Bee Moorhead - What are climate scientists thinking now?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - In terms of climate science, a lot of their work is incrementally learning more every year. If you go back 10-15 years, you see shifts, not only in terms of the work that’s being done but also in how scientists are viewing the problem. 10-15 years ago, we all thought this was way in the future - 2100 or so. Now we’re realizing that the amount of gases we’re putting out exceeds our worst-case scenarios from 10-15 years ago. No one anticipated the kind of growth that would happen across the world, esp. China and India. They’re getting our lifestyle, which means they’re pumping out gases.
10-15 years ago, we thought we had decades to figure this out. Instead, the world is growing much faster than anyone anticipated, and so we must take much stronger action much sooner than people were thinking.
Bee Moorhead - Political reality has not comported with that.
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Politicians 10-15 years ago were totally on board; cynically, I think they were on board because it was in the future and they didn’t *really* have to deal with it. Now, when it’s very clear - not only are we already seeing impacts, but that the worst impacts could come decades before we thought they would - now the politicians are saying, “well maybe we need to think about this a little more. I know I said we needed to do this 10-15 years ago, but now maybe we need to consider this further”. I really do think the difference is that the types of action that scientists are saying would have to be done, to reduce emissions to a level that we can cope with (though we will have impacts), that we can do something about, is going to take very strong (global) coordination - no single nation can do it on their own. And although there are meetings every year, very invigorating meetings, of 183 nations, there’s a lot of great talk. If politicians did what they said they were going to do at those meetings, we’d have no problem.
The thing is they go back home and sway the people and their legislatures, and now they’re saying “that was exciting at the time, but reality check - I can’t do those things and get reelected next time around.” That may be true - the kinds of actions we need to take now may mean that some people don’t get reelected. They’re changing people’s lives - it is Big Brother, but it’s necessary Big Brother. We had to do this before with acid rain - the world got together and did something about it, and now we have much less trouble, nothing like the problem we were having in the 1970s. It worked, and you don't see anyone complaining about that.
Greenhouse gases require the same level of international agreement, it's a lot more difficult because many more types of processes emit greenhouse gases, whereas you could address it systematically in the 1970s. It's more than just coal plants - it's what individual people are doing. It's the way we farm, it's the way we practice forestry. It involves really every aspect of what we call civilization. So, it is a more difficult problem, but it requires that same level of international agreement, of commitment and focus on the goal, and that's what I'm not seeing.
Bee Moorhead - You've seen climate change move from "future" to "now". Is it really true that we've passed into a time when climate change is a reality?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Climate change is a part of our lives whether we want it or not. A major transformation in science is that we are not going back to a time of no anthropogenic climate change, it's simply not going to happen. We're going to have some level of warming caused by humans over the next several centuries. No matter how much action we take, there's going to be warming that we caused.
Bee Moorhead - So should we just throw up our hands and give up? Is it hopeless?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - I give a lot of outreach talks, and for many years I had to convince people that something was happening. It's all over the world. I would succeed too well, and by the end of the seminar I'd have people saying "I just think we have to give up because there's nothing we can do!". So I've shifted my approach to talking about it. It's very important that people understand that climate change is happening, that it's having these effects. You've got to go into that to some extent, but it's important for people to know that there's a range of futures and that we have control over which timelines we're going to go into, and although we're definitely going to have some warming, if we take action now, take a lot of action, we can keep down to the minimum level of warming (2 degrees Centigrade), and that's not pleasant but we can handle it - we can survive as a nation, we can survive as a civilization, so that we can continue to have art and music and fairly comfortable lifestyles.
Bee Moorhead - Is there some reality that we don't have civilization?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - If we continue to not take any action (there's been a lot of talk), we're starting to hit levels of warming from 6-10 degrees Fahrenheit. That level of warming is taking us back about 4 million years. We were not around, and not much that we know of was around. It was a totally different world. It's unclear to most scientists I know whether or not civilization can survive, and it's even unclear if humans as a species can survive that. Some of us think, "humans as individuals will survive, but it's not the world we know - the big cities (most of them will be underwater)." We don't want to go there. Doing nothing is giving up on human civilization, which is extreme. Why would you do that? If we take action, we'll have a warmer world, but a world we can live in and live with. That's a huge difference, and it's a difference that the public and the politicians aren't getting.
Bee Moorhead - It reminds me of when people find out they have diabetes.
Dr. Camille Parmesan - The analogy is absolutely perfect. Think of the earth as a single human body that has this chronic disease, global warming, and the doctor's telling you "I can't cure the diabetes, but here's what you can do to enhance your quality of life for the moment and ensure you have a longer life." If you do none of these things, if you completely ignore it, not only will you start to feel completely terrible, you'll actually start losing some of your body. Parts of your body will die off and you'll die fairly quickly. You have a miserable life, parts of your body coming off, one at a time, and you die long before you should have. It's the same with human-caused climate change. At this level it's chronic - there are too many gases in the atmosphere. We'll continue to have some level of warming, but if we take action now to reduce greenhouse gases, reduce that output. We can take action to help cities adapt to climate change.
Bee Moorhead - As the patient, I hear diabetes, my first question is "what's my life going to be like? Is there a chance of a nice life?"
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Just like someone being diagnosed with diabetes, the earth being diagnosed with global warming means that, yes you'll have some lifestyle changes - things need to change a little - but if you make those changes, you'll have a long, healthy life. Day to day, you'll have some things that'll be a little different, but it's not a lot and you'll get used to it. That's the point that people need to get to, to recognize that we now have a chronic problem, that there is no quick fix, but if they make some (what i think of as) relatively minor changes in their lives, and if the government makes sure we run the system, then we can continue to have a long, healthy civilization as human beings.
If we don't do anything, I hate to be a fear monger, I don't like jazzy headlines, but unfortunately where if we do nothing... in a very matter-of-fact way, if we do nothing, we certainly lose a lot of biodiversity (that's my own field), but we'll also lose all the coastal cities, we're going to lose a [audio / video glitch] lot of areas will become unlivable, like the Sahara desert, because people will simply not be able to survive there. Agriculture will change dramatically and in most cases, we won't be able to grow things in areas that we consider bread baskets now. These are not tiny changes, and yet the kind of changes we need to make to prevent that are relatively small, in my mind.
Bee Moorhead - Sometimes, when someone is diagnosed, they go through a period of denial, and there are different things that move them forward (family, support group). ... Is there anything out in the world that's making you think there's support for those lifestyle changes? Is there a way we can mutually support each other that will help us collectively make the changes that will make us healthier?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Any time anyone hears bad news, the initial reaction is denial - that's just human nature. Climate change is no different - people would rather believe it's not happening. As warming is getting worse, people are seeing changes (sometimes literally) in their back yards - the robins' migration are changing, gardeners are noticing worse pest problems. People are seeing these changes, and i think that's helping the general public shift towards a more general attitude that something is happening.
Two things are important for getting beyond the vague to the important, from top down and bottom up. First, politicians have to admit it's a problem, universally and regardless of political party. I've given talks in Texas, my home state, when GW was president, and I'd have petroleum geologists come up to me and say "you've presented a lot of data. Why is our president saying it's not happening?" How do you answer that? "You're his buddy, you ask him." People really do listen to their leaders and that's important. The other point, the ray of hope that I have in outreach talks, is that as the public are becoming more aware, I'm seeing many more grassroots efforts, including Interfaith Power and Light. It's fantastic, because you're scaling it down to what's happening in people's local areas in their own lives. If you just get the president or the PM saying "climate change is happening and we must do something", that still leaves the individual saying "what can I do?" These local efforts like IPL are incredibly important to tell people, one-on-one, here's what you can do. Here's what we can do as a congregation. Here's what you can do as an individual. There are all kinds of things that we need to do on every level of organization, going from how the individual handles their day-to-day life all the way up to huge international agreements.
Bee Moorhead - Sometimes you can know something is true for the long-term, but today that ice cream is tempting and it's hard for me to see the connection between that and my life. Are there ways that we can convince people that those individual things they do are a part of the bigger whole? The changes seem so small.
Dr. Camille Parmesan - People do believe that they can't make a difference - it's absolutely not true. How do you convince them of that? I show them a pie chart, about the typical life of a person in German. You can see the line of gas you put out on heating. Looking around it though, as big as heating, is the line for a snack of strawberries from a hothouse. Don't give up your home heating, but you can give up the strawberries, right? Is that really a sacrifice? I don't think so. You have to point this out to people. You're not asking them to be uncomfortable or to move back to caves, but you're asking them to make more intelligent choices and be more aware of what things they're doing that have big imprints and what things don't. Some of those imprints we can't do much about - we need A/C and heat. You don't want people dying, suffering or being ill because of lifestyle changes, but there are so many we can do that really, when people think about it, are not that big a sacrifice. I think it's getting an awareness into people of which of the changes they can make that would be relatively minor, little sacrifices they can feel good about, and not make them do big sacrifices that will make them miserable, because that is probably not necessary.
Bee Moorhead - We all want to think that our efforts do have efficacy, that we're not just giving people tasks to make them feel better. At the same time, isn't it true that there have to be big changes? Small changes on their own aren't really going to do it without major changes in public policy?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - We do need big shifts in national and international policy. We need to find much better ways of getting energy. Coal-fired power plants are terrible, but it's difficult for people to imagine the shift. What might get the US going is that China is becoming the leader in renewable energy research. They're getting creative and leaving the US businesses behind. Maybe a competitive edge will get people going where doom and gloom scenarios didn't? I'm not sure.
Bee Moorhead - What's the average person looking for when they're becoming aware that things are changing?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - We've had about 1 degree Fahrenheit warming due to humans. What it's done depends on what part of the world you're in. In the SE USA, people haven't had warming very much. Texas climate has already been variable, so it's difficult to see a long-term trend through that. If you go to the SW USA, however, with the drought, 11 of the 12 projections show that continuing. What's happening there now is believed to be caused by human-caused climate change. They're having severe water shortages, conferences on it every month, with mega-droughts. If you go to Alaska (i've been there two or three times), I was in a taxi to my hotel, and the taxi driver tells a story about taking his pickup truck through the ice caves, and they don't form anymore. The Iditarod is run every year, but they can't have it earlier (it's too dark) so they're moving north to start it because the snow isn't there in the south. Everyone in Alaska is seeing the changes.
People in many parts of the world are seeing changes and are recognizing that something major is happening. They don't necessarily accept that humans cause it ... the answer is that we should be going into a colder time. At least when people see those sorts of major changes in events that they see happening as they go throughout the year, then they see what's going on. I think that one reasons that Europeans are more accepting is that there are more changes there, more steady and stronger warming. The USA is more patchwork. I think that has a huge influence on people accepting our impact. A lot of it, funny enough, has to do with the natural world. "The ice on the pond in my back yard", "the turtle in my pond came back earlier". They don't think of it that way, but it is the natural world.
Bee Moorhead - What you've hinted at is: if we don't take action now, if we continue in denial past a certain point, we're going to have some irreversible things that conclude our life as we know it. What are some markers of knowing it's too late?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Climate scientists are very intensely studying tipping points, what they are, how they manifest, etc. We're going into unknown territory, and it's not easy to do. We can look at the geological past and come up with complicated models building in the physics we do know about. The big question, the tipping points, it really has to do with the big ice sheets (Greenland, Western Arctic). If we lose those, we get 6m rise of sea level (18ft), swamping Houston and London and Los Angeles, etc. The reason why people think of this as a tipping point - we're already getting melting, and it's happening slowly. The trouble is that scientists don't expect the trend to stay steady. what you expect to happen is suddenly getting huge chunks of ice breaking off - that's what's happened in the past. The sloughing of ice off the Canadian ice sheet caused a mini-ice age in Britain and Scandinavia because of the fresh water in the North Atlantic, it shut down the Gulf Stream, the heat didn't go to the northern latitudes. It lasted a couple of hundred years then normalized. We know that when they happen, they can happen in just a few decades. Especially with the W Antarctic ice sheet, if water gets in underwater cracks, it'll melt quickly and bring changes quickly and there's no turning back (thousands or millions of years).
As a biologist, I'm worried about the unfrozen tundra - Canada, Northern Russia, and Alaska - peat and organic matter stores carbon because it's frozen. Every summer you get the plants, they die and it goes into storage. With warming, these areas are unfreezing and drying out. The summer-winter cycle is breaking down, with decomposition in the wintertime, and the sucking up in the summertime can't counteract that. The tundra has thus become a carbon source rather than a carbon sink. This could be a tipping point if that process accelerates. There are glacial and biological tipping points that people are watching for. What's difficult to figure out what level of warming will cause what kinds of problems - where's the threshold? That's why, if you look around at all the different sciences, everyone says "let's keep it down to 2 degrees Centigrade because we're pretty sure that's below a tipping point." It's a consistent response from every field - past that, we don't know the effects. We have uncertainty because we haven't been there and are depending on ancient data from the geological record.
Bee Moorhead - You're known for butterflies. Talk about butterflies.
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Why butterflies? They're gorgeous and wake up late, but it turns out that they're sensitive indicators of a lot of different environmental health problems, esp. climate. [there's a slam] If you think about animals to look at, what we'd like to do is find something that's sensitive to climate but not a whole lot else. Frogs, for instance, are too sensitive to everything we do. We can pick out areas of the world where butterflies aren't affected by many other factors. Butterflies' yearly cycles are affecting by the changes in the weather. Some of the first indications of serious trends in climate came from butterflies shifting their ranges northward. They're tracking the climate shift almost perfectly. We have an organism with one generation a year, that can respond really rapidly to the environment, and we were seeing them shifting northward by 300-400 miles, and it matched perfectly with shifts in summer temperatures. When I came out with my first paper, I met with Tom Karl on climate science. Here was this very famous scientist wanting to see me. He said "you validated the climate station data". Seeing this upward temperature affecting organisms completely validated the data.
Bee Moorhead - What about polar bears? Are there species that it's already too late for?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - I don't want people to lose hope, but I don't know if there's a chance the polar bear will survive the climate change. I can't set a timeline, but sea ice is their habitat, and they can't live on the land. Everyone who lives on sea ice is doing badly, and no one can see that it will start expanding. If you take away their habitat, how do they survive? It's a pretty sure consequence of the damage we've already done. I tell people we'll lose things, and say "you can't expect to keep everything", and there's a whole range of species adapted to a cold earth, but a lot of other things will. If we take action, we'll lose some species. We can save a lot of them, lose maybe 10%. I like to focus on the positive, on what we can save by taking action and keeping the warming down to the minimum level rather than getting depress about what we are going to lose. They're still here, so go take that trip!
Bee Moorhead - Scientists have ideas about timeframes on when things have to happen.
Dr. Camille Parmesan - The deadlines put forward do vary, but the important thing to remember is that there's a long lag time between cutting emissions and seeing a response in the climate. Our action now will keep climate from warming 50 years from now. It's hard to grasp - the warming we have now goes back as far as the 1850s. It's a very slow response of the climate system, which is why we really need to reduce emissions down in the next decade. People may say 5-15 years, but on average we need to make severe cuts in the next decade to prevent severe warming in the latter part of the century.
Bee Moorhead - Can we achieve the reductions necessary without public policy?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - we have to have international agreement and development at each nation to get there. Individuals play a role, but we've got to have some agreed-on policies to reduce the energy sources that release gases, increase sources that have minimal impact. That shift in energy production is a major block that we've had to really get reductions going.
Bee Moorhead - A problem for the public is that it's such a complicated topic, lots of complicated concepts. It's easy for any member of the public to say "it's too hard". There appear to be competing theories. How do I evaluate which of them are valid? They give up. Can they have confidence in their information?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - It's difficult for the public to evaluate scientific data from the standard media. They're trying to sensationalize something, and in climate change it's worse than that. In the field, you have very strong competing interests and agendas, and you get huge amounts of misinformation and wrong information. It makes it difficult for the public to know what's really going on. I teach classes in this to train them in how to evaluate the data and do their own research, but that's a whole semester. What do you tell the average person? First, if someone is quoting "a scientist", look up their name. What's their field? Guy who's a political scientist example. You can look these people up, it's easy to vet them now. Find out what their training is, and ask yourself, "do they have the training that qualifies them to be an expert in that field?" Half the time it's no.
Other things. If you're looking at websites, look at their mission statements / background information for who put it together. It is a foundation with an agenda, or is a group of scientists? Several websites are run by climate scientists where people are translating their work into lay language. Those are good sources of information. If the site is run by an energy provider, you might think about bias. Delve into it! The other piece of advice that I give Americans is, look at English-language newspapers from around the world. Try and get a more global perspective on an issue, because all the US media has one perspective that's counter to the perspectives in many European newspapers. We have this incredible access now, so use it - don't just go to the same-old, same-old.
Bee Moorhead - it's for real.
Dr. Camille Parmesan - In the USA in particular, you get a lot of conflicting statements about climate change - is it happening? did humans do it? Let me say - the science is absolutely definite. the changes we're seeing are caused by humans, no question. It's unequivocal. We're 90% sure humans are causing it, from scientists across the board. I've been saying it for 15 years and it's astonishing that people still think there's a debate, there isn't one.
Bee Moorhead - We've talked about chronic. People who have a disease, if they deal with it well has to do with what they have to live for and their orientation towards the future. Is there a parallel conversation among human civilization? Will it play a role?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - One of the biggest reasons we don't have more action (only words), has to do with the lag time - the changes now will have their worst impacts 30-40 years from now, and our current warming has to do with greenhouse gases from 100 years ago. So you're a politician, 50-60 years old? Senior politician? And you're presented with the problem that if you take action now, your political career is over, and in 30 years someone will be thanking you. Most folks look at that timeline and say "I can't deal with this, this is not in my interest. You're telling me it will matter in 30-40 years." They're not going to be around, and it takes a very altruistic politician to put forth action. It's very similar to dealing with someone with a chronic illness. The ice cream is here now, and maybe i'll live three months less, but that's not my problem now. That's not the right philosophical view to take on the issue, because not only will eating that ice cream make you not feel well for the next few hours or few days, but it may cut your life 10 years, because you're not going to do it just once, it's every day. It's never just once. This making the excuse that it doesn't matter, that it's in the future, is partly true, but it's incredible to me that someone would say "I don't care that the world is trashed in 30-40 years". I have a stepson, i have 7 nieces and nephews. Do I want to destroy their lives? [recapture] That's what you're saying. Unfortunately, people in power are in their 50, 60, 70s. Unfortunately we aren't the people who will be most affected by what we're doing now. It's our children, their children and grandchildren. I know that sounds trite, but it's true. I just am astonished at the attitude - either people really don't care after they're dead, or it's simply inconceivable to some people that the world can be trashed in 30-40 years, because it hasn't been trashed yet - I haven't seen it, therefore how can it really happen? That's where you get back to the science, and once you understand it, it's pretty terrifying.
Bee Moorhead - For that one person to eat that ice cream, the life they're cutting short is their own. Climate change is cutting the lifespan of people far beyond just your own. What gets you out of bed?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - I feel like it's all our responsibility - if we are going to believe ourselves to be a good person, then I have to believe I'm not just a good person for me, but for other people too. I'm not just doing good things for myself, but that are helping other people (in small or big ways), in general I'm contributing to society, the general benefit of humankind. That's what makes you feel good in the morning, right? I can believe that I'm a good person. In terms of thinking about climate change, part of me is very cynical because I don't see a lot of action being taken. Not that I don't believe we can make a difference - I think we can, but we have to do something, right? You can't just say "we can make a difference" and not do anything. I've been doing this for 15 years now, from the scientific viewpoint, simply documenting the consequences of different amounts of warming. That's my contribution - to show people what has happened and what's going to happen so that the decisions can be based on reality rather than an agenda. I keep doing that and I keep seeing very little return. [audio cut]
Why do you keep doing it then? It's because you have to! You have to try, like Lyle Lovett said. I think that's one of the best philosophies anyone has espoused. To give up is to give up on being a good person.
Bee Moorhead - Change is happening and people are noticing. At a population and individual level, people are adapting. Are those strategies making things worse?
Dr. Camille Parmesan - Adaptation is an interesting concept. Scientists are focused on that. Because of the lack of political action, scientists are shifting to "how do we deal with it?" That's a tricky word, because in its broadest sense, it means you do things to keep maintaining your current lifestyle. There are good adaptations (renewable energy, usage, etc) - you keep your budget the same while keeping your lifestyle the same. There are other adaptations that make the problem worse. In the SW US, things are getting drier, and it will continue. The entire SW US is drying up, yet we have these enormous cities struggling with how to deal with it. There's a lot of talk of desalinization plants. Lots of places are exploring this. Climate change is causing us to dry up? we'll use the oceans. First, this takes an incredible amount of energy - coal. This makes the problem worse, it's totally counter-productive. Plus, there are all of these environmental consequences that we haven't realized until recently when we've started doing this. So we end up with water on the one hand, and the mineral / junk / pollution sludge on the other hand, concentrated. Now they're just pumping that back into the estuary and you're getting die-off zones in the places where fish are supposed to be breeding. The run-on consequences are tremendous for what seems like a totally sensible solution, which will in fact make the problem worse in the next 10-20 years.