Transcripts For CSPAN Climate Science 20141227

Too, that were imagining a Massive Mission to effect this great transition. Massive missions always require a mastery of politics. There is simply no other way to marshal the requisite resources. We could more fully master politics, we could more fully ensure a certain transition if more of us showed up to serve in elected office. Now, you may agree that the world is run by those who show up, but youre not the least bit inclined to show up to serve in the irrational world of politics. Well, you know, i found that politics is not all that irrational. I served as a montana representative. Its a world defined by a bunch of knuckleheads, but theyre not irrational. [laughter] more importantly, i have come to believe that at its core, our political system favors folks like us. It favors people that believe that facts and knowledge and scholarship and determination matter. Why do i believe this in this age of hyperpartisanship . Because of the way in. Way in which our country was founded. During the formative years, from 1786 to 1788, the founders recognized that there was no way on the heels of the hardfought revolutionary war to establish a republic that resolved the problems related to the rights of the federal government versus the rights of state governments. There was no way to resolve the problems related to the rights of women, the rights of native americans, the rights of slaves. At the time of our nations founding, those problems were insolvable. So our founders created a political system, and political parties, as institutionalized channels for ongoing debate, which permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treesson act but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument. The constitution provides a framework for debating salient questions endlessly, if need be. We will not succeed in ending the extinction crisis, in making Renewable Energy a foundation of a new energy future. We will not succeed in any efforts to make the world a more peaceful, prosperous or just place for all creatures great and small unless we more fully master politics, by winning more debates, by winning more elections. In 1990, following 27 years of imprisonment, Nelson Mandela spoke words that ended apartheid. War butwe cannot win a we can win an election. In 1990 four, he became south africas first black president and with that ended the policy of apartheid. Similarly, we can win. By winning enough elections, we can ensure the consummation of the wondrous diversity of life and that is of course a critically important part of the great transition before us. Thank you very much. [applause] more now from the american Renewable Energy summit with a group of scientists discussing Climate Change and the increasing number of category 4 hurricanes. From aspen, colorado, this is 45 minutes. Good morning. I hope youre ready for some Climate Science, and i know youre awake, because those were two great presentations, and were happy to follow that. And its good that youre awake, because im going to put you to work. Instead of just listening and instead of me asking questions of the panelists, at the end of their presentations, i want you to do the asking. I want you to be thinking of questions during their presentations. So please write those down and be ready to engage in conversation at the end of the presentations. So my name is cindy schmidt. And im with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. And the United Nations foundation. And those are two institutions that are funding my project, which i would like to plug, because i think it could be a good resource for all of you. Its called climate voices. Its the website is climatevoices. Org. This is a network of scientists across the country, in all 50 states, that are going to their local communities and are willing to talk to any group within those local communities about Climate Science, about Climate Change, in those communities, and about what can be done in the community. And these scientists are ready to involve with their fellow citizens there. So please go to climatevoices. Org and take a look at that developing and growing project. This morning i am delighted to be here with three distinguished scientists. Were talking about Climate Science and the current state of knowledge of Climate Science. And as you all know, its not just the atmosphere that were worried about. This is a real sort of jigsaw puzzle of land, water, atmosphere, and two of our presenters this morning are going to address the state of knowledge of that science. And then our final presenter will talk about a possible solution that addresses all of those, land, water, and atmosphere. So well get started on that. Greg holland is going to be our first speaker. Hes a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in boulder. And his academic career is in tropical meteorology with a focus on weather and climate extremes and the relationship between the two. Youll hear from his accent that he probably is not from brooklyn. Susan avery is going to be our second speaker. She is president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. And we are lucky enough to have her on two panels. She was on one yesterday. Some of you may have heard her then. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is affectionately known as whoi. And susan used to work at the university of colorado. And then also at the institute for research and Environmental Sciences which she directed in boulder. And those of us in boulder who worked with her were very sorry when whoi stole her. Dennis bushnell is going to be our final speaker. Hes the chief scientist for Nasa Langley Research center where he is responsible for oversight programs for the formulation for several technological areas. And dennis holds several patents and has contributed much scholarly work on the area of biofuels and biomass as petroleum replaces, which hell be addressing today. Please remember to think of those questions. Well start off with greg. Cindy, can i have the slide . Someone was supposed to get me a clicker. Do we have the clicker . Ill just tell you to go to the next one. Thats easy. You can see the title up there. Oh, thats the clicker cindy is sitting on it. [laughter] i thought it was part of my chair. I just stole the clicker. Ha ha you can see the title up the back there. I dont think im going to be able to quite live up to cindys expectations, because i dont think i can give you a summary of the state of the science in the next five, ten minutes. But what i would like to do is make three points. Those three points are, firstly, what actually is Climate Change . And the second point is, how are extreme weather and climate systems responding to that Climate Change . Because at the end of the day, its the extremes that really matter. Thirdly, how can we actually work with society at large, and how does working with society at large help both not fix but actually let us adjust to them and become more resilient to those changes but also to actually let the scientists understand how they can do their job better . To start with the first one, which is Climate Change, if you look at most newspapers and things like that, you see this lovely curve that goes up at a steady linear basis, until about now, then it starts to go off like this. And thats only partly true, because if you look at the Carbon Dioxide in the air, the main Greenhouse Gas that is changing due to us, its going up like that. But the warming did not go up like that, because up till about the 1960s, we were putting in another gas and aerosol into the air, and that was called sulfates. You can remember the acid rain and all the major ecological problems. We cleaned that up. What had happened before then was those sulfates were a net cooler and you have a net warmer and a net cooler, and they were largely cancelling each other out. So the warming that were actually seeing is because we cleaned up the smokestacks. Its not accelerated quite rapidly up at a much deeper curve than you see in the simple linear curves. When i talk about Climate Change, thats what im actually speaking about. With regard to extremes, there are a lot of problems with being able to predict what happens to extremes. For one simple reason. They dont happen very often. And so theres a big noise level. It is very hard to get a statistical signal. But there are fundamentals that you just cant get away from, and that is, if you make any changes to the overall distribution, the means and the way the distribution looks, the biggest change is always at the extreme. So its not that the changes are not going to be big, we just need to be able to identify them and tie them down better. And theres another story to this as well, because those extremes actually have other limitations other than Climate Change. For example, the most extreme thing that can happen is usually happening because it basically used up all the energy there is. You can drive your car, maybe 500 miles, maybe 600 miles, but at about 700 miles, you aint going to drive it anymore unless you put more fuel in it, because youve used up all the energy. The atmosphere works like that. If we look at hurricanes to start with, this is what has happened with hurricanes. The bottom curve, bottom axis is the number of categories where category 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 im sure youre aware of. 0 is tropical storms. Up on the other curve is relative to all hurricanes. If you just focus on the little area on your righthand side, back in the 60s and 70s when we cleaned out the smoke stacks, we had a curve that came down like this. Every decade since then, it has actually bulged up. Theres been a bit of an increase out in the category 5 area, but the big differences happen at the category 4s. Thats because the energy limit has changed a little bit but not fast. But the capacity to intensity has gone up very rapidly. This is all published information. So its not that were going to have superhurricanes. Thats the good news. The bad news is weve now got twice as many going on to two and a half times as many category 4 and 5 hurricanes as we had before. It happens globally. Thats the global result. It also happens to have happened in every ocean base except the eastern pacific. So thats something were living with now. Lets look at temperatures. As cindy said, im not from brooklyn. Im from the south country down here. And in 2013, we had a horrific summer with january actually the hottest weve ever seen. There were several days in january where the temperature exceeded 40 degrees celsius for the whole country, not just one station. And theres a lot of talking about it and everything else. So we decided wed go and have a look at it. Its actually interesting, because this is the temperatures in this particular case on one day. The really high temperatures you can see, greater than 42 celsius. You can see the cooler temperatures around the coast and things like that. Where do you think the records were set . Well, we can do this two ways. Im going to show you another slide and say, what happens if i apply another 100 of green here . In other words, double the greenhouse for that situation . What do you think will happen . Well, heres what happened. This is a change. As you can see, weve got around 3 degrees celsius change. And let me i guess i cant go back. I wont go back. But if you remember the area that was there originally, all the hot was up in the center of the country, all the changes down here. Thank you. And thats because whats happened is that extreme temperatures havent gone up. But the temperatures near to the extreme have gone up substantially in frequency, same as is happening with the hurricanes. And this is also an energetic limitation. Its really hard to get extremes higher. Theres not enough greenhouse forming to do that. So what weve seen happen is this. You see some unintended consequences here. Look a little bit further north. Its actually maybe a little bit hotter, maybe a bit cooler. But its mostly nothing or a little bit cooler. In the southwest, its just because of the particular peculiarity that month. But in the content as a total is warming up, the summer monsoon gets more intense and youre bringing more cold, tropical air, cold and wet tropical air, down into the northern region. These are the sorts of uncertainties you read about in the paper. And people say, well, look, you dont know anything. The answer is we can say sensible things about this. Thats my second message. My third message goes to how we can actually interact with folks like you in particular. Were interacting with several groups. But i want to show you a slide. Heres a slide. Its an old slide, deliberately so. You look at it. You say, well, that was a pretty well disaster. What do you think it was . Well, heres the headline that goes with that slide. A bloody vat of molasses blew up and took out the entire town. And my point here is that if we are going to actually say whats happening with Climate Change, there is another element to the case, and that is that we cant just be building buildings in a more rigid, more extreme, able to go another 100 years without falling over, because they will, and they will for a whole bunch of reasons we dont understand. So weve been working with groups such as these. The engineering for climate extremes partnership and rising voices. You heard about rising voices from my colleagues in the native American Community yesterday. And what were doing is were just trying to get a dialogue going where we can actually say, hey, this is whats happening and we need to work out how we can work with you. And im going to give you one example, which goes back to the picture above, thats come out of that, which really makes a big difference to how i do science, but its making a big difference to how people do planning as well. And that is the concept of graceful failure. We no longer are talking about hundredyear return periods for a building. Were still talking about it but no longer focusing entirely on that. Were saying, what happens if the building falls down or the dam breaks or the vat of molasses blows up . What you do is build the consequences and recovery there that into the planning process. So you say, if it happens, here is what we need to have as part of the planning process to make sure we can recover quickly. Thats what i call resilience. Its becoming a bit of a buzzword now. Im sure youll start to hear a lot about it. But i want to go further since were talking about alternative energy. I absolutely support alternative energies. And we have to go to renewables. Let me start by saying that. But it is not a panacea. Indeed, there is no doubt that if we took all of our Current Energy requirements and the growing Energy Requirements of india and china and the rest of the world, but theyre the two big gorillas on the block, and turned them all into alternative energies in the sense of wind and solar power, we will make permanent and unknown at this point changes to the climate. It wont be necessarily global. It may be global. But it will certainly be regional. A good example i gave you earlier on was, when we cleaned up the smoke stacks, we did it for very good reasons. We then accelerated the warming, which brings us to this meeting here. When the lets say we just simply took all of the energy for the United States and used wind farms to do it. You cant take that much energy out of the wind systems of the world and not make some changes. And its not just going to happen in the United States. It will make changes elsewhere. If we make the entire Sahara Desert green, grow trees, whatever we decide to do there, it will change the climate of the world. And it has. There is an example, because the global sorry the nile valley was once a very fertile region. It dried up and that happened in conjunction with the onset of the Indian Summer monsoons. Cindy is giving me a wrapup here. All i want to do is simply say the three points i hope youll go away with. Firstly, look carefully what you mean by Climate Change or what is meant by Climate Change. Extremes are going to happen, and in my view, have already happened and i showed you an example. And thirdly, lets keep the dialogue up in a twoway sense, because i think there really will be good things come out of it. Thank you. [applause] thank you. Thank you, greg. I think greg really sets the stage for what i want to share with you, and, again, i think do i have the power to start this . I guess you do. But what i want to do is talk about the fact that this climate system, this jigsaw puzzle that was alluded to, has more components than the atmosphere. A lot of times theres the total focus on whats happening in the atmosphere, not realizing its an atmosphere, ocean, land, humanity process going on here. And so i want to talk about some of these intersections of these complex things. Whats happening in the arctic, and the triple whammy of whats happening in the ocean in terms of a warming ocean, acidification. This triple whammy is affectionately called the warming and gasping of the ocean. Im showing this slide again because i showed it yesterday. Several people wanted to see it once more. When you look at the planet from space, you see all of this water and think, oh, its not going to do anything. Its not going to change. I dont need to worry about it. But in reality, as you drain all of this water off the planet, the amount of water that you have, that really is a major part of our planetary system, is quite small compared to the volume of the planet itself. The amount of fresh water you have is that second dot there that is drained off of the larger blue. And then the smaller dot is the amount of available fresh water. So since the next panel is really talking about fresh water, i thought i would show this again to really give you a perspective of how precious this ocean is and the water that we have on this particular planet. And it is a critical component of the climate system, because the ocean is the fly wheel of the climate system. Its the memory of the climate system. It basically holds so much of the capacity of heat. And in fact im going to show you a slide later on here that shows that most of the heat, the excess heat that has gone into the atmosphere as a result of Carbon Dioxide is being taken up by the ocean. So lets start first with Sea Level Rise. I want to focus our attention on the west Antarctic Ice sheets. This is some of the latest science coming through, what is happening in antarctica in terms of the melting ice sheets. This is an animation i want to show. It goes quickly. It was produced by nasa and an antarctica. It is mostly covered by ice. Its actually speeding up. And so what im going to show you here is this animation of that process of a flow coming in and the flow coming out. Its colorcoded. And the red in this colorcoded animation basically means faster glacier flows that are happening. Heres your western antarctica. You see the inlets there and then the outlets of the glaciers. They are basically rivers of ice. Whats happening here is that this warmer water thats happening in the antarctic is basically coming underneath the floating ice shoals that you see here. As it comes under this ice. It puts up and erodes the grounding points of it erodes the glacier. As it erodes this, the grounding point moves landward. And that unstabilizes. Its not as secure. Then the glacier begins to fall and surge forward and out into the ocean. So this is the process of this complex interaction between a warming ocean and its ice that is basically cascading and melting and putting ice into the water and eventually melting the ice. Now, the amount of Sea Level Rise could be attributed to melting of the western antarctic. So what does that mean . Ten feet of Sea Level Rise . Lets put it into the context of new york. This is new york city with ten feet of Sea Level Rise. I think the first thing you can see, that you complete the inundated three metropolitan airports. Okay . Now, ten feet of Sea Level Rise might occur over 100 years or so. But in the short term, ten feet of seawater inundated new york has happened and already has happened. It happened with sandy. Sandy is a combination of the small amounts of Sea Level Rise that we have already, combined with a storm at a relatively high tide period that gave you two and a half foot storm surges that inundated manhattan. So these things can happen, this intersection of whats happening on a longer term time scale to our climate system along with these extreme events that one is seeing in terms of weather patterns. It can easily produce surges like this that were going to see in the short term. The point is, not only are we going to need to worry about mitigating and clearly Climate Science is telling us get off fossil fuel as much as possible, but there is also an adaptation strategy in terms of the engineering of our cities and infrastructure that we have here. Adaptation strategies, you can retreat. Can we retreat new york . I dont know where its going to go. Maybe to colorado. We can accommodate. We can raise these cities. Certainly, in the 1800s, we raised chicago and seattle. But heck, it was a lot easier to do in those days than it is today. Or you can protect. Theres a lot of debate on, how do you protect . Do you protect with harder infrastructure, building walls and seawalls, or do you protect with putting our selfdefenses back into place, no longer building on barrier islands, putting back and restoring our mangroves, restoring wetlands. Theres a lot of discussion going on in coastal communities about exactly how theyre going to approach this problem, of a combination of both soft strategies to adapt as well as hardened strategies. So let me go to the arctic, the loss of sea ice is certainly a sentimental feature of Climate Change in the arctic. Youve seen this graph before. But the point is, its not just the sea ice area thats important. Its the volume of the sea ice. And increasingly, what were seeing. The arctic is much, much less longlived ice, ageold ice, four to fiveyearold ice, and almost all the ice is becoming singleyear ice, which melts rather quickly. Theres an uptick in 2013, but this is an anomaly, you see a lot of wiggles there. Our point is that it may have increased the area of ice for that year 2013 but it is still oneyear ice. Now, arctic ice has an interesting well, let me stop a minute. This is basically a Tipping Point with respect to geopolitical issues. What does it mean in opening up the arctic. Opening up the arctic certainly has a lot of economic potential, has an economic potential in terms of fisheries, in terms of shipping lanes, in terms of oil and gas and other extraction. And you know companies are looking at this. I think one of the greatest fears from an oceanography point of view is when, not if an oil spill is going to open, it is when an oil spill is going to happen in the arctic. And its not going to come from probably drilling for gas and oil. Its going to come from shipping. If you look at what the response was for deep water horizon and getting down there and trying to clean up an oil spill in an area which is basically mother natures pretty kind basically, has a lot of ways to help clean up that oil spill, compared to what is going to happen to a pristine area that we know little about scientifically, with no real physical ability, easy physical ability to get there, in an easy way, and how to clean it up. So theres some real important sort of adaptation strategies or thinking through about the security of whats going to happen in the arctic as this becomes an icefree area. Of course, theres the geopolitical consequences and economic values that they have. Interestingly enough, the boundary lines between the u. S. And russia have been well established as a result of the cold war. But its the other nations that are still arguing whats going on here. Finally, im going to skip this. Im just going to go to the triple whammy. That is, as Carbon Dioxide increases, that Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is dissolved in the ocean. The ph decreases and you have certainly a major habitat consequence associated with that. This is the whole process. There is a lot of research looking at the biological functioning and relationship between ph conditions and healthy ecosystems. Clearly, one of the problem areas is the habitat loss of the coral reef systems and production of mollusks and ability to function. That is the acid issue. The warming issue. The ocean is warming. Okay . Most of that heat content is in the ocean. This just shows you the fact that the ocean, the heating we have from the Carbon Monoxide is ending up most in the ocean. If we didnt have an ocean it would be a lot of a heck more atmospheric heating right now. That is buffing us right now. The growing oxygen minimum zones in the ocean, my last slide, first this is the surface of the ocean absorbing more heat, warming up. You arent getting as much oxygen down into the deeper parts of the ocean which is pretty critical because that different part of the ocean is disassociated with the atmosphere in that deeper part. The only way the lower levels of the ocean are going to get oxygen is through the mixing process. Warmer water inhibits that mixing process. You are basically enhancing the ocean minimum zones in the deep ocean and theyre going to spread. That has tremendous implications for marine animals that require oxygen such as the tuna. Oxygen tuna require oxygen. They live in the deeper parts of the ocean. Without oxygen theyre going to run into some trouble here. It does, though, provide a wonderful habitat for jelly fish. If you want to have jelly fish we may have lots of jelly fish because they thrive. This accounts for what were having on coast with the nurent loading from atmosphere basically run off, your pharmaceuticals, whatever, in the coastal regions, it causes the plankton to bloom and pull the oxygen out of the coastal waters there. As you have these minimum zones increasing in the deep ocean coming up into areas of coastal areas where you already have additional stresses associated with nutrient loading you enhance the dead zones in the ocean increasing and we are seeing this as well. So you are this complex Feedback System in the complexity of an oceanland atmosphere system of which science is becoming really beginning to come to grips with. We are at a stage where i think it is really important to make that investment in r d that really looks and studies these complexities. This gives us the information to adapt to a changing world. [applause] thanks for that overview and statement of some of the problems. Now dennis with address some of those with possible solutions. If i could have the charts please. Folks yesterday said we have to do something very different and what youre going to see is very different. This is the salt plant, grown on waste lands, deserts, using sea water irrigation to solve land, water, food, energy, and climate affordably and soon. All of it. There are two types of plants. Fresh water plants and then halophyte, salt water plants used for food and fodder in india and other countries for hundreds of years. A goodly portion of the sahara is capable if we plowed it up and irrigated with the mediterranean and grew halophytes with direct sea water irrigation of producing sufficient biomass to replace all of the carbon fuels, provide petro chemical feedstock and all the food anybody wants to eat while returning much of the 68 of the fresh water were now running out of for direct human use. I. E. Solves land, water because were substituting salt water to grow food, solves food because were growing food. Solves energy because were producing biomass and biofuels at about 50 a barrel. The climate because were sequestering some 18 of the co2. So conventional wisdom for agriculture salt is bad but with this salt is good. 97 of the sea water of the water is sea water. We wont run out of it. It contains a massive number of minerals needed in the human diet which weve just about depleted out of the land. 80 of nutrients required for agriculture in proximity to a large number of desert and dry areas. 40 of the land worldwide is waste land, has a lot of sun light and barackish saline ground water. You dont have to pump ocean water. You can pump saline ground water. In the sahara there is an aquifer that is absolutely huge. We can utilize these to solve our problems. The characteristics of this wasteland, halophyte sea water, no absorbable salt buildup, produces a cooler surface, produces fresh water, rain downwind. In the sahara, you could put rain back in the middle east and regrow the cedars of lebanon and stop the decertification of the sub sahara. We have a plethora of wastelands and sea water to solve what we have now. Theres about 10,000 metro halophytes and 25 of the irrigated lands now perfected because the aquifers were now pumping including the one down in texas and oklahoma are in fact becoming saline. The characteristics, the yields can be equal to this and it produces the entire spectrum, seeds, fruits, roots, tubers, grains, foliage, wood, oils, berries, gums, resins, pulp, rich in energy, salt penalty, 35 saline water already grows this stuff. Use it for food, fodder, biomass, energy, petro chemical, feed stock, wood, co2 secretion and wildlife habitat. For centuries theres been a successful saline brakish water agriculture with no buildup and 22 nations are now growing halophytes for food and fodder. Wastelands are a massive possibility to do this. Western australia, persian gulf, middle east, sahara, southwest u. S. Including west texas, and south america and many others. The current efforts in the u. A. E. , boeing is growing halophytes for airplane fuel. I worked with the state department. There is an operation down there farms in northern mexico are growing fuel. There are several others that are in the formative stages. So utilize the opportunity the opportunity is utilizing wastelands and deserts, inexpensive land. Utilize sea water which is extremely pottable and inexpensive. Grow halophytes, massive amounts of food and biomass for petro chemical food stock and green fuels while sequestering about 18 of the co2 afford bli with existing technology. Start now. 1020 years out you fix land, water, food, energy, and climate. Thank you. [applause] thank you, dennis. Thanks to all three of you for those great presentations. Do we have questions . Yes, john . The presumption which i think we all share is that Climate Change is real. My question is about application of your science to reality, being that we have a Gubernatorial Election coming up in which one candidate says that Climate Change is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated and the other who claims to be a scientist saying the science is unclear. So my question to you all is what can you do to affect the leadership in this state and what can we do to help you . Because our governor claims to be a scientist and claims that there is no significant proof of aspergenic caused Climate Change. Its just crazy. I know your objectivity keeps you in a certain rem of being scientific but there is too much at stake. We need advocacy and we need to support that advocacy. [applause] ill start off. You heard yesterday that the Climate Change politics is driven largely by the financial aspects in the real world. And recently the renewables are punching through a parody and so the financial business is in fact becoming very successful. Half of the new generation worldwide is now renewables and one of the previous speakers this morning went into this. Okay . So its actually not the concern about climate i think, which is going to change things the way some of us would like to see it go. I think its the favorable financial aspects which are just about here. You talked a little bit about other countries being involved with halophyte development. Do you see that in the u. S. . Do you see some attention to that now in the u. S. . Yeah. Halophytes in the u. S. Were actually started out of university of arizona. There is a major effort in the university of delaware. D. O. E. Down in oak ridge has some halophyte work. We are, you know, becoming far more successful with this. The entrepreneur that actually started the major sea water farms operation in the horn of africa and is working now with United Arab Emirates came out of arizona. Greg, you wanted to address johns question . Yes. Very quickly, i spent many years working diligently with politicians and i woke up after a while i was getting nowhere. Its not because theyre idiots. Theyre actually very smart people. They have an agenda and its driven by two things. Its driven by the people in this room and theyre also driven by who gives them the money to get elected. You have to simply understand that. You can do all of the logical arguments you like. You are running up against that political reality. A few years ago we started not to do that. That is where for example the rising voices and engineering for climate extremes came out of. Let me give you two examples of where that is now affecting the political process. First, the last rising voices meeting, americans wrote directly into the president ial system saying, here is what has to happen. Its no longer me talking about it but all the indians in america and hawaiians in hawaii doing that. Thats what they listen to. The second thing is that the financial industry gets a bad rap as we saw in many cases but the insurance and the financial industry again working with People Like Us have actually come to a United Nations agreement. Were starting next year. Every company in the u. S. And other parts of the world that have shareholders, in other words publicly listed, has to put in their sensitivity and their problems that they may have with Climate Change and Severe Weather and similar things that come out of it. The world is moving in that direction not because the politicians are taking us that way. Because the people that elect the politicians are taking us that way. And let me just add to the conversation a little bit about voices. I mean, scientists are a small percentage of the population. Its your voices that have to come through. Let me just tell you a little bit about massachusetts. Maybe you can actually concretely look, tell your gubernatorial people, look whats happening in massachusetts. So in massachusetts, there has been a very concerted effort to put in place an agenda for a green economy, green and blue economy. The governor has done it. The state legislature has done it. There are resources that have been put into investments that have been done. We are beginning to see results already in terms of economic development. This is where you have to you have to talk about it in terms of financial terms. You have to talk about it in terms of human terms. You dont talk about it in terms of science terms. There are things happening here in colorado that shows the climate is changing. Regardless of what you, if you believe in it or not the climate is changing. We have to get away from this business of basically just talking at the scientific level and instead casting it in terms of economic development, human stories, and basically whats happened to the environment as a whole. Massachusetts has had success years in a period of five years. Take a look. Go on the website. Talk to people there. A question for mr. Bushnell. Halophytes sound too good to be true. Many of the middle Eastern Countries that struggle with food have lots of money. Why does the list not show saudi arabia for example . It sounds too good to be true. Convince me that its not. I have worked with the saudis. The saudis called me up and said theyre worried after they run out of oil whats their economy going to be . I worked with the people in the province of alberta for the same reason and i asked whether they had any sand. I asked whether they had sea water. They had sea water. I said, have i got a deal for you. The last time i saw the saudis were going down the street looking into halophytes. The middle east was on my chart. Thats one of the major areas. Again, for energy. One more question. My name is steven hoffman. Im really honored to be here. I live in boulder. I work in natural and organic foods and im working on the Colorado Ballot Initiative to label g. M. A. Foods in our state. I was very curious when you brought up the dead zone because its actually caused by agriculture driven by genetic engineering and is all the synthetic nitrate fertilizer that just poisons the water of toledo, ohio. Call that a dead zone too because its an algae bloom. Its caused by g. M. O. Agriculture. We think g. M. O. Agriculture and conventional agriculture in general contributes 30 of the Greenhouse Gases to global warming. Interestingly enough and im very interested in your halophyte conversation because