TEDxNASA - Bruce Wielicki - Climate Change: Fact And Fiction

all right really glad to be here I have to confess first being a scientist I will tell you this is the last place I ever want to be with all of you out there I really want to be hiding in an office somewhere with my computer doing my clouds doing my little cloud modeling but they asked me come out here and tell you about something that is my mission in life which is climate and climate change and to give you a little sense of how I got into that it started for me with Jacques Cousteau in the 60s some of you may remember all of his TV shows about the mysteries of the ocean that made me want to go off and be a physical oceanographer and I already spent three years of graduate school going for my PhD when I had the chance to go for a summer program where they brought one of the earliest climate models this would have been the 1970s and in that time period a climate model running in a big computer was something you'd run in your cell phone today and that model I added something that you just heard about cloud feedback but what's cloud feedback God feedback is as I warm the climate think of global warming just one degree centigrade two degrees Fahrenheit I change global cloud covered by one percent if I just change it by one percent it turns out I learned that summer that dramatically changes the sensitivity of the climate system think of the volume dial on your stereo you can turn it up or down depending on what clouds do that was my epiphany I had to go back and tell my major professor of three years I couldn't do oceanography anymore I had to leave I had to go somewhere else went to another Institute took up a whole new field got into clouds studied that and I have been chasing the holy grail of cloud feedback along with many people in the science community for the last 30 years now we haven't answered it all yet but in that process we've learned a lot of things and I'm here to tell you about some of those things we've learned and one of the things we've learned in particular is what I call the three laws of climate change the three laws are accuracy accuracy accuracy now you all know the three laws of real estate location location location right but these three laws actually are three different accuracies one is accuracy the scientific data we use we scientists love that one the other is accuracy of the public information you get to understand climate change and finally the accuracy of policymakers how do we change what we're doing so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that today and I'm going to start that process by giving you a little sense for how the climate system works you will have a budget at home you have income coming in of expenses going out you balance the two the way the climate system work is very similar to that sunlight is the incoming resource or energy that keeps heating up the planet we have to get rid of it somehow often the red on your right is infrared radiation you actually know what infrared radiation is you don't see it with your eyes but you feel it off of fire if you're near it that's dumping energy off to space the balance of the two is our budget or energy budget of the planet that's what determines the temperature of the planet but then we have these weird things called greenhouse gases what do they do they actually block some of that infrared from getting to space and when they do that they act just like you putting another blanket on your bed at night it's going to make you warmer the more co2 we put in the atmosphere the more blankets we have the warmer we get it really isn't that much more complicated than that so as we study that system I knew if I wanted to see a 1% cloud amount change I immediately was going to have to go off and look at satellite data because I couldn't see one percent in the sky out my window it's way too variable the weather is too noisy so we took some of the first satellite data you're seeing an image of it behind me from 1965 that's what the globe looked like from the first satellite view of the planet it's very bizarre to look at it's got all sorts of weird artifacts in it from mosaicing different times and places together but now let me fast forward from 1965 to where we are today that's the world we see from space today era 2000 our new Earth observing system from NASA satellites orbiting the globe we see that accurate of you every day of the entire planet that's why we know a lot more about climate change now that we did in the 1960s and not only do we look at it in the way we see it in light but we see it in many different wavelengths so thick colors of light we can see the green vegetation the brown deserts we can see the snow the ice the clouds we can see the thermal emission from the surface in the infrared up to space in the windows we can see emission from temperature and humidity vertically profiled through the atmosphere and all that goes together and our understanding of the climate system and how we can predict where it's going in the future but one of the key things I have to get a to you is the difference between weather and climate I have been giving climate lectures to the public for 15 years and this is the first thing that trips everybody up I get this question if we can't predict weather more than five days in the future how could we ever predict climate 50 years in the future and the answer is there are two totally separate things so look at this little chart here on the left you see daily average temperatures for right here in Virginia from March 2010 they varied from 35 degrees Fahrenheit up to 60 if I now instead take and that's the weather we're all used to seeing try to predict day to day if I now take the monthly average of marches for 30 years that's the middle and now you see you're down at nine or ten degrees Fahrenheit and if I take global annual temperature that's the one on the far right now there's only a range of about a degree over 30 years and most of that is a trend it's not actually noise so now you can see the dramatic difference in which the accuracy we need to need data you mention accuracy accuracy accuracy the first one I'm going into is the data itself and now you can get some sense of why climate and weather are two totally different animals so when we look for accuracy you already know in your own home life you really care when you put a thermometer in your child's mouth with a fever whether that fever was 104 or 101 that's a huge impact use with better be calibrated to within a few degrees well for climate we need things calibrated for a few tenths of a degree so let me show you a little bit about how that works and I have to apologize I'm showing a chart I know this is not good so stick with me here for a minute because some really important points in this chart first of all the vertical axis is the amount of change of warming per decade for 10 years so 0.2 degrees C on the left and about 0.4 degrees C on the right axis is what we expect to get per decade in the next couple decades from our best current climate models and where the world's going this is what the IPCC predicts what's the IPCC that's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that group is thousands of scientists around the world put together every five or six years the best wisdom we have on the planet for where the climate system is going what our risks are what our issues are so they're thinking couple tenths of a degree well look on that line for the green line that's what you'd get with perfect data if you are trying to do climate change and if you look at a record on the horizontal that tells you how long a climate record you have if you only had five or ten years on the left of that chart your uncertainty in the Green Line is way up at the same point two degrees we're trying to measure so if you see something on the internet this is oh my gosh since 1998 in the El Nino we haven't been warming in the last five or ten years that's somebody who doesn't know climate science at all that's just noise the climate system itself has its own noise but the longer you go out in the record the smaller and smaller that noise gets so unlike weather prediction climate is more predictable the longer we go it's a very different system so now in red you can see the accuracy of our current weather satellites about 0.15 degrees C and in blue you can see where we want to go in the future which is 0.03 and now you can see that blue line nicely gets very close to the perfect observing system and that lets us much more quickly get information on climate change than we currently do we'll need less time to see what we know and don't know about climate change so what Langley one of the new projects we have that I've been excited to be involved in about is called clary oh that's climate absolute accuracy and radiance and refractive 'ti it's a new observatory where we basically take the kind of accuracy we currently have in NIST laboratories here down the planet and launch them into orbit so that we get much more accurate data up in orbit that's really critical from what I was just trying to tell you about how can we do climate change and in the future this will let us raise kind of the whole observing system up in accuracy so for an example here's a Google map view of our clariel satellite in purple coming through making its observations planning the match in time space and angle a second satellite aqua coming through and actually allowing us to calibrate in orbit other instruments make them much more accurate so that all of our observing system gets a lot more accurate than it used to be this is one of those ground changing things we hope to do and our current planned launch date is in 2018 why do we care about accuracy and where climate change is going since we're here on the peninsula anybody who lives here knows how close we are to sea level this chart shows you from the University Arizona digital elevation around the globe if I had a 12-foot sea level or four meter sea level rise what part in red would be covered in water most of Virginia Beach a lot of Hampton a lot of Norfolk you can see many of you probably live in places that would be underwater that 12-foot sounds like a lot we're not getting anywhere near that fast so far so is that really where we're going well if I go that IPCC report it says depending on how much carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere how long you wait for the system to warm up and how sensitive that volume dial is I talked about we have anywhere from 1 to 11 foot of sea level rise coming up just from the expanding of the oceans thermally so that thermal expansion of the oceans alone is going to give us 1 to 11 feet when you add the ice sheets on top of that you're going to get more in the ice sheets by the way to show you in the Paleo data the ice core data we have back from 125,000 years ago we can show the poles were a little bit warmer than now they're about where we're going to send them in the next 50 years with carbon dioxide emissions and at that time sea level was 15 to 20 feet higher than today that's where the planet wants to go that's where we're trying to push it and you should realize we are pushing the planet 100 times faster than a glacial interglacial is pushing it by our orbit around the Sun we are doing something the planet has never seen before so now let me switch from accuracy of the data to accuracy of public information and that's highs the sim earlier talks here at Ted about the information age and where we're going in it and what I've got to offer in that particular age particular topic is how difficult it is for many of you to understand so here's a topic climate change this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation that was just last November in a headline of a magazine here's another one Climategate and the big green lie this is all some scientific conspiracy according to some people but yet actual objective inquiry into that over the next six months while you were all confused as a public about this scientific conspiracy showed no there's no scientific conspiracy a matter of fact if you ever worked in the science community you would realize the last people on the planet capable of conspiracy are scientists their entire career their entire career is spent trying to prove the other guy's wrong that's what we do for a living we we revel in it do you think we're gonna ask inspire together oh my god we would it wouldn't dream of it but yet that's what's sold to the public is why climate is not real it's just some conspiracy so you should realize here's an entire book that's been written by science historians about something called merchants of doubt now what do you mean by doubt well doubt we all have things sitting here on the internet that tell us where all this climate change fact is it fiction what's really going on is it political agenda there are groups out there you just have to realize who are making beautiful scientific looking websites with the sole purpose of convincing you there's more uncertainty about climate change and there really is they are merchants of doubt you as consumers of information have to learn how to find accurate information in the Internet this is just like the American Revolution when newspapers exploded on the world for more rapid cheap information flow and initially there was no quality control there was mostly garbage showing up that with strong political agendas were right back in that world it's not bad it's just we're in a change and we have to society to learn how to better quality control the information we have so how do you do it well the science community has been doing this for hundreds of years we've learned the way to do this is don't ever trust any one individual scientist climate science is so complicated you can't even trust me who's been in 30 years because I may know clouds but climate change is oceans atmosphere chemistry biology you can't get one scientist to understand it's and frankly most of the skeptics aren't even climate scientists they're nuclear physicists or they're chemists or they're engineers you think they know climate science don't listen to them but how do you figure out then where to go for the right information the right information comes from places like the American Association for the Advancement of science millions of scientists around the world established in 1850 this is not a recent political think-tank this is scientists who've been spending hundreds of years trying to get the right answers the american geophysical union 50,000 scientists started in 1920 the American Meteorological Society guess what while the media may tell you the IPCC has three errors in its 3,000 pages of documentation all of those scientific exhort organizations endorse the IPCC is the best thing out there we currently have so you do have ways to find accurate information you can go to these IPCC assessment reports you don't have to read all 3000 pages they have little 20 page summaries you can go to to get a better idea of what's going on you can go to major scientific organizations and there are statements that they make just one page statements or what they think is going on you can go to the u.s. global change research program basically a dozen organizations in the US that study climate change together as a group so I've told you about accuracy of the data accuracy of policy information that you need to get is public but then we have to get accurate policy decisions how do we do that and one thing we have to realize is this is probably the most difficult challenge Society has ever faced why because all of our genes have been trained over a million years to react to very short time scale threats lions tigers bears and storms that's what you and I are trained to do we are not trained to attack a global fifty year time scale problem so it sounds at first hopeless but is it we actually have evidence two thousand years ago of actually really long efforts to do things like the Great Wall of China that's actually pretty impressive and it wasn't recent it was a long time ago we have recent efforts like 350.org actually coordinating organizations and meetings and demonstrations around the globe on climate change so there are evidences that we can do it we can deal with it but now I'm going to bring up what the challenge really is because it's huge think of all of us on this big chips steaming through the ocean and this is the Titanic we're out on a new Titanic it's an incredible ship it's the most powerful thing ever done it's speeding through the ocean but we need lookouts to see what's coming ahead well that's what the IPCC is they're our group up in the crow's nest trying to figure out look with long view up ahead what's going on and where we're going they've told us we're headed for an iceberg but we're still arguing about how big the iceberg and how much damage are we going to get when we hit it we're not arguing about are we going to hit something we're going to hit it meanwhile on the bridge we have captain's not captain captains the US China India Europe all of them trying to argue about which way we should turn the ship or whether we should in a chip at all or whether we should speed up and go faster this is the level of problem we're dealing with and remember we're all in the same ship there's no other ship we can go to there's not a rescue ship coming in there isn't another planet coming up to ours that we can jump off to this is the only one we've got we've got to do this right the first time so we have to be looking out long ahead you have to think of this as a long-term generational problem not just today's problem or even next year's problem you have to think of this as multiple decades and we have to figure out how we're going to get there and steer this ship in a more constructive direction so what I'd like to do to summarize that is you need accuracy and observations accuracy in the information you as a public yet and you've got to have accuracy and policymaking but that will only happen if you guys get accurate information to push where policy is going and I like to summarize all those up with the following quote which is that man masters nature not by force but by understanding and democracies are wonderful but they only work when most of the people in them understand what needs to be done and I need all of you to become part of that understanding thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 268,515

Rating: 3.8843431 out of 5

Keywords: ted, Wielicki, tedx talk, tedx talks, Bruce, tedx, ted talk, ted x, ted talks

Id: _YNfA7mDri4

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2011