Transcript Too Hot not toHandle
Dr. Donald Kennedy editor in chief Science
Dr. Stephen Schneider Co-director Centre for Environmental Science and Policy, Stanford University.
Accident of nature
Changes are already visible to the man in the street.
The most obvious impacts are more heat waves (Heat wave last more than four consecutive days have nearly tripled in the last 50 years).
Heat waves are greatest manifestation of Climate Change in the USA. They are responsible for more deaths of people than hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning and blizzards combined.
Dr. Laurence S Kalkstein (Climate Change Scientist, University of Delaware)
Heat Wave deaths are not as apparent as from natural diasasters such as Hurricanes, Tornados and Tsunamis, but nevertheless the die through cardiac arrest, respiratory stress and stokes. Just going back to Chicago Illinois July 1995, the population can survive one, two or even three days in a row of high temperatures, but this situation persisted for at least a week with temperatures around 40 C. Approximately 800 people died over a short period of time (a week or two) in one city during one heat wave.
Dr. Richard Sommerville Climate Research Division Scrippts Intitution of Oceanography.
The Chicago case was a very serious case illustrating the effects of Climate Change
In Europe summer of 2003 the heatwave killed tens of thousands of people. (Over 6 000 died in Germany, over 14 000 died in France and over 19 000 died in Italy).
The European heat wave got our attention by being a very rare event, but tthat will become commonplace in a few decades if we do not stop global warming. Heat waves are predicted to double by 2020 if global warming is not curbed.
What is Global Warming?
Dr. Stephen Schneider defines it as what happens when you add junk into the atmospheres mostly from the tail pipes of our cars and smoke stacks of our factories and it blocks some of the energy exchange between the earth and space trapping heat near the earth’s surface.
Prof. Daniel Schrag, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University.
To understand Global Warming you have to understand the Green House Effect. The Green House Effect works by sunlight coming through the glass of the green house and getting absorbed by the plants and the soil. The absorption of that light turns that energy from the sun into heat and the temperature inside that green house heats up. If the heat could just escape it would be very cold inside that green house but what happens is that glass insulates the green house and traps some of that heat, making the temperature significantly warmer if that glass had not been there. The same exact thing happens in our atmosphere, our atmosphere is transparent to the visible light from the sun and so the sunlight come through and gets absorbed by the surface of the earth. The surface heats up and instead of the heat just escaping back to space the green house gases, particularly Water Vapour and Carbon Dioxide traps some of that heat as it leaves the surface and is like putting a blanket on us at night.
Dr. Richard Sommerville
On the Green House effect the concern is that mankind is changing it.
Dr. Donald Kennedy
What humans are doing is to add green house to the atmosphere by processes that were never known in pre-industrial times. The dramatic change is the increase in emission of Carbon Dioxide due to industrial activity. We are adding extra Green Houss gases to the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas, and it is like adding more and more blankets all the time.
Human activities are thickening the Green House blanket and are threatening to make earth warmer than it has been in millions of years.
How did this happen?
Do you drive a car? Burning gasoline causes global warming.
Do you use electricity? Turning on a light switch or using air conditioning or a rerigerator uses power usually in a way that causes global warming. Almost all our use of energy leads to global warming.
Dr Stephen Schneider
One of the silliest things is when somebody points to a super heat wave and says “see global warming did it and then you get a cold wave and they say oh no Global wrming is a phony. Weather is what the atmosphere is doing at this moment in every place, you should never look at what happened this week in the weather, you are going to get some really weird hot and some weird cold so you have to average statistically all around the world and when you do that Global Warming emerges as a virtual certainty.
Dr. Richard Sommerville
You know when we talk about Global Warming, we usually talk about the climate getting a little bit warmer, 1C, 3C or maybe 5C warmer and people make fun of that bcause they think it is not a very big number. You can die from diseases symptoms if the fever is only a few degrees above normal.
Is it all about Heat?
Dr Jonathan Patz Director, Global Environmental Health Initiative, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
It is important when you think about Global Warming to remember that it is not just temperatures creeping up its actually increases in extreme climate events and extreme weather events like storms, floods and droughts.
Extreme Weather
Global Warming is all about climate extremes.
Dr Tom Wigley Senior Scientist – National Centre for Atmospheric Research
Of course global Warming means that the average temperature of the planet will increase, but when we do that we change all aspects of the climate system, for example if you warm up the oceans that you increase the amount of evaporation, if there is more water vapour going up into the atmosphere, then its got to rain more.
Dr Kevin Trenberth Head Climate Analysis Scetion - National Centre for Atmospheric Research
What is happening across the United States is that moderate rains are decreasing slightly, an heavy rains, very heavy rains are increasing, so it rains harder when it does rain. It is the very heavy rains that is difficult to manage because they are the ones that cause local flooding, or if the continue more widespread flooding.
Dr Paul R. Epstein Associate Director Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School
And it is these heavy rainfall events that can then flush the water out of the sanitation systems into the clean water supplies, and what that will mean to our health in terms of water contamination is something that we will have to contend with.
On the whole, the atmosphere and the planet are going to get wetter due to global warming, but in many areas, in places that are already sort of dry, the climate will on the whole will get drier, because the increased heat is going to bake the moisture straight out of the soil, and in some areas drought will become more and more common and that is a very dangerous thing, because this will have a big impact not only on agriculture but on the availability of water.
Prof. Daniel Schrag, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University.
We all see different parts of the climate system and we all experience the climate differently, we do not see the full way that the climate affects our lives. The way it affects natural ecosystems, and the way it affects our air and the water that we use and everything else.
I think what is really important, when you look around on your surroundings, just look outside, is to realize how connected everything is.
Dr Jonathan Foley Director, Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
I think a lot of people see climate change as some big theoretical thing far into the future that doesn’t connect to their everyday lives. And really don’t think that is true.
Imagine, imagine that you live in New England and I grew up in Maine for example, and seeing that the time of the leaves change colours starts to change or maybe they don’t change colour anymore. Or your favorite skiing spot no longer gets snow, or here in the upper Mid-west where I live now you cannot go ice fishing in the winter anymore, or the geese that come in the spring don’t come at the same time. All of those things that we take for granted about the pulse of the seasons, about when the Maple syrup runs in the spring and when the leaves turn in the fall, or when the snow comes for the kids, if all of those things started to change, it would really change the character of where we live in many profound ways.
Dr William Collins Climate Scientist - National Centre for Atmospheric Research
Scientists are sure that we are changing the climate for the foreseeable future, but what we are not sure about is whether we are able to live with those changes.
What kind of changes?
Water Supply
Our civilization is dependent on having water, where we want it and when we want it and in the quantities that we need it. That whole system is going to be turned upside down as the climate changes. For instance its going to change the balance between snow and rain, and that’s a big deal because of a lot of places in the west we are dependent on our ability to store water and get it from snow-pack.
Dr Kevin Trenberth Head Climate Analysis Section - National Centre for Atmospheric Research
Snow-pack is a way of nature saving water from the times when we really don’t need it in the winter time to the times when we do need it in the spring and in the summer time, when the plants are beginning to grow.
In the western states, 75% of the water supply comes from snow-pack.
Dr. Stephen Schneider Co-director Centre for Environmental Science and Policy, Stanford University.
And the predictions are that as it gets hotter and this is not a very sophisticated concept, it gets hotter you are going to get less snow.
Scott Pattee Water Supply Specialist, US Department of Agriculture
In Yakima Country, Washington May 2005 what is happening is there is no snow at the lower elevations which is no surprise for this time of year, there isn’t any snow at the mid altitude elevations which is a little bit of a surprising since there should be some snow in there, but then we get up to these elevations where there should be lots of snow and there is again virtually no snow up here. I have been doing this for twelve years and I have never seen it this bad. Normally at this location we have several feet of snow, where these roads are we would still be good for cross-country skiers.
Dr Michael Scott Scientist Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
If the weather is warm in the winter in this part of the world the precipitation that does fall, tends to fall as rain rather than snow, or if it falls as snow it tends to run off early and what that means is that the water that escapes down the rivers before we need it and this year all of the water came down the river at the wrong time of year, and we don’t have the capacity to hold that water back, the man-made storage is not large enough, so we lose the water in effect.
Dr. Richard Sommerville Climate Research Division Scripps Intitution of Oceanography
The very elaborate infrastructure that has been put together in the dams and the pumps and the canals and the reservoirs won’t work because they were designed for the climate that we had rather than the climate we are going to have.
States that rely on Snow Pack for water provide more than 75% of the USA’s fresh fruit.
Steve George, owner The George Fruit Farm, Moxee Washington
If I don’t have water, I will eventually will lose the trees and then I will have no way to generate an income. Basically what we don’t have is the snow pack that say we used to have you know forty or fifty years ago.
Since 1950, spring snow pack has declined as much as 60%.
You know the precipitation doesn’t come as snow, it only comes as rain and runs off , or if it does come as snow it melts faster, and I got no fruit, or hardly any fruit. If you have this to deal with this once every ten years you could probably absorb it, but every third to fifth year makes it very difficult, you know its not much different than going to Las Vegas. And if I don’t have water I cannot even begin to throw the dice.
Dr William Collins Climate Scientist - National Centre for Atmospheric Research
There will be aspects of global warming that will be changes in the water supply that will be stressful. As we go further up into the future there may be aspects of global warming that will fundamentally change the United States.
What else could change?
Greater or lesser extent all of our lives will be affected and most of those effects will be very unpleasant.
Forest Fires
For instance there are three things that you need to get a forest fire going, heat, drought and dead trees (vegetation), and global warming is going to give us all three of these.
Extinction
We can already see large scale damage to coral reefs. If we have a very large warming species, which literally cannot stand the heat will have to move out of where they are or if they can’t move go out of business all together.
One quarter of all plant and animal species could face extinction by the end of this century due to global warming.
Tropical diseases
Prof. Michael Oppenheimer Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University
Certain bugs that don’t do well in cold weather do very well in hot weather. So as the earth warms those bugs are going to thrive and we are going to see more and more diseases of this sort that have previously been confined to the tropics largely.
In 1999 West Nile Virus was first detected in New York City. It has now spread to 48 states in the USA.
Dr Jonathan Patz Director, Global Environmental Health Initiative, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
The mosquitoes that carry that virus are already in the United States and it only took the introduction of that virus probably from international travel for this disease to begin to take hold.
Dr Paul R. Epstein Associate Director Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School
The mosquito that carries West Nile Virus bites birds and can transmit the virus between the birds. Other mosquitoes bit the birds that are infected and pick up the virus mosquitoes and then they bite more birds and so you get a lot of virus circulating in nature. Some of these mosquitoes bite humans.
Dr William Reisen Research Entomologist – Center for Vector-borne Diseases, University of California - Davis
And the speed at which all of this happens is driven by temperature. West Nile Virus will not grow in a Mosquito below 50F. It occurs more effectively in areas above normal temperatures. So it is an aggressive invading virus that is finding virgin soil to multiply in. With the warmth here last year, we wound up have West Nile Virus around Lake Tahoe, we have never had to look for these viruses in lake Tahoe (a ski resort high up in the Sierras). As Canada warms this mosquito will move north and so will the viruses with it.
Dr Jonathan Patz Director, Global Environmental Health Initiative, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
It is important to recognize that climate variability and climate extremes really can take an immediate and a long term toll on human health.
Dr Kevin Trenberth Head Climate Analysis Section - National Centre for Atmospheric Research
The key thing is that we are adapted to the current climate that we have and it is not just humans who are adapted to the climate in particular, it is all of the ecosystems, all of the biosphere that are adapted to our current climate.
Dr. Stephen Schneider Co-director Centre for Environmental Science and Policy, Stanford University.
People say don’t you ever see anything good in climate change, yea if I were a farmer up in Northern Canada or in a high latitude I am going to get a longer growing season, and the Carbon Dioxide is a fertilizer itself of green plants so people will focus on the fact that I will see there are benefits and there will be some, but they forget that Carbon Dioxide is not just a fertilizer of the plants we like corn, wheat plants and forest but also fertilize weeds.
Pollen
Dr Lewis Ziska Plant Physiologist, Crop Systems and Global Change, US Department of Agriculture
We know that Carbon Dioxide is the principle global warming gas, but it is also the gas that makes plants grow and if you look at Ragweed and what we find is that as Carbon Dioxide increases in the atmosphere that Ragweed grows bigger and it produces a lot more pollen.