifting to the north or not anything above zero means they're shifting towards the poles anything below zero means that shifting towards the equator and this is spiders beetles butterflies grasshoppers and if you focus on the dark green lines as the average of them they all are so on average everything is shifting towards the polls in accordance with these very generalized expectations of climate change but there's a lot down here that aren't really responding the same way as the rest so the question is you know is this just measurement there or is this just something that we're missing or is this really something that we should be paying attention to and more importantly is this consistent with climate change or is it inconsistent with climate change when it goes against this generalization so i want to give you kind of a case study of where this kind of came to a head in the scientific literature about six years ago it was a paper by christmas at all in science and science  nature the top two journals in the field i mean i've seen scientists cry when we get rejected i mean it's so hard to get in the sides of nature they had a paper where they tracked the elevation distribution of sixty four species of plants under a warming climate so you can see that generally conditions are getting warmer over the seventy five years they tracked it and what they saw is that the vast majority of this the plants shifted down slope exactly the opposite to what the general trend was so it's getting warmer but what you'd expect is they die off and they all sear upslope the blogosphere went nuts i think even rush limbaugh got involved in this you know another i p c c claim contradicted with new science you know we can't trust the scientists and it went nuts well what happened if you look at the paper it's not only did temperature increase but precipitation also increased in other words it got wetter this is a paper in science and it shows that plants respond to temperature water i mean this is this is the bottom line with this this paper showed yet it engendered a huge amount of controversy because it went against the prevailing trend it's entirely consistent with climate change it just means that the effect the precipitation increased rain over overbalance the effect of increasing temperature that would have otherwise decrease plant growth so we understand the scientists we can we  can explain this but when i talk to the authors about this because we had a similar paper in science that similar response and what they said is when we try to explain this is viewed as a post hoc explanation it's just an excuse as you told us that you should elevation of ships and latitudinal shifts and now this is what you're finding so you're making excuses and you know how can we trust anything you say because if it doesn't fit what you say you can change your perception i think in part the scientific community is to blame for this i mean just like we used to call it global warming because you know we are talking about increases in average surface temperature even though we knew there's a lot of variability if you look back at the i p c c in two thousand and one there's a lot of discussion about mechanisms that are either consistent with responses to climate change so in this case you know more than eighty percent of the biophysical processes are consistent with the well known mechanisms of system responses the climate in this case documented examples that are consistent it's not too far to reach to say well if these are consistent that what's inconsistent in our examples like i just showed you inconsistent with with climate change this becomes very personal to me if if you ever heard of the end i p c c every time every four years  comes out with a report the heartland institute has a conference called the and i p c c non governmental international panel on climate change and lo and behold i didn't realize that about three pages devoted to my work that i guess i've been showing that climate change wasn't real news to me but it's essentially the same thing that we talk about this variability we talk about the locations of climate change how it impacts some places more than others how in some cases it's actually having a positive impact but it was cherry picked it was actually use evidence that you know this is going against this this generalization so so really you know when we talk about these differences when we talk about the exceptions if you would to general rule are these really inconsistent with our understanding of climate change with overall warming or is it just that we're not being sophisticated enough and how we're presenting this perhaps in an effort to communicate this in soundbites things that are hard to argue against things that you don't have to sit through an hour long lecture i understand but you can get into a thirty second sound bite part of this is not only communication is what we do about climate change i mean despite what you've heard the scientific community has decided a long time ago the climate change happening is having large impacts it hasn't been debated trust me in a long long time what we've moved to is what do we do about it so there's a large focus not just mitigation about slowing it but adaptation you know how do we prepare for the on coming effects of climate change one of things about climate change even if we magically shut off all greenhouse gas emissions we are still going to experience change when there's a nurse in the system we have to prepare for change so adaptation is essentially preparing for today's society mitigation is preparing for tomorrow society but when we prepare for climate change it has to play out at a local level so just you've ever heard politics is all politics is local all climate change is local it always plays out at a very local scale we have species that all respond differently to environmental change and we have winners and losers some species actually do really well they can the species we don't like but often solutions involve alteration of something that has nothing to do with climate so if we have a population that's undergoing warming there may be nothing we can do about the warming of that population but we can prevent other insults we can lower over harvesting we can reduce pollution stress we can reduce all those other stressors interact with climate to push that population over the edge s those sites we might be able to do something about it so just kind of two examples of why this this matters aquaculture is really coming to maturity in the us rapidly and it's already been in europe and in china for a long  time but muscle aquaculture and already orser aquaculture are really starting to take off right now the question is where do we place these facilities what species do we use of the different kind of geno types that we can use of the animals we have some skill now it actually predicting at pretty local levels in the near couple decades what environmental conditions are likely to be we also have been for a long time measuring physiological performance in the lab so we know it what temperatures these guys die we know what temperatures they reproduce the best the same thing if you look at a crop species we have a good understanding of if we know what the environment is we know what the responses so we do have some skilled at forecasting where to place these these facilities so we have some ability to help guide the location of aqua culture facilities just as with crop species we have some skill in informing farmers what crops they should plant the other thing we can do especially in the marine environments called marine spatial planning and that's essentially prioritizing where to put resources so i explained this to a news reporter a while ago he said well essentially what you're doing is you are looking at a train wreck it's as if you are a paramedic and you've come up in a train wreck you resources on them you're probably not going to save a lot of the other victims their victims that will do pretty well for a while you can prioritize them second the ones that are really the most interesting are are the ones that are most critical are those that are right on the edge if we get to them right away those are the ones we can save essentially that's what we're doing is trying so imagine we have funding available to create a marine reserve at one site and maybe some funds left over from the pollution campaign the way we have done this in the past as we take all our political will power all our funds we dump it everywhere is much as we can and we hope that something sticks we have to be more strategic now and so what we're arguing in this this is controversial because it means that there are sites that you have to give low priority to we haven't seen that yet don't take these too literally there are coral reefs sites that there's nothing we can do i mean i've worked in jamaica in the past and it's awful i mean parts of jamaica are so far gone there's nothing we can do about it there are parts of the caribbean eighty percent of the corals about already there's nothing we can do to save them if we're going to create a marine protected area the worst thing we can do is exert all our political power and spend all our money in a place that's going to be fine now and dead twenty years from now so we want to have some confidence that what we protect now is going to serve as a seed bank in the future so that's the one that really we want to prioritize for protection as i misspoke before i mean these are the ones that are intellectually interesting and also  from the viewpoint of adaptation i think the most critical that we can prevent non climatic factors from interacting with climate in the climate is a stressor so just like when you get a fever if you don't eat if you don't get enough nutrition or if we gloss over when we tend to talk about climate change and the first one is that warming is not a uniform process we talk about this as a one degree increase in average global surface temperature when we know that there's high variability this is the this  is the anomaly of the surface of the globe there are places that are getting incidentally colder over the last fifty one hundred years there are places that are staying the same the vast majority of sites are getting hotter some are getting much hotter their places in the poles have got nine degrees warmer in the last fifty years alone we know that we know how that changes but we collapses down into one degree never years ago i had spent a lot of time fighting this book by michael crighton state of fear where he wrote this fictional book but half of it was nonfiction and argued that there's this conspiracy among scientists to hide climate change his argument essentially was that if climate change is happening a global warming is happening every single spot in the globe should be getting warmer and therefore if he could identify any spots that were not getting warmer that means that climate change is beyond think about that that means asheville north carolina is colder than vancouver british columbia that means that canada is warmer than the united states well that's not how it works we look at the vast majority of sites we talk about these averages we know that there are places getting colder because this is heat being moved around essentially you are trapping heat on the surface of the globe and then you move it around so why does all these strange things when the for example the jet stream gets pushed upwards towards in the canada it picks up cold air and it comes down and it causes these polar expresses its heat moving around the globe same thing happens in time where you know we've have seen two thousand and sixteen was the hottest year on record which preceded two thousand and fifteen that's not enough to show climate change if two thousand and sixteen had been colder than two thousand and fifteen that would demand that we are in some sort of pause or some sort of slowing down just like the simple fact of two thousand and sixteen was hotter than two thousand and fifteen alone does not mean that climate change is happening this is the overall trend so again if you kind of zero zero down near your focus to these one little regions you can say yes there are places where it gets colder it gets more recall the warmer it is overall trend that we talk about with climate so climate by definition then is a thirty year trend in weather it's a large scale pattern that you have to observe over a long time period and climate is useful the difference between now and the last ice age is sixty degrees an average surface temperature so we're talking about a six degree increase in climate the temperature the climate by the end of the century that's in that you tube the difference between now in the last ice age and the other direction so it tells you something about the total heat content of the globe as a biologist though that's not enough i can't take this and just say that one hundred years from now i know today is eighteen degrees c it's going to be twenty four degrees c in the future it's not a drive's how he does move across the globe and if you're something like a frog sitting in a in a treat you could care less what the global ever surface temperature trend over the last thirty years is you care about whether your little cranny that you're living is too hot or too cold for you to survive or reproduce where it's too hot or too cold for your food you care about these hyper local levels and frankly as humans that's ultimately what we care about is well we're impacted by weather just like other organisms why we care about climate as this weather this driven by climate so climate change the weather weather throws the punches if you're  in the ring with rocky balboa at that moment you really don't care who the trainer is you care with that left hook is coming at you but it's some point you really care with the trainer is because that's what drove the weather that's the throwing the punches so local example here for big red sox fan and b j this is who you fear when you're a pitcher but john farrell has something to do with this is as well so it's weather that matters but it's climate that determines as weather patterns as an example of that those the gray is the weather that's the temperature the water temperature in two thousand and twelve you can see early in the season it started warming up until the end of the summer it was three degrees warmer than the climatology gulf of maine is warming faster than ninety nine percent of other large bodies of water on earth right now so as a result lobsters melted earlier they came the market size faster the u s fishery starts kicks in before the canadian fishery because that's warms up faster and so they're able to get the pots in the water there are so many lobsters in tw twelve that by the time the canadian fisheries got the pots in the water the market was already got it there were protests because a lot of the canadian fishers went out of business price a lobsters went down because they were bringing in so many lobsters and still today i mean that the parcel ops is not is rebounded now but they're still bringing in huge amounts of lobsters we know in the us and we understand this we also know from controlled experiments that a little bit of temperature increase causes them to grow faster a little bit more causes them to die so the right now as we're seeing this boom but a little bit more they're going to go over the edge but this is you know this is alternately consistent with climate is any given storm or any given warming period we can't necessarily share with climate but just like we know that there are stronger hurricanes the chances of things like this happening are much greater than they were before and certainly things like this happen in the past we've always had hurricanes we've always had warm periods but the chance of them happening the incidence of that happening is what's changing we're seeing much more of these so we're talking about a six degree increase in climate there's not attacking on of six degrees of water temperature that's a much greater increase in the propensity of these we're now maybe instead of three degrees it's ten degrees now we've you know even by tw the lethal limit over that of lobsters so that's what we really care about that's what other organisms care about the last it kind of a walk you through is how do we how do we measure this and how do we view it as a non human organism so you know whether we recognize it or not we're really intimately dependent on the natural world around us i mean even if we're living in a cave in a city life we depend on the rest of the world not only for food but for oxygen we look at salt marsh driving by on the side of the road they will filter out contaminants there's looking a lot of blue carbon absorb a lot of the carbon dioxide but most organisms on earth have a really different way of viewing the world than we do so just  sudden we're seeing bull's eyes were seeing runways it's guiding the insect into the scent of the flower that's all entering our eyes i mean it's not that we're somehow blind to we just have no machinery to interpret that we have no ability to take that information that's coming into our eyes and turn it into something that we can perceive so you know these are the kind of things we can understand what remains of wavelengths go in through the eyes of these different species look at the nervous system so we can make these kind of false color images w v camera the same thing happens with a whole bunch of other processes that we don't tend to think about so one is water flow most organisms that are stuck to the bottom of the ocean aren't ventilating they're your head and you hope that the wind was blowing because this is not you're going to suffocate because rather than moving in and out by breathing it out you have to wait for the water flow to move over the surface of your breathing apparatus so these guys literally suffocate if the water stops flowing the only thing they can do is through their shape they can make the water more turbulent so for example we see very hydrodynamic lee shaped organisms and high water flows they don't have to worry about giving of oxygen they have to worry about getting ripped up in very low flow areas we see organism to have streamlined shapes to induce turbulence to help them to breathe and to get food and to get larvae away from them so when we look at an organism in nature they all have these different ways of experiencing nature and sure doesn't that are side by side may have very very fundamentally different views of that world they may be experiencing radically different environments just because of how they're interacting with it in the case before you've got this guy sitting next to this guy the oxygen in the water may be exactly the same but this guy may be suffocating in this one may not just because of how they're interacting with the environment one of the things we spend a lot of time looking at them in this again is something that's kind of foreign to us is body temperature i mean we have very tight control of our body temperature if we have a fever of one hundred four we know we're really in trouble so you know we maintain a temperature of ninety point six pretty consistently because we're able to make of that up to metabolism if we get too air temperature were gives you the equivalent air temperature that it would be in still or temperature when you move to south carolina of this awful thing called the heat index which basically tells you when sweat no longer works because humidity is so high a much happier appearance in massachusetts but most organisms don't have that luxury they are active terms they have their body temperature is driven by their environment more than ninety five percent of organisms on earth are ectotherms and so when they experience changes in temperature they really experience changes in temperature so they start to cook the protein start to the natures of anybodies makes a b j before you take lime juice and you start to essentially make the proteins fly apart in fish the same thing happens when you cook meat right me start to make proteins fly apart enzymes only work under certain range of temperatures they have to be just flexible enough to bind with the substrate if they're too warm they start flying over the place one of my  protein and said that if it gets too cold it doesn't work either so you know as or going to start to cook in this is when we start seeing these populations shifting and all these species have different tolerances so it tends to be those that are already have really broad tolerances that we don't like the things that you know mosquitoes lionfish things that can do well of a really wide range of conditions do well under climate change because they've got wide ranges of tolerance those that are in demick those that for example will live only on one mountainside in one narrow region those have evolved to live in a very narrow range of conditions so those conditions change those are the ones that get hit the hardest so in an awful irony it's the native species that get hit the worst with climate change and those that we don't like like mosquitoes do really well you know through the floor a lot faster so that all these different things that we keep track of infrared to me is a really cool one because anybody remember what the color of a star tells you age yep and what else the injection heat it will tell you the temperature exactly so every object in the universe above absolute zero emits electromagnetic radiation which i think is so cool so the temperature of a star determines the colors of the hotter it is the shorter the way blank so we look at a white star red star it tells you something about the age it tells you something about the composition and it tells you something about the temperature when we get down to the biological range we're doing exactly the same thing remitting electric made a great ation is just in much longer wavelengths in infrared sitting about ten centimeters away from these the scale bar tells you the colors so these are sitting there forty degrees these are sitting there twenty five degrees the not making any heat the only difference is these are just in the sun a little bit more they may be a little bit darker so they're very different way none of them are equal to the air temperature none of them are equal to the rock temperature because they're being driven by all these different mechanisms of heat exchange so the color of the organism the shape of the organism how much contact it has with the surface  all drives is temperature so air temperature it turns out for the vast majority of organisms is a very poor indicator of actual animal temperature and it's animal temperature that drives the physiology again you know the only reason we care about air temperatures and because that was drive the temperature of our oversells so we can have two animals side by side having very different experiences of the world so this is a predatory sistar sitting on a muscle in the west coast the predator is sitting there at twelve degrees the muscles at twenty one degrees the air temperature is completely something else this is what we've gotten pretty good at calculating mean again if we know something about the air temperature and the solar radiation we know something about the temperature of the animal and yes as you increase air temperature basically sets the basement so with increases in global temperature we do see increases in animal temperature as well but the difference is there are a lot hotter than we ever thought before just based on air temperature so again when we go into the lab and we will measure performance on these controlled conditions if we just base it on air temperature will find that yeah they're doing pretty well if we go out and actually measure the temperature of these guys they're a lot closer to death and we have thought before so the same way if you go out in a parking lot in a really hot summer day and you put your hand in that parking lot it's a lot hotter than the air temperature right the same thing is happening with these guys and it tells you it's the sun heating the surface the surface then he's the air temperature not the other way around so air temperatures is indirect indicator of temperature that affects us but for anything near the bottom the lizard is the muscle of and there are a lot hotter so when we do these forecasts we take it down from these very large scale measurements we've been funded by by nasa  noah to take weather stations and satellite data we scale it down to the level of organisms in that we scale it back up to kind of these these whatever scenarios to ask you know not only what is it that we can do about this but what impacts of these likely to have on humans and this is kind of the tricky part because you have to get in the head of a muscle so when we measure temperatures of the animals in the field this is the the west coast of north america so this is this is the border with mexico so baja mexico is down here this is los angeles santa barbara oregon washington british columbia when we measure the temperatures of animals in the field rather than seeing things getting colder as we move towards the north we see these what we call mosaics where it gets hot it's cold it's hot it's cold because of all these local conditions interact to drive temperature in this case it's because of the timing of low tide in summer in oregon where conditions are getting as hot or hotter than southern california all the good low tides on the west coast as it's called the mix some way they are and also as you move the tie gets later and later the amplitude gets less and less but it means that all the good low tides in summer the middle of the day in oregon they're right in the middle of the night in california so california may be baking but the shores ok because the animals are under water what this means then is the impacts are probably happening in a lot of unexpected places and people have started to look at this not only in the system we have studied but in tree line systems and in another number of other ecosystems as well and what it means is for only look at these ranges we're missing a whole lot of information and so now that we're starting to know where to look now we're starting to see die off events in the middle of the range the other reason to do this again i the winners and losers so that we can then inform management based on our understanding of where trouble spots really could be again with this kind of we're getting really good at this in the near future i mean there's so much v ability that one hundred years from now we can tell you what the climate is what i can tell you exactly the weather but we've got good enough that we can make early warning systems we have weather forecast for mussels we can do weather forecast for lobsters so in the case i gave you before in may we could have predicted that event with lobsters i mean we know enough about lobsters that that we could've seen this coming the limitation in this case is not science it's policy i mean what if we had known it what were we going to do about it i mean lobster fishers don't have access to a whole bunch of other gear that they're going to go out and switch targets i mean maybe we can come up with some flexible policy where we reduce the catch or we spread it out over time but these are the kind of things that we need to kind of wrestle with i mean we're starting to get good at the science but it's how we integrate that with policy and communication that matters which kind of brings it back then to full circle to communicating climate change in this idea that you know especially as scientists we know we've been trained over and over again i'll keep it simple keep it short keep it the sound bites there's been a big shift away from that in recent years that we're actually hurting ourselves with sound bites because there's just so greatly oversimplifying it people you know people are not stupid they're going to see that when we make these these sound bites and they've got the real world they see things that are contradictory to these sound bites in a lot of cases so they'll see that maybe their local population is doing really well maybe it's just the fact that they're  only looking at the very local environment and we experience whether or not climate and so you know how do we get around this idea of meetings uses so there's some interesting literature from the psychology world a pa weather forecaster gets out there every single day and makes herself vulnerable to me she makes a prediction and then you go out and you test it and if you know she predicts it it's going to be beautiful and it rains then you know bad on her so weather forecasters develop audiences  because they develop trust but what they found is a lot of this is because it's making themselves vulnerable even tess's it's not wisdom being handed down on high that this is a way it is trust me i'm a scientist don't worry about the details  it's trying to actually get the information across not so that everybody can go out and make their own weather forecast or make their own muscle forecasts but at the understand enough about the system to know that yeah you know there is variability but we understand enough about this to make some predictions so sorry i guess they said the forecast of them was there what's it all these are the guys that did the global warming six americas it the yale climate project they found a much higher level of trust by meteorologists so if you think about it when we talk about climate we talk about a six degree increase essentially that's given the same weather forecast every day i mean if i give you a weather forecast that tomorrow is going to be average they have to be averaged if that's going to be average on average my skill would be about the same you know my difference of average of about the same but how much trust would you have if i just told you every day's average in contrast if you make the prediction and even if you're wrong it actually shows that you have some understanding the mechanism and that you are trying to convey that  complexity and so you know again this is this is definitely controversial among scientists right now but you know this is kind of my view of it so you know how we perceive our environment then is so dependent on  our history i mean it's dependent on our interests or childhood experiences our culture our politics in so a lot of this comes down to how do we communicate science and this isn't just an aside this is people like you who are interested in science  how do we communicate the view of the world to somebody with a fundamentally different view of the world as yvonne mentioned i work all over the world in the place of work is the middle east i work in iraq actually and the first time i went there i had this great talk and looked out there and even that was being translated you know absolute nothing the audience because the cultural references weren't there i didn't have a handle on any kind of woke will culture i've gotten better with that now  but this happens therefore and he has this little app that you can you can put this together but this shift towards narrative is really starting to take hold we're again it's not communicating all the information there is in the world is communicating why you should care about it and why would you want to learn more why should at least trust that somebody knows more so just in the last couple minutes here one of the things that have been mentioned that we work on is helping people to develop a sense of place  especially young people and in particular what we want to understand is how do you develop a sense of place that you can then communicate to people around the world hopefully therefore gaining a sense of empathy for their sense of place so we're never going to get kids from from arlington to go to southern iraq but we can virtually take them there in some of the virtual reality tours that we we develop so we've been spending a lot of time making virtual reality that is very content heavy  where we can take them underwater we can take them to places like china or or israel where we work in a minute i'll show you some of the live images of this these are these are high resolution images that you can stand i use for google street view and so we've been going around the world and making these really really high resolution images of sites that we can then put we conti's these assets and so we can put videos we can put stories in them we were linking to the encyclopedia of life at harvard with their cards and lately what we've been doing then is having students co create these so that they can communicate their sense of place to others so this is a group called beach sisters they're affiliated with girls inc of when these train high school students to become mentors for middle school students we bring them out for a couple weeks in the summer to the marine science center we essentially create this this palette this digital palette we send about to the field where they get muddy and then they tell us what they want to do with those those assets so why this little busies this is created by them and again i'll show the scene a minute but they then use this to teach seventh grade students about their felix parents as they go out and they talk about what they've what excited them they have videos of themselves where we're moving with this now we have a group in israel and a group in boston that we're getting to teach each other about their local environments and hopefully if we can get this to happen get  drainage saddam hussein drained ninety percent of it in retaliation for the the shia muslims helping the u s army this is the border with iraq and iran so you can actually look over and see the yes just to the west that's a no no so this is a bullet hole from the iran iraq war we can these are videos of  which we took there but it gives you some idea about it i do want to show you the the ones that are we two other kinds we have ones that are still organs one of my favorite ones  it shows you how close and you can get through these things so we have taken teachers out in the field taught them to use the equipment we take these images of them they then go back in the classroom and then have their students do the same experiments in the lab one of the things work  i was in south carolina for twelve years we went to every field trips a site in south carolina and made these tours the teachers go out pre and post field trip and then and teachers you couldn't get their kids out in the field trips could go into virtual field trips the last one i just want to then a couple times this is a quest underwater habitat so we live inside there for ten days and this looks cool here you should see it in virtual reality we also work in the museum of science studio on our planetarium as well so these are the kind of things that we can do to try to communicate a sense of place and we're always looking for partners for new places to do this we have hundreds of these things now and i've got a couple master's students are testing how well they actually convey information and the sense of empathy as well so that's kind of a really broad brushstroke overview of the kind of stuff we do i mean talk about the coral reef stuff we do but they give you some an introduction the way we kind of think about this where we go back and forth between science in how we apply the size how we communicate the science within cycles back to how we then go out and collect the data again i'm hoping this is the way  that the scientific field is going i mean i moved to northeastern four years ago and the main reason i did it is because it's imbedded in their d n a that they work outside the university that they have all these connections outside the walls and university and that's really what i want wanted to do and so i'm loving being up