The Global Environment and Climate Change, Iowa City, Iowa, February 19, 2013

- [Peter Hansen] I wish to acknowledge our university sponsors, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, and the University of Iowa's international programs, and also I wish to acknowledge today's community sponsors, the Community Foundation of Johnson County, Joyce Carmen, and Ed Zastrow, and we greatly appreciate their support. Following Professor Schnoor's remarks, he will answer questions, so on each of your tables you'll find three by five cards on which you can write questions, they'll be collected and brought up to me here when the time comes. Jerry Schnoor joined the college of engineering here at the university in 1977, he's the Allen S. Henry chair in engineering, he holds professorships in two departments, civil and environment engineering, as well as occupational environmental health. And in addition, he's co-director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. Jerry's a member of the National Academy of Engineering, he was elected in 1999 for his pioneering work using mathematical models in science policy decisions. He's testified before Congress on quite a number of occasions, including on the environmental effects of acid deposition, and the importance of passing the 1990 Clean Air Act. Since 2003, he has served as the editor in chief of Environmental Science and Technology, which is a leading journal in environmental science and engineering. In 2010, Jerry received the Simon W. Friess Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Prize, awarded annually by the National Water Research Institute for his research and international leadership on water sustainability. Jerry's research interests include environmental observatories, water quality modeling, global change and sustainability, and phytoremediation. So, let's welcome Jerry to our podium. - [Jerry Schnoor] Thanks Peter, and thanks to all my friends at the ICO Foreign Relations Council, it's great to be back and to be here, and they always give me the coldest day of the year to talk about climate change, but I hope you'll bear with me anyway. And we'll try to talk about some kind of recent events regarding our global climate, and what's going on with respect to the United Nations process, and open it up for questions, I'm sure you'll have a lot of good questions. This is the big blue marble which we're trying to protect, and the atmosphere, the thin veneer around it, maybe 50 miles or so up is held in place by gravity, and it's actually quite a small reservoir. In terms of total mass, it doesn't amount to very much, and when you have seven billion people on Earth and their activities in terms of gross world product increasing about three or four percent every year, you would expect to affect the atmosphere first. And indeed we are. We're taking, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 1700s when the steam engine was invented, and we started to really use coal. We've taken coal oil and natural gas deposits, which formed in the Earth varied over 50 to 300 million years ago, any time you take something that took 300 million years to form in the Earth's crust and you try to burn it and release it back again in just a couple hundred years, a blink of an eye in geologic time, of course you're going to change the atmosphere, and we are changing the atmosphere. What's more surprising to me maybe, when I graduated from college in 1972 at Iowa State University, if you would've told me that we could change the oceans, which is a massive reservoir, I would've said no, you're crazy, there's no way that we could possibly affect the oceans, even given seven billion people and three or four increase each year in GDP. But in fact we are changing the oceans too. They're about 30 percent more acidic, the entire ocean, than when I was born, so in just a few decades we've changed the acidity of the ocean, and they're about one degree Fahrenheit warmer of the sea surface temperature, an immense amount of heat that we're adding each and every year. To try to put it into perspective, it's if every one of us seven billion people could hold, I don't know how you would do this, but could hold 40 hair dryers, the big ones, the 1400 watt kind of industrial strength hair dryers, turn it on, point it down at the water, run it every day, day and night, 24 hours, 365 days a year, that's how much heat we're adding each year to the ocean. So already, it's an immense amount of heat that's being transferred from us, from our activities, to the planet. There's more heat going in than is coming out, that's very clear in the measurements, it's a top down warming, we can see it very clearly in the oceans as deep as 700 meters down. It can only be explained by warming from the atmosphere then to the oceans and down. The emissions since the Industrial Revolution continue to increase, and in fact, it's more than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could've possibly even imagined when they made these scenarios, these various storylines about our development in future decades. They underestimated the rate of increase of emissions, unfortunately they're going up. Now, they paused a little bit in 2007, 2008, and 2009, during the Great Recession, but they are still monotonically, they're going up globally. You may or may not know that there are project pledges for decreases among most of the nations participating in the United Nations negotiations. Even the US, it's right at the bottom of this page, I know you can't read it, but I'll tell you that in Copenhagen, President Obama pledged that we would decrease our emissions in the United States by 15 percent by 2020, and by 73 percent by 2050. Now, there's no teeth associated with that, that's just a pledge, but most all the countries have done that. Unfortunately, even when you look at the pledges, this is again the emissions through time on the x-axis and business as usual is basically what we're following, that red line that continues to go up and up. But if you take all the pledges into account from Copenhagen negotiations, it's still only the gray wedge here. So, it's woefully short in that not only do we need this curve to level off the emissions, we need a steep decrease, such that we need it to go from roughly 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year, that's about where we're at now, down to let's say 10. We need an 80 percent cut, that's way off the plot. So by night, we need to turn that frown upside down and have it go all the way down to 10 instead of 50. We haven't even figured out how to level it off yet. And that would allow us, if you could do that, go down to 10 by 2050, that would allow us just to level off the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere at roughly 450 parts per million. So, it would still ensure a warmer planet in the future, but at least would stabilize the situation, an 80 percent cut. Well, needless to say the carbon dioxide concentrations, because of the emissions, continue to go up. That small reservoir, it's easy to affect that, and we are indeed affecting it. And what's the obligation for various nations? It's maybe good at this point to remind ourselves that the United States can and should act first, be among the early adopters. That's because on the right side of this graph, this is a so called Cancum-o-Gram that was prepared in the United Nations meeting in 2010 following Copenhagen, and you can see that the red ball is the size of the total per capita emissions of each country. So, the red one, the United States in the upper right corner is by far the biggest. The only one that's close to us is near the lower right hand corner, Brazil, and you can see that on a per capita basis, and not everyone agrees that that should be the basis, but certainly on a per capita basis, we are the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases compared to any other country. But if that's not the way that you'd like to look at it, perhaps you'd like to think about the historic responsibility, that's the square in the middle, it shows the red, of all the greenhouse gases that are up in the atmosphere warming it each year, about 30 percent of it, 30 squares on that middle block, is from the United States. So, we're responsible for about 30 percent, even though we're only five percent of the world's population, another rationale for why we should act first. Even if you want to talk about the emissions now, today, that's the block here on the left. We're still about 16 percent of the emissions of the world, with five percent of the population today. And China has passed us up, as you may know, there was a lot about it in the press about seven years ago, they passed us, and they're at about 17 or 18 percent. But even by this reckoning, we're still one of the very largest emitters globally. So, because we're rich, you could argue, because we've benefited from all the emissions that are up there already warming the Earth, therefore we should act first. Unfortunately we're not, under the United Nations hospices, and really, folks, it's the only game in town, it's the only organization that is even trying to address this problem, so I would say thank heavens for that, they have many flaws, as you know better than anyone, but at least they're trying to deal with the very difficult problem. The Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997, we signed it, but we did not ratify it, so we're not party to that particular agreement, has come to an end. It expired at the end of 2012, and so now the countries who both signed and ratified the agreement have to think about a second pledging period, and they are thinking about that right now, and that's part of the negotiations that are going on at annual meetings of the conference of the parties. But the renewal of Kyoto is, I would say, uncertain. Many countries have said that they will pledge to a second period from 2015 to 2020. This is all under the hospices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Several of the people in our audience were at that particular meeting, that was prepared for the Rio Earth Summit, we took a bunch of students from the University of Iowa, the United Nations Association was very active in that particular meeting, Burns Weston, Dorothy Paul, and several others here. We took a lot of students, we learned a lot, and happily, the United States did sign and ratify that particular agreement. But it really set everything into place, it's a good thing, because we're a part of the negotiations, we're a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But we did not sign the Kyoto Protocol to actually reduce our emissions. 165 countries signed at that time in 1992, 195 countries have ratified, most everybody except South Sudan has ratified this, so I guess on the good side there's a recognition that this is a serious problem that we should be meeting, and doing something about it. But the progress has been lacking. The latest meeting, so after Copenhagen, when again we took a bunch of students and learned a lot, but without much agreements coming to fruition. We had Cancun, then Durban, and then Doha, and there'll be another one, I forget where, in November or December of this year. But it's all about trying to keep the process going on the Framework Convention for Climate Change. At the Doha, they agreed to a second commitment period, this 2015 will be the signing, and 2020 will be the implementation for a new Kyoto, a replacement to Kyoto. But on the bad side, lots of countries objected, even countries who ratified the first time, like Canada, Canada pulled out in 2011, like Russia, Belarus, have said that they will not participate this second go around. Other countries that were not a party, like the United States, also have not said that they will participate. So, it's not looking good for another round of agreements. In fact, the countries that are serious only represent 15 percent of the total emissions. So, we're down to a group of countries that really can't Affect the issue very much any longer, and the ones who have said that they will back out, Japan, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, New Zealand also, United States and Canada will not participate, and so combining that with the fact that China, the world's largest emitter, India and Brazil, are not subject to emission reductions right now, it makes it rather weak. I think that on the general public it's kind of lost that these negotiations recognize that everyone will eventually have to be involved. The United Nations clearly recognizes differential responsibilities, that's the key word, of different countries, but that everyone will need to eventually reduce their emissions, and that's important since we need an 80 percent cut in the emissions, it is mandatory that everybody participate. And this just is to remind me to say that the rich countries as well as the developing countries are scheduled to begin to reduce their emissions, but somewhat later than the annex one countries, the rich countries, and that's the United Nations recognizes that that's the correct way to proceed, and I think it is. Well, you might say well, so what? You know, has this begun to affect us much? Look how cold it is outside today, and the answer is truly, we're just at the beginning of this. The global warming and all of its ramifications have just started, really. I consider a data point to be a decade in the sense of climate change, you think long term. Every 10 years is one data point to me, so we've only had about three data points or so, the last 30 years, where the signal has emerged from the noise, where it's very clear that we're beginning to warm up, say, since 1980. And the signal's strong, and it's monotonic, increasing 10 to the 12, President Obama said in his State of the Union Address, thank heavens, last week quoted that 10 of the 12 warmest years on record have occurred in the last 15 years, and that's true, it's part of this monotonic increase that we're observing at this point. The plot on the upper right is how much warmer it's gotten in the last 100 years, and averaged over the whole Earth over all the seasons, that's about 0.8 degrees Celsius, or about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. You can see it's a lot more in the Arctic, we think we understand why that is. As the sea ice in the Arctic begins to melt, the white reflective surface yields to a dark sea, that absorbs more radiation, and it's a positive feedback loop. And that's why the Arctic is so much warmer, Antarctic not so much because it's continental ice. Even if it melts or breaks off, it still yields a white reflective surface, so the models generally get this right. If anything, they would indicate that the Arctic should be warming less fast than it is, so if anything, they're on the conservative side. And you can see on the lower right one, I hope it's not too small, but this 30 year signal that I'm talking about where we're real sure now that the signal has emerged from the noise, we're just at the beginning of it, three data points, in my view of things, but we are experiencing the beginning of warming, and it has important repercussions. This is the sea surface temperature in just the last 50 years, so within our lifetimes, you can see, most of us, anyway, in the audience, you can see that the Earth is warmer, its oceans, 40 hand dryers per person, seven billion of us not withstanding, this is how much it has increased in 50 years, smeared over the whole planet over all the seasons, about one degree Fahrenheit warmer. Notice it's a bit less than the atmosphere, that's because it all kind of makes sense, multiple lines of evidence, first we're warming the atmosphere, we know that because actually we have SANS that measure this 3,000 argo SANS that show quite clearly in the last six years that more energy is going into the Earth's surface than is going out. We have very good measurements on that. And the result of it is this plot of a warmer ocean. So yes, in our lifetime, we're getting warmer, and even the oceans are getting warmer. It's a top down warming, first the atmosphere, 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, then the ocean, one degree Fahrenheit. So, it's lagging because the ocean is such an immense heat capacitor that it lags, but it is warming. And we can see this signal 700 meters down. Most of the climatologists that I talk to don't worry so much about those averages, because even 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit of the air warming isn't so much yet, we're just at the beginning, like I said. But we're at a beginning of an accelerating warming process. It's the extremes that they worry about more, and one way to measure the extremes is this particular index, it's an index that sums the extremes year by year of precipitation, temperature, the drought index, and there's a fourth one that's been added recently on the severity of the wind velocity, and wind sheer in tropical storms. And I don't know if you can see it, there's a green line connecting the red bars on the right hand side, that's the recent years since 2010, and you can see that the extremes in climate indeed are increasing. And that has ramifications in terms of damages and how much we have to pay to repair things like the storm from hurricane Sandy. Again, I'm not sure how much people realize, but we are beginning to see true extremes in our lifetime. Hurricane Sandy is one example. Four Katrinas could fit inside of Sandy, it was such a massive storm, unprecedented, on the eastern seaboard. It hit 943 miles of coastline, several hundred miles longer than any other storm, with tropical force winds all at once, 943 miles, a massive storm. We measured a pressure reading in the middle of that storm of 940 millibars, that's an all time record, 200 year lowest pressure ever measured on the eastern coast. The lowest pressure ever, ever measured on Earth was in the Pacific at 870 millibars. So, we're seeing extremes that haven't been seen not only in our lifetime, but in the last couple hundreds of years. So, it's really the extremes that maybe we should be concerned about. But coming back to the means, everything I've shown you so far has been data, this is the first time we've looked at a model, and these are the model projections from 2000 to 2100, and these are different United Nations IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, different reckonings, storylines, or scenarios depending on whether we get serious about controlling these emissions and temperature begins to level off, or whether we do not. The orange one at the bottom, right, is if we could stop all emissions today. So, of course we can't, but if we could stop all emissions, take it from 50 to zero on the previous plot, we'd still warm, and that's because the gases have such a long half life in the atmosphere, they stay as much as 100 years or more, and that means that the gases that are up there now are continuing to warm year after year after year, even though, if you could stop all new emissions, we'd still warm. But more likely scenarios are the blue, green, and red as you move up. We're following the red one right now, the most severe business as usual, which would result in a warming of right now we've had 0.8 degrees, it would result in a total of about four degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, so maybe not our lifetime, but certainly our children and children's children lifetime, four degrees compared to what, remember I said we're just at the beginning, 0.8 so far, that would really be a totally different planet Earth, different species, different climate, different storms, way different extremes as a result of anything like that. If we could do this 80 percent thing where you not only transition, you transition out of the fossil fuel age and get down to 10 instead of 50, we might be able to achieve the blue line on this plot, so we'll still see a great deal more warming, we'll still have 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we would achieve a warming of something on the order between one and two degrees Celsius more warming, which also is way more than we've had so far, still given what we've talked about. The latest story that folks are talking about these days is sea level rise. In the last IPCC report from 2007, there's a new one out, supposed to come out next year, but in the last report, they didn't deal very much with abrupt climate change or sea level rise, but people are very interested in that now. And the reason is, first of all, we know very well how the sea level is changing. We have good satellite data the last 30 years on that. And in the past, it's been a rising sea level about two to three millimeters per year, that's about roughly an inch in a century. So, about this much every 10 years, and we could explain that very well, and the models also get it correct, because as water warms, that one degree Fahrenheit warmer ocean that I showed you, it expands, water expands as it warms. And so, it was totally consistent, the sea level rise, with the thermal expansion of the ocean. But now, satellites tell us that it's rising about twice that rate, and very recently in just the last 10 years. And mass balances on water show that it's about consistent with the melting of the continental glaciers, the breaking of western ice shelves in Antarctica, and the melting of the ice in Greenland. So, land based ice that is now melting adds to the sea level, and that's roughly doubled the rate of sea level rise. Well, because it's accelerating, that's what everybody's talking about, how much could the sea level rise with this acceleration in the next few decades? And that's very troubling. Most troubling of all, oh, first of all, the floating ice in the Arctic, you know, that doesn't affect sea level. 'Cause like the ice cubes in our glass of water, Archimedes' principle, it's already exerted its buoyancy effect, and it doesn't change when the Arctic ice melts, the floating ice, but it does affect things like polar bears who have to fish off of the floating ice and there won't be any floating ice in the very near future. But what I was going to say is from a standpoint of abrupt climate change, this is what's troubling or worrisome. The notion that a lot of continental ice is melting, Glacier National Park, you better get there fast if you want to see a glacier. It's happening basically globally, all over. And here it Greenland it looks like this, it's a massive melting, it falls down shafts called moulins in the ice, and the concern is could it lubricate the land-ice interface, and all of this is slowly, at glacial speeds, slipping off into the ocean, but could it accelerate that, and accelerate it dramatically such that the seal level might not rise in such a controlled way, but rather maybe three feet or more at a time? Say, three feet in a decade, something like that. And as you know, it's not even really the sea level itself that we worry about so much as the storm surge, which is associated with a higher sea level and greater tides like we saw in hurricane Sandy. There was a man from Holland who went to Battery Park in Manhattan after Sandy and he looked over the railing, if you've been there, you know what he sees, the water's just right down a couple feet below the railing, and he just shook his head and said oh my gosh, he says, you're naked. You know, we are totally unprotected, and so we had hurricane Irene in 2011, we had hurricane Sandy in 2012, how many times do we need to evacuate the subways in New York? This is year after year after year, and we are naked. And then you have to ask yourself, you know, when does it occur that inaction is more expensive than action? I think we're at that time where inaction, doing nothing about this, will be far more expensive than beginning to transition our economy out of this fossil fuel age, which we've enjoyed for 200 years, and into something more sustainable. This is the result of the ice flow, so far most instruments indicate that it's accelerating but not feet of sea level rise change, but rather inches of sea level rise change. This is the Jakobshavn Ice Stream, the icebergs coming off of the surface of Greenland. I thought I should finish up by just talking a little bit about Iowa, and of course climate change affects us as well, and the governor and the Iowa General Assembly asked a group of people from the region's institutions to give a report on what does this mean for Iowa? I found it a little bit interesting in that they didn't want to talk too much about mitigation of climate change, you're hard pressed to get a good conversation going on actually reducing our emissions and what's necessary to reduce our emissions, even though wind power does that, even though big wind and small solar for Iowa makes a lot of sense. And I know that Mike Carbery and others in the audience, I think that's the way we should be going, Mike, big wind and small solar for us, and it creates jobs, and will help the economy. It doesn't have to be painful, but that seems to be how we look at it. At any rate, on the good side, people in Des Moines are very interested in talking about adaptation, they do think something is going on, they recognize that, our farmers are planting earlier, harvesting earlier, taking precautions that they wouldn't have taken even a decade ago. So, people do recognize that our climate has changed, and they are even changing their actions. They're all about let's figure out how we can adapt to this, they don't want to talk too much about mitigation. But for me, I think we have to be a part of a mitigation plan, again, thank heavens that there are still negotiations going on through the United Nations, but adaptation is important too. This is Oakville, Iowa, the scene on the right, not too far from here, when their levee broke, you may remember, in 2008, the whole thing flooded. Basically in the Midwest we're getting about 10 or 20 percent more precipitation than we were 100 years ago. But it's even a bit worse than it sounds in that the precipitation is coming at such a time and in such intense intervals that it's running off, so we're getting about 30 percent more stream discharge in eastern Iowa for a 10 or a 20 percent increase. And we think we understand why we're getting these intense storms, much more intense. If you go back in our record here in Iowa City, 100 years ago, you're hard pressed to find a four inch rainfall in a day, it's a very rare event. Now, it's not so unusual to get four inches of precipitation in a single day, and often followed by two or by one in the next day. We have a satellite called the Aqua satellite, it's got an instrument on board called the AIRS instrument, and it's an infrared instrument that water vapor's opaque to infrared signals, so we have real good data on the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, and it's increasing, as you might expect, because the Earth's surface is a bit warmer, so there's more evaporation, more evaporation means more moisture, more clouds, more clouds means the possibility of more rainfall, and that is what we're seeing. And the clouds that are forming are very high in the atmosphere, and we think that those are what is causing these intense precipitation events, which 100 years ago weren't very common. In fact, in the Midwest, we're part of about a 31 percent increase in the one percentile storm events. But notice the Northeast, man, they're getting socked. They've even seeing it much more than we are at 67 percent in the Northeastern increase in the one percentile, most heavy precipitation. And I don't need to remind you what it was like, actually at the University of Iowa, you may know that we kind of flooded inside out a little bit in that this barrier was put up with help from the governor and the National Guard, I'm told it's from techniques developed actually in Iraq, thank heavens there are some good spinoffs. But they got the barrier up and everything in time, and for that we're fortunate too in that we have the reservoir, so we get a little bit of warning, say, compared to Cedar Rapids, for example, because we have the reservoir. Until the reservoir fills and spills, once it spills you've lost all flood control, but we have a little time until we know that it's going to fill and spill. And that allows you to put up barriers, which we could do well here, but then it flooded through the steam tunnels. And you may know that that problem is fixed now, we have balloons that engage and fill the steam tunnels so that won't happen again. But that's what happened in 2008. I thought you might be interested, this is from Jean Tackley, my climatologist colleague at Iowa State University, just what our records tend to look like, this is the Cedar Rapids 100-something year record of total annual precipitation year by year, and you can see that it's trending up. When it started in 1900, Cedar Rapids got about 28 inches of precipitation in a year, but Cedar Rapids now gets about 36 or 37 inches of precipitation in a year. And you can see also that there's a lot of variability year by year, but I think the trend is very clear, especially when you look at river after river after river, they all look like this, it's a very consistent picture. This is the way that it looked in Waterloo on those June days of 2008, pretty scary phenomenon. And of course the entire downtown was flooded, we're still not out of this, as you know, even at the University of Iowa, the buildings that were flooded, many of them still haven't been replaced. So, in that regard, we're somewhat like New Orleans, it takes years, even decades, to recover from these events. This is just to show you on the blue at the top is the rainfall in 2008, the green is the flow in the Cedar River coming by the Cedar Rapids, and I don't have a pointer, but what I wanted to point out was that this area is about that represents two inches of rain, the blue lines coming down, and you can see that this was an all time high for Cedar Rapids, well outside of the record, which was around 72,000 if I remember, cubic feet per second, and it reached about 114,000 cubic feet per second because we got two inches of rain one day followed by two inches of rain, two inches of rain, one inch of rain, two more inches right as the peak of the flood was coming down the Cedar River, two more inches right on top of it. So, it was a perfect storm, if you will, but like all of these extremes, it's an event that will occur more frequently in the future. And so, can you say that the flood of 2008 was caused by climate change? I don't know, I mean, nobody can truly answer that question, but you can say with certainty that this type of a storm will occur more frequently in the future. For years now, I remember as a boy when we'd plow fields in Iowa, we'd use the deep moldboard plows and it was subject to a lot of erosion, and now, thankfully, we're leaving residues using conservation tillage, and even node tillage, and there's a lot more plant residue on the ground helping to intercept the energy of those raindrops as they come down, the snow melt as it runs across the land. But we're now faced with this increasing intense events which are causing soil loss, again, to be quite remarkable in Iowa. So, because of the change in climate, and the change in land use, more and more land planted to corn, say, corn for biofuels, for example. Because of that, we're getting more runoff and soil erosion. And the damages, again, maybe inaction really is more expensive than taking action, because they run in the billions of dollars from a loss like that. This particular slide, our committee thought that it was important to warn Iowans, especially if you respiratory disease, or problems of any kind, you really should work in a home like this full of mold. I mean, it's a really serious health hazard, and this is my public health coming out that this is actually a quite serious health hazard that's largely unrecognized of the need for people to go back in their homes with all that mold, and to try to make repairs, it's hard. Also, it not only affects people, and the whole talk has been very anthropocentric, and I apologize for that, but the animals and wildlife is effected by all of this, as you can imagine. I did a canoeing trip on the Maquoketa River not long ago and I saw some of these turtles, the Iowa wood turtle. They make their nest out on a sandbar, trying to protect the eggs from raccoons, and like that, but of course when you get these intense rainfall, away it goes. So, this is a species that's endangered in Iowa, and very much effected by the intensity of storm events that we're talking about today. So, our quote Adaptation Committee, which Des Moines is very happy to talk about, came up with some recommendations, I think they're kind of common sense recommendations, and I won't go through 'em one by one. But it has to do with hardening our infrastructure, we have to make it such that, you know, for every well at the Iowa City water plant, we used to have the pumps for those wells in the low area because it was cheaper to lift the water from there and the capacitors and the transformers in low areas, everything has to be lifted up. No longer do we put the physical plant for our facilities and our buildings in the basement, we can't do that anymore, the physical plant has to be on the roof, or somewhere else. And if you must build a building in the floodplain, like Cedar Rapids is planning on doing with the new casino, if you must do that, you got to be able to hose it down, you know, it's got to be completely floodable with minor work required to hose down the walls, much like our crew team's boathouse here at the University of Iowa. We made a series of recommendations about highways and changing standards for making them more flood proof, and the Iowa insurance division to more properly help us with the risks and costs of property insurance, and all that is in the report online if you're interested. But in conclusion, I would say that climate change is already occurring, it's here, but we're really just experiencing the very beginning of this, and it goes on and on and on without end until we make that curve turn over and go down. We have to transition out of this age that we call the fossil fuel age and find a whole new way of doing business, and that's a big challenge, because it affects every industry, and the clothes that we make, the cars that we drive, the buildings and the building materials, the industries and the manufacturing, everything, it's going to change everything. But we can and we must do it. I truly think we will, there's still more time, but not much more. I mean, we're nearing the end of our response time, and so I want this to be a call to action, not a call for pessimism, there is still time, but we have to have groups like this exert an influence and begin to change the hearts and minds of people in Des Moines, locally, and nationally, and internationally. Speaking of that, I think of a really wonderful book which has come out recently, I'd like to say that Burns Weston right here, and David Butler, have written a new book, Green Governance, Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons by Cambridge University Press, so maybe I can draw Burns into the question and answer period too to talk about what we really can do to have a positive and optimistic perspective on these very serious problems. Thanks so much for listening to me and coming out on such a cold day, thank you. - [Peter Hansen] First question, your prediction, will President Obama approve the Keystone XL pipeline? - [Jerry Schnoor] My prediction, or do you want to know what I think we should do? My prediction, I think he will approve it, I think he will approve it. Hopefully, let's hope that he gets something good in return for approving it. I don't think we need it, you know, we might as well burn West Virginia coal, in terms of the greenhouse gas footprint, it's roughly similar between West Virginia coal and you know, why do we need the Alberta oil sands? To me, we don't need either one. And so, I don't think we should, but I think he will probably approve it. I think he intends to address climate change, and I think he sees it as part of his legacy, I really do, I think his heart is in the right place, but I think he knows that it's a non starter in Congress so that it'll all be done by executive order and rules under the Clean Air Act, which thankfully the Supreme Court has ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and that many things are available to him without new legislation. I don't see us getting new legislation in the next couple years. It's ironic, because in 2007, before Copenhagen, everybody thought, I was in Washington, D.C., I testified there, everyone thought we were going to have comprehensive energy and climate legislation nationally. And they geared all the thinking in the laws according to that, but it didn't happen, the Great Recession happened instead, seems to have changed everything. Hopefully it'll change back again, 'cause it can very quickly, as we saw in 2007, 2008. - [Peter Hansen] Two questions here, is there hope for serious leadership on climate change by one or more of the BRICKS? BRICKS being Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Second question, will carbon tax proposals go anywhere? - [Jerry Schnoor] The BRICKS are pretty much have said they won't participate in it, so there's no hope there. Regarding the carbon tax, most of us are pushing for Mike Carbery, a column by him too, most of us are pushing for James Hansen's fee and dividend idea, that we would have a tax at the producer, at the initial point of production, or point of entry into the country, and that that tax would raise up energy prices from fossil fuels, and that it would be returned as a dividend on a monthly basis, on a per capita basis to the people with no government intervention, it'd be revenue neutral, so it would completely go back, and that would thus raise prices for fossil fuels, discouraging them, and lower prices because of economies of scale for things like big wind and small solar and energy efficiency, and the kind of things that we should be doing. If you're conservative, and by that I mean you're careful with your resources, you'll make money out of the deal because you'll get back more in the dividend than you're energy prices go up, and if you use a lot, it's a tax on your unsustainability and you'll pay more. I think it's imminently fair, and a good idea. The cap and trade has largely fallen out of favor pretty much globally. The only markets that we have are very low price of carbon at the moment, and fraught with all kinds of difficulties. - [Peter Hansen] What is your prediction about the possible altering of the flow of the Gulf Stream and its impact on Europe and North America? - [Jerry Schnoor] If that happened, that'd be a change, you know, and Greenland is melting so fast, as I showed you, and that's cold freshwater and it goes across the top and could force the Gulf Stream further south, it would make Europe colder, and make other places warmer, while at the same time the entire planet continues to get warmer on average. So, it would be a big change for European weather and the ocean circulation in the Atlantic. - [Peter Hansen] Well, Ed where's our executive director? It's getting a little late, should we keep going? I still have quite a few questions here. What is the best method for convincing climate change skeptics that this is a genuine issue? - [Jerry Schnoor] I wish I knew, I wonder if anyone has a comment from the audience. Pardon me, Burns? The ballot box. But like our quiz said, only 50 percent of us believe. I think it's slightly higher than that, our quiz might be a little bit old, but it's not greatly higher than that, I give a lot of talks, and I talk to a lot of people, and endure some slings and arrows, as I'm sure some of you do as well. - [Peter Hansen] Do you have any thoughts on how higher temperatures and increased heavy rains will affect farm productions and the type of crops in the next 20 to 30 years here in Iowa? - [Jerry Schnoor] Well, that's very interesting, because I showed you our past, which is very clear in the instrumental record that we're getting much more intense precipitation. In general, that's been favorable to agriculture, except in flood years. We've have plenty of water, the most important ingredient for good crops, however, the longterm productions of the models would indicate, you know, Iowa's kind of right on the cusp where our weather is dominated by the Gulf of Mexico and the precipitation that comes up from there, but we could easily flip over into a new climate regime where we'd look more like Nebraska. And that's how the models project us in the future as being warmer and drier. And so, while there could be still intense events, as I've shown you, because there's more energy to dissipate, the general climate in Iowa would be drier, that's what the models say, and that would be very bad for our agriculture. - [Peter Hansen] Does the melting of Arctic ice have implications for Earth's rotational stability? - [Jerry Schnoor] Boy, I don't know, where's our physicist? I got my biologist John Menager back there, let's see, I really don't know the answer to that, to that particular question. Very, very small is the answer. - [Peter Hansen] Perhaps this should be our last question. How many of the recommendations from your report have been implemented? - [Jerry Schnoor] That's a very mean question. The previous one that I chaired, we recommended more wind power, and we've got a lot more wind power, and we recommended less coal, and thanks to the Sierra Club and other reasons, we've gotten less coal too, and pledges for less coal in Iowa. Actually, it's pretty amazing, we've had about 100 coal-fired power plants, they're the small ones and the older ones, but we are making a transition away from coal-fired power now in this country, and that's some food for hope, I think. - [Peter Hansen] So, it's time to conclude today's program. On behalf of the Iowa City of Foreign Relations Council, we want to thank our speaker Jerry Schnoor for his talk on the global environment and climate change. Please give him one final hand. I also wish to thank our sponsors, University of Iowa international programs, University of Iowa's Honors Program, the Community Foundation of Johnson County, and Joyce Carmen and Ed Zastrow for their generous support. And Jerry, we have a crisis, normally at this point we present the coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug, but some scoundrel must've absconded with it, because I don't have it here. We'll have to give that to you at a later date. Anyone present today who's not a member, we hope you'll consider joining the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, again, table at the back of the hall here, Cathy has all the information you need. For those of you viewing this program on City Channel 4 cable TV, we hope you have found it stimulating. Should you wish to become a member of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council or support our programs with tax deductible contribution, please call 319-335-0351, or mail your donation directly to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council at 1111 University Capitol Centre, Iowa City, Iowa, 52242. Before leaving us to enjoy the rest of your day, please remember to return your nametags, and thank you again for joining us, we are adjourned.