Future Horizons in Climate Science: Turco Lectureship

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: - Thank you very much for being here bright and early on yet another morning, Thursday morning of AGU week. My name is Jim Hurl and I have the pleasure and the honor of serving as president of the atmospheric science section and I'm joined up here by the president elect, Paul Newman. Every year the atmospheric sciences section of AGU has the pleasure of selecting a very distinguished colleague in our community to deliver the Future Horizons in Climate Science Turco Lectureship. This lecture is intended to recognize significant interdisciplinary scientific research, discoveries or advancements in climate science and identify future areas of research that will engage both new and established scientific talent in solving the problem of global warming and related issues. This lectureship has been established through a very generous donation by Richard and Linda Turco and it's my pleasure to recognize Richard Turco who is in the audience this morning. So if you could stand up. This year it's a great honor to introduce Alex Hall as the speaker of the Turco Lectureship. Alex is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Many of you are probably pretty familiar with Alex's research. If not, let me say just a few words. His research has been really focused on reducing climate change uncertainty at both regional and global spatial scales. At the global scale, his research is toward reducing uncertainty surrounding processes, determining climate sensitivity, and in particular he's known for pioneering the emergent constraint technique. And he's applied this method to a number of climate processes including snow and sea ice albedo feedback, cloud feedback, and the intensification of the hydrologic cycle. The AGU recognized Alex for his very significant contributions in this area of research in 2016 when he received the Ascent Award from the Atmospheric Sciences section. Over the past decade, Alex has become especially active in the area of regional climate change, in particular the development of downscaling techniques to reduce uncertainty about processes that are crucial to regional climate change but are unrepresented in global climate models. Alex was a lead author for the regional climate chapter of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and he's made very many great contributions to our scientific literature through his publications. Currently, Alex is leading efforts to understand the future of water resources and fire in California. At UCLA, he directs the Center for Climate Science and he recently co-founded a new major in climate science. Alex received his PhD from Princeton in 1998 where his thesis advisor was Suki Manabi. He then went on to do a postdoc at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory before joining the faculty at UCLA in the year 2000. It's a great pleasure to welcome Alex to the stage and please join me in congratulating him on the Turco Lectureship. Thank you, thank you very much for joining us. [00:03:48] Speaker ?: Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. [00:04:14] Speaker 2: Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you very much for joining us today. This is really not so much about my own work, but about this very broad question of what I think that we should do next. So, let us move on here. Just over a year ago, the campfire raged through the Sierra foothills near Chico, California. And it was an unprecedented fire, the deadliest and most destructive in California's history. The rate of spread was terrifyingly fast and it was driven by dry, hot Diablo winds that carried embers far and wide. And most of the structural damage was done in just a few hours. By the time the fire was brought under control, 17 days after it started, it had burned more than 150,000 acres and it had killed 86 people. It left an entire town, paradise, completely destroyed. And it was the most expensive natural disaster in terms of insured losses anywhere in the world in 2018. It's the worst, but it's not the only major wildfire California has seen lately. Five of the ten largest and most destructive fires in the state have taken place since 2012. And we now believe that climate change is playing a role in the recent increase in fire for reasons I'll discuss. But we didn't predict that wildfire would become such a major impact of climate change so early in the 21st century. It was a blind spot. And as a community, whenever we're confronted with a blind spot like this, we need to do some soul searching. We need to ask, are we doing the right science to study climate change and to help society respond? In terms of how we conceive, structure and fund our science, are we approaching it in the right way? Is our business as usual good enough? Our field has had some great successes and we have a lot to celebrate. Over the past 40 years or so, we've built incredibly sophisticated global climate models that allow us to experiment with the climate system. We've also organized ourselves at an international level to produce consistent climate change experiments with these models. And here is the organizational chart for the CMIP 6 effort that's ongoing right now. And this allows us to compare models systematically. The CMIP efforts have led to real progress in understanding the collective behavior of models and the ways in which they might be biased. And in the process, we've learned a tremendous amount about the climate system. We've also organized ourselves to present a united front to the world about the threat of climate change. And to a certain extent, the message about the reality of climate change has gotten through. Unfortunately, we have failed to persuade the world to tackle greenhouse gas emissions in any serious way. Greenhouse gas emissions have kept increasing over the past decade. And there generally isn't too much serious action to adapt to the climate change impacts we've projected either. Now we're on track to produce the next IPCC assessment, the AR6. And one question is whether the fundamental messages of that report are likely to be new. We know it will reaffirm the large role of humans in the climate system as before. And we know that it probably won't narrow the range of climate sensitivity, a question that has preoccupied our field for about 40 years. In fact, the range may even increase a bit with so many high sensitivity models in the CMIP 6 ensemble. We can also look further into the future, say into the decade leading up to 2030. And we can ask whether more IPCC style science is likely to deliver fundamentally new insights. We're beginning to see the emergence of very high resolution atmospheric models, so-called storm resolving models. And this is an image from the output of one of those models. It's possible that with these models, uncertainties surrounding cloud feedbacks could finally narrow. Advances in superparameterization or ultraparameterization might help the cloud feedback problem too. But it still seems like significant uncertainties would remain, especially surrounding aerosols, whose dynamics and microphysics there's no hope of resolving any time soon. It's important for us to continue doing this work, what we might call traditional climate science. I love this work and I want to do more of it myself. And we need continued high levels of investment in it. But we should also ask ourselves, can this traditional climate science tackle the most critical and important climate science questions of our time? We now live in an era when significant climate change over the course of the remainder of the 21st century is a certainty. We may not know the eventual exact magnitude, but in the coming decades, virtually the same large climate changes will occur, no matter what is done about emissions. While our field seems to be moving slowly, there's been a big shift in the world around us in the past few years. Climate change impacts have accelerated, often in ways we didn't anticipate. I already mentioned the example of fire, but there are plenty of others. New and stronger evidence has emerged since the AR-5 of melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet and its growing instability. There's also been unexpectedly rapid melting of Arctic permafrost and associated methane release. And this is due to catastrophic land subsidence as permafrost melts. There's been a large increase in extreme precipitation events. Hurricane Sandy and Harvey and recent increases in flooding and drought events in India are but a small sampling. A few more examples later on. There has been a parallel explosion of other human impacts on our environment. Some of these impacts are unrelated to climate change, but many interact with or are strongly exacerbated by climate change. For instance, we're already giving ocean ecosystems a one-two punch. Overfishing and pollution, like this plastic bag floating serenely near the sea floor, are widespread. From climate change, we have ocean acidification, deoxygenization, and marine heat waves. These are added stresses. These human impacts can collectively lead to extreme degradation and transformation of ocean ecosystems, as I'll discuss more later. This is just one of many examples of how climate change is increasingly conjoined with larger environmental conversations. And so the risks to our environment seem likely to continue to increase. Another reason for the risks to continue increasing is the empowerment of far-right political movements. This has resulted in a doubling down on resource exploitation. This exploitation includes greenhouse gas emissions, but of course other forms of environmental destruction, like deforestation. At the same time, there's a new youth movement that is impatient with business as usual, and is seeking to move beyond incremental approaches to environmental progress. This is an emerging political force whose demand for solutions will only grow as this generation comes into adulthood. And so in our politics, too, there is this sense that there are large forces on a collision course, and that we're at some kind of historical juncture. And so in this sense that there are large forces of climate change in the climate change, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future. We're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future, and that we're at some point in the future. There's a rapidly growing environmental crisis that interacts strongly with climate change, and there's a crisis in our politics, too. And so we can't keep doing what we've been doing. We need a climate science that is responsive to all of these challenges. I'll talk more later about the change that I think we need, but first I want to take a deeper dive into three examples of systems where climate change is colliding with other dimensions of environmental destruction. My first example is the Amazon rainforest. This is a critical element of the Earth's system. Obviously, it's got astonishing biodiversity. It also is a big store of carbon, and it has a big role in the global water cycle. It contains about 15% of the carbon stores on land, and is currently taking up somewhere between 5 and 10% of human CO2 emissions. So any understanding of carbon cycle feedbacks to climate requires an understanding of the Amazon's future. And indeed, the Amazon may face an existential threat from climate change. The earliest evidence we have of this comes from a simulation using the CMIP-3 version of the Hadley Center model, forced by a business-as-usual emission scenario. In this simulation, anthropogenic forcing shifted the tropical Pacific to an El Niño-like state, and this starved the Amazon of precipitation. There was a two-thirds reduction in precipitation in the Amazon, and if you couple that with enhanced evapotranspiration from warmer temperatures, this led to a catastrophic loss of the forest. In the plot, you can see the trees declining catastrophically in the latter half of the 21st century, and savannah grasses taking over in their place. So the system was driven to a tipping point by climate change, and similar behavior is seen in some models of the CMIP-5 generation, forced by RCP-8.5. The real Amazon forest is probably even more sensitive to drying than the Amazons of the climate models. This plot comes from a recent observational study of atmospheric moisture sources when the monsoon begins in the Amazon. The solid black contours show the very high moisture levels in the 30-day period prior to the onset of the monsoonal precipitation. The elevated moisture increases the convective available potential energy, and this primes the region for convection and precipitation. And the conventional wisdom has been that these elevated moisture sources come from the initiation of the monsoonal circulation itself, which brings moist air from the ocean. In other words, the physical system initiates the monsoon. But the colors demonstrate that this is false. They show observations of the deuterium anomaly in the same time period. Water transpired from the forest canopy is enriched in deuterium compared to water evaporated from the ocean. The observed deuterium levels are very high, so high as to prove that the excess moisture comes from the forest and not the ocean. So the plants in the forest are co-conspiring to attract the monsoon earlier, increase its strength, and enhance local precipitation. So imagine that the forest loses its ability to transpire enough water before the wet season actually begins. Then the monsoonal circulations that keep moisture supplies high in the long run could weaken. And so we have some observational evidence that the Amazon forest plays a role in sustaining the precipitation that allows the forest to exist in the first place. The land surface can lose much of its ability to transpire water through destruction of the forest and its replacement with savanna or agriculture. And of course the Amazon has been directly threatened by deforestation for decades now. The pink colors on this map show the extent of tree cover loss in the Amazon just in the last 18 years. After a slowdown early in the century, deforestation is accelerating rapidly under the leadership of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. It's already been demonstrated that this loss of forest is leading to a reduction in Amazon rainfall and an increase in the length of the dry season. And this further underscores the critical importance of the interactions between plants and large-scale circulation. How the forest is lost also matters. Deforestation is not only occurring at the margins of the Amazon. Road networks penetrate the untouched forest, encouraging local deforestation and crucially, introducing fire into the landscape. This map shows where fires are now occurring in the Amazon. 2019 brought an 84% increase in the number of forest fires, the highest number in almost a decade. So this brings fire to the fragmented areas that haven't been deforested. Savannah vegetation is tolerant of fire, but forest is not. So the result is a tight conversion to savanna, like what's happening here. Continued recurrence of fire in the newly formed savanna can then eat away at the forest margins. No one knows at what point increased fragmentation and introduction of fire would lead to a total conversion of the Amazon to savanna. But clearly this is another tipping point in the system. So climate change, deforestation, and increased fire, they all have the potential to lead to a total loss of the Amazon forest. But the tipping points associated with each of these mechanisms are not understood or known. And it doesn't take too much imagination to think that these tipping points might interact with one another. So if you move towards the tipping point through one mechanism, it might get you closer to the tipping point associated with another mechanism. One major source of ignorance relevant to all of these tipping points is the variety of plant responses to changes in water availability. These responses could be as varied as the number of plant species itself. The diversity of plant responses has not been investigated or cataloged. And of course, it's not simulated in climate models. And the species level response to drought has to take into account CO2 fertilization and nutrient limitation. And these are things that GCMs have struggled with. So to understand the future of the Amazon rainforest, a problem that we all acknowledge is critical to climate science and to the planet, traditional climate science is insufficient, to say the least. The problem has fundamental dimensions that climate models don't consider. And these are associated with human behavior, fire dynamics, ecology, and plant physiology. We now come to my second example of how climate change is interwoven with ecology and human dynamics. It's the existential challenge faced by coral reef ecosystems all over the world, but especially here in the Caribbean Sea. As you all know, coral reefs are supreme generators of ocean biodiversity and home to a quarter of all ocean species. In the Caribbean, they're also the main drivers of the most important industries, tourism and fishing. And these reef ecosystems face existential threats from human activity. This figure tracks the observed decline in coral coverage at sites in the Caribbean. Over the past 50 years, reef coverage has trended catastrophically downwards and many systems are teetering on collapse. Such declines are due in part due to destruction from human activity. Pollution comes in the form of sewage discharge, oil spills, and wastewater from ships. And the reefs are directly damaged by construction, dredging, ships, and fishing. But one of the most important reasons for the decline is the catastrophic loss of animal species that feed on seaweeds. There is a competitive dynamic between corals and seaweeds. When the weeds are not eaten, coral is severely disadvantaged in recruitment and growth. And if you look at the picture on the right, you can see a seascape that was coral that was taken over by seaweeds. One species that eats the weeds is the sea urchin, which is shown in the upper left. It went into severe decline in the 1980s, probably due to an introduced pathogen from ship ballast water. The other species is the parrotfish, which is in the lower left. This fish would have picked up the slack for the sea urchin, but it too went into catastrophic decline because humans have been fishing parrotfish to the point where it's almost been eliminated from the Caribbean. So that is why the seaweeds have been taking over. Since the 1970s, corals throughout the Caribbean have also experienced very serious disease outbreak. The first report of widespread coral die-off due to disease was in the early 1970s, but regular outbreaks have continued since then. In total, about 13 different coral diseases have been identified. An example is the stony coral tissue loss disease, which kills affected corals very quickly. It's a relatively new disease, first seen in 2014 in Florida reefs. And since then, it has spread rapidly throughout the Florida reefs and beyond. And as with nearly all coral diseases, its cause and mode of transmission are unknown. But like the human digestive system, corals are host to an extraordinarily complex community of bacteria, archaea, and viruses. Each community member confers essential benefits to the host coral. These benefits include photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation, nutrient provision, and resistance to infection. Coral disease and mortality could be caused by attacks on any member of the coral community. And this underscores the desperate need for understanding and modeling of how the community functions and how its functioning can be impaired. And now, climate change is beginning to stress corals too. Coral bleaching often occurs in response to a prolonged marine heat wave lasting longer than about a month. The corals expel their symbiotic algae, causing them to lose their color and often die. In the Caribbean, bleaching events due to prolonged marine heat waves were rare before 1980. But increasingly severe bleaching events occurred in 1995, 1998, 2005, and 2010. And of course, as the oceans continue to warm, we only expect marine heat waves to increase in frequency, intensity, and, critically, duration. Often, coral disease occurs after a marine heat wave. So the direct cause of death is disease rather than bleaching. And this is a very telling example of how biological stressors can accelerate climate change impacts. And so the coral reefs in the Caribbean are in grave danger. Their future is caught up in a tangle of climatic, biological, ecological, and human factors that interact with one another in ways that are not understood. Predicting the future of the physical system is a necessary component of any effort to understand the future of Caribbean reefs. But our goal should be to make predictions about the reefs' future and to have an impact on how those amazing systems are managed. And so we must also take responsibility for modeling their biology and their ecology and direct human impacts. For my third and final example, I'll come back to the issue I opened with: wildfire in California. This is a visible satellite image from the campfire in November 2018. Fire in California is yet another issue where climate change is exacerbating problems associated with poor planning and bad human decision making. Here in California and in the entire western U.S., our relationship with fire went out of whack long before the human climate change signal emerged. Fire is a critical element of California's ecology. But humans have been building further and further into forested landscapes, creating a so-called wildland-urban interface. As a result, millions of people live in places that are adapted to burn, exposing human life and property to ever greater risk. And fire size has been increasing significantly since 1970, as shown in this plot from a recent study. The critical role of fire in California's ecology was not understood when the state was settled and its land use and land management policies were created. In the Sierra Nevada, and the forested landscapes throughout the western U.S., humans have been actively suppressing fire for more than a century. The mentality, epitomized by Smokey the Bear, was to stamp out fire whenever it occurred. The forest now contained much more biomass than they would without the low to medium intensity fire that was common before European and American settlement. All that dense vegetation sets the stage for bigger, harder to control fires like the ones we've been seeing for the past several years. Since the recent uptick in large fires, we've learned that human-induced warming is probably part of the reason for the increase, too. This is a simple scatter plot between fire size in the Sierra Nevada and warm season water vapor pressure deficit since 1972. Vapor pressure deficit has a monotonically increasing relationship with temperature, so you can think of the x-axis as just being temperature as well. The data are color-coded by time period. The relationship is strongly positive with the more recent years and their higher temperatures clearly associated with larger fires. But even in the cooler period, if you look at the blue dots here, the relationship between fire size and temperature is statistically significant. Warmer temperatures dry out vegetation, making it more susceptible to burning. Warming may also accelerate the spread of fire when it occurs. Climate change may also be playing a more indirect role in the increase in fire by facilitating the spread of invasive species like the mountain pine beetle. The beetle's range has historically been limited by cold temperatures, but it has spread northward and to higher elevations in recent years. While we have devastated conifer species throughout the western U.S. and southwestern Canada, during periods of hot temperatures and deep drought, trees are especially vulnerable to bark beetle infestations. This leads to widespread tree mortality, as seen in California's Sierra Nevada during the recent multi-year drought there. And all of that dry and dead fuel leads to greater fire risk. Remember the marine heat waves and their effect on the vulnerability of corals to disease. This is similar. Climate change is making life easier for the opportunists to take advantage of stress. Ecosystem change and regime change is being accelerated by biology in ways that are not anticipated by climate models that emphasize the physical system. So, as with the Amazon and Caribbean examples, fire in California is a fascinating systems problem. It's a problem of critical societal importance. Climate change is almost certainly deeply involved. But to predict the future of fire, we have to model not only the physical system, but also plant species, animal species, and their interactions and fire dynamics. The models need to include human activities like timber harvest and fire suppression, which we know will shape the future of fire. We've considered Amazon forest dieback, the loss of Caribbean corals, and the increase in destructive wildfire in California. All of these examples demonstrate failures of traditional climate science to predict outcomes. The reason for the failures are similar. Climate models don't include the necessary dynamics shaping the system. So, we need to enlarge climate science. And in some ways, this would be a continuation of trends that have been going on for quite a long time. Here are the elements of the Earth's system represented in climate models through time. This also approximately tracks the definition of climate science through time. So, you can see on the left, the early models had an atmosphere and maybe a rudimentary land surface and ocean. And then now, we have models that encompass systems like land ice, vegetation types, and the carbon cycle. And yes, the biosphere has recently become represented in models. But the emphasis on modeling the global carbon cycle has meant that true ecosystem dynamics, like the species levels interactions that I've been talking about today, are unrepresented. And we also have to remember that climate science is deeply rooted in atmospheric dynamics and atmospheric modeling. Even today, much of the intellectual and computational investment in climate modeling goes into the atmospheric component. And we all recognize that there are still critical climate problems that involve the atmosphere almost exclusively. And I'm referring here to problems relating to aerosols, cloud feedbacks, and the hydrologic cycle. And again, I work on those problems, and I love those problems, and I want to keep doing those problems. But I think that there is a lack of attention to the non-atmospheric and non-physical components of the system, and this is due to the history of the field. And that's now holding us back. It's kind of like all that excessive time people spent in the 1980s on their hair. We're a little bit out of balance. All three of my examples illustrate the critical roles of organisms, ecosystems, and people in climate system dynamics. Model complexity should be roughly proportional to the complexity and impact of each component of the system. My advisor, Suki Manabe, compared modeling to flower arrangement, where you want things to be in balance. So it's clear to do climate science right. We can't keep focusing primarily on atmospheric problems or just modeling the physical system and the carbon cycle. We need to enlarge the field, and this needs to be quite a dramatic enlargement with a deep infusion of additional investment, especially into things like biology, ecology, and human behavior. Enlarging the field will enable us to focus on the deepest challenges, both scientific and societal. I've highlighted three already, but there are so many more. In the U.S. alone, the western part of the country faces water sustainability challenges that are greatly exacerbated by climate change. In the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast are extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and extreme flooding. The future of agriculture in the Midwest and Great Plains is in question in these highly productive farms in that region. In all of these examples, society is set up to manage resources according to the climate that we had, not the one we're increasingly getting. And let's face it, the current management practices are usually terrible. They don't even reflect the best science of yesterday. And so there's a desperate need for relevant climate science. Let's talk a little bit about the barriers to an intensive focus on the deepest climate challenges. One barrier is siloing by disciplines. It's part of the DNA of science. The academy is divided into disciplines with a strong reward system for disciplinary research. And as an example, here are the departments relevant to climate change at my home university, UCLA. The people in these departments are geographically dispersed on campus. They rarely see each other and they have zero incentive to interact. Those of you who are at academic institutions could probably draw similar diagrams. A different kind of siloing is pervasive in natural resource governance and management. Resource management agencies are balkanized into units of limited areas of responsibility. This is a map of California showing the jurisdictions of the state and federal agencies responsible for forest and fire management. The jurisdictional boundaries reflect human governance decisions, not the natural systems they're set up to manage. And emerging challenges like the increase in California wildfire, they don't respect political and jurisdictional boundaries. And so these agencies are ill-equipped to address them. The siloing of disciplines in academia is mirrored on the science funding side. In the US, climate-related science is funded by a collection of federal agencies that exist to promote a variety of objectives. And I'm sure you're familiar with this. NSF is basic science. NASA is remote sensing. NOAA is focused on weather forecasting and fisheries plus GFDL. And DOE has this mandate to study the implications of past and current energy production. And research funding streams within the agencies are often for particular disciplines. So as an example, this is a chart showing how some of the climate-related research disciplines are organized at the National Science Foundation. There is an effort to create cross-cutting research programs. A sampling of these are shown in blue. But they're typically funded through a tax on traditional funding streams. And this relegates the funding to levels that are an order of magnitude less than existing work. So don't get me wrong, these funding streams provide resources for fantastic work, and they need to continue. But we have a lot of siloing, whether it's in academia, natural resource agencies, or funding agencies. And it's leading to a spectacular failure to focus holistically on the most important challenges. And so it's clear that our existing institutions to fund science, produce knowledge, and implement solutions are not meeting the gravest climate challenges. Our business as usual is not good enough. We need new institutions that are laser-focused on the climate challenges posing the greatest threats. For now, let's call them climate response institutes. I don't know exactly what these things should look like, and I don't really even know what they should be called. This might be a terrible name. But I can sketch out an impression for you of what I think that they should look like. This is a picture of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN was created to promote scientific inquiry in particle physics, such as the search for the Higgs boson. Imagine efforts on this scale dedicated to solving the deepest climate challenges. Imagine if we had one such institute devoted to the future of the Amazon, another to Caribbean reefs, and another to Western US wildfire. And perhaps in the US, one focused on water resources, another on agriculture in the Midwest and Great Plains, and another on sea level rise on the Gulf Coast in the eastern seaboard. In my vision of these institutes, they would have several attributes. There would be permanent staff that represents deep expertise in Earth system components. They would have resources to attract expertise on an ad hoc basis, either through funding calls or residencies at the institutes. The modeling investments would have to be substantial to accommodate high resolution and the necessary additional model investment, especially in the realms of biology, ecology, and human behavior. There would be a need for greatly enhanced observational capacity for both in situ measurements and satellite data processing and analysis. And the institutes would have an educational component, perhaps through university affiliations, to train a new generation of science in a new and enlarged climate science. These institutes would also need social science and policy expertise. We have to face the fact that climate challenges are situated in places. And these places have cultural contexts and political contexts that inform policy making, individual and institutional behavior, and perhaps even the science itself. We also have to face the fact that our science, and maybe especially our science, cannot be divorced from ethical considerations. Scientific tools and knowledge can be used for good or ill. So there must be attention to ethics. And these institutions would include robust, professionalized communications and outreach to maximize the impact of the science and promote stewardship of the planet's precious resources based on the best science. Some might say that this is just too expensive. And they might balk at the cost. But let's look at how much is spent on existing big science efforts. I mentioned CERN. The Large Hadron Collider cost $5 billion to build and about the same amount of money every year to operate. Much more is spent by the U.S. every year on medical research, nuclear weapons research, and by the big tech companies on the latest and greatest in information technology and electronic gadgetry. By comparison, climate science funding in the U.S. is a pittance. My favorite statistic from this is that I gathered is that CERN's computing budget, that they have, they work, they have a lot of work doing simulations and data analysis and they have super computing facilities. And their budget for that is an order of magnitude greater than the entire budget of GFDL. In fact, their computing budget is greater than the combined budgets, I think it's about twice as big as the combined budgets of GFDL and NCAR. So, you know, we're kind of small potatoes compared to these other efforts. So, one question is, you know, how much are these climate change impacts costing? And what's the right scale of investment to match the cost structure of the impacts? So, here are just a few examples of costs associated with climate-related damages. The damages from the recent increase in wildfire in California are already in the tens of billions of dollars. That's just over the past couple of years. And conservative estimates of the future costs of climate change impacts are half a trillion dollars a year in the U.S. alone. And that's just one country. And these costs don't take into account the intersections of climate change with other dimensions of environmental degradation. The synergies between climate change impacts and other environmental issues. And ecosystems are not valued at all. So, how much is the Amazon worth? How much is this California Sierra Nevada worth? These are not included in these cost estimates. So, clearly we're talking about a problem with eventual cost to society at a scale of trillions of dollars a year. And we should be asking for resources that are commensurate with the scale of the problems and their gravity. I know that climate response institutes at this scale might sound pie in the sky. But we're at a critical juncture. And creating new institutions at critical junctures is nothing new. In the 1930s and 1940s, the world faced a global crisis stemming from economic depression and world war. In response, we built completely new institutions at an unprecedented scale. Like the United Nations and the European Union. These institutions included scientific ones like the national labs. So, we've done this before and we can do it again. Like the 1930s and 1940s, we live in a time of crisis. A key dimension of this crisis is our relationship with our environment. We need to recognize the urgency and the stakes and build new institutions that are tailored to the problems of the 21st century. Climate science has real strengths. Numerical modeling, coordination, analysis of modeling experiments, and the development of consensus science in the face of public controversy. We need to be bold and bring this quantitative rigor to bear on the most urgent and deepest climate challenges. If these kids can be this bold, so can we. [00:44:45] Speaker ?: Thank you. [00:44:46] Speaker 1: Thank you, Alex, for that really stimulating and terrific talk. Don't go too far. We have plenty of time for some questions and discussion. I would encourage anyone that has a question to please come to the aisles just a little bit. This side of halfway up are microphones on the left and right sides of the room. So, please, some questions for Alex. [00:45:24] Speaker ?: Bill. [00:45:25] Speaker 3: Alex, really phenomenal talk. I want to just pose a question about what you didn't talk that much about the culture of the scientific community. And perhaps we need a greater focus on service to these issues. I think the institutes are an incredibly worthy component of that. But one could equally well imagine a set of graduate fellowships or postgraduate fellowships that are essentially like the analog of national service, that are dedicated to working on these critical problems. And we essentially invest, we more or less pivot to a point where the community is asking its members to engage directly in useful action and not a traditional academic activity. So, the institutes are great, but I'm wondering if you think there's also a need for a cultural shift in the way that we do our science? [00:46:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I am arguing for a cultural shift. I think part of the problem is the way we define problems. If you look at the Amazon and you think about the fundamental scientific problems there, we're not really focused on those. What we define as fundamental problems are different from that, but I would like to suggest that the dynamics that I talked about, those are the fundamental problems for that particular issue. And that it shouldn't be a service activity to work on that. It should be someone's scientific lifeblood. And the way that academia especially is structured, those things are defined as service activities. And we all know what happens to service activities, how much time people actually spend on that. We can't, these can't be voluntary efforts. These have to be substantive and big. And so, yes, I think there needs to be a cultural change. Thank you. [00:47:20] Speaker 4: Alex, I think you're absolutely right. If we're going to solve these problems, we have to invest the money, the resources that are necessary to do it. One thing that you didn't talk about was the source of funding support to do these sort of large-scale Manhattan project types of efforts. Do you think it's fair to do that by taxing the sources of the problem in the first place? In particular, the fossil fuel industry, there's already been much discussion about carbon taxes, for example. We need to have a funding source in order to do these things. And does that seem like the most logical approach? [00:48:14] Speaker 2: Well, California does that to an extent. The funds from California's cap-and-trade program do go into climate change adaptation work. So that's a good example. There's a little bit of that going on already. Yeah, I avoided talking about the practical question of where to get money. But yeah, I mean, I think that's a sensible approach. I mean, I think the other thing is that other scientific fields have succeeded in getting government money at a much larger scale than we have. And so I wouldn't ignore that as a source either. And the other thing is that the philanthropic community has - when I was researching for this, I was looking at some of the wealth stats of the 10 richest people in the world. And, you know, their wealth is orders of magnitude more than our budgets also. So I think philanthropy is another element. But I think the first step is for us to start asking. I think we have to realize how resource intensive these issues are and we have to start asking for the resources. So, yeah. [00:49:26] Speaker 1: Great, thank you. Yes, please. [00:49:28] Speaker 5: Thanks so much. This was a fantastic talk. My question is kind of a scientific one. You mentioned that there are things that we failed to anticipate and then there are things that are emerging earlier than we anticipated. And those strike me as totally different things, as you said. So there are some things that climate models never would have predicted because they don't have those processes in them and they're not designed to do that. Versus there are some physical consequences that are emerging earlier than we expected. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how we can sort of diagnose and attend to the things that we failed to predict, how we figure out what failure means. [00:50:10] Speaker 2: So, yeah, I mean, it's probably a matter of going problem by problem and looking at it. I think most of the ones that emerged early have had this attribute where they weren't included in the models. I think that's been a pretty common theme. So, I think there is definitely a need to look beyond the systems that we model already. I think that's very clear. But, yeah, it's well worth a deep dive into a lot of these emergent phenomena and asking the questions, what models do we need to understand and predict these phenomena? And that's a very sensible thing to do if we're trying to build better models. [00:51:00] Speaker ?: Thanks. [00:51:02] Speaker 1: Thank you. Yes, please. [00:51:03] Speaker 6: Thank you for your talk. My name is Jennifer Balch. I'm from the University of Colorado Boulder and I direct one of USGS's climate adaptation science centers. I'm a fire ecologist. And one thing that really struck me about your talk is there's a potential to bridge with the National Ecological Observatory Network, which is a $600 million plus NSF investment that has become fully operational across 81 sites just as of May. And it's intended to track species and ecosystem response over the next 30 plus years. And I would love to hear your thoughts on the potential connections between climate science and ecology to potentially address some of the issues that you raised. Or what can we do now to build that bridge across communities? [00:51:49] Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think that's a really key question. I went to, there was an ecological forecasting session yesterday that I went to and I was impressed by what's going on in that world. Yeah, so there's a lot, there's a lot being done to track species, to catalog species, to track changes in ranges over time. And that work is really important. What I perceive to be missing is the kind of systems and modeling mindset that is necessary to do predictive modeling based on first principles. And I think that's the thing, that's the kind of, that's the concept, the conceptual framework that underpins climate science. And I think that's what needs to be married to the, you know, the observational capacity of the ecological community. And that requires almost like a different breed of person, because I don't think either the climate science community or the ecology community produces that type of person. So I think there, I think that's, that's a gap that has to be addressed. [00:53:01] Speaker 6: Thank you. [00:53:02] Speaker 2: Yes, please. [00:53:04] Speaker 7: I really like the fact that you talk about a cultural shift. And it seems like part of that cultural shift has to be an acknowledgement of capitalism's role in, in exacerbating climate change, especially in its requirements for growth. And in doing that, it seems like your institutions ought to have something that looks at other economic ways, other ways we can organize human behavior to get what the work done that needs to be done, which is all an economic system is. [00:53:32] Speaker 2: So, yeah, so in the, it's a tricky one. I, I put in the attributes of the institutes. That's why I put ethics in there. That was kind of a catch all for, you know, these questions about how, how you, how you do the science in a way that supports people and who, and what kind of people are you supporting to do it? Um, and, um, and also, you know, balancing this question of, of resource exploitation versus economic development, um, which comes up a lot, um, when we talk about any, any kind of environmental problem. Um, and so, um, and I don't have all the answers to those. I don't have the answers to those questions, but I think we need to acknowledge those from the outset and include them in the way that we, in the way that we attack and think about these problems. So I don't know if it's destroying capitalism or not, but, um, it's, it's certainly acknowledging that there, there's an economic dimension to the solutions and, and the way we manage systems. Okay. Yes. [00:54:37] Speaker 8: Hi, I'm Peter Kalmus from NASA JPL. Um, that was a fantastic talk. I think it's spot on. Um, I've been thinking along those lines too. Um, it seems like maybe one way to kind of start developing this program is maybe right here in California, because we've got the amazing, like UC network. And I think the, it feels like the California legislature legislature is starting to get, starting to think along these lines too. I mean, they're, they're totally freaking out about the fires and the electricity and they, they've been reaching out to some of us already just in a really disorganized way to try to get some input. So, so I think there's possibly some, uh, maybe some, what's, what's the word like, uh, the, the gears are starting to turn there. So have you, have you been kind of talking to some of them and do you think there's a path forward there to start exploring some of this on a sort of state level scale? [00:55:38] Speaker 2: Um, so I, I, you know, I think that that is happening to a certain degree there's, but in the state of California, there's been, um, there's been quite a bit of money that's, that's, um, that has been earmarked for fire research. Um, and the state through different mechanisms has funded, um, several, several projects that are on the scale of maybe, maybe two to $3 million. Um, there, the problem is it was, it's sort of a knee jerk reaction to a, um, a panic about the increase in fire. Um, you know, we got to do more research. Let's, let's have some funding calls for that. And, um, the result has been that a kind of an uncoordinated scattershot approach to, um, to, to, to, you know, get, getting the work done. Um, so that, that's a, that's a kind of a first step. At least the resources sort of got, got freed up a little bit. Um, what I think is missing still is this kind of intensive coordination. And, um, and, um, you know, we had, we had one workshop where we, we tried to bring together a bunch of the fire projects that are, that are going on. And, um, that, well, that was just not, not nearly enough. I, I really think that the efforts have to be centralized and housed in one place. And I think there's no substitute for that deep engagement. [00:56:59] Speaker 8: Yeah. That that's, that's my whole point. I think, I feel like there's, there's kind of like an energization. Uh, there's an appetite there that needs to be somehow coordinated channel. Right. Yeah. And like encouraged. Yeah. [00:57:13] Speaker 1: I'm going to take two more questions. Then I'm sure Alex would be happy to stick around, uh, afterwards to, to have more individual conversations if you would like. So please. [00:57:22] Speaker 9: Thank you. Uh, so I, I really, uh, appreciated your, uh, your approach to, uh, talking about where climate science should go. And to, uh, perhaps a redistribution of where the resources go to focus on these deep problems. But you also, you talked about, uh, a Manhattan style project, a big, uh, a big new funding project. And I really wonder whether, uh, we need the knowledge that much or whether we actually have enough knowledge that we know what we need to do. And if we're going to invest, uh, these vast amounts of money, we shouldn't be focusing on, uh, the decarbonization problem rather than on learning new science. [00:58:06] Speaker 2: The, um, of course we should be focusing on decarbonization. I, I don't, I think it's a false choice. We have, we have to focus on mitigation, of course. Um, the, the issue is that there, there, no matter what is done about carbon emissions, we, we are committed to profound climate change already. Um, and we are also, and climate change is not the only problem. There are these other deep environmental challenges that are intersecting with climate change that we're ignoring if we just talk about climate change. And to get at those problems holistically requires deep engagement, um, across many, many areas of inquiry. And we just don't do that. Um, so I pretty strongly believe that for those problems, for those adaptation and resource questions, we, we need more resources. Yeah. [00:59:05] Speaker ?: Okay. [00:59:06] Speaker 2: And last, uh, question in plenary. [00:59:07] Speaker 1: Yes. Thanks. [00:59:09] Speaker 10: Hi, I'm Kristina Williamson from NOAA at System Research Laboratory. Um, thank you so much for using your platform to raise, I think, this really important idea. You kind of touched on or hinted at, um, one aspect of it by referencing how politics is getting more nationalist, and then using SEAN and the UN as your examples. I wonder if you might like to expand a little bit on how we might need to focus this effort on enabling more international research and more substantive, um, international collaboration in institutes like these. [00:59:45] Speaker 2: That's another tough question that I, I honestly don't know the answer to. Um, you know, the, and one reason why I featured some U.S. examples is because I think, you know, the U.S. is, the U.S. funding streams are large enough and there's enough wealth in the U.S. that, that you could, you could pioneer this type of concept within the U.S. Um, but I think if you look at a problem like the Amazon, you could argue that that's, that's a, um, a region that the entire world has a stake in. Um, and that there should be, the only way to accomplish that would be a very robust international effort. Um, and so I, I guess, I guess maybe we can learn from, um, our colleagues in high particle physics who have been able to garner high levels of international support for, um, an endeavor like CERN. Um, um, um, but, um, you know, to date, I don't think we've, we've been too successful in doing that. [01:00:52] Speaker 10: Thank you. Okay. [01:00:55] Speaker 1: Okay, Alex, um, I'm sure your parents will watch this. So, uh, to both your mom and your dad, I would like to, uh, ask the audience to thank them for waking you up this morning. you up this morning.