- Hello everybody.
I'm Dr. John Hayes
of the Geography and Sustainability Department.
And good morning to all of you.
And thank you so much for coming today
to our virtual presentation on this wonderful Darwin Week
at Salem State.
The Geography and Sustainability Department
is honored to host the visit
of Dr. Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux
to the 42nd Annual Darwin Festival at Salem State.
Professor Dupigny-Giroux is a full professor
in the Department of Geography at the University of Vermont.
She received her bachelor of science degree
in physical geography and development studies
from the University of Toronto in 1989,
and her master of science degree
in climatology and hydrology
in 1992 from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
And then her PhD in Climatology also and GIS in 1996,
also from the McGill University's Geography Department
in Montreal.
The Geography and Sustainability Department
at Salem State has been hosting an invited speaker
at the Darwin Festival since February, 2002.
And we are very grateful to the Biology Department
and the Darwin Committee for letting us be able
to have this opportunity every year.
And we're also pleased that Dr Dupigny-Giroux
is with us today to continue this tradition.
We also would like to thank the Charles Albert Reed Trust
for sponsoring our invited speaker over the past 20 years.
Professor Dupigny-Giroux is an applied climatologist
by training.
Her research intersects a number of areas.
It intersects climate, hydrology and natural hazards.
She also has interest in climate literacy.
She also researches the use of remote sensing
and geographic information systems or GIS
in the fields of spatial climatology,
and also the intersection of climate
and land surface processes operating across the surface.
She wears two hats, two very demand,
her second very demanding job
is she's the state climatologist for Vermont.
And so her work takes her across the state of Vermont
to assist colleagues in state agencies
related to the DOT, Department of Transportation,
Emergency Management, State Department of Agriculture,
forestry and legislatures, sorry, legislators
to help plan for and adapt to climate change.
Her area of expertise, especially, is floods,
droughts, severe weather and the ways
that these affect Vermont's landscapes, society and peoples.
She also works extensively with K-12 teachers and students,
trying to bring the spatial science of physical geography
and the use of satellites and understanding climate
to all levels of the K-12 curriculum.
She teaches introductory courses in physical geography
and remote sensing, advanced courses in climatology,
GIS applications and satellite climatology
and land surface processes.
And her courses have a service-based learning component
because of her involvement with the state climatologist.
So again, we're absolutely thrilled
to have Dr. Dupigny-Giroux with us today.
She's gonna be speaking on highlights
from the Northeast Chapter
of the Fourth National Climate Assessment
with a focus on implications for natural hazards.
And if anybody is having any issues with closed captioning
at the bottom of your screen,
you can disable that at the bottom of your screen
if you would like.
You can do what's called,
you can hide the subtitles.
So again, thank you and welcome everybody.
Normally, we would be applauding
Dr. Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux
for her presentation today.
Thank you, everybody.
- Thank you, Dr. Hayes for that very gracious,
and in-depth introduction.
It's wonderful to be here and thank you
for the invitation to to be part of this
very special Darwin Festival.
Can everybody see my slides?
So as Dr. Hayes mentioned,
I am gonna talk a little bit
about some of the highlights
of what we found in the Fourth National Climate Assessment,
which was released in November of 2018.
And because I am a climatologist
who does a lot of natural hazards,
I was particularly thrilled to be part of this
and just to see some of the implications
that we have for natural hazards
and for understanding how this impacts us as human beings.
And so some of the things that we'll talk a little bit
about today are that relationship,
that handshaking between the highlights
of the Fourth National Climate Assessment
or the NCA4 as it relates to us
as human beings with a particular eye to climate hazards.
So to get us going a little bit here,
the one thing that we can think about
are how do we see hazards?
How do we perceive hazards,
(indistinct) of some of those things
that we've seen in the recent past.
And so if you think back a few years ago,
we heard about parts of South Africa
potentially running out of water.
So that's one way that we can look at hazards.
We can also look at wildfires in California.
They were particularly extensive last year, 2020.
But if we think back and look back in time,
we will notice that they have also been observed
as far back as 2018 and then before with a tremendous amount
of air quality implications and even infrastructure,
so road infrastructure implications as well.
And then, the last thing that we could look at
is probably trying to bring all of these together
in one place.
And if we were to try and do that,
we can see the various other implications
so drought, severe weather extremes,
particularly in the winter time, how drought affects things
like agricultural patterns,
the influence of particulate matter
on different parts of our ecosystems, for example,
including our marine resources.
And so what we're gonna talk about today is NCA4.
We'll step through the Northeast chapter
which I was the lead author on.
And then we'll take a look at what does this mean
for us as human beings, from a geographic perspective
and think in terms of vulnerability issues,
and then how does this all play out
from looking at natural hazards, in particular?
So whenever I give a talk like this,
I like to start off with this NASA gas visualization
which takes us from 19, sorry, 1880
all the way up until 2020.
And it shows us the change from an average timeframe
in five-year chunks, so that we can see
how the earth has warmed.
And we can see which hemisphere has actually warmed
at different rates.
And then who has been particularly affected.
So let's just play this for a sec here.
I'll let you see it once
and I'll tell you what it is we're looking at here.
So it starts off in 1880
and it steps through five-year chunks.
And the blues tell you that you are colder than the average.
The oranges and the reds tell you
that you're warmer than the average.
And so we're in the '60s,
we just moved to the '70s,
popping into the '90s here
and getting to the 2000s and ending in 2020.
And 2020 tied the year 2016
for being the warmest year on record.
So we're looking at that particular signal
across the Northern hemisphere in a large part
because we've got most of our landmass
in Northern hemisphere and we have land
that surrounds a water surface
which is in the Arctic region up in here.
And so the warming that we see that drives
a lot of that warmest on record
is due to that land signal.
But there's also a lot of sea ice also being lost
in Northern hemisphere as well.
So we can put that into perspective
in looking at that change from the average.
And by the way, the change from the average is 1951 to 1980.
That's the average period that we will looking at in here.
So something else I always do
whenever we look at this is we try to put this warming
in the whole context of the entire earth as a system.
And so we can look at all of the things
that we need to factor in so radiation,
that's these short arrows in here for short wave radiation
and then the emitted part back into the atmosphere.
Those are those red arrows.
We need to factor in looking at moisture patterns,
that hydrologic cycle and how evaporation occurs,
where the water falls is precipitation,
how it's stored, how it's not stored.
And then what does that mean for things
like drought or floods and so forth?
So climate is a system.
Climate change is also a system
because it's all interconnected.
And so changes in the atmosphere
then get presented or seen in other types of changes
like windfall, moisture patterns, changes in humidity.
And then we see those in changes
in your soil moisture content, and so forth.
And so when we look at climate change,
we need to make sure that we're putting
all of those various components together
so that we actually, (indistinct)
what's actually changing in here.
So one last way of looking at climate change
is this continuum from the actual processes
of how climate changes.
So changes in the greenhouse gases,
changes in land use patterns,
changes in industrial processes.
And then as a result of those,
what are some of the impacts that we see
in terms of ocean acidification
or changes in sea level, phenology changes,
whether they are birds or different types
of changes in your vegetation regimes.
And then the last thing that we can look at
are some of the strategies
for either mitigating climate change
or for adapting climate change.
So we've got process, impact and then strategies
that we can look at.
So if we switch to NCA4,
the Fourth National Climate Assessment,
and just to put all of this in the context,
what I'll do is step us through the rationale
for the Fourth Climate Assessment.
And then some of the things that we thought about
and created as part of that Northeast chapter.
So the first thing to know
is that the National Climate Assessment
is part of the US Global Change Research Act of 1990
which is congressionally mandated
and it's supposed to occur every four years or so.
And so the specific language in that act
talked about writing it so that we look back
at all of the research that had been occurring
since the last assessment, and then use that to help
with informing policies, but not prescribing policies.
So when you read the National Climate Assessment,
you won't see words like you must do this
and you should do that, which is prescriptive.
What you will see instead is over the last four years,
we have learned more about such and such
and that we've seen these impacts in this particular sector.
And so it's designed to inform how we create policies
or decision-making at various levels
from the local level all the way up
to the national level itself.
And as we were doing that this time,
there was a shift in the orientation
of the way in which the climate assessment was created.
And we use what's called a risk-based framing
which is great, because it comes out of hazards thinking.
And so we ask questions like who is at risk,
what sector's at risk, who are vulnerable populations?
And then what are some of those impacts that we've seen
and how have we tried to mitigate against them?
How have we tried to adapt to them?
And then this last point in here,
which is a tipping point type of question,
how bad can things get and what would happen
if we were to exceed that particular threshold?
So these are four, some of the questions
that we use to think about the entire assessment
in its whole, and to help inform that,
what we conducted were a series
of engagement workshops across the entire US.
And the one that we had for the Northeast
was actually in Boston.
And it was on a day like today, it's snowing outside
and we actually had to have folks call in
to be able to participate and share their stories,
share the case studies, share the work
that had been done from the town levels,
all the way up through to the entire region.
And those are what we used as part of the story
in terms of creating the Northeast chapter.
So a couple of things were important
to just highlight, as we wrote the chapter,
some of it had to do with the new way
in which we looked at different regions.
So our Northeast region actually runs
from Northern Maine, all the way through to West Virginia,
across into Jersey.
And then one of the things that we did
is to actually create what I called climate summaries
for each state across the entire US.
And so this is the climate summary for Massachusetts.
And if you take a look at it,
just look for climate summaries,
take a look at it and you will be able to see
some of the pieces that were observed for Massachusetts.
What are some of the iconic things
that are of critical importance to the state,
for example, and what are some of the temperature changes,
precipitation changes and so on that have been observed.
A couple of other things that were new for the NCA4
were the use of climate change indicators
from the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA,
and brand new downscaling products
that were uniform across the entire US,
so that you were able to tap into a standardized
or consistent way of looking at methodologies.
And for the very first time, we had economic studies
to look at the impacts on labor, for example,
or the loss of potential human power hours.
So they asked us for each chapter
to think about what was unique to our region
and then to use that to create the chapter itself.
So if you think about the Northeast,
we'll come back to this map in a sec,
if we think about the Northeast,
one of the things that is particularly unique to us
is this tremendous dichotomy
between having some of the largest cities in the US
and having that megalopolis that runs from Boston
all the way down through New York
and down into the DC region here along I-95 corridor.
And then juxtapose with that,
we have a tremendous amount of rural area.
So we have that rural-urban interface that we looked at.
We also have a lot of our region
being coastal with marine resources
that we needed to keep in mind
versus the inland regions which are our mountainous
and how that plays out from a weather climate
and climate change perspective.
In terms of peoples, we have a cultural heritage
that includes indigenous peoples.
It includes settlements that date back
to the 1600s and the 1700s.
And so the cultural heritage of the region
is a little bit unique and special compared
to other parts of the US.
And then our physical geography is critically important
because it sets up different types of dynamics,
different types of both physical and human vulnerabilities.
So here are some of those economic studies
that were brand new and it allows
us to bring that human element
in terms of either the number of hours
that are lost due to changes in temperatures
or inhospitable type of work conditions
but also changes in air quality
and what does that mean for us as humans?
So in putting all of these together,
let's take a look at what we created for those chapters.
So all of the chapters went through
that entire process that I just talked about
and what the USGCRP main office in DC did
is they pulled out all of the elements
of each particular region.
So for the Northeast here, most of our impacts
are in water, energy, transportation, infrastructure
and some of the hazards that we are particularly prone to
are different types of storms,
droughts, heat waves, flooding, sea level rise
and so forth and I know you cannot read the slide
because it is very tiny,
but it's one of those main takeaway chapter highlights
that we have in the introductory section
of the assessment itself, very nice way
of pulling all of this together.
So the 10 regions, so 10 regional chapters
and what I did is I went through
and I looked at all the major highlights
of these 10 regions to see if there were any threads
through the tapestry of what the overarching themes were.
Most of the chapters all talked
about having to pay attention to ecosystems
and ecosystem services, the importance
of indigenous peoples and human health challenges
in our regions, looking at adaptation to climate change
and how our adaptive capacity
could or could not be affected,
the ways in which climate change influences our productivity
in the agricultural sectors.
And then the imposition on infrastructure,
both built infrastructure as well as transportation.
And then for those who are along the coast,
looking at the marine resources,
coastal resources and sea level rise.
So for the Northeast chapter, we had five key messages
and each one encapsulates the big change
or the big piece in its bullet point
and then pieces from there.
So the first one talked about the influence
of changing seasons on our rural landscapes,
rural ecosystems and our rural environments
and the economies and livelihoods that are based on that.
And so we're looking at ways in which milder winters,
earlier spring conditions, changes in snowfall regimes
affect things like tourism and farming, forestry,
and the depth snowpack, changes to our forest
and stream flows and so forth.
And so, again, just looking at why we had
our rural piece in here, it has to do with the large extent
of our rural conditions across our region in particular.
So knowing that agriculture is one of the key pieces
for us as a Northeast region,
how do we look at what those changes mean
from an agricultural productivity perspective?
And one way to do that is to look
at the length of the growing season.
And what you're seeing here is, on the left-hand side,
the last date of freeze occurring
in the springtime conditions and on the right hand side,
what you're seeing is the first date
of a freeze in the fall.
So in between, gives you an idea of your growing season.
And the way that the color scheme shows,
the number of changes in the days that you have
that time of your freeze, springtime and fall,
so that the yellows show you anywhere
between, let's say, six and 14 days change.
And then the reds show you
anywhere between 26 and 30 degrees.
And then the last thing that you're looking at in here
is different scenarios that this was run for.
And you may have heard
about these representative concentration pathways, RCPs.
4.5 is a really aggressive RCP or scenario.
8.5 is more like business as usual.
And each one of these is for different timeframes.
So these first two panels are for the middle of the century
under the more aggressive scenario,
4.5, and then the business as usual,
8.5, so you'll see there's a bigger change
in a number of days under the business as usual.
And then this last panel on here
is business as usual but for later on in the century.
So you see a tremendous amount of change
in that last panel in there.
So if we switch from agriculture
and we look at stream flow conditions,
this is some work from one of our coauthors
on the Northeast chapter in looking
at the timing of these stream flow conditions.
So the way that you're reading this
is stream flow timing gets earlier
and that is denoted by triangles that point downwards.
And the more red those triangles,
the earlier in time you see those stream flow patterns
are occurring.
And so you see a lot of reds across Maine
and the Northern part of our region
all the way down through the spine of the greens
and into the Appalachians across in here.
And if I blow this up, one other way of slicing
and dicing it, this is, again,
the same work from Hodgkins and Dudley,
on the left-hand side, you see changes in precipitation
and on right-hand side,
you see those changes in storm flow.
So this is, again, feeding into that timing
of your stream flow patterns.
And so you see again, the triangles,
but this time they're pointing up,
which means you're getting increase in precipitation
and also increases in our storm flow.
So the second key message
was keeping with the physical environments
and those changes in your physical environment
and looking at some of the changes
that we see in our coastal regions,
so both on the coast itself, but also offshore.
And one of the reasons why we're looking
at both offshore conditions
is sea level rise has been occurring.
It's occurring in one of the fastest rates in the country.
Some of the warming that we're seeing
off the Northeast is also occurring at rates
that are some of the fastest in the country itself.
And so when we think about sea level rise,
we think about our coastal regime in particular,
what does that mean, not just for ecosystems,
but also for our built landscape?
So we can think about some of the impacts
of Hurricane Sandy, for example,
and what those meant for having
some of the flood, the subways in New York
actually being flooded.
So speaking of New York, that took us
to our third key message, which is our urban areas.
And again, this juxtaposition,
this interplay between rural areas and urban areas
and the interconnectedness of them
but also some of the features
that are particularly unique to our urban areas.
And so a number of critical infrastructure pieces in there
and a number of transportation pieces in there
but also knowing that we have some particularly
key historic sites in our urban regions
that we need to pay a little bit of attention to.
So sea level rise, flooding is used,
flooding challenges and looking at how that plays out
in some critically important coastal cities.
So we've got some flooding in Annapolis highlighted in here.
And then if we think about some of the strategies
that have been implemented as a result
of some of these extreme storms that we've had,
this is a shot from downtown Manhattan in New York City,
where in response to Sandy,
when we did some mitigative and adaptive type of strategies,
these are some of the subway coverings.
So instead of having that flush with the ground,
like they usually are, they're elevated
so there's that mitigated barrier
for the floodwaters not entering directly into the subway
and these grates are also now multi-use.
So pedestrians and also for bike use.
So it's a multi-approach
to actually mitigating against extreme storms.
So the fourth key message,
turn our eye to peoples and, in particular,
to the threats to human health.
And as the region warms, as we have changes
in our moisture conditions, both offshore and onshore
what are some of the ways in which we can look
at things like vector-borne diseases,
ticks, Lyme disease and so forth.
And ways in which changes in temperature,
change in air quality and water quality
are important for us as human beings.
So one of our colleagues from Brown University
was able to do some of this work and use visits to hospitals
and emergency rooms, in particular,
as a way of having this as a proxy
for looking at the way in which we can look at implications
of changing temperatures for the region itself.
So the last key message talked a little bit
about what are some of the highlights,
if you will, across the region that have already occurred,
in terms of adaptation, adaptation types of strategies.
We included things like Reggie
and some of the other really great work that has been done
in both towns, as well as from a regional perspective
and highlighted that in the fifth and last key message.
So all of this work was done by an author team
which included both university affiliates
as well as federal affiliates, affiliates of tribal nations.
And so we were able to bring all of these pieces together.
So this is our author team,
and we also were particularly grateful
to having technical contributions
from a number of folks who either helped out
with our mapping and also with the actual case study
deep dive that we needed to have in place.
So if you'd like to read some more
about the Northeast chapter, here's the citation.
The full citations here and you can access
the entire chapter as well as all of the other chapters
in the NCA4 at this particular site.
All right, so let's use some of those things
that we've observed and bring this into the realm
of natural hazards in particular.
So one way of doing that is to focus
on looking at extreme events,
because those are of particular importance to us,
both as human beings as well as our various sectors.
And we can do this from both a temperature perspective,
which is what you see on the top here
as well as a precipitation on perspective,
which is the one on the bottom.
And so as climate changes, we observe that
in looking at distributions.
And so as a distribution shifts off to the right,
in other words as the temperature changes,
that change is not just the average conditions
which is what we're looking at here
but it also changes the extremes.
And so we're looking at probability
of having more hot weather in here at this upper tail
and the probability of having less cold weather,
which is this lower tail.
And from a precipitation perspective,
the shift is from the lighter line in here
to the darker line.
So that changes in precipitation play out
as seeing fewer events that produce low amounts
of precipitation and more events
of having higher precipitation.
And so another way of looking at that
is that shift that we're seeing.
And that then translates into looking
at either drought conditions
so there are fewer moisture,
events that produce a lot of precipitation
in those types of conditions or if you have excess,
what that plays out is for having things like mudslides.
And then when you bring all of this together,
we can look to see places that are particularly prone
for having droughts or our colleagues out in the west.
This exacerbates things like wildfires.
And then there's that sort of feedback loop,
how does that play out for us?
And when you have changes in your oceans
and changes in sea surface temperatures,
changes in the atmosphere,
you're gonna see also that played out
in the dynamics of the intensity of our tropical cyclones.
So even back as far as 2010,
climate.gov, which is a great resource
in looking at not just maps and rainfall,
but also teaching resources, even back then,
there was this question that was answered,
how can you have warming but record snow storms?
And we know we've had a number of records snowstorms.
And so we're looking at the way in which changes
in the temperature of the atmosphere changes the amount
of moisture in the atmosphere
and where does that go in the summertime,
in terms of heavy rainfall in the winter time,
in terms of extreme snowstorms and blizzards and so forth.
And so it's possible to have both of these in here.
So highly recommend climate.gov
as a great resource for doing a deep dive into some of this.
And the other piece, in all of this,
we mentioned hurricanes.
So why are we focusing on hurricanes?
And why is this a new piece
in this whole climate change realm?
We know that the Northeast has experienced hurricanes
in the past and in the recent few months and so forth.
So we're gonna look at that in a sec but why hurricanes?
Part of it is because as the climate continues to change,
we're noticing that hurricanes are slowing down
and Hurricane Dorian from a couple of years ago
was actually moving so slow
you could walk faster than Dorian was moving.
And so why is that a problem?
It's a problem because as a hurricane slows down,
the amount of precipitation that falls in a single place
is gonna be higher than if that hurricane
was a faster mover.
And so the speed with which the hurricane moves,
in addition to how much moisture it has in it,
critically important in here.
So let's do a little quick detour into hurricanes.
So David Vallee, who is at the River Forecast Center
in Taunton, Mass actually put together
some of these slides here.
And what you're looking at is all of the hurricanes
that have passed by Providence, Rhode Island
as far back as we can get in the hurricane database.
And so you're looking at hurricanes from 1850,
all the way up until 2015.
So there's tremendous amount of hurricanes moving through
and making either landfall or grazing
the Eastern seaboard across in here.
So you've got a number of those listed
for you along the right in here.
So this is all of them, like I said, 1850 to 2015.
If I slice and dice this,
or if David sliced and diced this from a 50-year timeframe,
one of the things you'll notice is this is 1900 to 1950.
So lots of these tropical systems moving up
through typical pattern here,
which starts off in the Eastern Atlantic,
does a little jog and strikes us here,
so that's the first part of the last century.
And this is the second half of the last century.
So we've got 1951 to 1999.
And you notice there's a little bit of a difference
in terms of where these are moving.
And then the last piece is 2000 and 2015.
And what you'll see in here is that the direction,
the track is a little bit different.
And why is this important?
Well, it's important because knowing where hurricanes
and tropical systems move is important for us to think about
and to always keep out on forefront
because our cognitive sciences
and our hazards sciences have told us
that it's easier to talk about things
that are part of a lived experience.
And so if you've never experienced one of these systems,
the vulnerability to the awareness of it might be different
than if you lived through one, two, three, four
or multiple of these events in question.
So using all of those, all that information
about those hurricanes, using all of the information
about the fact that extreme events are changing,
what NOAA was able to do is to actually update
all of that extreme precipitation
in something called the NOAA Atlas 14.
So NOAA Atlas 14 allows us to actually incorporate
all of these changes in extreme events.
And this is important
because what we're seeing is that shift
from the older information from the 1950s and '60s
to bringing in the newer information
in a way that allows for local emergency management,
local transportation, departments,
to actually have cutting edge geographic information science
or GIS based information that allows them to do planning
for all of these hazards on a more local (indistinct).
So the yellow lines in here are contours that were drawn
by hand back in the '50s, back in the '60s.
And then the shaded maps that you're seeing
are the new pieces that emergency managers
and transportation engineers now have
and so there's this tremendous amount
of high quality, high spatial variability information
that we can use for planning for natural hazards.
So why would we need this?
Well, part of the answer to that question
of why would we need to improve our data
that we're using for natural hazards
is because we're seeing increases
in their occurrence, increases in their realization
as a disaster over time.
And so you may be surprised
that most of the natural hazards
are actually meteorological hazards.
So that's what these green ones are
and then, to your physical hazards,
which are things like earthquakes and tsunamis
and volcanic activities occupy a smaller percent in here.
And then climatological hazards
like droughts and wildfires and extreme temperatures,
we've also seen those increasing over time.
So this was just updated to reflect the 2020 values in here.
So here's 2020, 2020 set an absolute record
in terms of billion dollar disasters.
They've been keeping those records
of when a billion dollar disaster occurred
across the entire US since 1980.
And so if we look at this, we've been noticing
that they have been increasing over time.
Some years are larger than others.
So 2011 was when we had Irene.
2012 was Sandy and then 2020
just blew everything out of the water.
And so what was the underlying factor for that?
Well, part of it was because we had a tremendous amount
of a tremendous number of these tropical cyclones
and hurricanes making landfall
across especially the Gulf regions, but also Florida
and in the Carolinas in 2020,
some places literally experienced five of these
over the course of the entire hurricane season.
So that's one part of the answer to that.
And this season was so long.
Remember we finished the regular alphanumeric alphabet
and went into the Greek alphabet
because there was so many systems.
And part of that is, is of course
because we are still in the middle of a la nina event,
which is very conducive to having
a lot of these systems move over the continental US
and the Caribbean Sea and so forth.
Wildfires, also critically important,
a lot of severe weather taking place as well.
So when we think about it,
what we need to now bring into play
are us as human beings
and who our vulnerable populations are.
When we think about understanding hazards,
when we think about trying to mitigate against hazards,
we need to keep in mind all of our peoples.
And so the ways in which peoples are vulnerable
and how those may either increase their vulnerability
to particular hazard or not.
And so some of the things to keep in mind
from a geographic perspective are historical legacies,
race and ethnicity, languages, health status,
socioeconomic status, immigration status,
whether we have a strong social network or not,
or gender and identity, other factors,
mobility challenges, all of these things
can help to increase our vulnerability as human beings.
And so why is this important?
Well, if we are experiencing more of these extreme events,
if they're becoming more frequent
and we overlay them with all of those factors
that we just introduced in here, it then sets up
this dynamic for how do you try
to make sure that all of our populations,
all of our peoples are being taken care of
in the face of these extreme events.
And so whether, sea level rise,
whether we're talking about coastal flooding,
whether we're talking about inland flooding,
along things like subways, for example,
how these extreme temperatures
then cause things like buckling of roads
or when we have something like Irene
and other large events that produce tremendous amounts
of erosion in place, why are some
of these things critically important?
And so geographically, when we think about our peoples,
we also need to think about our history.
And this is an example from Vermont
where our topography, our physical geography
is such that we have very, very narrow value regions.
And so, historically, your rivers are running
along the the base of those valleys,
but your roads are also right next to the rivers,
because there's no other place to put them
if you think about it like that.
And so from a historic perspective,
historic and cultural perspective
in inland regions, especially inland mountain regions,
we have this dynamic where and this actually occurred
in Irene where the rivers and the roads
actually can create ice islands
of where people were cut off or trapped
when the erosion occurred
and cut off these regions across in here.
So this is the town of Waterbury in Vermont
where the Winooski River
actually isolated the town of Waterbury
during the Irene flooding.
And so thinking about history,
thinking about the ways in which we can use this,
this is a map that is a little bit hard to read in here.
It's a map that was created by one of my colleagues
at VTRans, Vermont Agency of Transportation.
And it superimposes all of the places
where we had road damage in Irene,
those are the colors that you can see,
with the places that had road damage in 1927, the '27 flood.
So let me blow this up a little bit for you.
And again, colored areas are Irene.
And then the darker black areas are during 1927.
And you'll notice that they match, pretty much like this
because again, here's the history of the region.
So what this allows us to do
is maybe get a jump on where we need
to take a look at which regions of states,
which regions of our topography,
which populations might be affected
because of that historical piece that we see in here.
So to bring all of this together
and to think about a changing climate,
to think about what does this mean for extreme events?
What does this mean for our natural hazards?
There are a number of these dimensions
of the human environment, historical,
socio and economic pieces that need to go together
for us to take a look at this.
And as we think about, and we think about trying
to mitigate against changes
that are particularly detrimental to all peoples,
how will we bring in the geographies of vulnerability
into the conversation?
So how are we getting information out,
how are we making sure that all of our populations
are being well taken care of?
I think COVID has heightened our awareness of vulnerability.
And so if we think back to last summer in particular
when we had heat waves and we had
the call to shelter in place,
how do you shelter in place if you do not have a home?
And so the at start here, we have vulnerability,
critically important for the weather,
climate and climate change mitigation
adaptation conversation.
And as we're looking at this, and we're looking at it,
keeping in mind that all of these changes and processes
are occurring at different scales,
from local scales, all the way up to regional
and national scales and the ways in which we need
to take a broad scale systems approach
to making sure that we are looking at all elements
of either actual weather systems
or climate changes in particular,
in relation to the landscape, in relation to our peoples,
in a way that allows us to bring together
all of the disciplines that needs to be at the table
for us to understand and advance
our knowledge and appreciation of all of this.
And so it calls for a certain amount of flexibility.
It calls for a certain amount of nimbleness
in our response to an understanding
of using all of these various pieces of science
in the service of society.
So with that, I thank you for your attention.
I thank you for your invitation
to be part of the Darwin Festival.
And I would be happy to entertain any questions
that might have been put into the chat.
So thank you.
- Thank you so much, Dr. Dupigny-Giroux.
This is Nelson Scott Gale.
I'm a member of the Darwin Festival Committee
and I'll be helping moderate the questions
along with Dr. Ryan Fisher.
I think I just put into the chat for everybody
the website for NCA4 just so that people
could have it available.
And our first question in the 2016, 2020 image,
the last one in your five-year average
of global temperature anomalies,
is there an explanation other than random variation
for the blue spot in the middle of the Atlantic ocean?
- Okay, so there's certain parts
of the ocean that tend to have cold pools.
And that is one that we have observed in the past.
There was also one across in the Pacific Ocean
and part of it has to do with the dynamics
of flow in the ocean itself.
And if we think about the way
in which your ocean currents flow,
we've got the warm Gulf stream
that moves up the Eastern seaboard across to parts of
just off the coast of Europe and then back on down.
And so the cold pool that we're looking at
was in between that Gulf stream,
making its movements in there.
And so we've got that surface current.
We also have overturning of the ocean itself.
So from a 3D perspective,
we also have to factor that in there,
but it's one of those persistent pieces
that we've observed in the past.
And it helps us to understand or to think
that when we think about ocean currents,
when we think about ocean temperatures
and sea surface temperatures,
that different parts of the ocean,
whether we're talking about the Arctic Ocean
or the North Atlantic, whether we're talking
about the Antarctic Ocean respond differently
because the overturning conditions are different
in different sectors of our water planet.
- Dr. Dupigny-Giroux, thanks for a very good talk.
My name's Ryan Fisher.
I'm also in the Darwin Festival Committee.
I have another question from our audience today.
How do you think the Green New Deal
would help climate change?
Is it risk-based framing?
What can we do on a day to day basis to help?
- Okay, so great question, great question.
And I have not had a chance to delve deeply
into the Green New Deal.
So I would not be able to comment specifically on that.
One of the things I can say
is that the Northeast has been a leader
in terms of a lot of the strategies
that are taking place across the board.
I know there's a very active community
in a lot of the towns across Massachusetts,
I think back to some of the presentations
that we saw at the NCA4 conference back in November.
And so I think as we wait for the new administration
to start creating and implementing policies,
I think it's absolutely critical
to continue doing a lot of the really great work
that is taking place at the local level
so that when the time comes
and we can do this merging of local to federal,
we will be in a good position to do that.
- The next question was does the stream flow increase
affect sea level at all since streams flow into the ocean?
- So has the stream flow increase affect sea level.
So I think that that is, that's an interesting question.
So for most of the streams across New England,
they pretty much flow from the North down towards the South.
And at the same time, we're looking at sea level rise
along the Eastern seaboard, which is coming up like this.
And part of the challenge is the Northeast shelf
off the coast of our region looks like this.
And so part of that sea level rise
has to do with the shape of the coast.
I think as that sea level rise occurs
and we're seeing that it's taking place faster
than it is, in say, like the south east region in there,
that water that's moving down into places
like pitch and sound would be influencing
and helping to raise your sea level
that it's already occurring
along the Northeast shelf in there.
And so I think that's part of the reason
why we pay particular attention to our coastal resources
because we've got a particularly fragile system
that doesn't look like other places
for the south of us or the Gulf of Mexico
or along Pacific Ocean.
- Here's another question for you
with an acronym that I'm not familiar with.
How realistic is RCP 8.5,
given the recent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions
as well as planned future investments in renewables?
- Okay, great question.
And two ways of answering that,
when we think about greenhouse gas emissions,
we have to really parse out which ones we're talking about.
Are we doing methane?
Are we talking about carbon dioxide?
Are we doing something like nitrogen dioxide,
some of the decreases that we saw in the last year or so
were due to the COVID lockdown
and nitrogen dioxide decreasing as a result of that.
But nitrogen dioxide is a really interesting greenhouse gas
because it actually started to rebound as soon
as we came out to lockdown.
And so when we think about it,
we really have to factor in the entire spectrum.
Methane, which you may remember
has a greenhouse warming potential
of 20 times carbon dioxide,
sometimes it's a forgotten gas
but it's a really critical gas because when it gets released
from either permafrost or from forest fires,
we saw that big jump last year, again,
when we saw a lot of that permafrost release taking place
in Siberia and other parts of Northern Russia,
making us aware again, we need to pay attention to methane.
And then the last gas that we're still learning about
is HFCs, which are hydrogenated fluorocarbons,
which are gases that were just discovered
about three or four years ago.
And again, they have a very, very potent
greenhouse gas potential in terms of warming the atmosphere,
very long lived.
And because they're synthetic,
we still need to learn a lot about them.
And so even while we make strides
in terms of the gases that we know more about
like nitrous oxide, like carbon dioxide,
there's still some of these others that are either new,
so the HFCs are new or that are gonna be released
or are being released at rates
that we are still getting our hands wrapped around,
which is things like methane.
- A somewhat related question is how much
of the ozone layer have we depleted over time
with pollution and aerosols?
I think there's a relation with those in the HFCs.
- So the ozone layer is a talk in and of itself
but I'll try to do it in like two minutes. (laughs)
All right, so if you remember back to the slide
that I showed you with the NASA visualization
and change from 1880 to 2000,
that massive amounts of red across the Northern hemisphere
in last little bit, if you remember the same time
you saw slightly different signal down in Antarctica.
And so the ozone hole is a depletion
in the amount of ozone at around 19 miles
above the Earth's surface, primarily over Antarctica.
So when we say the ozone hole,
we're not talking about an actual hole,
we're talking about a decrease
in amounts of ozone at the upper level here.
So there's a 3D thing going on.
There's a decrease at this level.
And what that means is that we get
more ultraviolet radiation coming down to the earth surface.
Ozone also occurs at this level where we walk around
and at this level, ozone at this level is a greenhouse gas.
And so when we think about ozone
at the levels that we walk around,
that's the stuff that gets produced from cars
or forest fires or cars, forest fires
or industrial processes.
And when we talk about it here,
that's a greenhouse gas, that's a human irritant.
The ozone hole up in here in the stratospheric regions,
19 miles where your jet aircraft fly,
that is what protects us from skin cancer.
So there's a subtle difference
between the height that it occurs.
And it's important, both critically important,
but for two different reasons.
- I'm conscious of the time, everyone.
We probably have two more questions.
For those in the audience, we always get lots of questions
and we try to have as many of them as we can be answered.
So the next question is has less travel
due to COVID mitigated climate change?
- So that goes back to the previous comment
that I was talking about with the gas in question.
So when we went into the lockdown,
there was a thinking that we would see,
this is a real world experiment and what turned out
was that the amount of carbon dioxide emissions
were not impacted as much as we anticipated
that they were gonna be.
So that was one part of the answer.
But then what we learned was something
that was really, really unexpected
because we didn't know about nitrogen dioxide
and how quickly it responds.
So it was responding on the order of weeks and months.
We saw that dramatic drop.
But then as soon as the economies started,
we saw all of that rebounding.
So it came back to the levels
before they lockdown itself.
So the answer is we saw a short-term drop
in one of the gases, but it didn't mitigate
against all of the greenhouse gases,
in terms of making an impact on climate change.
- Do you think that encouraging people to move
to unpopulated areas that have less disaster damage
would help save money in disaster damage?
- So that question is what we call climate refugees.
And that is a huge, huge topic, not just for discussion,
not just for research, because population movements
are a complicated and complex topic.
And it's not just a question of moving
from one place to the next.
You also need to look at the receiving communities
and whether the capacity exists
from a socioeconomic perspective,
from a land-based perspective, from a services perspective.
So it's not just a question of let's relocate
from here to here.
There's all of these other geographic elements
that I've talked about.
I know Dr. Hayes knows about, in great detail,
that we need to really do that human environment,
political, cultural, economic, physical,
all of those pieces have to go together
before you can understand this.
So we've been seeing some of this.
And again, it's one of those things where we can maybe try
and use this as an experiment, but it's not a simple answer.
- Dr. Hayes, if you would like to thank our guest,
and then we'll end the webinar.
- Yeah. Thank you, Ryan.
So Professor Dupigny-Giroux and Lesley Ann,
my friend, thank you so much.
It was a stimulating presentation.
You showed that the complexities of the problem
and human, society, climate, water.
So I really appreciate it.
And your involvement and lead author of the chapter,
it's just so cool that,
that you're a geography professor
and played this important role
in the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
And I don't know how you're a state climatologist
and a professor too, but you're amazing.
So thank you so much.
- Well, John, thank you.
(John laughs)
- Thank you very much, everyone.
That concludes our webinar and hopefully,
we'll see you at the next one at 2:00 PM.
Take care. - Thanks everybody.