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 avai