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I did not start out wanting to be a climatologist, not that I am one now. As long as I can remember I wanted to be a weather guy. Believe it or not, Figure 1 shows a rain gauge cylinder of the type that existed before things went digital. It is very similar to one that I built when I was growing up in Jamaica. I was 7 or 8 years old at the time, and I bugged my parents and bugged my parents because I wanted a rain gauge. Eventually we found a cylinder, but I still needed a funnel. So, we went down to the tinsmith at the market, and I am sure the tinsmith really appreciated some
A native of Schenectady, New York, Rear Admiral David Titley was commissioned through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Commissioning program in 1980. Rear Admiral Titley served over 10  years at sea,
including a tour as navigator aboard USS Farragut (DDG-37) and tours
as oceanographer aboard USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3), USS Carl Vinson
(CVN-70), Carrier Group Six, and U.S. Seventh Fleet. Shore tours include serving on the staff of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and as the senior military assistant to the Director of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Rear Admiral Titley has commanded the Fleet Numerical Meteorological and Oceanographic
Center in Monterey, California, and was the first commanding officer of the Naval Oceanography Operations Command. He served his initial flag tour as the commander of the Naval Meteorology and
Oceanography Command. Rear Admiral Titley has a B.S. in meteorology from the Pennsylvania State University and an M.S. in meteorology and physical oceanography and a Ph.D. in meteorology, both from the
Naval Postgraduate School. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Seminar XXI on Foreign Politics, International Relations, and National Interest and is a fellow of the American Meteorological
Society. In 2009, Rear Admiral Titley assumed duties as oceanographer and navigator of the Navy and the director of Task Force
Climate Change.

36 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 snot-nosed 8-year-old with a tape measure checking his work. The first time the funnel was 6 inches in diameter, the second time it was 4 inches in diameter, and by the third time it was right. I got my 5-inch-diameter funnel. I am not going to show you my paper records of rainfall in Jamaica, but I still have them. The first thing
I can tell you—and maybe this was more weather modification than climate—is that beginning the day that I set up the rain gauge outside our house, we entered the longest dry spell that occurred while we were in Jamaica.
Figure 1. Rain Gauge Cylinder
But I knew forever that I was going to do weather. I really had not thought very much about climate at all. If you are going to do weather, where do you go? Well, 30  years ago there were only about half a dozen places in the United States where you could study meteorology; one of those was Penn State. They accepted me, and Naval ROTC accepted me as well. Because Penn State is obviously in Pennsylvania, which was not my home state, it met my criterion of getting away from home. It was close enough, though, that I could still get home if I needed to. I would love to tell you that it looked like the scene depicted in Figure 2 below. That is what the Penn State Weather Center looks like today. When I was in school, we were using all the papers and charts that appear in

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 37 the lower portion of the Figure. I would come in at 4 a.m. and use those data to plot up the morning weather maps.
Figure 2. Penn State Weather Center
How many meteorologists do we have in here? Why would you do a 9Z chart? What is better about a 9Z as opposed to an 8 or
10Z? Oh, come on. You guys disappoint me—isallobaric analysis.
The 9Z chart allows you to determine the change in atmospheric pressure over the last 3 hours. By plotting those changes, you can determine where the isallobars (lines of equal pressure change) are, and thereby see how the atmosphere is changing. For short-range forecasting, that was pretty good and that was actually worth getting up 1 hour early for. I was into weather, so that is what I did.
So what did I want to do when I got commissioned? I still wanted to be a weather guy, but what happened instead was I received what I would still to this day call my best-ever piece of career advice. I still have the letter that came from a detailer named
Captain Pine. He essentially said: “Hey midshipman, I understand you want to be a weather guy. That’s really nice. But guess what, you went to ROTC and the reason the Navy paid you to go to
ROTC is because we need unrestricted line officers, so go get yourself a warfare pin. In 3 or 4 years, if you’re still interested, come back and see us, we’ll probably still be around.”

38 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011
As I said, that was the best piece of career advice I ever received because I ended up on a Navy destroyer. The ship had one of those 1200-pound steam plants that The Honorable John Warner mentioned. I have a letter from the engineering officer of the watch that says I did not kill myself or anybody else while operating that plant. As it turned out, I actually liked this stuff, so I went from an objective of being in the Navy for 4 years and a day (I was going to give them 1 extra day after my legal obligation ended) to a goal of staying in the Navy as long as I was having fun, as long as the work still seemed meaningful, and as long as they did not throw me out. So far, by and large if you average over time, all of those have happened. They have not thrown me out due, no doubt, to a series of increasingly serious personnel errors on the Navy’s part.
At some point, though, we all have to go home.
Eventually though, after thinking long and hard about it, I transferred into the oceanography community and I got to do things from the tactical to the operational scale. I worked for some terrific gentlemen: Admiral Walt Doran out at Seventh Fleet and Admiral
Art Cebrowski, who had Carrier Group Six at the time. I learned a tremendous amount from them, not only about weather, but about operations and how to think at the level that those gents do.
In the process, I learned that collecting weather data and making forecasts was really fun, but that it is more or less at level one in the overall scheme of things. If you are a decision maker, you do not really care about collecting the data or creating a forecast. What you care about is what kind of decisions you have to make. So, we figured out that we needed a translation function that connects all that weather, oceanography, and climate information with what we needed to do operationally.
Figure 3 provides an example of what I call a “performance surface.” The left-hand graphic on the second row from the top, for example, tells you how well your sonar is working. The right-hand graphic on that same row, the one that depicts the Horn of Africa, is a very simple version of what we call the Pirate Performance
Surface. It does not mean that we want pirates to perform better. It means that if you know where the pirates are, what their CONOPS are, what their tactics, techniques, and procedures are, how the

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 39 weather will impact their little skiffs, how high the waves are, how strong the currents are, and what the visibility level is, you can actually figure out where the pirates are going to be. What that allows you to do is like going to Vegas and being able to count the cards. Now the bad thing about working in the natural environment, or what we like to call nature’s casino, is that there is a whole lot more than 52 cards in the deck. The good thing is that if you figure it out, there is nobody with a big crowbar who is going to go break your kneecaps for doing so. So it is worth doing, and it gives us in the United States an advantage. It is a competitive advantage to be able to do this.
Figure 3. Performance Surface Illustration
So what does all this stuff have to do with climate or climate change? The short answer is nothing. I was not really thinking about climate at this point in my career. That debate was sort of going on through the 1980s, through the 1990s, and through the early part of the 2000–2010 decade, but I tended to look at it the way that a lot of meteorologists do. I was happy if my weather forecast models could tell me what was going to happen 3 days from now. If they were still more or less correct after 5 days, I was ecstatic. So, when someone started talking about climate forecasts,
I would invariably ask: What do you mean you can tell me what is going to happen 40, 50, or 70 years in the future? Can carbon dioxide really be all that important? I do not know that I would have

40 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 been called skeptical, but I am also sure that I did not fit in the true believer category. I can pretty safely say, though, that sometimes when people stumble over the truth, usually what they do is they just pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and keep on going as though nothing ever happened.
Well, as the climate debate kept going, I decided that maybe it was worth looking to see what some of the data showed. So, that is what I propose we do now. Let’s not worry about projections just yet. Let’s just look at what some of the data show.
Figure 4. Arctic Sea Ice Continues to Melt and Thin [1]
Figure  4 shows what is going on with the ice in the Arctic.
In the late summer, there is a lot less ice than there used to be at this time of year. That is probably not a Ph.D. dissertation kind of insight. The thing that is interesting is the graph at the bottom. It starts in 1981 and goes to about 2010. The really hard, really old ice that is really hard to break through is colored black. What they call “first-year ice” is colored blue, and the stuff in the middle is colored white. What we have seen over the last decade or so is a pretty big change in the Arctic. Is it going to stay like that, or is the

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 41 new ice going to stay around long enough to become old ice? I would say the jury is still out on that, but right now things are starting to look more and more as though we have seen this very fundamental change occur in the Arctic. It has gone from being totally frozen in the winter, to almost totally frozen in the summer, to now one that freezes up, albeit with first-year ice, in the winter. Now do not get me wrong, first-year ice in the Arctic can still be 2-, 3-, or
4-feet thick. This is not like first-year ice in Virginia, which if you step on it, you go right through it. Still, it is first-year ice, and it melts back very fast. You have this very, very dynamic system as opposed to what was almost a static system. So, that is going on. What does it mean? I am not sure yet, but it is certainly a piece of data.
Figure 5. Earth’s Total Heat Content Anomaly
Now, let us look at the Earth’s heat content. The data shown in
Figure 5 go back about 60 years or so to about 1950. If you look at where the heat is, you find that it is in the ocean. The heat is not in the atmosphere. The heat is in the ocean. The amount of energy it takes to warm up a certain volume of water is a whole lot more than what is required to warm up the same volume of air.

42 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011
So, it should not come as a surprise that the heat is in the ocean. If you look at temperature variations, especially on the land or in the atmosphere, it is sort of like the atmosphere tail is being wagged by the ocean dog. That is one of the reasons that you see these yearto-year and even seasonal or longer time period variations. It does not necessarily mean that the Earth is warming or the Earth is cooling. From a maritime perspective, if you really want to understand what is going on in the climate, you need to be looking at what is going on in the oceans.
Figure 6. Sea-Level Rise (See the Appendix for Close-Up
Views of Panels a, b, and c)
Sea-level rise is another thing that we are looking at. As shown in Figure 6, we started off in the 20th century with a rise of about
2  millimeters per year, which was mostly from thermal expansion and some from glaciers melting and flowing into the ocean.
We are already up to about 3 millimeters per year. As was mentioned before, we have got to be careful. If you really want to get people’s attention, you say: “Oh my God. Here we are, 2011, the rate of sea-level rise is 50% higher than it was in the 20th century.” When I told this to a friend from Sandia, he joked that
Sandia might not be high enough and proposed that he move to

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 43
Los Alamos. Yesterday, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) said that we need to be deliberate. So, the bad news is that sealevel rise is accelerating. The good news is that it is still only about
3 millimeters per year. What that tells me is we have time to try to understand what the real vulnerabilities are and what the most cost-effective and operationally effective mitigation strategies are so that we can keep going.
What is the real unknown here? The real unknown is not thermal expansion. We know that as water gets warmer it takes up more space. It is not even the glaciers. You may have heard the ruckus a couple of years ago when it was reported that the Himalayan glaciers were all going to melt. Actually, from the perspective of sea-level rise, the glaciers are small stuff. The big deal is what is going on with the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet. It is like the famous question: “Why do you rob banks?” The answer is: “That is where the money is.” If you are studying sealevel rise, why do you study the ice fields? Because that is where most of the world’s supply of fresh water is currently locked up.
What seems to be happening is pretty fascinating. If I were in my early twenties and looking for a Ph.D. in one of these fields, this would be pretty cool stuff. It is the intersection of weather, oceanography, glaciology, and climate. It seems to combine all of these different sciences.
As best we can tell, on the basis of reports from scientists at
Woods Hole and a number of research centers, what is happening is that when the ice fields come down into the fjords as glaciers, they ground on the ocean bottom because they are about a mile thick. What is happening then is relatively warmer water is melting those glaciers. The Arctic is kind of weird. You actually have warmer water underneath really cold water. It is not like a normal ocean. So some process is bringing up this relatively warmer water.
Now, between you and me, my idea of warm water is, say, 85°F.
The Arctic’s idea of warm water is plus 1°C or plus 1.5°C, but every degree of additional heat can, over time if you let it sit there for about a year or so, actually melt about 10 meters of ice off the bottom of a glacier.

44 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011
So, all of a sudden what do you have? You had this glacier that was grounded and now it is not, and the best analogy I can think of is the Gothic cathedrals in Europe with their big flying buttresses.
Those buttresses keep the walls up, and that is sort of what the glaciers were doing. If the bottom of the glacier is now floating, what happens? It is like taking the buttresses away from those cathedrals.
If you do that, the walls spread out. What is happening to the ice fields? They are spreading out. When they spread out and accelerate, more ice flows into the ocean.
Is that going to continue to happen? Well, we have a variety of observations that show that it is happening now in both the
Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Is it going to continue to happen? Is it going to slow down? Are there other interactions that we just do not know about? That is why there is such a big unknown with regard to sea-level rise. The National
Academies and the National Research Council say that the sea level will rise 0.8 meters. I have told the CNO that the sea level will likely rise 1  meter by 2100, but I have added that if I am wrong, I am probably wrong on the low side. And if I am in fact wrong and sea level rises by more than 1 meter, then that is going to be a big deal. As you heard from The Honorable Jackalyne
Pfannenstiel yesterday, that will have a big impact on Navy infrastructure. Today, though, it is about 3 millimeters. The take-home message on this is two things. Sea-level rise is a big deal, but we have some time to get it right.
Figure 7 shows what is called the radiative transfer equation.
Why have I done that? Because I hate you? No. That is not why.
The reason is, if you look at global warming, that is what it is all about. Who is a science policy guy who hated arithmetic in high school? I know we have got to have some of those in here. We cannot all be science and engineering guys and gals. Well, as it turns out, the science policy guys do not have to worry about this stuff because global warming at the big, big scale is actually pretty easy. I should not tell you this because the climatologists will get mad and nobody will fund them to do the rest of the stuff that needs to be done.

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 45
Figure 7. Radiative Transfer Equation
But at the big-picture scale, it is pretty easy because you have
“gazintas” and you have “gazoutas” (more precisely, “goes-intos” and “goes-out-ofs”). Okay? I mean that is what you have. The gazintas are the Sun. I mean it is not like we get a lot of other warmth from stars or other astronomical objects besides the Sun.
Sure, there is a little bit of heat from the Earth’s interior, but basically most of the input is from the Sun. NASA has measured the
Sun pretty darn well for at least 50 years from space. They have really good observations. We have other observations and other records that go back farther, but certainly for 50 years plus we have excellent data. What does it show? It shows that to within plus or minus one tenth of one percent, the Sun’s been constant. There are some little wiggles, but it has basically been constant. Okay, so the gazintas are the same. Now let us look at the gazoutas. It turns out that you can also measure those, and NASA has done a pretty good job of that. At the frequencies that correspond to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which we know from independent observations is going up, we see that less and less heat is actually leaving the Earth.
So, for all you physics and engineering majors and even the national security majors in here, if you have the same gazintas, but you do not have as much gazoutas, what happens to the system?

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Something has got to change, right? In some way, shape, or form, it has to heat up. That is all global warming is. That is it. That is all it is. Now the details get really, really, really, really hard. You have to start understanding that equation I showed earlier. You have to understand positive feedback. You have to understand aerosols, versus carbon uptake, versus how much CO
2
is getting sucked up by the ocean and so on. As you would expect, the details get really, really hard, and there are enough details that it is sufficiently hard to talk about climate change even at the regional and decadal levels. But at the big-picture level, it is actually pretty simple.
Figure 8. Global Hurricane/Typhoon Energy [7]
One of the claims frequently heard about global warming is that it will produce more and stronger storms. We have all heard that we are going to have more hurricanes and those hurricanes are going to be bigger and more intense. Well, Figure  8 shows
40  years’ worth of data, updated as of just 3.5  weeks ago. The measure used is a variable called accumulated cyclone energy.
It is calculated by taking all the hurricanes and typhoons in the world over a given period of time (e.g., a year) and computing the product of how long the storm lasted and how big or strong it was. Then, those products are added up, and a running average is calculated to smooth it out a bit. What you see is that it certainly goes up and down. There seem to be some cycles there as well, but right now, the value for 2011 is pretty low. While the big stuff is easy to understand, we have to be careful even when we say

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 47 things that seem obvious, for example, that if you are heating up the ocean, you are going to have stronger hurricanes. Maybe you are, maybe you are not. I think the jury is still out on that. So, what is the message from this? Is the message that global warming is a bunch of hooey? No, the real message is that you have to look at the data and evaluate everything you hear.
At one point in my career I was a navigator on board a ship
(and, of course, now I am the Navigator for the entire Navy, but that is an entirely different job). One of the things I taught my quartermasters was “red right returning.” When you bring your ship into port, you keep the red lights and buoys on your right. I told them if you cannot remember “red right returning,” remember “red left new job.” I really did not care which version they remembered, just as long as they knew which what side of the channel you come up.
When I was a navigator, we did not have GPS. So, I learned to use a sextant, charts, and dividers. I computed my course using dead reckoning and by looking out the window. Never underestimate the value of looking out the window for either navigation or for weather forecasting.
But the way you do navigation, and I think the same is true for a lot of things that we do in our profession, is you never rely on one single piece of data. You look at everything. You look at all the data. I have shown you a couple of things; we could spend the whole day looking at the tons and tons of data that are available.
I will not ask you to do that, but if you did, the conclusion you would reach is that yes, the climate is changing, and yes, a primary component of that, although probably not the only component, is greenhouse gases. Where are those greenhouse gases coming from? They are coming from humans burning fossil fuel. I know a lot of people say: “well I can see that it is changing, but I do not really care why it is changing.” However, if you do not care why it is changing then you can probably believe that maybe it is all natural, and if it is all natural, then perhaps those natural changes might stop tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. And if you thought that, why on God’s green earth would you invest billions of dollars to adapt or to mitigate for something that is going to be part of a natural cycle that is going to change regardless?

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So, I think it is important for the Navy, and for the military in general, to have some understanding at some level as to what is causing these changes. If somebody tells you they know the details as to what is going to happen to the climate in Washington, D.C., in 2037, my recommendation is to run, do not walk, away from whoever is trying to sell you that. You need to be careful. Still, the overall part is pretty simple, and it can be explained by the fact that humans are putting lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Moreover, that explanation fits even when you start digging into what is happening 15 or 20  miles up into the atmosphere.
As it turns out, it is actually getting colder than it used to be up there. That is consistent, because if all your greenhouses gases are down low, which they are because that is where all the gases are—and remember that the gazintas are constant—then what we have done is redistribute the heat. We have kept more of it like in a blanket down low, but because the gazintas are constant, it has to be colder up top to balance it out.
So, we have all kinds of data, and it all seems to make sense.
We can even replicate it with our computer models. I talked about those models at the beginning, and I will come back to them shortly. When I was still forecasting the weather, getting 5  days of accurate forecasts out of a computer model was really, really, really good. Now, of course, about the only forecast I am allowed to make is whether I can have the roof on my car up or down when I go to and from work. Nobody lets me forecast anything else. Given that we cannot forecast the weather accurately much more than a week out, why should we believe these guys who come in and they say that in the year 2070, the Earth’s going to be
3° warmer, or 2° warmer, or 5° warmer? Why should we believe that? It took me a long time to figure this out.
So, let me ask: who did engineering or some sort of physical science at some point in their past? Remember partial differential equations and things like initial conditions and boundary conditions? Well, the weather specifies the initial conditions for our long-range forecasting problem. Why is it going to rain here this afternoon? The answer is because it was raining in the Midwest last night. Those are the initial conditions. What is the climate?

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 49
Climate specifies the boundary conditions. Among other things, climate specifies what the Sun is doing. Are we stopping sunlight from coming in day after day, or are we bringing more of it in? Are we keeping more of the heat, or are we getting rid of it? Those are the boundary conditions. So climate is boundary conditions, weather is initial conditions, and somewhere in between the two, at perhaps the decadal, seasonal, or interseasonal scale, you go from one system to the other.
Let us take a look a how something that is a trace gas can possibly affect the climate. To help us understand that, let us look at another trace molecule that some people, so I have been told, might have some familiarity with, and that would be blood alcohol content. It does not take a very high blood alcohol content for a person to get into a lot of trouble, especially if they are sitting behind a steering wheel. As it turns out, 0.04 is about where the
Earth’s atmosphere stands today with regard to CO cisely, the atmospheric concentration of CO
2
2
. More pre-
is 390 parts per million or about 0.04%. I think most of us would agree that there is a whole lot of difference between being at a party with everybody at
0% and being at one where everybody is at 0.04%. The difference is just a trace. Now I am not trying to torture this thing in saying that alcohol is the same as CO
That is all I am trying to say.
2
or anything, but traces can matter.
As it turns out, my boss, the CNO, is interested in the Arctic.
He wants to know when these changes are going to affect what happens to the Navy. One of the things that the people who work for me know is that when your boss is interested in something, you better be fascinated by it. So I rapidly became fascinated with climate, and I thought I better try to understand what is going on.
Admiral Gary Roughead always wants to look at the data to separate fact from folklore, and clearly there are both a lot of facts and a lot of folklore swirling around the climate. So, he told me to go figure this out. What do we need to do, and when do we need to do it? As the Vice Chief said, we do not want to get caught unprepared, but we need to remember that we do not have the money to go and spend and do things either ahead of need or do things

50 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 just because they are nice. If we do not absolutely need them, we cannot afford them.
One of the things we figured out on day zero was we cannot, will not, and should not do this by ourselves. So, thanks to my topnotch staff, we have established great relationships with some international partners. We have talked to Norway, Sweden, and Canada.
Through some of our academic associates, we have pretty good contact with scientists in Russia. We are also working with other parts of the DoD, like the Air Force Weather Agency. As you might expect, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) has been a key collaborator, as has the Department of
Energy and its labs at Sandia, Los Alamos, and Oakridge. We are interacting with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and lots and lots of academic institutions. We have received great support from the National Academies of Science. (See Figure  9 for more details.)
Figure 9. The Task Force Climate Change Team
While climate change is a big deal, we have to think about it in the context of other things. At last night’s dinner, we were reminded that the world’s population now stands at 6 billion and counting and that we might level off at 9 billion, give or take a billion. That is

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 51 a whole lot of people. There will be competitions for resources, for food, for water, and for energy. Climate change is going to impact and be impacted by those competitions.
Our ability to address these problems will also be affected by our computational resources. When I got into the Navy, $1000 bought you the computer power of a nematode. Some people think that was my computing power and maybe it is; I am not sure.
By about 2000, that same $1000 bought you the computer power of a lizard, and by 2030 or 2035, $1000 is going to buy you what is essentially the computing power of the human brain. So how do we use that? How do we use that to tackle these problems? Do we make them better? Do we make them worse? And exactly how do we solve these problems when we are out of money? If you do not already know, we are now working in a very, very constrained fiscal environment.
Let me mention some of the things we are interested in. First of all, there is the Arctic. The Bering Strait is about 60 nautical miles wide. It is deep enough for any of our ships, but it is actually pretty shallow. We were talking to the skipper of the USS Connecticut who went up for the Navy Ice Exercise (ICEX) 3 weeks ago. He said that the transit was pretty interesting; he had ice 25 feet above him and the bottom was 25 feet below him, and it was like that for about 4 or 5 days.
Another key concern is sea-level rise. As I indicated previously, we have projected that the sea level is going to rise by about a meter by 2040, but there is a lot of uncertainty about that projection. As it turns out, the local currents have a big influence on how much or how little the sea level will rise. And if that is not complicated enough, in some parts of the globe, the land surface is going down, and in other places it is coming up. One of the things that affect the height of the land surface relative to the sea surface is glacial recession. When the glacier’s weight is removed, the land bounces up.
If you live in one of those places, sea-level rise probably will not affect you. But, if you live in one of the places where the land surface is going down, the apparent change is going to be even worse.
To make sure we understand these issues, we are working with the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program

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(SERDP) to make sure that we understand the relative changes in sea level for the places that the DoD and the Navy care about. So, you see that sea-level rise, like politics, is local.
Yet another topic of concern is the ocean acidification issue that Rear Admiral Philip Cullom mentioned in his presentation.
Will it have a direct impact on naval operations? Probably not.
Some people think that it might impact sonar performance by changing sound absorption. The best we can tell from studies done by the Office of Naval Research and Woods Hole is that it is probably a tertiary effect. There will be some effect, but it will not be huge.
The big effect is the indirect one, and it gets into the whole global instability thing. Although we do not eat a bunch of the stuff that is in the lower parts of the marine ecosystem, we do eat the stuff that eats that stuff, like tuna and tasty fish. So, if we end up taking out part of the marine ecosystem, and if people cannot get that protein (about 1 billion people today get their primary protein from the ocean), where are they going to get that protein? When you add to that the fact that the Earth is getting more people, not less, you end up with what I call the silent partner to global warming. There is not a big controversy about this. The chemical oceanographers have shown that the pH levels are coming down, which means the ocean is getting more acidic. You are not going to be able to put your finger in and pull out just bone—it will not be that acidic. But it will be acidic enough that if your ecosystem has had this nice steady state for 200,000 years chemistry-wise, and then in 200 years you change it, then wham, like that, what is going to happen? The answer is nobody knows, but we are running this big uncontrolled experiment as we speak.
As the Vice Chief of Naval Operations mentioned, we have published two roadmaps—an Arctic Roadmap and a Climate
Change Roadmap—and got them signed out. [8, 9] Both are available on the Internet, and they are free. Dr. Ronald Filadelfo mentioned the Naval Studies Board panel that was chaired by Admiral
Skip Bowman, former Director of Naval Reactors. The study’s recommendations are listed in Figure  10. We have also been working to encourage Senate ratification of the United Nations

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 53
Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The United States signed the treaty, but we have never ratified it. Why does it matter?
Well, because if you ratify it, you can then make what they call
“extended continental shelf claims.” The potential claims available to the United States would cover a land area on the order of half the size of the Louisiana Purchase. The U.S. Geological
Survey estimates that the associated mineral resources could have a value approaching $1 trillion.
Figure 10. Naval Studies Board Recommendations [10]
Then there is research and development. We have set five strategic objectives for ourselves (Figure 11). Unfortunately, I seem to be able to remember only three things at one time, which is why I have to have them written down. When you leave this symposium, though, there is just one that I would really like you to remember, and it is “safety, security, and stability for the Arctic.”
That is really what we are about. We are going to protect the
American people, we are going to protect the infrastructure, and we are going to make sure our forces are ready, which is really why we have Task Force Climate Change. It is for readiness in the
21st century.

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Figure 11. Navy Arctic Strategic Objectives [11]
Figure 12. ICEX-11
I just got back from this year’s ICEX (Figure 12). I was joined on the trip by Admiral Chris Colvin, commander of the 17th Coast
Guard District, Alaska Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell, and Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, Chief of Naval Research. The

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 55
USS New Hampshire was there. The Coast Guard helped out by dropping some vitally needed supplies. While there, I learned how people in the Arctic get fresh water. They find a piece of old ice and start chipping away at it. It is called “ice mining,” and it can be a lot of fun as long as you do not have to chip enough ice to meet the daily fresh water needs of 40 people.
Thanks to Task Force Climate Change, we have been able to get the Navy’s Hampton Roads complex onto the top tier of facilities that SERDP will be studying (Figure 13). We have talked about how we go from weather to climate, but even though we can get projections out to the year 2100, who budgets for 2100? The answer is nobody. The DoD stops planning ahead shortly after the end of its Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) and the associated Defense Planning Projections (DPP). Although the Navy has a
30-year ship-building program and buys aircraft that it expects to have around for 30 years, like the rest of the Department, it plans budgets for the next 5 or 6 years. I am sure that it is the same for other parts of the government and for the commercial side. So, how do we as a nation improve our capabilities at the regional level and at time scales that matter? We are working with NOAA, with the Department of Energy, with NASA, and with our Air Force colleagues to see what can be done.
Figure 13. Installation Vulnerability Assessments

56 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011
So what are we doing on adaptation? You know, I mentioned this topic yesterday with a couple of comments on how we educate the next generation. One of the things I have told CNO is that by the mid to late 2020s or 2030s, we are going to have probably about a month or so of ice-free conditions in the Arctic each year. By the middle of the century, we will have 2–3 months of relatively open water. Now, 2040 is just 29 years from now. What that means is that the Navy has already assessed the officers who will be the senior captains and admirals at that time. They are in the Navy today. They will be dealing with this, and it will not be like some guy standing up with a PowerPoint brief saying what might happen. It will be: “Hey, we have got all this ocean where there used to be ice. We have got all these people up there sailing around. What are we doing? What are our needs?” So the more we can start talking about this and getting people to think seriously about it, it will be to our benefit.
Yesterday, Rear Admiral Cullom told us that the Navy is engaged in Task Force Energy primarily to be better at delivering combat power. A tremendous co-benefit, though, is that it will help to mitigate climate change. It will not do so directly, because the DoD as a whole accounts for about 2% of the greenhouse gases emitted by the United States. The Department of the Navy accounts for just a quarter of the DoD share. So, even if the Navy’s emissions went to zero, it would not make much of a difference. As we all know, though, leadership is a nonlinear term, and a little bit of leadership in the right place can have tremendously outsized effects, and that is what the Secretary of the Navy is looking for.
Here are some of the things that are coming up next. You can probably pick your favorite event on the calendar in Figure  14.
Of course, we are here today at the Symposium. Our capabilities based assessment was mentioned by the Vice Chief. It is part of that whole Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System or acquisition process. It is not particularly sexy, not like “woo hoo,
I am going to go work on a capabilities based assessment today,” but it is absolutely essential that we have the foundational analysis down so that in 2014, when we start asking the Navy to make significantly different investments, there is an analytical basis for

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 57 doing so and so that we can defend our proposed changes first within the Navy, then within the Secretary of Defense’s Office, and ultimately to the Congress.
Figure 14. What’s Next
Sometimes I am asked what keeps me awake at night. Well the answer can be found in Figure 15. Between about 60,000 years ago and about 12,000 years ago there were big, big changes going on with the climate. Then suddenly sometime between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, it is as if somebody flipped a switch off and we entered into this wonderfully benign and incredibly stable weather and climate system. When did civilization start? About
12,000 years ago. Can I say it is causality? Somebody brought up the question about causality at last night’s dinner speech, and it is a very good question. At this point, I guess I should put up a picture of Clint Eastwood asking: “How lucky do you feel?” Can you imagine 9 billion people migrating thousands of kilometers, all chasing the best agricultural land? How are we going to deal with that? You can deal with that when your world population is
2 or 3 million and everybody’s nomadic. But how are we going to deal with that when you have 9 billion people? Are we going to be able to go back into some less advanced state if we have to? I am not saying we are, but we do sort of have our foot on the

58 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 gas pedal. The real answer is, we do not know, but I would say that there is considerable risk that we may not have thought this through. I do not know how you mitigate that one, so that is what keeps me up at night.
Figure 15. Climate Change in Prehistory
I will close by returning once more to Winston Churchill. He once said that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting every other possibility, and I think that is where we might be with regard to climate change. As you know, there are climate change deniers, climate change skeptics, and climate change believers. I do not like those terms. I think the
American Meteorological Society is trying to use the terms convinced and unconvinced. I think those are better terms. I will tell you ladies and gents one thing I do believe in. I fundamentally believe that America, our nation, will figure this out with our allies and partners, and rather than having a Thelma-and-Louise moment with climate change, we will have an Apollo 13 moment. When that is going to happen, I do not know exactly, but I can tell you that without the efforts of everybody here trying every day, we will not get there. So, keep plugging away. I appreciate the work that everybody here is doing on this, and we will get to the Apollo 13 moment for climate change.

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 59
1. Jackie Richter-Menge, and Jim E. Overland, Eds., Arctic Report
Card 2010, 2010, http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard .
2. Robert A. Rohde/Global Warming Art, Recent Sea Level Rise, http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_
Level_Rise_png .
3. CU Sea Level Research Group, Global Mean Sea Level Time
Series, 2009, http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ , last updated July
29, 2011.
4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment
Report: Climate Change 2007, IPCC, 2007.
5. E. Rignot, J. E. Box, E. Burgess, and E. Hanna, “Mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet from 1958 to 2007,” Geophys. Res. Lett.
35:L20502, 2008, doi:10.1029/2008GL035417.
6. Eric Rignot, “Changes in West Antarctic ice stream dynamics observed with ALOS PALSAR data,” Geophys. Res. Lett. 35:
L12505, 2008, doi:10.1029/2008GL033365.
7. Ryan N. Maue, “Recent historically low global tropical cyclone activity,” Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L14803, 2011, doi:
10.1029/2011GL047711.
8. Department of the Navy, Navy Arctic Roadmap, 10 Nov 2009, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/documents/USN_artic_ roadmap.pdf
.
9. Department of the Navy, Navy Climate Change Roadmap, 21
May 2010, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/documents/CCR.pdf
.
10. Naval Studies Board, National Security Implications of Climate
Change on U.S. Naval Forces, National Academies Press, 2011.
11. Department of the Navy, Navy Strategic Objectives for the Arctic,
21 May 2010, http://greenfleet.dodlive.mil/files/2010/09/US-
Navy-Arctic-Strategic-Objectives-21-May-2010.pdf
.

60 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011
Close-Up Views of Figure 6 Graphs (Sea-Level Rise)

Chapter 2 Task Force Climate Change Update 61
Q&A
Q:
r eAr
A dmirAl
d
Avid
t itley
: I think it is important to try to understand what has led to climate changes in the past and why the climate has been comparatively stable for the last 10,000 years.
We do know that from 60,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, the
Earth’s climate was undergoing some pretty dynamic changes. Ice ages came and went at fairly rapid intervals. I do not want to be left in the position of saying that just because the climate changed before it is going to change again. We need to know why. If we could have another 5,000, 10,000, or 15,000 years of benign climate, why would we consciously want to stop that? You know, we have something pretty good. For better or worse, we have built our civilization on that stable climate. There is probably nothing magic about it, but it is stable. So now we are going to change it, and potentially change it quite radically. I do not think we know the full consequences. My guess is that some of the things we all worry about will turn out to not be a big deal, and there will be other things that nobody is thinking about for which we will say: “Man, where did that come from?” Ultimately, it comes down to how much risk do we want to take. As Clint Eastwood so aptly phrased it: “How lucky do you feel?” The fact that there were big changes in the past, in my view, does not absolve us if we consciously create big and unknown changes in the future.
d r
.  r onAld
F ilAdelFo
: To answer your question really succinctly, it is not the size of the change, but the rate, and the simple statement is the rate of change we are seeing now is inconsistent with any known natural cycle.

62 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 r eAr
A dmirAl
d
Avid
t itley
: Fortunately, people are very, very adaptable. But, the faster you change a system, the harder it is and the steeper that adaptation.
m r
.  G len
S turtevAnt
: Can you comment on the Arctic Air
Responsibility, AAR, and how that relates to today’s combatant commands? Is there a decision that may change that?
r eAr
A dmirAl
d
Avid
t itley
: From what I understand, that plan has now gone across the Potomac. It had sat on Secretary Robert
Gates’s desk for quite some time, and I understand that it is now awaiting the President’s signature. But until the President signs it, I think it is probably premature for me to say how that is going to get carved up, because I will guess wrong. I think we will see a simplification of the division of responsibilities. I will just put it that way, but until the President signs it, I probably should not get in front of his headlights.