(techno music)
- [Paul Kelly] Welcome to the second day
of Darwin Festival 2023.
Our speaker this morning is Steve Young.
He's a professor
of Geography and Sustainability at Salem State.
Steve got his bachelor's at Yale University,
a masters from University of Vermont,
and his PhD in geography from Clark University.
He does field work in both New England and China.
Among his many interests is the use of satellite imaging
to analyze climate change and deforestation.
In addition to his academic research,
Dr. Young does outreach to the general public,
including a long-running art photography exhibition entitled
Macro or Micro,
which has been on display at the Museum of Science,
and in Tehran, Iran.
Today's talk is titled Impacts of Climate Change.
They Have Only Just Begun.
Please welcome my old friend, Dr. Steve Young.
- [Stephen Young] Okay.
Okay, I need to turn on my various microphones
so people can hear me.
And thank you Paul Kelly for that introduction.
Paul and I, years ago,
we team taught biogeography,
and that Macro Micro exhibit is one that I do with Paul.
Paul does microscopic imaging,
things that are like, the width of your hair.
And I do satellite imaging of things that are like,
a hundred kilometers in size, and we put 'em up on the wall,
and it's hard to tell
which is which because the earth cracks,
and the earth does things at different scale,
and you have nothing for scale.
And anyways, it's a very interesting thing.
So I have a strong affinity to the biology department.
I have a master's degree in forest ecology,
and in geography, I've learned how to look at the world
from a spatial perspective.
And so I've been able to marry my biological background
with my geographic studies.
I wanna thank the Biology Department,
the Geography and Sustainability Department,
the Earth Day's Planning Committee,
and the Charles Albert Reid Trust
for sponsoring this talk today.
Very appreciative.
There's a lot of people who do a lot of work
in the background to make this happen.
So, alright, that was a preview
of the talk because we ran through it
to make sure it worked, and I left it at the end.
I do wanna make a shoutout to people that are online.
Thank you for joining us today,
and for all of you here today.
So I'm gonna talk about
Climate Change: The Impacts Have Only Just Begun.
And so in this talk today,
I'm gonna talk about the science
of why our climate's changing,
what to expect in our world as it warms,
changes happening in New England,
and then how Salem State University's engaged
with solutions to our issue.
So science, right? Most of you are in biology.
What is science? It's about answering questions.
It's a methodology in which we understand our world,
and it's based on observations.
We go out, we gather data,
and then we look at those observations,
and we try to come up
with some sort of answer to what's happening.
And then we do lots of experiments to see if that,
in fact, is right, and we kinda refine.
Science is always refining itself.
It's transparent. There's nothing hidden.
There's no secret recipe.
It's very open to everybody, our data, our methods.
So one question is, is our climate changing?
And so we've got all kinds of instruments
out there collecting data.
We collect lots of data in our atmosphere
about temperature, wind, moisture.
And then, humans are pretty ingenious.
This is a really cool temperature measuring device,
and making observations in the ocean.
And what it does is it drops down to about a thousand meters
below the surface and hangs out
for many days collecting data,
then it drops down further,
and then it creates a profile coming back up, pops up,
sends its data to a satellite.
That satellite sends that data to a receiving station.
And then we're able to get a good glimpse
of what the temperature's like inside the ocean.
And we've got hundreds and hundreds of these
around the world bringing in that kind of observations.
So one of the conclusions
of those observations that we've been doing
for quite a long time
is very clearly recently, the world has started to warm up.
And I'm gonna focus on this graph a little bit.
This graph, it's titled as,
Global Average Temperature Change from 1850 to 2021.
And each one of those red dots
represents how far that year varied
from a long-term average.
It's called an anomaly, right?
An anomaly is something that is different than the norm.
And in this case,
we took 1850 to 1900, we added up the annual temperature,
global annual temperature for all those years.
And divided by 51, and got a long-term average,
then we compared each year to that long-term average.
And those red dots are how each year varied
from that long-term average.
And what we see very clearly is between 1960 and 1980,
the long-term trend bent upwards.
It's been relatively flat.
And each year it goes up and down, up and down, up and down.
Cause the earth is a complex system.
It's not a linear change,
but you can see that long-term change.
And also in science,
we don't rely on just one dataset.
We often look at multiple data sets.
And so these multiple data sets
of different ways of measuring the data,
collecting the data, also that change has happened.
And if we go back in time,
there's ways that we can figure out the temperature
in the past.
And one reason we look at that past data
is what's happening today, normal, not so normal.
And what we can see from these data sets,
the most recent temperature, which we've measured
with actual thermometers in the ocean.
And the atmosphere is that red line at the end.
And it is a distinctive change,
which we are experiencing now.
So the reason why the world is the temperature that it is,
it's actually a pretty simple equation.
It's how much solar radiation we get from the sun compared
to how much pressure radiation we send back to space.
Everybody, even ice cubes, radiate energy.
As long as you've got some energy, you radiate it.
The sun radiates a tremendous amount of energy to Earth,
Earth then sends it back to space.
And when the amount
of energy leaving earth equals the amount
of energy coming in, temperature stays the same.
If more leaves than comes in, then it gets colder,
more comes in than leaves, it gets warmer.
And that's what's happening today.
We're continuing to get the same amount
of incoming solar radiation,
but we're slowing down the energy of the earth leaving.
We get energy from the sun.
And so I want you
to see the yellow line is an actual measurement.
We have great measurements
of how much energy the sun is putting out.
And the red line, which goes to the vertical column
on the right is temperature.
And we can see there often is a correlation
between incoming sun energy and temperature,
which we see in the early 1900s.
But since about 1960, 1970,
solar radiation has slightly declined
and temperatures increased.
So the issue is not we're not getting any more energy
from the sun.
We're not warming up because of that.
What's happening is we've changed the chemistry
of our atmosphere.
We've put these gases up
in our atmosphere that let the sunlight in,
but they stop the earth's energy from leaving.
And the more of those molecules we put in the atmosphere,
the slower energy leaves the earth's system
because it's absorbing that energy
and sending some of it back to Earth.
And the more of those gases we have,
the less energy leaves the system.
So what's happening on Earth is like this example
of a bathtub.
As long as the amount of water coming
into the bathtub is equal to the amount
of water leaving the bathtub,
that little ducky is gonna stay at the same level.
But what we've done is we've squeezed that drain pipe.
By putting those gases in our atmosphere,
we're slowing the amount
of energy that can leave the system.
And so just like that bathtub,
the earth is slowly filling up with heat.
Our oceans are getting warmer,
our groundwater is getting warmer.
Our soil is getting warmer.
And on the growth scale, we can do that.
We can measure.
We have satellites that can measure
how much energy's leaving the earth,
and how much energy's coming in from the sun.
One thing we're doing in science is we quantify it.
We've quantified, actually,
how much extra energy is being saved on Earth.
Where is that energy being stored?
Most of it's in the ocean,
and that's one reason why we really don't feel it.
We don't live in the ocean. Over 90% of that energy.
The oceans act like a battery
storing that excess energy that our system's creating.
Understanding the past, right?
I showed a little bit earlier,
having a little bit of understanding
of how things changed in the past gives us a perspective
of how things are changing in today's world.
So one of the cool things that scientists do
is they get these things called climate proxies, right?
We didn't have thermometers back 800,000 years ago
to measure the air temperature.
So we use things in nature
that help us find out about temperature and other things.
And ice cores, like in Antarctica and Greenland,
actually, we can look at the molecules,
and tell what the temperature was like, and also parts
of gases from the atmosphere were captured in that ice.
This one goes back 400,000 years,
some of 'em go back 800,000 years.
And what I want you to notice is this is a classic way that
we look at data to see if there's any relationships.
We're looking at carbon dioxide concentrations
in the atmosphere and temperature.
And on the right hand side is the temperature,
which is the purple line.
And on the left hand column, we're looking at concentration
of carbon dioxide.
You should be able to see that there's a very,
very close relationship between those two carbon dioxide,
and temperature.
In fact, a mono carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere has often been referred
to as the thermostat of Vostok temperature.
Here's another diagram showing that relationship.
This one goes back 800,000 years.
And I want you to see the star
up at the top right hand corner,
that's the concentration of carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere now.
It's nowhere as near
where it's been for the past 800,000 years.
And so that is one
of the reasons why our climate's changing so significantly.
Why it has that upward bent, right?
This is measurement.
A person thought,
"Hey, it'd be cool to measure gases in the atmosphere,
and I'm gonna get a grant to go out to Hawaii
and put this thing up on an island volcano
because there's not a lot of humans or industry around,"
and started collecting carbon dioxide as one
of those chemicals.
In fact, we are increasing those greenhouse gases, right?
Size is all about observations.
Here is an interesting graph.
This is the total amount
of carbon dioxide that we're putting in the atmosphere.
See that little dip at the top right there?
That was COVID, right? Everything shut down.
We stopped driving around and stuff,
but it only made a small dent.
Our way of life is very carbon related.
And we need to shift that.
Methane, just got this graphed the other day.
Methane is another greenhouse gas.
We were told natural gas was gonna be the link
to the future, and it turns out that we're releasing a lot
to the atmosphere also.
So one thing about science is we can marvel
into the future and there's a group of scientists,
the IPCC, that look at all the data that's going out there,
and they try to figure out what's our future gonna be like.
And they have said based
on science that we should really try
to keep the earth's temperature
from not rising more than one and a half degrees.
Because we've looked in the past,
anything of that magnitude is gonna bring about a fair bit
of change, like melting the glaciers and things like that.
The carbon dioxide is driving the temperature change.
So we need to stop putting that in the atmosphere.
A lot of towns and our university has made a goal
of 2050: become carbon neutral.
Well, we've got momentum going in one direction.
We really need to change as a society,
and change fairly quickly to get down
to not putting so much carbon in the atmosphere.
All right.
That's the end of most of the graphs.
There's a couple more to come,
but so what can we expect in our warming world?
We know, right?
We know the relationship between these greenhouse gases
and Earth's temperature.
So here's some observations,
which have been happening.
Up at the top, we see it's, well, the base years,
it's 1951 to 1980.
Often when we're studying climate,
we'll take like a 30 year period
as kind of our measuring rod, our standard.
And then we took decades after that
to look at how temperature was changing
in the northern hemisphere.
And you can see we kept the same base period.
And what's been happening is we are shifting clearly
into a warmer world.
It's not a fluke thing that this winter's been pretty warm.
And also, there is wild weather.
Just because we broke records of cold about a week ago,
doesn't mean that we're not warming up.
All right.
If you wanna understand what's gonna happen in the future,
this is an important graph to understand.
This is how much moisture the atmosphere can hold.
And so when the atmosphere warms from 20 degrees
to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, you can see
it doesn't increase the water availability.
The bottom of this graph is temperature
going from cold temperatures on the left
to warm temperatures on the right,
the scale on the left,
how much water the atmosphere can potentially hold.
What's the room,
what's the capacity for moisture going from 0 up to 60.
And you can see that 20 degree change from 20 to 40,
not a lot of capacity changes,
but from 80 to 100, it increases dramatically.
This past year, we've had tremendous amount of floods,
and we've had tremendous amount of droughts.
And it's all driven because a warming world
lets the atmosphere hold more moisture.
So now the relationship.
Greenhouse gases are pushing the temperature up.
The temperature's making the atmosphere be able
to hold more moisture.
A warmer atmosphere increases evaporation.
There's more energy in the air,
so it goes into evaporating water molecules,
and it can hold more moisture.
So it takes longer for that moisture to leave the air.
So we get droughts.
I'm sure many of you are aware,
the southwest United States is drying up,
and it's been drying up for a while.
Lake Mead, Lake Powell,
major reservoirs for water for the southwest,
and also electricity production is decreasing dramatically,
right?
They found bodies that had been put in oil barrels
and stuff that were sitting on the bottom
of the lake have become above water now.
China last year had historic droughts,
and they've got a long recorded history.
Major lakes dried up, rivers dried up,
and the reservoirs dried up so much that they had
to cut back on electrical production.
And they had rolling blackouts,
as did other parts of the world.
Europe, all of a sudden these sunken ships
that were downed in World War II were appearing
out of the river because the river is almost dried up.
Navigation had to stop.
We had a drought, right?
We live in a really humid part of the world,
and we had a pretty punishing drought.
What's happening is,
and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute,
but our winters are warming the fastest,
and our summers,
and most of the precipitation, now added precipitation comes
in the wintertime.
The summer precipitation stays kind of the same,
but it's getting warmer.
So there's more evaporation going on.
And so we've had a number of droughts recently,
a higher frequency than we usually have.
Also by warming, it means when it rains,
it can now hold a lot more water
than it ever could hold before.
So when it rains, it dumps a lot of water on us.
And so we've seen last summer, we saw incredible floods,
Death Valley.
In one day, it had almost a year's worth of rain.
Hurricane Ian.
So a 1 in 1000 years storm means that it's likely
in a thousand years you might get this kind
of storm, right?
It's not very likely.
We're seeing more and more of these.
Pakistan, unbelievable amount of monsoon rains coming in,
and this river just flooded so many communities.
China, there was a city
where they had a new subway system, 10 years old.
And so much water came in,
people drowned in the subway cars.
It was never designed, never imagined,
that there would be so much flooding to happen.
New Zealand, Auckland the other day got a summer's worth
of rain in one day.
Jiachang Tu was a master student here a few years ago,
and now she's getting her PhD,
and we're working on this paper
about looking at Shanghai.
And when this started about two years ago,
she and others proposed doing a 1 in 1000 year flood survey.
And I thought,
"That's crazy, that's not gonna happen to Shanghai."
Now I feel like,
"Wow, things have really changed because we are seeing more
and more of those floods."
Okay, just wanna make sure my time.
So the pandemic happens,
and two of my sons come home from college,
and they're working on their college class at home.
And I say, "Hey, had this great idea.
Let's gather data.
Let's look at weather and climate in New England."
And one of my sons says,
"Yeah, no, I'm going to play video games, thank you."
And my other son said, "Okay, I'll do it."
And so we looked at temperature data for all the states
in New England from 1900 to 2020.
And we were so astonished by what we found,
we decided to publish it.
And it got accepted and published.
And so here are the little pinpoints
of the different weather stations
where we collected data from 1900 to 2020.
These were one of our results.
The orange line is decadal temperature in New England.
So we average data, not yearly, but by decade.
Get a more general sense of what's happening.
And so each dot represents the average change
in temperature for that decade.
And so the blue line is the change in global temperature,
what's happening around the world.
The orange line, what's happening in New England.
And those bars that go up
and down are what we call error bars.
Scientists, we always say,
"Well, this is our area of uncertainty.
When those areas of uncertainty do not cross
between those two lines,
it means there's a significant difference
between those two trends.
And what this graph says,
New England is warming significantly faster than the rest
of the world.
And right, there's no snow, it's February.
Often the bummer about the Darwin Festival is it's
in February, and sometimes snow happens,
and things get canceled.
Not even close this year.
And one big finding was winters are warming much faster,
and that's what's happening in the world
are the colder places are warming
faster than the warmer places.
3.2 degrees Celsius is almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Our winters have warmed up quite a bit.
Yeah, precipitation now comes a lot more as rain
than as snow than it used to.
We should actually have had a fair bit of snow this year,
but it came as rain.
And that's my son.
And after we published it, actually,
the Boston Globe picked up on the article,
and published it.
So if your parents ever suggest doing some data analysis
or something, you know, you should say yes.
Another article that I did
with a graduate student was we looked at snow cover
and temperature in North America.
When light hits snow,
it reflects and doesn't pass much energy off.
When there's no snow,
the light doesn't reflect as much and the energy stays here.
And that's one reason why New England's warming faster
than other parts.
Also just off our coast, the Gulf of Maine is one
of the fastest warming bodies on Earth.
And one reason is
the Gulf Stream is pushing a little bit further up,
and it's pushing that warm water
into the Gulf of Maine,
which is also making New England warm.
Yeah, last semester a student asked me,
"Why all of a sudden scientists interested
in climate change?"
We've been interested in it a long time,
and right, the first paper was published back
in 1896 projecting how the world is gonna warm
to carbon dioxide.
Even the fossil fuel industry's scientists
in the 70s published and predicted what was gonna happen.
And unfortunately,
the fossil fuel companies used that information
to raise their platforms cause of sea level rise
to invest in arctic oil because it's gonna warm up
in the arctic.
Tip on my shoulder.
So biology, we did a lot of things that climate change
in New England touches upon.
But in biology we're starting
to experience kind of ecosystem disruption,
land ecosystems, marine ecosystems,
marine ecosystems especially cause remember,
that's where a lot of the heat's being stored.
Also, not just the warming temperature,
but the drastic change in weather, the floods and droughts.
It's hard to survive through such extremes.
Species are on the move, are migrating.
Long Island Sound used to have lots of lobsters.
Now they have hardly a single lobster.
They've all migrated up to colder waters.
Same thing happening on the land, health issues.
If you're in biology, in the health profession,
you're gonna see a lot of new things, stressors,
because of the climate, because of the heat,
because of new diseases that are coming
into the area that we're not accustomed to seeing.
And also being aware of certain people
in our population that are more vulnerable
to climate change,
that don't have good healthcare insurance,
that don't have access to air conditioners and the like,
increased pests and diseases, disruption.
So, that's where we are.
We know that our world is changing, becoming warmer,
and there are these different weather events
that are happening,
and we know we've gotta reduce our carbon footprint.
And so one of the things I love about Salem State
is we are very involved,
and we've made a pledge for 2050
to reduce our carbon emissions.
And so Salem State is fostering sustainability
in our facilities, in our culture,
and in our education.
Facilities-wise, we've got solar panels
on a lot of the buildings on campus.
Not only that, our library,
we've got geothermal energy,
where we're taking energy from inside the earth
to help heat and cool the library.
Our university has won awards for de-carbonization plans.
And with Project Bold,
where we're gonna reimagine North Campus,
we're also gonna include a lot of de-carbonization.
In fact, Salem State is one of the leading institutions
in moving forward towards de-carbonization.
Changing the culture,
trying to change the culture on campus,
EV charging stations on campus,
bike share program on campus, planting pollinator gardens,
having recycling and reused tables in the dorms, right?
We used to not know what to do with those possessions.
We didn't want anymore that were still good.
We often threw 'em away. Now we share them.
So the culture on campus is changing in a sustainable way.
Education, there's a lot of education that goes on
on campus about sustainability.
In my department, we often teach about how
to use geospatial technologies such as GIS
and remote sensing and drones
to gather data observations about what's happening.
Activism also.
I'm gonna tell you a brief story.
Must be now eight years ago or so.
Meservey was president, and the students were trying
to push Salem state
to divest our endowment from fossil fuels.
And an hour before the Board of Trustees meeting,
when they were gonna decide it,
President Meservey came and saw Noel Hilly
and myself and said, cause we were pushing this,
so the Board of Trustees are not gonna divest,
it's too much of a thing to do.
So many students showed up
to that Board of Trustees meeting.
The room was filled with students.
They changed their mind and they divested from fossil fuels.
And Professor Healy got us into a pool
with a number of other universities,
about 10 other universities,
and there was $59,000
to share whatever university divested from fossil fuels.
And Salem state was the only one.
And so we got this fund,
and then Professor Healy insisted that the fund go 100%
towards scholarships.
And so we've established two climate change scholarships
for a thousand dollars each every year
from that money we won because the students demanded
that the university divest from fossil fuels.
And I'll tell you, that's one
of the most powerful moments I've experienced
at Salem State, seeing the collective voice
of the students.
We do a lot of work from out in the community.
My department's got this exhibition about taking action
with mapping where we show sea level rise effects
on the North shore.
We document sea level rise.
My colleague Marcos Luna focuses on climate and equity,
and there's a lot of climate justice work going on.
In fact, my student, who I'm gonna call up here in a minute,
Danny, Danny and I are gonna go in a few weeks to Honduras.
There's a coffee cooperative, and they want
to reforest the areas that have been destroyed,
and they want to get carbon offset money,
but they've got no way to verify how their plants grow.
So we're gonna go down there
and teach them how to fly a drone
so that the farmers themselves can verify the trees
that are growing and get carbon offset money instead
of that carbon offset money going to other groups.
So our future world is arriving now, our climate.
Yeah, climate's been stable for a long time.
We've created an incredible civilization based
on that stability of climate.
And now we live in a time of instability.
And so we need to change. We need to change.
It's not the end. We need to change how we interact.
The type of economy that we have that worked really well
in a stable economy is not gonna work
in an instable economy.
So we've gotta change our ways,
we've gotta change our culture.
Gotta change our economic system.
For example, the fossil fuel industries like ExxonMobil
made a record profit last year,
and it's their product that is changing the climate.
And that's how off our economic system is right now.
But we know what to do in the future,
and how to change our facilities, our culture,
our education.
So this type of conversation is gonna continue this spring.
Every spring we have a week where there is
we call it Earth Days week,
where we educate and celebrate about our environment.
So there's three things I hope you got from today.
One, a little bit more of an understanding
of the science of climate change,
A little bit of feeling of the urgency, right?
There is urgency that we change things, right?
The hotter the air gets, the more moisture we're gonna see
these droughts and these floods.
Obviously not everybody's gonna be involved
in climate change stuff in their life, but being aware
of climate change.
And there's little things in your life
where you can make a difference.
Whether it's what you choose to eat,
whether it's what you choose to vote for,
coming from an educated standpoint to try to change things.
We can all do that.
Some of us will continue into education and stuff.
And finally, I hope you feel some pride about Salem state.
We really are one of the leading institutions
in New England on trying to change
to a more sustainable way of life.
And now I wanna invite my student,
Danny Szottfried,
to show a video that he put together.
And I'm super proud of students at Salem State.
- [Danny Szottfried] All right,
so today we're gonna show you a quick video that me
and another classmate, Becca, made.
It was back in 2021.
It was right after we both took
the geography department's drones class
with Professor Young.
And he approached us as the class was wrapping up.
He had a little extra grant money from a flash grant
from the Center for Research and Creative Activities.
And they were doing some research
in the Great Marsh out in Essex.
And we had the opportunity to fly the area,
collect a lot of above ground imagery,
and we put this little PSA together
to kind of inform people what exactly is happening.
(lighthearted guitar music)
- [Narrator] Known for its stunning views and vast wildlife,
the Great Marsh is one of the most important ecosystems
in New England.
This area covers over 25,000 acres of land
in the North shore, with half of it being salt marshes.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
The Great Marsh provides the perfect habitat for plenty
of plants and animals,
including 300 species of birds that call this area home.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
The marsh is an important resting and feeding ground
for thousands of migratory birds that visit every year,
and is utilized as a nursery ground
for many different aquatic species.
Coyotes, raccoons, deer, and other mammals can be spotted,
lurking through the marsh in search of food and shelter.
While the Great Marsh is important to the environment,
it is also very beneficial to humans in many different ways.
Salt marshes help protect the shoreline from erosion,
and improve water quality
by filtering excess nutrients from any runoff.
It acts as a buffer against heavy wave action
and storm surges between the ocean and the mainland.
They also decrease flooding during storms
by reducing the flow of flood water and absorbing the rain.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
The Great Marsh also benefits local cities
and towns in Massachusetts economically.
Hundreds of tourists visit this area each year
for outdoor recreational activities
such as bird watching, nature photography,
hiking, hunting, fishing, and boating.
About 95% of the land
in the Great Marsh is used for recreational activities
and tourism.
The shellfish industry is huge in Massachusetts,
and the Great Marsh provides ideal conditions for clamming.
Unfortunately, the habitat and benefits
of the Great Marsh may be at risk
as our planet undergoes climate change.
As more carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere,
the surface temperature of the earth rises more and more.
Since 1880, the average global temperature
on Earth has increased slightly over 1 degree Celsius,
or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
Although it does not seem like much, this increase
in surface temperature causes devastating impacts,
especially on ecosystems such as the Great Marsh.
Sea level is currently rising due to the expansion
of sea water as it warms up.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
Today, we are already seeing the impact sea level rise has
on the Great Marsh.
The sea level rise affecting salt marsh's model,
done by the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management,
found that the current rate of sea level rise
will cause areas that are typically irregularly flooded
to become regularly flooded.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
This clip was taken during a King's Tide
at a Salt Marsh in Essex, Massachusetts.
This allows us to see what the tides will look like
in the near future.
As you can see, the tide goes up
against the only access road
to the Essex County Greenbelt's headquarters.
Erosion and flooding has also been a major issue,
and will continue to get worse as time goes on.
A possible increase in storm intensity
from warming sea surface temperatures combined
with the already existent sea level rise
could cause areas not typically flooded
to be completely flooded for short periods of time.
As climate change progresses,
winters in New England have shortened,
and are becoming warmer.
Shorter and warmer winters increase the probability
of invasive species and pests entering the Great Marsh only
to cause devastation among the marsh's ecosystem.
Other impacts of climate change include extreme drought,
especially in the western part of the United States.
Currently, people are battling large wildfires out west,
and as the jet stream carries the smoke from those wildfires
across the U.S., we get a gloomy haze
in the northeast as shown here
at the Corbit Salt Marsh in Essex, Massachusetts.
Although this haze is not directly impacting the salt marsh
as much as sea level rise does, it is concerning
to see that a climate change induced wildfire,
burning hundreds of miles away, can cause smoke
to fill the air at one of our most precious ecosystems
in New England.
As wildfires become more frequent,
it may be necessary for us to see the impact air quality has
on our Great Marsh.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
The question raised here is,
"How will these impacts on the Great Marsh affect us?"
As sea level rise causes irregularly flooded areas
to be covered with water, infrastructure such as roads,
buildings, and sidewalks located near a marsh
will be at risk.
A large storm event, or even an irregularly large tide,
could cause erosion near important infrastructure.
Damages could cause a homeowner
or local town thousands of dollars
as sea level rise progresses.
With the loss of habitat from climate change,
the shellfish industry, and other fishery industries,
will be heavily impacted in the North shore.
There is also a possibility that tourism will decrease
as climate change affects the marsh.
This could ultimately impact the local economy.
Plenty of organizations, including the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration,
Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management,
and Land Trust Organizations
such as the Essex County Greenbelt
and the Trustees work hard to conserve, protect,
and restore the Great Marsh system.
Currently, the Geography and Sustainability Department
at Salem State University
is using advanced geospatial technologies such as drones,
satellite imagery, and geographic information systems
to map marsh ecosystems,
and monitor and model changes caused by climate change.
(lighthearted guitar music continues)
- [Stephen Young] All right, thank you Danny.
That was great, and an example
of why I'm so proud of our students.
So I hope I left you with, as I said,
a little bit more understanding of climate change,
some sense of urgency and pride in ways that it's solved.
And I want to thank you for coming out
and listening and if there's any questions,
I am open for that.
I don't know if there's online questions coming in.
Oh. (faintly speaking)
Yes.
(audience member faintly speaking)
- [Audience member 1] The use
of fossil fuels are also anti-nuclear powered.
What do you think of this?
- [Stephen Young] Yeah, there's a lot of trade-offs
that we have to think about.
And so are the detrimental effects
of nuclear power worse than a warming world?
Yeah, I don't have the answer to that.
We've got some hard choices that we have to make.
(audience member faintly speaking)
So must be like eight years ago or so,
my sons went off to summer,
it's kind of like wilderness camp,
and they hike and canoe and stuff up in Vermont
where there is no Lyme disease and they come back,
and they've got this rash and an itch and stuff,
and it's unlikely that Lyme's disease is the problem
because they're up in Vermont
where Lyme's disease does not exist.
And after a lot of torturous time,
they eventually were diagnosed with Lyme's disease.
So as Professor Hayes points out,
with our warming world, especially with the warming winters,
life is always trying to expand its range.
And so these ticks and mosquitoes
and other pests are gonna expand.
They are expanding into our range.
Lyme's disease is now up throughout New Hampshire,
and Vermont, and into Maine as are other new diseases.
And so in the health field, that's another thing.
We actually went out west when they had Lyme's disease,
and the western doctors, health people
had no idea what Lyme disease was.
So for those of you that are getting into health profession,
there are gonna be some new vectors,
new diseases that you're unaware of
and need to become aware of them as they move
into our environment.
(audience member faintly speaking)
It was nice.
(audience member faintly speaking)
Yes, it is.
(audience member faintly speaking)
We are, so that's a great point,
is water vapor itself, is a greenhouse gas?
If you've ever been camping and it's a clear sky,
it's generally gonna get cold at night.
You're camping,
and it's cloudy cause there's all that moisture up there.
It tends to be a warmer night unless some air mass moves
in because the water maintains the heat.
And so we have documented that our atmosphere
since the mid 70s has had more water vapor
in it than long-term averages.
And the issue about water vapor is
it lives for a short time in the atmosphere
where carbon dioxide can live up there for a thousand years.
Methane can live up there for decades,
water vapor can come and go.
So if the climate does start to cool,
then the water vapor will come out.
(audience member faintly speaking)
Yeah, I was wondering that myself,
but Vermont was one of the states warming the fastest.
And I didn't bore you.
Originally, I had every state's graph in there,
but someone told me I should cut back
on my graphs a little bit.
So I didn't show all those graphs.
But the data also, right,
each state had like, eight data points.
Because we needed data that was verifiable all the way back
to 1900.
So I'm wondering if with more finer data,
we'll see the coastal area warming up more than inland.
But the data, we couldn't tell. Yeah. Yeah.
(Audience member faintly speaking)
Alan.
- [Alan] Hey Stephen.
- [Steve Young] Hi.
(Alan faintly speaking)
(Ms. Gallagher faintly speaking)
So we had the geothermal, it had some issues.
It is running, but not as optimally as it would be.
One reason is we're early adopter.
Someone has to be an early adopter.
Someone has to move forward.
And so we can expect some things like that,
some hitches to happen like that.
(audience member faintly speaking)
Oh my gosh.
Okay. Will do.
So the question is,
"Is there any evidence that we might be moving
into a glacial period?"
So I didn't go into this, but there's a number
of things that happen that determine
how much energy comes from the sun.
And one of them is the Earth's orbit,
actually, over 100,000 year changes
from a circular to an elliptical.
Also, the earth is actually wobbling every 44,000 years.
It makes one wobble. So it's on a different time scale.
So in the past, that changing orbit,
and that changing wobble created various ice ages.
There's been many ice age periods.
In fact, when I showed you that carbon dioxide temperature,
you probably noticed it went up, it went down,
it went up, it went down.
That was that change.
And if we didn't put any greenhouse gas in the atmosphere,
we would be heading slightly for a cooler time
over a long period of time.
But we've overwhelmed the system
with greenhouse gases that we are not going
towards a glacial period by any means.
Yes.
(audience member faintly speaking)
Yeah, so all fossil fuels at some point
in their life input toxicity into our environment.
A lot of 'em at the source like coal mining
and the like, sometimes in transportation,
like the Exxon Valdez, sometimes in the use of it.
And so there are toxic chemicals in gas.
And so, right, we put a scent into it
so we can tell when it's leaking.
I'm sure most people here know the scent of natural gas.
And so natural gas leaks,
and it's got chemicals in it that have been shown not
to be good for our health.
It causes asthma in young children.
And so now the science has showed us that health-wise,
it's probably not a good idea to use gas stoves,
fake fireplaces, things like that because
of the long-term toxicity.
(audience member faintly speaking)
So the question is about in New England,
we have a lot of coastal areas, and with sea level rise,
are we gonna have to move inland?
Some places, whether we want to or not,
we will have to abandon and move inland, I would say.
A lot of ecosystems have to abandon where they are and move.
In a stable world, things kind of stay put,
but in an unstable world, things move.
And so one thing we need to do is the Great Marsh,
and marsh land is very productive for the beginning
of the food chain of our marine environment.
And with rising sea level, they can't survive underwater.
So they're gonna migrate.
And so now we've got to plan
and preserve areas where they can migrate to.
And so it's not only humans that are migrating,
but ecosystems are migrating also.
And it's absolutely crazy that we're still building
on coastal areas where sea level rise
and storm activity is gonna happen.
I didn't talk about it, but with more energy
in our environment, we've got stronger storms.
And so coastal areas are going to get more storm activity.
I do know that some places are, like, in Revere,
you start to see those new apartment buildings,
they have the parking garage on the ground floor.
That's smart. That's an adaptation.
It will last a little while as sea level rises, but yes.
(audience member faintly speaking)
So the question is how can we participate
in lowering the carbon emissions?
So first of all, being understanding climate change,
understanding the science of climate change,
what's happening.
And based on that science, we can come up with solutions.
And so some of us will have a lot of opportunity,
and people who are in political science may move on
and work in the state house.
And so in whatever capacity you can make a difference.
Some people will not be in any kind of job,
but they may vote, and just do an educated vote.
Choice of what to eat, choice of what car to buy.
Just educated things.
And one thing is we can't individually feel guilty. Right?
It's not your fault that what's happening, it's society's.
What's happening broadly in society.
And so we'll try to change society how we can.
It might just be raising children that are much more aware
of what's happening.
Some of us will be activists.
You can't feel guilty that you're not being an activist,
but just do whatever you can in your life
when you come across those opportunities.
Sure.
(audience member faintly speaking)
Thank you for making me live my anxiety. (laughs)
I really do try to appreciate what's happening today.
You know, the beauty of our world and stuff.
But I will tell you this past summer,
for the first time I felt like,
"Oh my God, I'm living
in the world that was predicted 30 years ago."
And 30 years ago, it was almost science fiction.
Unbelievable, and so realizing that we're living
in the world,
the climate you all grew up in will not happen again.
The climate that we're having right now won't happen again.
So that is anxiety producing in the uncertainty and stuff.
But okay, that's the situation.
And what can I do today?
And I try not to feel like it's all my fault,
it's all my responsibility,
and where I can do things, I'll do it.
And I've been part of different environmental organizations
and stuff, and I decided education was
where I can do the best.
And so that's how I do it,
but still can't get rid of that anxiety.
But maybe that motivates me to realize the urgency
and do stuff, but I do try to not let it overwhelm me.
And I don't think it should, society's issue.
That answer your question? Yeah. Yeah.
That's a great question.
And thanks to Danny also.
Thanks Danny, that was great.
- [Danny] Yeah.
- [Stephen Young] And goodbye to my online group.
Hope that you had a good class, lecture. Bye.