OFP Session I
Part I
CC = Climate change
GHGs = Greenhouse gases
Catherine: I want to welcome you all to this event, the Open Forum Portland. We will be talking about
CC and what if anything needs to be done about it. We’re going to be looking at the science part in the
following session. I wanted to let you know how this came about and how scientists thought about
doing something in psychology. Essentially for me it came from a meeting in Denver in April 2010, ?,
which is a process-work type of meeting where we look at conflict resolution and get different types of
issues that particularly handle some tools of psychology with what is called a process work, they were by
Arnold Mendal and other people. And as I was attending this meeting and really enjoying what we were
doing- looking at contentious issues, looking at the different aspects of them and how it should work out
the difference of people playing sometimes the role of skeptics, people disagreeing with the main point
of view. I thought maybe we could apply this to CC, because I was getting frustrated by the lack of
action, particularly after Copenhagen where nothing happened in terms of setting up some actions to
reduce the emissions of GHGs in particular. I thought maybe we could use some of the tools that were
presented in this workshop for CC if we started looking at what we are doing about CC from a conflict
perspective. So I went to talk to Arnold Mendel, and he was pretty enthusiastic with us from the start.
He said you can count on me and we can do it, just tell me when. So that was a good door-opener for
me. And you can imagine it helped entrain a lot of people into this activity. The next step was to
convince the scientific community that using scientific tools was a useful approach, so I talked to a lot of
colleagues, and one of them ---- said well, you know, if you want to really convince everybody you have
to convince Jeff --, because Jeff is both a climate scientist and a Jungian psychologist. So I emailed Jeff
immediately and he was enthusiastic from the start. He has been such a good co-organizer that I can
really only thank him very much. Now, I just get to the meat of the meeting, but before that thank all
the people who have accepted to participate. We have no underwriters so everyone is doing it on their
own time. [introducing facilitators, thank yous]
Jeff: [Thank yous] The objectives. When Catherine and I started talking about what to do with this time, I
think the very first thing that emerged was dialogue. Hopefully, that’s what we can accomplish over the
next 3 days. Provide a forum where people can feel free, open to standing up and asking questions,
taking positions, and really have an open dialogue around this central issue of CC. The way that we’ve
structured this process is to start tonight in terms of what we know is happening to the Earth, and CC.
And then the 2nd part of tonight is going to be about how that science is or isn’t connecting into issues
like social policy issues and societal issues. So tomorrow, we’re going to pick up on that theme in the
morning, and look at the implications of CC for the social dimension and its relevance to how people are
reacting to this issue, emotionally and cognitively. After we’ve looked at sort of all the affect that can
arise, the social dimensions of this problem in the morning, then in the afternoon Bonnie and I will be
looking at the path the path for transformation. There we’d really like to focus on where we are now
and where we’d like to get to in the future. A lot of that is going to be kind of imagining the world that
we would like to see in the next few decades to the end of this century. So we hope to involve people in
exercises around that. So now we’ve gone through transformation by Saturday evening. Arnie and Amy
are going to break their magic into the mix and use their process work to look at the tension, the
polarities that can exist around this issue. Sunday morning is really meant to be a reflection around
what’s taken place over the 2 ½ days. Looking back, but also looking forward- where do we go from
here, in terms of what we’ve accomplished this weekend, and where we want to take this in the future.
So those are sort of the objectives and the structure is carefully designed to get us from the basic
science through the social dimensions into the more challenging issue of transformation and how we
emotionally deal with this issue into a more reflective space Sunday morning to think about where we
will go in the future. [giving next session place and time]
Valerie: So I would like to start this session on the science of CC. I am Valerie –-- I’m a climate scientist
from France. I’m a climate scientist focusing mostly on natural archives of climate, so the past changes.
Orangon: I am from UCSB, the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. I’m a social
scientist by training, my background is in political science, economics, public policy. I am not only
studying issues of public policy but I also have the good fortune to play a fairly active role in public policy
process around some issues.
Valerie: We wanted this session to be focused on the type of information that will help you make
decisions, or cause you to change your position on whether or not human activity is acting on global
climate. There is a very large scientific community in the world, thousands of scientists working on CC,
which is quite exciting, being a scientist when climate is changing. So we wanted to organize this session
in two parts. The 1st part on the scientific challenges, the tool and methods. And the 2nd part on the
relationships between science, policy, and the general public. For the 1st part, we have invited 2
scientists from Oregon State University to give a presentation on the methods used in climate science.
So I would like to introduce you to Karen Michelle. She’s an assistant professor and she’s working on
climate modeling and the feedbacks linked with changing of water vapour, clouds, snow and ice. And
also to introduce you to Andres Shittner, who’s also an assistant professor working on climate modeling
the role of the ocean, and how to make use of past climate data and climate modeling to understand
the way the system is working. Their idea is to answer a number of frequently asked questions about
climates. For instance the difference between weather and climate. Why is it so difficult to predict the
behavior of the climate system which is a complex system. And the tools that are available and the
strengths and weaknesses that are associated with them. And also the way to understand the role of
human activities on the climate.
(14min45sec)
Karen: We’re going to switch back and forth. Ok so just to start out, can I see a show of hands of people
who feel comfortable with the basics of climate science? So the 1st topic that we wanted to cover was
the relationship between weather and climate. So I just grabbed the last week or so showing the
weather over the US. You can see some storms are moving into the Pacific Northwest. All sorts of
complexity and you know that past 10 days or so, the skill of the weather forecast just isn’t that right.
That’s because there’s all this complexity in the system. It’s very difficult to make predictions beyond 10
– 14 days. Why can we say anything at all about climate? If you think about another system you’re
familiar with, the annual cycles. This plot now shows data from 40 averaged together and it shows you
each month what the temperature is. As you can tell, there’s a definite pattern to it. In the summer it’s
warmer, in the winter it’s colder. So if you take the average over a long enough time period, all the
storms and all this messy stuff gets smeared out. So you are still able to make statements. Now I’m not
able to say what the temperature on June 1st will be, of next year, but I can say with a lot of confidence
that it’s going to be warmer on June 1st than it will be on December 1st. And so this is an example of
when you look over a longer time period, the noise that you see, these little storms, they average out
and you really see the fundamental processes driving the atmosphere, or the air temperature in this
case. And in this case, it’s the seasonal cycle, it’s the relational tilt between the Earth and the Sun. And
in terms of climate, we’re looking at things like the relationship of temperature and CO2 in the
atmosphere. It’s sort of like looking at how the height of people has changed through time. People are
all different height (I’m short, she’s tall). But if you look over time, people are more likely to be tall now
than they were 100 years ago because nutrition has changed, medicine has improved. And you can sort
of think of the human impacts on climate like that. We’re changing the overall structure, so even though
you have these little storms going through, or these little changes going on, you still have long term
averages. And I do want to say, we are a small group, feel free to ask any questions.
So, in interest of time, I’m going to skip it. But I do actually have a movie that shows some of the
observational records, the change in temperature over the last 100 years. You want to see it now? I was
told we had to do 15-20 min… This starts out at the end of the 1800s and what you’re seeing is the
difference in temperature at each location from the average temperature over I believe ---,so you can
see as you progress throughout the20th the overall trend is warming, so when you get to the end it is
warmer on average than it was 100yrs or so ago. So this is representing the fundamental change in the
climate system. Improved medicine and nutrition is in this case the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Speaker: Thinking about the answer to this, people would say things like, a volcanic eruption which
released CO2 in the air, more than the US did in a year, so, what’s the point? Would your answer be that
those volcanic eruptions were always happening so they are part of the base?
Karen: That’s a key insight, that you do have volcanic eruptions throughout history. However, they don’t
emit more CO2 and you don’t have one every year. Volcanoes impact climate through aerosols but the
aerosols only stay in the stratosphere for a couple of years. And they do have a cooling effect and we
can see it. In fact I have a picture later on where you can see that decrease in temperature after some of
the bigger eruptions of the past century. And in fact that’s one of the ways we used to test climate
models. And so the amount of CO2 that’s released by volcanoes compared to the amount that’s
released by humans is small. There are definitely other natural effects that are happening, but the effect
that humans are causing is swamping. An analogy I’ve heard is: you’re on your bike riding down the
street, and suddenly you’re on the pavement. Was it because a little rock in the road that you hit? Was
it because there was an attractive person walking by of the appropriate gender? Well that might have
played a role in it. But the main thing was really the car that hit you. So yes, the rock in the road, the
attractive person may have contributed. But the car was dominating what we see now and what we’ll
see in the future.
Speaker: Along similar lines, what do you say to someone who watches this progression, who say, this is
just natural variation. We have periods where it’s warming and then it goes the other way…
Karen: I think we will discuss that. So I think Andres is going to talk about the complexity of the climate
system.
Valerie: Just one comment on volcanoes. We are acting as a geological force, together, as human beings,
and we emit more than 100 times CO2 than background emissions.
Andre: So Karen showed this video already but I’m going to show it again because it shows kind of the
complexity of the climate system. It shows the clouds moving around, but you can also see that there’s
this blue area, which is the ocean, and the land which has some green parts to it, and some yellow colors
which are the deserts. The green areas are of course the vegetated areas- forests. And the ocean is of
course a big water source. Water evaporates there and sometimes as it moves around in the air, forms
clouds. And the water also moves from the ocean in the air and then it rains over land and sustains
vegetation. As you can see from the satellite, vegetation is not only an effect of the climate, but it
determines the climate system itself. It absorbs more sunlight than the desert areas, which are brighter
and reflect more sunlight back to space. So there’s an interaction between the physical climate system
(the winds and the ocean currents and rain) with the biological system(the vegetation that is growing).
And then there are these --- areas. Which is a 2 miles thick layer of ice. Which also reflects light back to
space, as do the clouds. And all these different components interact with each other which make it hard,
but also very interesting, to study. So it’s a fascinating topic for a climate scientist. Not only is there the
physics involved, but it’s also the --- involved. As I mentioned, vegetation has an impact on the physics of
the planet. Now you could have gone and talked about chemistry. Chemistry is also very important in
the atmosphere (the ozone layer, for example, and greenhouse gases). Also the ocean, there is carbon
dissolved in the ocean, it cycles through the ocean. The biology in the ocean take up carbon and as the
plankton die it sinks down into the deeper parts of the ocean where it sequesters. Keeps it away from
the atmosphere. So there is also this role that biology in the ocean also has on climate. All these
different components interact with each other which makes it a hard problem, but also fascinating to
study. So that’s all I have to say on the complexity. Are there questions?
Speaker: So we were given 5 questions and I think the next one is, different tools that climate scientists
use to study climate. I sort of group these into 3 broad categories. The 1st one being actual observations.
These can be from satellite instruments, ground measurements, or balloons or plane measurements.
Paleoclimate, and in climate models. What a lot of scientists do, is combine these different types of
observations with each other, to try to gain insight into what’s going on. So you never really use one of
these exclusively, you combine it with these other tools that we have to try to get more insight. So there
are a lot of satellites up there, this is sort of the pride of NASA, NASA’s ---satellites. It’s a group of 5
satellites. There would have been more but there have been some issues. The important thing about
these is that they all sort of follow each other, so you can get a lot of information about what’s going on
at a certain point, and they all provide different information about that location in the atmosphere, so
they’ll tell you how much water vapor is in the atmosphere, what temperature of the clouds is, about
the surface temperature and the albedo. And so each of these different satellites gives us different
information, and because they’re all pretty close together, we get co-located information. So we can put
together- at this particular time, this is what these different components of the climate system are
doing. Now this is great, because satellites provide you with pretty close to global coverage, so you don’t
have to travel to get the data. And there’s a good record about how the data were obtained, there’s a
lot of quality control that goes into it. And you know they’re relatively nice datasets to work with. And
they provide nice even coverage through space and time which is really good for understanding what’s
going on in the climate system. But you can probably guess one of the big disadvantages- they haven’t
been up there that long. So we really only have satellite data going back 30 yrs or so. And these satellites
were less than 10yrs. Who knows what the situation is going to be like in the future. Unfortunately a lot
of these satellite programs are being cut. Due to budgeting issues, we’re not getting satellites going into
the future with the same type of coverage that they provide now. They’re great datasets but we’re
constrained by that, that they’re short datasets. Now ground observations go back significantly more.
This is going back to 1850 [pointing at visual] and this is the temperature anomaly. So this shows the
departure of the temperature for a given year from this average. And these are all based on ground
measurements. Now we do have ground measurements that go back beyond 1850, but of course the
further back you go, the less reliable those are. This is just one example showing the change in global
temperature over time, from 1850 to 2010. This is the advantage, that we have a longer record. We’re
still using instruments and we have sort of a reasonable extent, and we have a good, what we call
temporal, extent. We have data for every single year. This doesn’t necessarily have the global extent as
with satellites, but we can go back longer. This is another tool we can use. You can go back a few
centuries with scattered instrumental records. But if you want to go back beyond that, you can talk
about this, Andres.
Andres: So Valerie is actually getting the data and I am just using them. So the paleoclimate data put this
more recent change into perspective. And therefore it is important that we can extend back into time.
But the disadvantage is that since we didn’t have temperature thermometers in, say, 2000 years ago, we
rely on indirect evidence. In the oceans, there’s zooplankton living at the surface. These are called
foraminifera, and they build shells out of calcium carbonate. When they die they’ll be eaten by other
critters and the shells sink. Some of them get deposited on the sea floors. So these layers build up on
the sea floor as time goes by. My colleagues go out on a big ship and take a core of the sediment from
the sea floor. If you go deeper in the core, you go further in time. For example, if find a location that is
currently warm, where a species of these foraminifera live that are adapted to warm temperatures,
where all of a sudden you find a different species that you can distinguish by the shape of the shell that
corresponds to colder waters, you have an indication that it must have been cooler at that time. And
that’s one of the methods that is used to reconstruct past temperatures. You can put that in a
mathematical framework and calculate the temperature at the past ocean’s surface. Similar methods
can be used for land, based on pollen, which can be found in lake sediments. Vegetation, of course,
depends on climate, and therefore you can reconstruct the climate based on pollen. And then, Valerie,
maybe you want to talk about ice cores, because that’s her specialty.
(36minutes)
Valerie: So for the ice cores, we don’t have plankton, well very few of them. We just have to analyze the
molecules of what is there. We have information of the past temperatures from the molecules of water
that are there. And we have information on particles coming from the ozone or the desert. And we have
information on the past atmospheric composition because air is trapped in the transformation from
snow to ice. And so we have a good recorder of the atmospheric composition and of concentration of
GHGs. If someone wanted to invent a way to trap air for long time periods, you would not find anything
as nice as ice cores.
(37minutes)
Andres: This shows some of the paleo data. Here are some of the CO2 measurements, the red curve
here, and this now goes back in thousands of years. So here at the left hand we’re at 600,000yrs before
the present and here at the present, 0. We can see the up and down in the CO2 from 180 to 280 ppm or
so. Also methane, which is the blue curve here, goes up and down. And here’s Antarctic temperature,
from the oxygen isotopic condition of the ice, water, which is out temperature indicator. All these GHGs
and temperature go up and down together. When the Antarctic temperature was warmer, also the
GHGs were higher. When it was cold, GHGs were lower. And that’s not only true for Antarctica, that’s
also true for the globe, as indicated here by the sea level curve which indicates how high it was. So the
current sea level is here, at the top of the scale. As you go down about 20,000yrs before the present, sea
level was about 120 meters lower than it is today. Those cold periods are associated with much more ice
on the continents, there was a big ice sheet over North America. And CO2 was low. There’s this strong
evidence from the paleo record that CO2 and climate are closely coupled.
Valerie: CO2 is 390, 395 ppm now I think.
Speaker: Maybe you’re going to address it-now the most recent is humans, but what caused the
previous spike in CO2 and previous spikes in the air temperature and sea levels?
Andres: Well that’s a great question. In fact we don’t completely understand it. We sort of understand
what causes these general oscillations between these warm ages, which are relatively short- so for
example, if you look at this warm period here about 120,00yrs ago, it was only 10,000yrs long. The
colder periods were much longer. They dominate the history of the past million years of so. At some
time these warm periods ended and it got colder and CO2 went down. Generally this transition from
cold to warm phases are caused by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. So the Earth’s orbit is
tilted with respect to the path of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. That tilt is essentially what gives us
summer and winter. So when the Northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, it’s summer, and it
moves away, and when it’s tilted away from the Sun it’s winter. This tilt is not constant; it is modified by
other large planets, like Jupiter and Saturn. It changes a little bit, which changes the seasonality. If the
tilt is stronger, it’s warmer in the summer and colder in the winter. If the tilt is less strong, it’s colder in
the summer and warmer in the winter. So this change, we know that the time scale of the changes is
40,000yrs. Astronomers can calculate the Earth’s orbit very exactly for millions of years in the past and
in the future. And this cyclicity here in the sea level also exhibits the periodicity, 40,000yr cycles. And
there are other cycles in there, 20,000yrs, 100,000yrs cycles. A lot of those cycles have been found in
the deep ocean sea level data. So this is data from the deep ocean, ----, shells of foraminifera.
So people have tried to understand these changes in CO2. Why was CO2 high in these periods and why
was it low in the cold periods. Most of the people think that the CO2 that was missing in the atmosphere
must have been in the ocean somewhere. But we don’t know exactly where and why, and how this is
related to the climate changes.
Speaker: Just to follow up with your question, how do we know that the present day spiking is not
temporary? How do we know- those are 1,000 yr periods, where it goes high and low
Jeff: Remember where on that curve you would be today.
Karen: Today, it’s 395. This is higher than it’s been for the past 600,000 years.
Jeff: So the point is the values today, the values we’ve had for the past decades, are well outside that
range of natural cycle that’s been in the system for 100s of 1,000s of years. And that’s the difference,
the big difference between what nature’s been doing and us. That star on the top, that’s us increasing
CO2.
Valerie: Coming back to your question. Our civilizations they’ve developed in the past 10,000yrs, since
the beginning of agriculture. And that’s thanks to a rather stable climate. That’s a very important one at
the global scale. There have been changes regionally but globally it was quite stable. And as you said, it’s
unusual to have climate in a warm state, and the length of these warm periods, which we call
interglacials, is linked to the orbit of the Earth, and their interplay also with the composition of the
atmosphere. The point is that we emit CO2, and it will stay for a very long time. And also the orbit of the
Earth now is very stable. There’s no reason to have an ice age in the next thousands of years, for sure.
So it gives a lot of space for our activities to change the atmosphere and interfere with the climate
system. The processes that drive glacial and interglacial cycles, we know they are not happening in the
next thousands of years for sure and possibly a little more than that.
Karen: So now we’ll switch to something completely different, and talk about that 3rd tool that we use,
which are computer models of Earth’s climate. Now all of this data we’ve been talking about based on
observations or the paleo climate effort, that can tell us what happened. But we want to be able to say
what’s going to happen. And we also want to be able to understand what’s physically going on in the
system. And so you can write down all the equations that govern the climate system to the extent that
we know them, it would take you a really long time to do that. But it’s absolutely impossible for you to
solve them. You can’t sit down with a piece of paper and walk through them like you were doing a
homework assignment. We use computers to help us out. These computer models are mathematical
representations of the climate system. We take all the equations we know about the climate system. We
incorporate different observations like cloud formation, how they work. And then we solve the
equations mathematically. And the equations are solved on grid. So we divide the Earth up into latitude
and longitude and solve the equation in a spatial pattern. Now this doesn’t work for everything because
sometimes there are things going on that are just too small for the grid spacing that we have. So this is
an example of what we call the resolution of models. So what this grid pattern is is of climate models
and how this has altered with time. Back in I think the 2nd IPCC report, most of the models were using a
grid size like this. So Oregon would be represented by3-4, somewhere around there grid points.
The most recent IPCC report, the one that came out… (and I’m sorry, the IPCC is the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. And probably some other people here can explain it better than I can.
Basically representatives from almost every nation get together every 7yrs and write reports that
represent the state of the science. So what do we know about CC. The most recent one came out in
2007 and I think, I think some of the people in here we co-authors who helped to write it. And it actually
won the Nobel Peace Prize that year, shared with Al Gore, due to the peace implications of climate,
which perhaps people will discuss later on in this workshop. So the most recent report used models that
had resolutions like that. So this resolution is about 1 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude.)
And so you can see Oregon is becoming better represented but it’s still not represented that well. Then
we get the higher resolution. And actually it was very difficult to go from one of these spatial resolution
grids to the next one. So there’s still, for this next report, where the climate are just wrapping up being
run right now, are using a resolution sort of like that. But some have higher resolution. But as you can
expect, even with higher resolution, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s going on within in the model that fits
inside a single grid cell. If you think about a single cloud, I don’t really know too many clouds that pass
by that are really 100km by 100km. We have to include within the model approximations. The effects
that these small scale processes (smaller than a 100km), topography, turbulence, that sort of thing.
There are about 2 dozen of these models around the world at different centers like the National Center
for Atmospheric Research. The different models differ in how they represent these processes. And so
just to give you an idea of how computationally extensive these models can be- from 2002 to 2004 this
was the fastest supercomputer in the world. This is the Earth Simulator in Japan, designed primarily for
running climate models. Historically, weather and climate simulation models have been one of the
primary users of these super-fast computers. So in order to do these simulations (I’ll show you some
results from them later), we use these super powerful computers. You also can do some on a slower
basis. This is Mindcluster, and it’s not that big. I can run about 6 years of a model in one day. So for
running 100 year, it’s a bit much. I could talk about this forever but I’m going to try to keep this short.
There’s a lot of evaluation of these models that’s done. They’re based on mathematical descriptions of
these physical processes. But we test them ----. So this model, someone mentioned something about
volcanic eruptions, and this shows the observations in black from the years 1900 – 2005. And then all
these yellow lines, which are sort of smeared around it, are model simulations using these different
models that I mentioned – you’ve got all these different models around the world. And then the red line
is the average, all the models averaged together. So a couple of things. First of all the overall pattern,
the increasing temperature and then then another period of increase around here and here. The models
capture this. And they don’t get as big swings back and forth as observations do. Anyone have any ideas
why? So this black line which is the observations, it’s got this natural variability in it. So this is like
weather but on longer time scales. The different models have different behaviors. They don’t line up.
When you average them together you lose these swings, but you also get the trend. And I also wanted
to point out these lines are volcanic eruptions. So one of the things we do, we match up how the models
behave. You can see the cooling from these volcanic eruptions. And this is one of the ways we test these
models. So that was a quick summary of models. I guess we’re running out of time.
Valerie: Do you have a question on these black boxes that are climate models?
Speaker: So clearly there’s no way for the model for the model to predict volcanoes…?
Karen: No, this is in the past. There are educated guesses. The further back you go, the more uncertainty
there is. But for the most recent big eruption, Pinatubo in 1991, there’s a lot of data about the aerosols
in the atmosphere.
Valerie: And we a good guess of the eruptions in the last 1,000- 2,000yrs because these aerosols are
deposited in ice cores. So if you scale--- these changes to the more recent ones, it gives a good idea
about the key drivers of climate. Maybe it could be nice to have a summary of the key findings that
relate human activities to this observed CC.
Karen: Why don’t I put it on this slide then, which shows the different indicators we have that the planet
is warming. And I’m not going to go through all of these, but I did want to point out this is more than
just looking at the instrumental temperature record. We’re looking at a whole bunch of different
variables and seeing that they’re changing. So this theory of global warming due to people is not just
based on one line of reasoning, it’s based on a whole bunch. I listed the main things. We have
observations of warming. We have our physical understanding of why adding CO2 to the climate warms
the planet (and we didn’t get to talk about that much so we can talk about that if you want). We have
paleoclimate, showing how the climate has varied in the past. And we also use climate models. It isn’t
one of these things that tells us humans are warming the planet, it’s using all of these things that
provide support to this theory.
Speaker: What do you say to people who say, yes the climate is warming, but we’re not convinced that
it’s anthropogenic. That’s where I would say, the physical understanding is the 1st answer to that. And
that is that if you put CO2 in the atmosphere, the planet will warm. Due to very basic physical principles.
The Earth gets sunlight which warms it. And the reason it doesn’t get warmer and warmer is that it’s
emitting infrared radiation to space. So you see an infrared camera and it shows you things that are
warm- you can see people because we’re warm compared to, say, a desk. Well, the Earth emits infrared
radiation as well. If it’s not emitting as much radiation as the sunlight that it’s absorbing, it’s going to
heat up. The sun is warming, the infrared radiation is cooling. If they’re not in balance the planet is going
to warm up. And CO2 decreases the radiation going to space. So the planet has to warm up. We could
go into more details, but in the very basic principles of conservation of energy, there’s no way the planet
could not warm up if we put CO2 in the atmosphere.
Valerie: Just like when you put blankets to warm your body, and the more blankets the warmer it gets.
That’s the same idea.
Jeff: [inaudible]
Andres: Scientists have looked at the other effects as well, so we know that the Sun is changing, and
there are volcanoes, but none of them can explain the rise of temperature that we see.
Jeff: We know that CO2 in the atmosphere is the largest it’s been in a million (?) years, and we do know
that that’s largely a consequence of humans.
Valerie: We are certain of that. Because the CO2 that’s emitted by oceans and volcanoes, it doesn’t have
the exact same molecules that we emit from fossil fuels. So that’s really certain.
Speaker: Is there consensus in the scientific community about that, or are there researchers or groups of
researchers, or schools of thought that don’t agree with these interpretations or findings that are
emerging. The ones that human activity has impacts on CC mostly.
Karen: It depends on which aspects you’re talking about, and what you mean by consensus. If “agree”
was 100% of scientists agree, then there are scientists who disagree. But it’s less than 1% of the people
in climate science. And you’ll find different levels of agreement for different things. So I would say that if
someone is going to tell you that if you add CO2 to the atmosphere and it doesn’t warm u the planet at
all, that they either need to disprove the laws of thermodynamics, or they’re misguided in some sense.
Now there’s, how much is it going to warm up? That’s an issue where there’s less certainty. So some
people will say it’s going to warm up by 5 degrees, or 7 degrees, or 2.
Jeff: ---- to point out that consensus is not particularly a scientific value. Scientists don’t by and large
strive to achieve consensus. Policymakers would like scientists to speak with one voice…
Karen: In fact you could say that going against consensus is one of the main drivers of science. Everyone
wants to prove someone wrong.
Valerie: And in fact it’s much easier to prove something is wrong than proving that something is true.
Jeff: It doesn’t improve you scientific career, it doesn’t increase your chances of getting the Nobel Prize
to just add your vote to the consensus.
Catherine: What would you answer to someone who would say that sure, we put CO2 in the
atmosphere and we increase temperature in the atmosphere, but there are some feedback processes
where as the temperature increases, you have more evaporation, you have more water vapor, more
clouds. And if you increase the amount of low clouds, you will cool the atmosphere. So there are
feedbacks that can react to the increase to of temperature, positively, increase it, or negatively and
reduce it. So we know that they exist, these feedbacks. Now how do you know that there won’t be any
feedback in the future that will decrease the increase due to GHGs.
Karen: I guess this is my research. I would say, I would love to find a negative feedback, other than the
ones that we know about, and find some evidence for it. But the feedbacks that have been proposed
have not stood up to scrutiny. The observations do not support the evidence that in warmer climate,
your clouds are going to enhance cooling. The observations just are not there. Yes, there are a few
papers that argue otherwise. And it’s good to have that discussion, to keep looking at the evidence and
coming up with more ideas. But in terms of most of the papers and most of the work, there just isn’t
evidence to support a negative cloud feedback. In other words, one that would make the warming not
as large as it would be otherwise.
[inaudible]
Speaker: Another thing I think worth noting is that the Earth today is in what scientists call a no-analog
state. That is to say we’re operating with an Earth system that is outside the boundaries of most of the
physical parameters of which we can work out over the last --- or so million years. And so it’s very likely
that there are processes in this complex system, as we emphasized, that really haven’t been identified
yet. They could drive the system further and fastest towards some kind of dramatic change or they
could go the other way. The system is so complex that certainly have to be prepared that there could be
surprises. On the other hand, Karen is absolutely right that in everything that we know, we don’t see
these feedbacks.
Chris ? : I’d just like to stick with this question because I think it’s crucial. We’ve come onto the
scientology (?) take on it. One the results that has emerged from quite a bit of research quite recently is
that the question you’ve just asked is a gateway question. It’s crucial. Is it an agreement among climate
scientists or is it an argument. And the polls show that most people who aren’t professional climate
scientists in the USA think that it’s about 50-50, that there’s an argument going on in climate science.
That’s the way the media presents it. And we can think about why the media presents it this way, it’s
entertainment isn’t it- you have somebody in the red corner, you have somebody in the blue corner, you
don’t really care what they’re talking about but it’s fun to see who prevails. This is a dialogue event, not
a debate, and there are fundamental reasons why it needs to be a debate. That’s what a debate is, it’s
entertaining, it’s fun, but it doesn’t resolve anything. The research that has been done in the climate
science literature shows that less than 3% of scientists are arguing against the debate of whether the
Earth is warming or not and whether humans are driving it. When that is made clear, then that will shift
people’s understanding about what this is about. So it’s a gateway question. Once you understand that
all professional climate scientists believe that the world is warming and that humans are driving it and
have been for the last 40 (?) years, then you can begin to have a discussion.
Speaker: Just to follow up on this, in a way for me, an interesting piece is in the way, not only in the
debate, but in the absence of engagement in the issue. And the voice that is missing here I feel is the
voice that is disengaged and is not participating in the discussion, not interested in the discussion , or
feels overwhelmed, they can’t do anything about it anyway, it’s not going to make any difference, so
why bother? I don’t know how the scientists would speak to that. That’s part of what I’m interested in.
How can we engage, how can we speak to that absent voice.
Jeff: I think that’s really, I hope that’s an issue that’s going to be discussed tomorrow. With regards to
the sessions, especially tomorrow morning. But there are a number of, well if I put my psychologist hat
on, there are a number of psychological reasons why people don’t want to engage with this issue. And a
lot of it has to do with the affect, the feelings that one experiences when you present this information to
the public. The anxiety around it. For me, something that I commonly find when I present to the public is
a sense of loss. It could be a loss of agency (I don’t know what to do, how could one individual affect
change on a large problem). It could also be on the other side. I think there’s a lot of fear of loss of
independence. That if we agree to mitigate or reduce carbon emissions, that may require governments
to tell people what they can and can’t do. And that’s threatening. I could lose my ability to decide.
Especially in this country, that’s an issue. So I think there are these psychological processes, conscious
and not, that play an important role in why people are not engaged with this issue. That’s my own
personal opinion.
Speaker: Let take another question or two, and after that do we want to shift gears a little bit to the 2nd
portion of this session.
Speaker: I do have a question. To me the connection between CO2 in the atmosphere has been over for
a long time. There’s evidence that they’re related, and temperature is warming, and the debate should
get beyond that into the effects of CC. Stronger hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, insects migrating from
the tropical climates up into the Northern. Those are what people are concerned about, and the debate
that they have to address in order to get people behind, essentially to deal with CC. I think that’s where
the debate, for me, left 5 years ago.
Karen: Yeah, and I’m not necessarily the person to talk about getting beyond the debate, because I still
go around giving talks to people about the basic science. I do feel that people are more engaged when I
show them Pacific Northwest predictions in particular. Relating it to local things does seem make people
more engaged. But to some extent they already have to have bought in, mentally and emotionally, to
anthropogenic global warming. So that’s a question for other people.
Speaker: Do you mind if I just respond to that, because I agree with you completely. It’s the so what
question. If you get to the point where you do accept this as happening, so what, who cares. I’m going
to digress slightly and then I’ll close in on that. There was a very nice article written by a man called
Sarwits (?)about a year ago, where he said the best thing that happened to earthquake science (it was
pretty obvious early on that you wouldn’t be able to predict when and how an earthquake would be.
But we know all about where earthquakes happen and what the consequences are.) and so the
intersection between science and society was all about building codes. The engineers know all about
how to build buildings to withstand the quakes. So there were 2 things: build the buildings right, and
have a recovery plan so that if the buildings do fall down you can get people out. And they say the worst
thing that happened to climate science what that it emerged from the meteorological forecasting
community. And there’s an assumption that if you wait a few more years and get a bigger computer, you
can be absolutely explicit about people should do. And the point is that you’re onto this because the
message hasn’t been delivered. What exactly will happen to Oregon? The truth is that the models will
never be able to say. You haven’t exposed the fact that all of your models don’t include all of the
biological and other feedbacks, they can’t. So they models can get a general direction of where we’re
going but they can’t be explicit. So in fact you can argue that we already know enough, and we should
be acting. And we know the general sort of things that we need to do to make society more resilient.
The difference is that we see pretty regularly the consequences of not having society resilient too
earthquakes, people being dug out of the rubble. So you take it pretty seriously. We do see the impacts
of our current mal-action towards climate. We see being in Bangladesh being flooded out. We see
droughts and fires in Texas. But we don’t connect that with not getting this problem right, and it seems
to me that what you’re talking about is exactly that. People aren’t connecting that with the need to
make society more resilient to CC. Not even making ourselves more resilient to CC in the present
system, but to the future one. That is where it seems to me that we need to be aggressive in this.
Karen: I’m having a bit of an emotional reaction to the slide on climate models there, and you know they
can be better than what they are now, there can be regional models that do provide that sort of
information. I think where some of the disconnect happens is how the public understands uncertainty.
When I talk more about actual effect of CC, and try to sort of list things according to things that we’re
sure will happen and things may, but I think a lot of people want that certainty. Maybe policy makers
want that certainty as a, well, you told me that was what was going to happen. And I think this issue of
uncertainty has a lot to do with this. And becoming more resilient to the types of changes that might
happen is a way forward that we should be pursuing.
Speaker: So this is probably a good point at which to segway to the 2nd part of this evening’s session. In
the 1st part we were just trying to lay out the current state of the science and the scientific
understanding of the Earth climate system. And then we wanted to go on to a series of questions about,
so what, the relationship between science and the policymaking process, and the relationship between
science and society at large. And along with these questions that you have raised and that Chris has
raised, so, do we need a two minute stretch?
Short Break
Part II
1:22 hours
Speaker: Welcome back. As I said right before the break, we’d now like to move on and ask a series of
questions about the relevance, or the significance, of the following findings of science regarding CC and
ask questions regarding: what is the relationship between science and the policy process and society
more generally? What we thought we would do, the 3 of us (Matt Hershwin is the director of
communications at National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.) Valerie and I, we’ll
just make a few opening remarks, identify some observations about these questions of science, policy,
and society as a way of kicking off the conversation. And hopefully identify we’ll get to, where I think we
were moving before the break- so what, is there something we should be concerned about, and if so,
what are the processes for society through this concern can be expressed not only individually, but
collectively. So that’s the procedure, and we’ll all just make a few opening comments and then engage
with you all at any time you might have questions.
Matt: Thank you, I actually grew up here in Portland so I feel like I’m coming home with a lot of respects.
I’m actually probably your unusual suspect in some respects, I’m not a climate scientist, I just happen to
work with hundreds of them in my current job. My role and my background is as a professional
communicator as a public relations professional. I’ve done that in pretty much every sector from social
sector, non-profit, to the corporate sector. I worked for ?-Mckinsey and Company, which is a very large
global consultancy. And now at NCAR, it’s quasi-governmental. I think the group has done a very good
job in terms of launching into what I call my day-job, with the questions that you’re asking. So I want to
add a little more context and color to that which hopefully propel the conversation. I was struck by a
question which you both posed, which was- what makes it so hard to communicate around this issue?
That’s my day-job. And while my portfolio science is very broad, it’s very much dominated by the CC
issue. So let me call up 3 areas, some of which have been raised here, that I see as my daily challenges
when I go out and talk with journalists, scientists, people who are general consumers of the information
that comes out of the scientific community.
So the 1st one, agree or disagree, is what I call the institutional mistrust that I see across the spectrum.
It’s not just a mistrust of science as an enterprise, science when you actually crank the numbers makes a
higher level __?. It’s actually a mistrust of government. 70% of the R & D that’s done in the US (it might
be different elsewhere) is government-funded. Government is not held in the highest esteem right now,
and that casts a pall over some of the findings. And there is of course the business community, which we
haven’t talked a lot about in deth here, plays a pretty significant role in either propelling beliefs about
climate and what we should do about it, or containing, and actually changing and maybe misaligning
those beliefs. So that’s the 1st one, institutional mistrust, general speaking, is what I deal with a lot.
The cognitive piece, or what Jeff called the affectation, is I think very real. This is what I like to call the:
you are raising your children very poorly kind of debate. The science and the numbers that you saw here
is equivalent to telling someone you, you don’t care about/ you’re doing an awful job of raising your
kids. In this case, you’re doing a bad job of living your live, you’re doing all the things wrong. And I think
it’s very easy then, once you hear what the science suggest, that it does cause a behavioral freeze of
sorts. The problem is big, it’s collective action, I’m just a small actor in this whole thing, I’ve got my Prius
and I’ve done my thing. So this is part of the discussion. Also, especially in the US context (I just moved
back from Europe and it’s fascinating) and I don’t think this is unique to the US, a technical optimism.
That there is going to be a technical breakthrough solution to this problem. Some smart kid at MIT is
going to figure out how to suck all the carbon out of the system and we’re going to be ok. The other
thing that impedes us is this technical optimism.
The 3rd one, and it’s perhaps not surprisingly, it’s straight up what I call a rational or economic argument.
I speak to a lot of people, a lot of scientists, I’ve trained a lot of scientists, about how to address these
issues. And the 1st thing I ask them is- how much do you think is at stake, based on the findings that you
share? In terms of pure economic value, pure vested interest in this system. What is that number? I
don’t know what the number is. But I do know one thing. I know that it’s staggering. Because I used to
work for a lot of those folks. I also know what kind of budgets and war chests (?) they have to truly go to
war over this issue which threatens fundamental incomes and ways of life. So that is very real, and the
great thing, what I love about working with scientists, is that like me we all believe that the truth will
prevail. And the real question about this is how long will it take real truth to prevail. If you haven’t read
any of Naomi Oreskes’s work (wonderful author) they chronicle these kinds of battles over time whether
it’s tobacco or leaded gas, we are reliving the same story one more time, it just happens to be CC. So this
is my world as I said, I think there’s a lot of interesting things which I know this group will hack at over
the next few days. But I just wanted to keep those 3 of the main ones, certainly for me.
Valerie: I’d like to make a few comments on this, the relationship between science and society. I’ve been
involved in, as one of the scientists writing the next report of the IPCC, with a huge deal about
quantifying uncertainties. And it’s so frustrating to see how it is poorly read. So my own belief is that we
need to transfer our knowledge __? I really think it’s my duty to transmit all this information we
accumulate in the laboratories __? We teach our children the history of civilization. Why? We think it
gives them some framework to understand the world and to understand the implications of our choices
today. I do believe we need to educate children in what we know about climate science. About what we
know about the past changes and why. And how the future changes compare with these. Why is it
important, why is it abrupt, the change in 5 degrees in one century, this is what we call abrupt. And it’s
so frustrating to see the lack of science programs for children. Our policy makers, they were educating
most of them in the 1960s. That science was not available. We cannot blame them for not knowing. And
now we have all this information. How many generations will that require, so we can just talk to people
about the basis of what we are doing. So that’s the 1st part of this concern.
(1:30 hours)
The 2nd point was mentioned. It’s that we are climate scientists. And we navigate in this highlypoliticized environment. You have organisations that communicate on climate science with alarmism.
And we have dishonest actors that are played by which or which interest. And who acts not to have any
change. It’s very difficult to have a sincere debate with people who are dishonest. I think that’s
extremely frustrating for us. Because we like to debate, we like to exchange arguments. We do that all
the time in our meetings. And the public debate is sometimes so much biased. Let me give you a very
recent example. I the news, yesterday I think, about North Carolina. North Carolina (NC) is a nice place,
it has nice shores. And it may be affected by sea level change. And there’s a proposed bill for NC that is
exactly stating the following point: any report for NC on future sea level risks should be based on the
following. Take the data from the last century, extrapolate them. And use this value as the risk for NC
sea level change. But what happened in the past is not what’s going to happen in the future. Why is sea
level changing? Because the ocean is getting warmer, so it expands. Glaciers are melting, here and in
other places, and also since about 15 year, since ice sheets are melting and flowing faster. So it makes
no sense, extrapolating the past. You need to model the ocean, you need to take into account GHGs that
were not present 1 century ago, you need to model glaciers, you need to model ice sheets, and when
you do that sea level change doesn’t stay the same, it gets faster. And it has already increased in the last
20 years. So you can see the worst, when science wants to prescribe what science should be doing. And I
think it’s proceedingly up to the citizen to put pressure on decision makers. Just leave the science free.
Make choices, and be brave about the choices. If you want one to hear about the risks, just state it.
Scientists explore a large range of possibilities for the future. Maybe it’s hard to handle some of these
risks. So maybe some people want to ignore them. But stand up and say clearly that they cannot handle
these risks. So that was my last point on how some of the policy makers would not like to hear about
what the scientists say.
Speaker: Ok, let me add 4 comments. Which I think are compatible to what Matt and Valerie have said.
The 1st comment is what you might like to think of as value trade offs. So let’s say you accept the
science, that you agree that the climate system is changing and that it’s largely anthropogenic in nature,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should drop everything else, and focus all of your attention
on addressing CC. For example, should we not allow Shell to drill for oil in the Gulf, does that mean we
shouldn’t go forward with shale gas development in various parts of the country. Well, there are other
values at stake. For example, energy independence. And the economic recovery and the creation of jobs
and so on. These are other values that science can’t say are irrelevant or unimportant. It can simply say,
here is one set of considerations. Which you certainly should take into account when making decisions,
but not in here’s when you should decide. That’s the 1st point.
The 2nd point is this issue has become, like many other things, particularly in this country, highly
politicized. We are not only --? there is an unusually high degree of polarization. Anything is somehow
turned into a confrontation, a battle between two different points of view. This tends to make it more
difficult to have a reasoned discussion about the complexities of CC. Also we have very large an colorful
interests at stake and this is an issue. So for example, major oil companies have a lot of biding on the
decisions that get made in the policy process and they have a lot of money to pour into these kind of
policy discussions. So this politicization, polarization, the difficulties in having some kind of a responsible
discussion is my 2nd point.
The 3rd point, which I think complicates even further, is the degree of uncertainty. Even if we accept that
the climate system is changing and that it’s anthropogenic in nature, we ask ourselves the question,
what will be the costs if we don’t address the consequences of CC in a timely manner. Who will bare
those costs? And what would be the cost of really doing something about the issue? That is head-on and
invest in the energy and resources, financial commitments that would make a difference. There’s a very
high degree of uncertainty around those questions. If you think it’s hard to put numbers on the
anthropogenic impacts on the climate system, it’s even harder to put numbers on the costs of CC, of
really doing something significant about it. For example, some people say that if we devoted 1% of GDP
to addressing the climate issue, we could probably more or less solve the problem without too much
difficulty. But other people say it must be 3, 4, or 5%. Those are very big numbers, those are trillions of
dollars. That’s the 3rd point, the difficulties of making responsible decisions in the face of uncertainties.
The 4th point is in a sense going back to what Matt said but perhaps carrying it a little further. The public
by and large is not interesting in gaining significant expertise in climate science, the public in this country
doesn’t want to devote a lot of it’s time to these issues. So it’s very easy to have somewhat superficial
opinions and regulate (?) trust or optimism in technological solutions. And after all, aren’t we a society
that became great and powerful as a result of technological accomplishments. An estimated likelihood
that when push comes to shove we can invent our way out of different consequences. And that leads to
very alarming sorts of scenarios, we may want to lead to geoengineering to clean it. But I think these are
the 4 points I wanted to use in terms of trying to understand climate science and the complexity of the
climate system and the role of --? forces, that’s the easy part. And we go on now to try to understand
the political system, or the society at large which in a democracy is ultimately driving the political
system. The complexities of why it’s difficult for the political system and society to address the issue. We
now have a good chunk of time to raise questions or disagreements. We encourage dialogue, different
points of view.
Speaker: Sure. You used the term superficial opinions and that sort of struck out to me because I’m
disappointed in the success of the push to have plastic supermarket bags and use curtailed in the
preference to pay or bringing your own bag. I think as a member of the public it makes me think that I’m
doing more for CC that I really am. That I can take my shopping bag or drive my Prius, that my
contribution is greater than it actually is. So it’s kind of more of a question issued for concerned parties.
Matt: I could just pick up on one part of that. I don’t think it’s just a challenge for the scientific
community, I think we can be helpful with this. I think there more --? now which is just beginning to
occur across the sciences to the social sciences to economics. Actually describe, what does that strategy,
the bag really get you. It’s 0.11.. % of the solution, whatever that is, we need to really draw that up. I
work in a space and I don’t know all of the biggest levers that I can often pull. I live in Boulder, CO for
crying out loud, I should know that. But I don’t , and I think there are huge opportunities to tell that
story and some are beginning to try.
Speaker: I work for an environmental group that has worked on CC for many years and other issues as
well. So I’ve read all that stuff in terms of communication and all the articles that talk about how the
public freezes up when they hear the bad news or how they deny what they do or this or that. But
recently I’ve been really thinking- you wouldn’t expect me to single-handedly earthquake roof my
house, there need to be codes. I think we have underemphasized this challenge of communal action,
because it’s really now up to us to do what the government has failed to do. And it’s a colossal failure. If
I just think- today we just talked about CC and the ocean acidification that comes with it. We have an
alien invasion at Fukoshima (?) and an earthquake at the same time. Actually the signal that’s coming
from the government is business as usual, nothing’s going to happen.
Speaker: I’ll just draw an analogy with the point you were making. If you talk to clinical psychoanalysts,
which I’ve been doing recently, they see in many of their patients the same denial sequences that you
see in society about these big issues. First of all, --? problem, the world isn’t warming. Well, yeah, maybe
the world is warming but it’s got absolutely nothing to do with me. Well, maybe it is something to do
with humans, but there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. Well, maybe there is something we can
do about it, but it’s too expensive or whatever. And so how do you draw people through this sequence,
maybe that can be really interesting. In that discussion they say there there’s a really really critical point
where you get someone’s psychic reality aligned with reality and they accept all these things- there is a
problem, it is me, I have to do something about it. And they say at that point if you’re not careful slip a
cul-de-sac. Which is self-delusive. They start using plastic bags, which actually has no impact on the
problem at all, but they feel much better. If you let them slip into that cul-de-sac it’s actually harder to
get them back out of it again and to the right place then when you had them back in the original state.
So you answer is really important here, if just buying a Prius makes you happy and the message behindoh I’m a rich Hollywood star but I’m a really good person because I bought my Prius, it’s not actually
going to solve the problem.
Speaker: I’m listening to the frustration with the polarization of the science field, the political field in this
country. And yes we do our share. But I haven’t heard anything about the international community. How
do you work. I know we’re a small cog in this whole thing all together. I think we produce a lot of the
waste, but you know internationally they have billions of people in China, how is that all brought into
play?
Speaker: Of course we don’t have a government at that level, so the only way to do something about it
internationally is through negotiational agreements between governments, societies, so on. Of course
we do have these international agreements but it’s very slow and frustrating to give them teeth and
then implement them. In terms of climate we have the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. And there’s a
long process of turning those negotiations into something more substantial. And it’s a bargaining
process in which nobody wants to appear to be weak or willing to make concessions. And so in this age
the progress is extremely slow. I guess I should say through a good part of human history, maybe that
part that Karen was showing on the graph, 10,000 years and relatively benign policy. It didn’t matter so
much if the process of negotiating agreements was slow because the system wasn’t going to fight us so
hard. But we are now moving into a situation where the dangers of putting of, or the process of
negotiating to show who’s the toughest negotiator may have greater impacts towards a significant
tipping point set off. Then the consequences of the being very slow to address these global issues may
be very severe. So we find ourselves increasingly in a situation where there is a mismatch between the
state of the world and what’s happening to it and the state of our capacity to address these large issues
collectively.
Valerie: I’d just like to add one thing. My own view is sort of schizophrenic between the results of
international negotiations where governments decided to have targets of maximum 2 degrees Celsius
warming above pre-industrial levels, which is something extremely difficult to achieve even current
emissions. At the same time very small engagements of controlling their own emissions of GHGs. So it’s
very strange to observe this where governments have committed themselves to climate targets without
bringing any action to achieve these targets.
Matt?: I’d argue that it’s not so strange. It’s a bit like the Dr. Phil factor. For those of you who aren’t
familiar with Dr. Phil he’s a television counselor/social worker type. He says “How’s that working for
you,” because you only make change when things aren’t working for you. For many of these instances,
whether it’s personally or for the Chinese or the Indians, it’s all working very well, thank you. We’re
industrializing, people are moving into the middle class at a rate faster than seen before in humanity.
Things are working pretty well in the short term. We were talking before the session, we see this on
many issues, whether it’s the budget in the US or Europe, we are very content to not make the hard
decisions in the short term and not kick that can. And I think this is just one of the perennial families of
call it man & woman kind. I’m not shocked by it. Intellectually we can all say oh my gosh, and wring our
hangs, but it’s actually very rational.
Speaker: I’ll speak right now, I’m actually a little shy about speaking now because 1st off I want to speak
very personally, and then I’ll speak more politically. My personal story is when I was 19 years old in 1975
and I was in college. I had a choice to take an ecology class to fulfill my science requirement. And so
everything I need to know, everything you’ve told me today, I already know back then. But what I kept
asking myself from that moment forward, was why was I the only person paying attention to this. I don’t
mean I’m the only person, but why aren’t more people. Why am I the only person riding a bicycle? How
com I’m one of the only people in my community who recycles and brings their own bag and is involved
in a co-op? That was back then in the 70s. My mother married a man who was the executive vicepresident of Halliburton, and I tried to have a reasonable friendly conversation with him about nuclear
power plants, and he yelled at me in my face: we’re going to drill in Monterey Bay and there’s nothing
you ecologists can do about it. And he hated me, and I felt all the venom. And I worked for years trying
to really understand that dynamic. First off, I went to get my bachelor degree in community studies, so I
understand the evolution of communities, how people evolve. Then I started process work with the
Mendels and I started learning how people transform. I also dedicated my life to environmental
concerns and issues. I live on the coast with 200 acres that were clear-cut that I love and take care of. I
do want to say one thing. Story telling touches people. That’s why I told my story here today.
Storytelling makes us human. When we have facts, it does do something and sticks to a certain
community and turns its wheels. Human beings relate, at the average, they care about their families,
about their communities. And they want to know how’s my family going to get by? What are the things I
can do in the little time I have to make things better for me and my family. There’s something about
grassroots, about telling our stories, about being inspired by those very stories. I think that’s what Opera
was very good at by the way, and she was the person who introduced Dr. Phil to the world, who by the
way I actually studied with. Actually I can’t say that, I challenged him. He challenged me, I challenged
him back. He doesn’t mess with me anymore. So one thing I don’t care for about his style- he does have
some great euphemisms and lessons for the world- but he has some abuse and male power style. One
thing I’m really learning these days is that when we have compassion, when we have love and care
about each other as much as we care about our own family, we care about their future, we care if they
have water, we’re not just looking out for ourselves, that’s when we make a global community. There’s
something I would like to invite people who are more scientific than myself to consider. How can we
find those poster children. Who can go out into the world and be those representatives: I can go out into
the world and I’m that person who has time in my day-to-day life to make live a little simpler for
everyone else. I don’t think there is one pocket solution. But little solutions here and there can add up.
And if people are smart enough, they work with human technology and create a program to follow that
to see how can we make improvements in the community of humans. And I think that’s where process
work is also very very powerful.
Jeff: One topic that hasn’t come up, that I think is important to this issue, is consumption or
consumerism. You’re right that people are happy with their rising affluence. The problem, as we all
know, is that there is a heavy price to pay for affluence. Especially if everyone wants to be as affluent as
people in this country. It’s interesting that we have adapted this sort of paradigm that the more we
consume the “happier we will be.” There’s absolutely no statistical evidence that that’s true. In fact I
think it’s been shown that there is no correlation between what you make and how happy you are once
you’re above a certain income level. I want to go back to the comment about psychoanalysis. Because I
do, I’m an analyst and I work with people in that framework. And I think one of the important things to
realize is that yes, you can reach that state with a person where they’ll say, yes I understand that all
these things I’m doing are terrible for my life. But they continue because that’s there paradigm, that
defines who they are as a person. That’s their self-identity. It’s called their ontological security. And if
they were to move beyond that, and it was this way one day with a client I was working with how looked
at me and said, ah, but if I were to change I wouldn’t know who I was. That’s the ontological insecurity.
If we were to give up this paradigm that we live in, which is who defines us as in our identity. It also
follows with growth, every year we must consumer more. Those are very fundamental to who we are at
least in the developed world. You see this paradigm spreading in the developing world. That for me is
the greatest challenge. How do you break through that? It really is a painful process, at an individual
transformative level, to move out of the old paradigm and into the new one. When your identity is so
strongly constructed around: I am a consumer.
Valerie: I think we have to also design what is the concept of progress in the 21st century.
Speaker: I was just thinking, how to make things more immediate. We’re not good at thinking in the long
term. How to bring out climate science in a way personally and immediately. It’s always been a
challenge. Even in the classroom, a lot of us couldn’t understand the science, you know, is this real, how
does that relate to my life. Even in our conversation people have talked about earthquakes. And people
who live here, you do know that we live in the Pacific Northwest, and you know it is a matter of when
not if. And yet, we have school buildings here, most of them are old brick buildings. If there is an
earthquake, when that big earthquake comes, the buildings will absolutely crumble. We will have
thousands of dead children. So when I say that to people involved in school policies, and PTA meetings,
you know we just had a bond that went down to improve school buildings. I say ok, you don’t want to
pay it now, you want to pay it in 3 years when that earthquake comes and you know when the
earthquake comes, we will have all those dead kids, and you know the millions and millions of dollars
that will come into our state. The amount of money that we’ll raise when it does happen. And I want to
see a big pay-add in the Oregonian that says, when do you want to put that money up? The day after?
Or do you want to do it now and save those lives. That’s an emotional issue and we can feel that here.
For me climate science has to come from out of the theoretical realm. It has to make you really upset as
I’ve said I am when I talk about the earthquake issue here.
Matt: I think that’s a very good point, from the economics perspective. The gentleman over here raised
it too. We’re watching disease vector change before our eyes. As things that only were in the tropics are
migrating. I think there’s always been this hope and expectation in a community that when extreme
weather became more of the norm, those were going to be those holy grail kind of moments that
snapped people to attention. And I think survey numbers actually showed that. We saw general
consensus around climate going down over the last few years. It was a very strange winter and spring,
and those numbers rebounded. I think that this does it becomes real for people. It’s not reassuring in
the least. If next winter is a normal winter and we go back to this it’s very comfortable, it a hard curve to
climb. And I want to say one more thing on the economics side, for those of you who are familiar with
the Stern Report, which was a great work which got the economics of this, many of the
recommendations which it did quantify..--? But the Stern report also said the real cost, the counting,
which is something we’re not good at, is actually assigning real value to commodities that reflect their
impact on society. We can actually use the market as a mechanism to do this, we just haven’t been
willing to do this in many quarters.
Speaker: I had a question and a comment. I remember when the Copenhagen climate resolution
occurred. And then there was that big story about how scientists were fudging on the numbers and
that’s all you heard. It was so disappointing. Even on NPR they gave stories that made people question
the reality before climate science. So I really wish there were some voices that were able to come back
from the misinformation that was out there. And I hope that that voice becomes stronger. Thank you for
being here.
Valerie: I think you are referring to what was called Climate Gate. I am part of the group of scientist
whose emails have been released with exchange with British journalists. A number of audits have been
made on the science, of these scientists. They’ve all been made cleared. This is exactly part of what
Naomi Oreskes calls the merchants of doubt. Who have released this, I guess on purpose, right at the
time of the Copenhagen meeting to have a change in the media treatment of climate. I think before the
media treatment of climate was in the science pages. And then it went into the economics pages, and
then it went into the dry pages, and this proved to be extremely efficient in killing any trust in climate
science. So the question is how to bring trust into sciences. And contact is one way to do that because
you see people and you see how they work, but we cannot do that all the time. So we need the media to
help in explaining the fact and covering these international negotiations.
Speaker: Are there any media representatives here today?
Catherine: We had today before the meeting interviews with people in Washington.
Matt: I think it is a sign of progress. The period you’re talking about, there was a 2nd round of released
emails. There was a 1st round which really garnered a tremendous amount of attention. Of course I
immediately get on phone with journalists and affected scientists, for most journalists, it was a big
yawn. Some journalist wrote up the story as you saw it, but for most of them, they just said we know
what’s going on, it’s timed, as you said, to coincide with this. I will tell you today, there are thousands
more that have not been released. They’re just sitting somewhere. I know our presumption is that all
the juicy ones. But there will be a point in time, when there is a discussion in Germany or elsewhere, and
you will hear another story about more emails being released about really not anything. A question is
who’s behind this. That would be interesting.
Speaker: I wasn’t directly involved, but listen, there is a really complicated situation when that 1st group
of emails was released. There have been 6 investigations, reviews in one form or another, and what they
found was whatever was said in the emails has not undermined the science. In addition to those 6
formal reviews, I know there are a number of companies like McKinseys and others have out of selfinterest done internal reviews and decided that the science was solid. What is very difficult for those of
us that weren’t involved or implicated in it is what the emails revealed. And I don’t think you can just
ignore what was in those emails. Those emails made some scientists very uncomfortable. They were not
aspiring to the highest standards expected of the science community. Although there were many many
reasons why one could understand that, they were put under what appears to be malicious attempts to
subvert their work and so on and so on. Nevertheless, something that appears to distort the peer review
process is something that scientists feel very uncomfortable about. And it seems to me that were talking
about rebuilding trust. Now that the dust has settled, I think it would do well for the climate science
community to come out and have a discussion about this and if not a Socratic oath, set itself to some
standards which it aspires to recognizing that we’re all human beings and that we will all fail some day
and ask to be forgiven. I think this is an unfinished dialogue. I don’t think that until we get a handle on it
trust can be rebuilt. I don’t think it’s just the trust of the people, it’s the trust of the media. If you talk to
environmental correspondents, at least in the UK, and ask them- why isn’t climate science being covered
these days? They’ll say because we have been let down by the science community. We were persuaded
that this was a big story and we went out on a limb. Climategate gave them the reason to not trust us
anymore. So it’s not just gaining public trust directly, it’s gaining trust indirectly through the media. It’s a
toxic subject as a result of this. So you’ve touched on something that I think is really an issue that we’ve
got to get a grip on. There’s a level of denial any unwillingness among the community to address this.
Matt: to add to that, it played a bit differently with US journalists, there was less of a feeling of being
betrayed, more then they’d say they’d told the story, and now what.
Valerie: It’s almost not covered in France, it’s very strange.
Speaker: One of the things we haven’t said is that all of this angst have to do with the English speaking
world. If we were holding this in China, people wouldn’t know what we were talking about. This serious
polarization. It’s worst in America, it’s similar in Canada, it’s getting that way in Australia, and it’s being
exported to the UK. So whether it’s to do with rugged individualism. It’s not the same elsewhere, it’s not
the same in France, and I’ve been trying to find out, Valerie you might be able to say. One theory I’ve
heard about France is that there’s still a deep respect for rational thinking, from the French revolution.
[inaudible joke]
Speaker: There’s a theory about the US along those lines. That there’s a streak of anti-intellectualism in
American culture. It comes to the surface from time to time, this may be one of those trigger events.
Speaker: I felt that there is so much money and power and its birthplace is in the US and that is a big
component to CC. My sense was, hearing the Climategate occur, immediately I thought who’s behind
that. I didn’t see people out there defending the scientists and pointing a finger, even questioning where
is this disinformation or where is this story coming from. CC is such an important issue for humanity and
for our existence. We maybe need to learn to play a tougher game. Play more hardball like the fossil fuel
industry is.
Jeff: One thing that I did feel Climategate did show was how poorly organized the scientific community is
to react to these sorts of things. I and my colleagues were completely caught off-guard in how to
respond to something like this. I personally felt very disappointed in the scientific organizations I’m a
part of. I’m actually a fellow of a number of them, the American Geophysical Union, the American
Geological Society, the National Academy of Sciences. I mean all these organizations could have quickly
come strongly with a simple sentence: that science is still sound. Irrespective of emails and what was
going on. None of those organizations did that. Eventually, they did get their act together and had some
press releases but by then it was too late. And I thought that was a classic example of how poorly
organized we are in terms of a community and its ability to respond to crisis. I hope we’ve learned from
that if you want to put a positive light on that. That we as a community have learned that we should get
our act together. To respond in a more forceful way and certainly a more timely way than we did in that
case.
Speaker: I wanted to comment about rugged individualism, I think it also permeates the scientific
community which makes this type of coordination you’re describing Jeff, which is so important, also
really challenging.
Speaker: I think it’s really interesting that this is called “CC” and if I could put my process work cap on for
a moment, how can I be the change in the climate? How can I change the climate around me, and the
way I interact with the world. And with all of the Earth and that’s all I need to say.
Karen?: I just wanted to contrast, I don’t know if many of you heard about the Heartland Institute where
a scientist, under false pretenses, obtained some confidential documents from the Heartland Institute
which is a conservative think tank which has been putting out misinformation about CC. And there the
scientific community behaved more honorably than the reverse when Climategate happened, because
people really did criticize the scientist. I think in fact he resigned from AGU. But that’s just sort of to
contrast what we did. I think, should we play fair, or keep trying to play fair?
Speaker: To add to that, he was the head of the Ethics Committee! So actually if you want a master class
in hardball, there’s a video, it’s very hard to watch, of Joan Bast (?), the director of the Heartland
Institute, responding the day after the documents had been leaked. And if you want to see somebody
who- I shall say no more since this is being recorded and I don’t want a lawsuit! But I’ll simply say to see
the opposite side of hardball. To see someone argue that black is white, you had to take your hat off to
him. He turned himself into the victim. It was an absolute master class in how to turn adversity into --?
It’s a Fox interview.
Speaker: Ok, let’s try to wrap up for this evening. I’ll make a few comments about the highlights. For the
1st half, we really heard about the climate science. We heard about the major findings, that the Earth
climate system is an extremely complex system that makes it extremely difficult to arrive at simple
conclusions. But nevertheless we have a variety of tools, that Karen and Andres described, derived from
observations and models and so on. We can make certain general conclusions with a fair degree of
confidence which have to do with the fact that the climate system is changing and a fairly strong case
can be made for the proposition that human actions are part of this story. We heard that a consensus
within the scientific community about these propositions is quite hard. So that was the 1st half and in
some sense the easy part. And then we came back in the 2nd part and got into the sort of so what
question, the relationship between the science and public policy and society at large or you and I as
individuals. And we talked about the different issues there and forces at work. And I’m just going to
repeat a few of them from this rich conversation. Some had to do with the individual level, sort of the
individual psychology, that their ontological identities are bound up in their behavior and that sort of
path dependence. Even if you recognize that you’re on a dangerous course, it’s not too easy to change
other than bringing your bag and buying a Prius. That’s a different sort of denial that people can explain
the lack of action and feel ok. We also talked about the political processes and political systems and the
power of interest and money and political influence and so on. The reasons why the political system is
difficult to address these issues, especially in an environment of a fairly high degree of polarization or
confrontation. It doesn’t lend itself to a creative or balanced sort of discussion. We also heard at the end
of the day many people assume that technology will bare us out, that when push comes to shove we’ll
find some sort of a solution one way or the other. And therefore it’s ok. And we had a long discussion at
the end around Climategate and the issues around that that the scientific community or the
organizations that represent them have the skill or resources or knowledge to address effectively when
science is under attack. Someone talked about the Heartland Institute guy being, I don’t know what to
say, more clever or more sophisticated in how to turn an issue. I want to end with the comments you
made about process work. I don’t want to end on a pessimistic note and I think there’s hope in process
work and there are ways to go forward in the face of these difficulties which we’ve touched on. That
may be the segway to where we want to move this discussion in the succeeding sessions.
Catherine: Thank you everyone. The advantages of the small group is that everyone can participate.
Tomorrow morning we will be looking at how people react to the news of CC and what kinds of fears it
raises in all of us, and to start thinking about how we can handle these fears and how can we be looking
at it in a positive way, in a constructive way that can give us hope. Because, as Oran was saying, it’s so
discouraging. People come up to me after a talk and say it’s so discouraging, the story of CC, so we
definitely have to change to message to something where we can help people to come up with
solutions. It looks like we’re going towards a collective solution. I wanted to make a comment that I
didn’t have a chance to make after Jeff suggested that the US was poorly organized. In France, this was
around the main skeptic in front, is called --?, and some of his collaborators, were given media coverage.
He’s the former minister of education so he’s really well known and he’s a geophysicist and he’s very
respected in his field and he talks about CC about which he knows very little in reality. But the French
scientific community got together and signed a petition…
Valerie: I was about one hour I heard him on the radio saying really wrong things about being green.
That showed he really knew nothing about climate science. But he was given 1 hour on the headline
news to speak. And so we had no organization but we organized by email, colleague to colleague, and
we debunked his book. Showing each statement that was wrong, why it was wrong. This was sent to all
our employers, universities, national research centers, ministry of research was the employer of
university teachers, and it had a lot of impact. It had impact in the media because the debate between
the science journalists and the other journalists was quite strong. In France, people believe there’s some
authority in institutions.--? So these reports had an impact on teachers, in the schools, and on the
general public as well.
Speaker: This is just to illustrate that we can do something if we can get organized. We don’t have to
wait for an organization, for a professional organization to do something. We have to do it. Acting
collectively. In the US it may be harder but we can do something. So ending on this more positive note,
see you tomorrow.