-: So, I wanna thank, first of all,
the sponsors at the University of Nebraska
for this particular session today.
The agricultural research division
of the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources,
one of the sponsors.
The Office of Research and Economic Development,
Graham Paul's office is sponsoring this,
the School of Natural Resources,
and also the Water for Food Institute,
so all four of them are sponsoring this session.
So, I'm always pleased when I go to these different groups
and I say, "We're putting on this session."
"Will you help sponsor this?"
There's never any hesitation.
They always say, "Yes, we'd love to do this."
So, I think it's a great opportunity to share information
between the various groups that are here,
to do some educating on this issue,
which is an important one,
and as you noticed on the agenda, following the break,
we're gonna have a report back on
from four of the eight roundtables that we had,
so we didn't have enough time to include
all eight in the discussion, but these are four
that are especially critical.
So, Ronnie's already mentioned the report and the authors,
so Clint Rowe is here as one of the main authors
that was associated with this report
that we did and published in September of 2014.
Deborah Bathke also, and also Bob Oglesby
were main authors of the report,
but there were a lot of other people
that provided input to this,
so I'll talk about in just a few minutes
the fact that we, as part of the report,
we focused on different sectors in the report
and I ask a number of people
that were experts in those sectors
to write commentaries that talk about
the implications of climate change
on those particular sectors and so, Scott Josiah's here.
He wrote about the forestry sector and so forth
and Nick, Nick Brozovic is here from the Water for Food.
He and some others wrote about
the agricultural sector, the water sector and so forth.
Then, we tried to flesh out more information
about those sectors in the roundtables
that were held in the fall of 2015.
So,
the remote's not working.
Is this not...
I can use the, I can use the...
Ah.
It was working earlier, wasn't it?
Let me just use the...
We'll edit this part out of the...
Let me just use, let me just use these.
Greg, this isn't working either.
Looks like it locked up.
Sorry about that.
Voiceover: While they're getting this to work,
I might just say that more and more people
are feeling comfortable talking about climate change
in this state and for those of you
who are not aware of this, the recent view
in the all rural poll showed that 61% of rural Nebraskans,
either agreed or strongly agreed
that the state needs to have a climate act plan,
so that's part of the reason for--
-: Okay.
Okay.
Nice filler, so (laughs) good job.
Okay, so this is the cover of the report
that we are talking about, the September 2014 report,
so the outline of my presentation is basically
going to follow the outline of the report
that we did in September of 2014.
If you want electronic copies of the report,
it's available at that particular URL at the university.
There's a lot of other information on that site as well,
including the roundtable reports,
so if you want to download that.
You're free to make copies,
distribute that as you need to and so forth.
So basically, I'm gonna go through some of
the observed changes that we've seen in climate,
global scale, national scale, Nebraska, and so on.
Look at climate change science,
what we know about climate change science,
what's driving these changes and so forth,
projections of future changes,
an understanding of these projections,
and some of the impacts.
What?
Is the microphone not working?
It's working?
Okay, all right.
Can you get rid of that, can you get rid of the box?
Or is it...
The box on the screen.
I thought that disappeared automatically.
Okay, all right.
So, as part of the 2014 report,
as I mentioned, we focused on a number of different sectors
that we thought were really critical
and we were building a lot off of
the National Climate Assessment report
that was issued in May of 2014,
and so, we pulled a lot of information
and then that report, there was talk about
changes on a regional scale, at a national scale
and there was also talk about changes
as they might affect different sectors
and so, we pulled off of those sectors
and included these commentaries
and then, as a follow on to that,
the roundtables were organized
as a mechanism to bring together
stakeholders within these various sectors
to actually talk about the implications
of the projected changes in climate
and the changes that we've seen already
on their particular sector and I think in total,
well, Kim worked with me on these.
In total, we had around 350 people
that attended these eight sector-based roundtables.
Ken kept popping up at most of these,
so he got counted many times, but 350 people,
so there was a really good exchange of ideas,
concerns, issues, and so on associated with climate change.
It's interesting because what we've done here in Nebraska,
in terms of the 2014 report and also the 2015 report,
is now considered to be a major success story
of the National Climate Assessment,
so the next National Climate Assessment,
which will occur in another three or four years,
is going to use Nebraska as an example of a case study,
a success associated with climate change
and what their expectation was
was that states would take the information
in the National Climate Assessment report
and do things like what we have done here,
so I think we're poised to take this to the next level
and then hopefully, this legislative resolution
will give us an opportunity to do that.
I'll start with, we brought to campus Tony Leiserowitz
in March of 2014, actually or 2015,
to talk about climate change.
He leads a climate change communication program
at Yale University, and so he came
and he gave an excellent talk.
He was one of the Heuermann Lecture speakers,
so I suggested to Ronnie that we bring him to campus
and he came to campus, when he began his presentation,
I mean, this is a very complex issue, climate change,
and so he said to a lot of audiences,
he tries to simplify this and he wanted to
simplify it in terms of 10 words.
So, those 10 words were, first of all, that it's real.
Secondly, that it's us.
Third, that it's bad.
Fourth, it's scientists agree
and finally, that there's hope,
so this message of hope is an important one
because when you look at climate change
and climate change projections,
it's easy to come away being very pessimistic
about our future and the future of this planet
in terms of how the environment's
going to change and so forth.
I gave a talk recently in Omaha
and when I put up this bullet that said scientists agree,
someone in the audience said, "No, they don't."
So, I'll talk to that in just a minute,
as to what we mean by that.
So, addressing climate change is really a moral issue
and this came out in the Pope's encyclical.
It was issued last year and so on
and it's not just for future generations,
but also now because we're already seeing these changes
and Ronnie was referring to those earlier,
but we need to do something about this.
We need to talk this out of the political perspective
and look at this from a scientific perspective
in what we know and what we don't know
and try to move forward with the conversation.
So, what is scientific consensus?
So I thought it was important maybe to
talk about that just a minute.
So the common statistics that's used
is that 97% of climate scientists agree
that not only the climate is changing,
but that humans are the driving factor here,
so we're talking about greenhouse gas changes
and concentrations and so on in the atmosphere.
So 97%, there's been more recent studies
that would put this closer to 100%.
So within the climate science community,
this is real and this is bad
and this is something that we need to do something about,
so scientific consensus, if you look at a definition of it
and there's a discussion of this in that 2014 report,
represents a collective position
of the community of scientists
in a specialized field of study,
so in this case, climate science.
It doesn't mean that every single climate scientist agrees
or may just disagree on certain aspects
of what some of the projections are
or some of the methodology and so forth.
Climate, or scientific consensus is achieved
through the process of peer review.
This is how science works,
is that we put information out there.
It's challenged by other scientists and so on
and we move forward.
It does not mean that all scientists
in a field of study agree,
so if you think about this
in terms of the health profession,
if you went for a diagnosis
and you went to five different physicians
and four of the five told you that
you needed to have surgery
and this is why you needed surgery,
but one disagreed with that,
I mean, you would take those
four out of five pretty seriously,
and so in this case, we're looking at
almost 10 out of 10 scientists
that are saying this is real, this is bad,
this is something we need to do about,
so there are some dissenting votes
and oftentimes, the ones you hear about
are actually not climate scientists,
but they're scientists in other fields of study,
sometimes completely removed from climate science
and they get a lot of publicity
and they get a lot of money from the
fossil fuel industry to say certain things.
So, our understanding of the magnitude
and the impacts of climate change continues to increase.
Improved computer models,
improved data, more data that we're collecting
from satellites and from other
ground observations and so on.
It's all improving our understanding of climate science,
so we continue to refine what we know,
modify what the projections are and so on as we go forward.
In the UN Climate Change Report,
we said in there, for more than a decade,
there's been a broad and overwhelming consensus
within the climate science community
that the human-induced effects of climate change
are both very real and very large
and so, this is the view within
the climate science community.
So finally, the global community came together in Paris
with the climate treaty of the conference of the parties
last December and signed an agreement
making pledges as to how they're going to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions and try to deal with this issue,
so we had, I think, 195 countries that signed this
and I think a lot of the success of this event
was to be attributed to the US, I think,
providing a lot of leadership for the first time
to address this issue and get countries
to come to this meeting, having already made a pledge
on what they were going to do
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So, I put this up there because
I could talk about this issue for a long time.
Clint could talk about it for a long time,
but there are time constraints, right?
So, I'm not gonna talk about this forever.
Introduction, background.
I wanna begin with this slide because
this is one that there's a lot of confusion
that results from, particularly in the public,
about the differentiation between weather and climate,
so weather is the condition of the atmosphere
at a particular place in time,
so it's highly variable from minute to minute,
hour to hour, day to day, week to week, and so on
and it's defined by sunshine, precipitation,
temperature, and all these variables, winds and so forth.
Climate, on the other hand, is the composite
or average of weather over a long period of time,
so with climate, we're looking at trends
in what we're seeing, whether it's temperature trends,
whether it's trends in terms of precipitation and so on.
We're looking at trends over a longer period of time.
We're also very concerned about
the frequency of extreme events
because these impose tremendous hardships
on society, on people and so on
on economic infrastructure and so forth
and so Mark Twain once said,
"Climate is what you expect and weather is what you get."
So, that's another way of sort of
defining the difference between weather and climate,
but people will, that live in a certain area,
maybe they're had a cold winter
will say things like, "Well,
"whatever happened to global warming?"
Well, again, climate is a regional phenomena.
Changes in climate are occurring over larger timescales,
so we're looking at trends,
but weather patterns obviously
are variable on the order of weeks, months, and so forth,
so yes, you're gonna have, if you look at
global mean temperature for a certain particular year,
you're gonna have some areas that were cooler than normal,
some areas that are warmer than normal.
What we've seen more recently is that
the warmer than normal are dominating.
So, why is climate important?
Well, climate is important because
it defines sort of the constrains of a lot of what we do,
so if you look at planting decisions by farmers,
what crops they grow where, when they plant,
and so, when they harvest and so on,
issues related to architecture
and how we design our buildings,
how we design dams, reservoirs, storm sewers, et cetera.
All of this is based upon climate
and historical climate information,
so we have these terms, stationarity
versus non-stationarity and,
so stationarity is assuming that we have,
while it's a variable, weather pattern over time,
that it's not changing, okay?
So, the climate is stationary,
whereas what we are seeing now
is that we moved to a situation
where we have non-stationarity of climate,
so we have trends, things that are going on,
so this raises all kinds of questions
about designs for the future, things that we're building,
whether it's utility facilities,
whether it's reservoirs or whatever,
how do we design those based on a climate that's changing
rather than one that's stable?
So, we'll talk about that more as we go forward,
so some of the observed changes in climate,
there are, could be, you could look at
10 key indicators of changes in climate.
If the climate is changing, we should see
a rise in air temperature over land, over water.
We should see an increase of ocean heat content,
sea surface temperatures should be increasing.
Water vapor should be increasing
within the atmosphere and so on.
Certain things should be decreasing as a result
of the higher temperatures and so on.
We should see a decrease in sea ice,
a decrease in glaciers and ice sheet,
a decrease in snow cover and so on,
so if you look at the data sets
for all of those 10 variables,
you'll see that they all confirm
that our climate is changing at a global scale,
at a regional scale for almost all places on earth
and so, we have sea level rise because of
the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
We also have a warming of the ocean,
so you have a thermal expansion of the ocean and so forth.
The sea level is rising.
This is creating huge economic concerns
for coastal communities and so forth,
island nations and so on.
So, I wanted to show you this animation.
So, what this is showing before I start this,
is this is showing global temperature
on an annual basis from 1884 through 2012
and so, the areas that are in yellow
are the warmer than normal
and then, the areas that are in blue
are the cooler than average regions of the world
for that particular year.
So as we go through this animation,
you see the year down here
and so, you see how these patterns,
these changes in weather from year to year,
are affecting different regions of the world,
in terms of areas that are warm,
areas that are cool, and so forth.
You get into the 1930s drought
and you see the very warm area of the United States
that shows up quite dramatically.
You see that also during the 1950s,
which was a significant drought event
in large portions of the central part of the US,
southern, Southwest and so forth,
but look at visually what happens
when you get past about 1970, 1975
in terms of this warming that we're seeing.
So the warming is dominating,
so yes, there are some areas where maybe there are some,
in this particular map, 2012 was a very warm year.
You really don't see much in way of cooler areas,
but you can see how the warmth is dominating.
If we look at 2015, a similar map.
2015 was the warmest year on record.
2016 looks like we're gonna beat 2015.
You see one cooler than average pocket up there,
but the rest of the globe is showing this warming trend,
so this is very, very significant.
So, this again shows this pattern.
This is from 1880 up through current
and you see the global mean temperature
shown here in the blue line
and you see the dominance of the warming
in more recent, more recent decades
and so, some incredible statistics.
There's 15 of the 16 hottest years on record
have occurred this century.
We're not very far into this century.
388 consecutive months through April of 2016
with a global mean temperature
above the 20th century average,
so what's the probability that you're gonna have
388 consecutive months that keep beating
the warmest month part of that on record.
1988 was a significant drought year in the United States.
It was a record year when it occurred in '88.
It now ranks as the 23rd hottest year,
so again, it puts things in perspective,
that we keep beating these records
year after year, month after month and so on.
So if we look at the pattern
of temperature change across the US
and this comes from the National Climate Assessment report,
you can see the majority of the warming,
the greatest amount of warming has been
in the northern tier and in the Western United States.
Nebraska is kind of a mixed bag
with some areas having a little more warming than others.
None of the areas that are cooling.
You see a little bit during this period.
There's actually been a little bit of a cooling,
but again, this is related to local climate controls
and the climate controls for different regions
are gonna be different, whether it's wind,
whether it's mountain ranges,
proximity to the ocean and so forth,
but you can see this general pattern
and you can see for the Great Plains north region,
which is what, the Climate Assessment report
put us in the north region, what that's showing.
Ronnie kind of referred to this in his opening remarks.
Observed increases in the frost-free season.
For the Great Plains as a whole,
the frost-free season has increased by about 10 days.
For Nebraska, it varies between about five and 25 days
and this is going to continue to increase
and so, farmers are adapting to these changes
obviously, in terms of farming practices.
This is the map that Ronnie was referring to.
I saw some of you looking for it in the roundtable report.
It's not in the roundtable report.
It's in the 2014 report,
but this is the line he was talking about
that was kind of along the Platte River.
This is the differences between
zones four and five in 1990
and if you look at where this demarcation line is in 2012,
it's up on the South Dakota border,
so a dramatic change in a period of 22 years
and this is obviously continuing to change.
The amount of corn that's being grown
in South Dakota's increased dramatically
because of these changes and so forth.
Shifts from spring wheat in the northern states
to winter wheat in the northern states
is already occurring, so we're seeing
a lot of those kinds of shifts occurring.
Another way to look at this is to look at,
if you have a stationary climate,
so one that's not changing across time,
you would expect to break high temperature records
at the same rate that you're
breaking low temperature records
and you see that was pretty much the case back in the 1950s
and then you can see what has happened now,
so now, we're breaking two high temperature records
for every low temperature record,
so we've shifted that pattern,
that distribution significantly.
As far as precipitation goes,
observed precipitation changes,
you can see relatively, rather significant changes
across the northern tier, across some areas.
Here are the Great Plains.
Significant drying that's occurring in the Southwest,
so there's a lot of concerns about that
with regards to allocation of water
and the Colorado River and so forth
and all the states that are competing for that water.
Again, Nebraska's kind of a mixed, a mixed bag
in terms of precipitation and this is annual precipitation.
What's really important is the seasonal distribution
and how that seasonal distribution is gonna change
and how the distribution of
high intensity storms is gonna change,
which we're already seeing.
So, this observed changes in heavy precipitation events,
particularly for the Eastern United States,
so we may not, for some areas,
we're seeing an increase in precipitation,
which you would expect because there's more
water vapor in the atmosphere
because there's more evaporation.
There's more energy in the atmosphere,
but we're seeing a higher proportion of the rainfall
occurring in these extreme rainfall events.
I mean, think of Lincoln.
Since May of last year, we've had three 100-year rainfalls,
one last May, one last October,
and then one in May of this year,
so we're getting more rain
in these heavy, intense rainstorms.
This creates all kinds of design issues.
Storm sewers, et cetera, flooding and so forth,
so this is a significant issue too with the future
and you're seeing this, not just in the United States,
but in other areas as well.
Changes in the frequency of extreme events,
this is from Munich RE,
largest reinsurance firm in the world,
looking at loss events in the US
from 1980 through 2015
and they're divided into different categories,
geophysical, loss events, so tsunamis, earthquakes and so on
and you wouldn't expect, those are physical events.
You wouldn't expect a trend necessarily in those,
so highly variable from year to year.
Then you have meteorological events,
hydrological events, and then you have climate,
climatological vents, such as drought
and extreme temperature, heat waves and so on
and you see this tremendous increase
and so, one of the issues that we always have
as climate scientists is to what degree
was the 2012 drought the result
of normal climate variability
versus how did climate change play into this?
There have been studies that
have looked at things like that.
Super storm Sandy, for example.
To what extent do climate change
add to the impacts 'cause of higher surge levels,
in terms of the water and coming to shore and so forth
as a result of winds?
The California drought that's been
going on now for five, six years,
to what extent is climate change playing a role?
So it's hard to sort of figure out
how climate change is affecting that,
but they are showing for these extreme events
that climate change is making things worse,
so it's not that the 2012 drought
might not have occurred anyway,
but if you look at the highest
temperature stress days that we had,
this was probably exacerbated by the fact
that climate change is occurring
and you're having this increase in temperatures.
I'll talk about that a little bit more as we move forward.
So, what is the climate change science?
One of the things that deniers of climate change will say
is that, "Well, climates have always changed."
That's true, they do change.
They change over long timescales,
so we have ice ages, we have warm periods and so forth,
but these types of changes usually occur
over thousands of years
and they're due to things like
variations in the Earth's orbit,
variation in the energy from the sun.
Obviously, volcanic eruptions can put a lot of debris
and gases into the atmosphere
that have a cooling effect,
but these are the large-scale volcanic eruptions,
like Pinatubo and so forth in 1991.
Things like El Nino,
these things have an affect on climate,
in terms of the short-term,
but also in terms of longer-term changes,
so there are these natural forces
that have occurred in the past.
They're occurring today and they're gonna
continue to occur in the future.
What we're talking about are human-induced forces
or anthropogenic changes,
so as an example, one, some people will say,
deniers will say, "Well, we're getting less,
"are we getting more energy from the sun?
"That's why global temperatures are going up."
But if you look at fuller radiance
over this period from 1880 up to current,
you can see there's actually been a decline
in more recent years while temperatures continue to go up,
so changes in solar energy
and how much we're getting from the sun,
that's not an explanation for
the increase in global temperatures.
So these anthropogenic changes
are these changes in greenhouse gas
concentrations in the atmosphere.
We hear the most about carbon dioxide,
but there's methane and other gases as well.
Changes in aerosol particles in the atmosphere,
related to fire, smoke and so on,
that are occurring on a global scale
and then also on a global scale,
we have changes in land use,
dramatic changes in land use.
I mean, almost all areas of the earth
have been disturbed in one way or another by humans.
Here you see an extreme example
with center pivot systems and so on,
so this changes the albedo of the earth.
It changes the reflectivity of sunlight and so forth
and so, this has an impact on climate as well
at more of a micro-scale or at a meso-scale,
so I'll talk more about the
greenhouse gases here as we move forward.
So, just to refresh from your high school science class,
composition of the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen,
so carbon dioxide and other trace gases
make up 1% or so of the gases in the atmosphere.
These are referred to as greenhouse gases and so on,
so we have carbon dioxide, we have methane,
nitrous oxide, water vapor and some others.
These are critical because these are the ones
that trap heat in the atmosphere
and allow earth, or allow life on earth
to exist as we know it today,
so without these greenhouse gases,
the earth's surface temperature would be about
57 degrees cooler than it is.
So these greenhouse gases are essential
for the climate that we have on the earth's surface,
so they are the heat regulators for the earth.
So if we increase the concentration
of these in the atmosphere,
we're increasing the capacity of the earth to retain heat
and so, that's the critical factor.
So, you see carbon dioxide increased.
This is just going from about the mid-1970s,
the increase in methane.
Gale Erickson's gonna be here this afternoon,
talk a little bit about methane, nitrous oxide and so forth,
so we said this increase in these
greenhouse gases within the atmosphere.
So basically, you hear about the greenhouse effect.
Well, if we have the same amount of energy
coming in from the sun that we have
going back out into space, then we have a stable climate,
variable, but stable,
but what happens with the change
in the concentration of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere is we enable
the atmosphere to hold more heat.
It's like putting a blanket around the earth,
so this shortwave solar radiation
that comes in from the sun is,
essentially, the atmosphere is transparent to that
and so, it passes through the atmosphere.
Some of it's reflected by clouds back into space.
When it strikes the earth's surface,
it's absorbed and it's re-radiated as infrared radiation,
long-wave radiation, and when that energy
is re-radiated into the atmosphere,
the atmosphere is no longer transparent to it,
so it captures that heat and it
holds it for a period of time.
So, as we increase the concentration
of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere,
we increase the capacity of the atmosphere
to retain heat and that's why
we're seeing this increase in temperature.
So if you look over longer timescales,
and we can go back 800,000 years,
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere
have generally been below about
280 to 300 parts per million, going back 800,000 years.
This graph those back 400,000 years.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere
was about 280 parts per million
and you see what has happened
as a result of the burning of fossil fuels
is that we've increased this concentration dramatically.
If we focus in a little bit more
and this data comes from Mauna Loa
on the Big Island of Hawaii,
where they've been measuring CO2
levels in the atmosphere since 1958
and so you see this annual pattern
or inter-annual pattern here in terms of
carbon dioxide concentrations,
but in 2013, we hit 400 parts per million
and then since then, we've been continuing to go up,
so now we're at somewhere around, I think,
413 or something parts per million.
So this is continuing to increase
and will continue to increase to 500,
to 550, to 600, this is outside of
the range of anything that we've experienced in the past,
so the impact of this on climate and on people
that are dependent upon that climate is really dramatic,
so if you plot CO2 concentrations over time
going back to 1880 again,
along with global average temperature,
you can see the correlation between these
and correlation doesn't necessarily mean cause and effect,
but in this case, yes, it does.
So, this change in concentrations of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
is really, really important in terms of
explaining this change in global mean temperature.
So, separating human from natural causes,
so we use these computer models
and Clint is a computer modeler, climate modeler,
so he can speak more about this,
but what you have on this graph
is you have here global mean temperature in the black line
and if we run these computer models
and we hold CO2 constant in these models,
so we don't let that increase,
you get a pattern that's shown here by the green.
The only way we can essentially duplicate
the rising temperature that we've seen
is to run these models and put in the
carbon dioxide concentrations as they are changing
and then you see that the predictions in the model
tend to parallel what we see in terms of
actual observed temperatures.
So, projections for Nebraska.
Well, when we, when the modelers run these models,
the big unknown, I mean, they have
a pretty good understanding of climate science
and how things are working in the atmosphere,
physics of the atmosphere and so forth,
what we don't know and I'm not a climate modeler,
but what we don't know is what are going to be
the future concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,
20 years from now, 40, 60, 100 years
because that depends upon what society
decides to do about this problem
and so, they run the models with different scenarios
of future carbon dioxide concentrations
and so, the red line here represents
essentially business as usual.
So, we just keep doing what we're doing
and we don't really make any changes,
but if we make some significant changes
where we actually try to reduce
this curve showing CO2 concentrations
or flatten it or even more,
then we're gonna have a different future
and so, one of the conclusions in our report
was the fact that the largest uncertainty
in projecting climate change into the future
is knowing what this level of CO2
and other greenhouse gas concentrations
are gonna be in the future.
We just don't know that,
so that's a huge uncertainty
and so, that's usually why,
if you've read some of the report,
they talk about temperature changes in ranges
and people will say, "Well, the reason they're
"giving a range is because the fact that
"the models are not very good."
The fact is they're giving a range
because we don't know what future
greenhouse gas concentrations
or carbon dioxide concentration are going to be
20, 30, 50, 60 years into the future,
so that's an important issue.
So, pulling information from the
National Climate Assessment report
and looking at what changes have
occurred in Nebraska already,
projections for Nebraska.
Projected increases range from
four to five degrees Fahrenheit
towards the last quarter of the century,
which we think of as being a long way out,
but I remember when there was a computer scare
and we were changing to the year 2000
and everybody was panicked
and it's hard to believe that was 16 years ago,
so time moves pretty quick.
So four to five degrees with a low emission scenario
and then, eight to nine degrees
with a high emission scenario.
So just think about Nebraska's climate
with an eight to nine degree increase
in our mean temperature.
So again, the range is largely associated with
uncertainties in terms of where future emissions
are gonna have us by the last quarter of this century.
One of the other big concerns for Nebraska,
being an agricultural state,
but also relates to questions of human health and so on,
is a projected high temperature increase
in the number of stress days,
so days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, the low emission scenarios
indicate a 13 to 16 additional days
and the higher emission scenario,
which is, that's what we are on,
is this business as usual scenario,
is looking at 22 to 25 additional days
over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during our growing season.
The number of warm nights increasing.
We're already seeing that, both in winter
as is in summer, and this has implications
for insects, over wintering of pests,
diseases, and all kinds of things,
as well as energy demand.
Then, the frost-free season continues to increase.
There's a seat up here in front and there's one over here.
So, frost-free season continues to increase
by an additional two weeks,
so we already talked about the fact
that the average for the Great Plains,
which were around 10 days for Nebraska,
five to 25 days, so an additional two weeks
lengthening of the growing season in Nebraska
and how we're going to take that into account
in terms of our agriculture, energy demand and so on.
So if you look at the low emission scenario,
versus the high emission scenario
in terms of temperature projections,
again, that one being the business as usual,
which is what we're on at the moment.
See, if we actually do something about
greenhouse gas emissions, so we actually are mitigating
some of the future warming, you see quite a difference
between these two maps, in terms of the amount of warming,
the four to five versus the eight to nine
degrees that I talked about previously.
If you remember the, just to give you an example,
if you remember the 2012 drought,
so we're only four years before the present,
Nebraska, of course, was in the bullseye
of this very, very severe drought
and this map is produced by the
National Drought Mitigation Center
here at the University of Nebraska
working with Noah and US Department of Agriculture.
So this map comes out weekly
and you see this huge drought area
and if you consider all the different
types of, or not types of drought,
but the severity levels for drought,
really, two thirds of the United States
was in drought in 2012.
So one of the characteristics of drought,
people think about drought as being a dry situation,
but another characteristic of drought
is higher temperatures, partially because of the fact
you have less rainfall, you have more sunshine and so on.
You have warmer temperatures and so on.
So if you look at a map of the number of days
over 100 degrees in 2012 across the United States
and you look at Nebraska, I pulled out a few of these.
McCook had 37 degrees over 100 degrees.
Lincoln had 17 days over 100 degrees
and Lincoln averages about five per year, they had 17.
McCook averages about 11, they had 37.
So, if you think about the projections
in terms of high temperature stress days into the future,
the bottom line is by the last quarter of this century,
2012 could be a relatively average year
and that's a pretty scary, scary picture
for all the sectors, not just agriculture.
So, this is a picture I put in.
Ken, we were talking about wind energy earlier,
so I happened to run across this slide the other day
and I thought, well, okay,
it doesn't apply to Nebraska
'cause we don't have many of these,
but Iowa does, Kansas does, and so on.
So one of the other things, you know,
when you talk to farmers, they'll say,
"Well, I irrigate, so if we have more droughts,
"we have higher temperatures, I'm just gonna irrigate more."
But then there's the issue about
the availability of groundwater.
There's gonna be less recharge
because of more evaporation,
more erratic rainfall patterns and so forth
and if there's more demand on the aquifer,
it's gonna cause declining groundwater levels,
so this is a map showing the groundwater changes
in Nebraska from the spring of 2012
to the spring of 2013, so this is after one year of drought
where you've had a decline in the water table
of anywhere from five to 20 or more feet in one year.
Now, the groundwater levels in Nebraska have recovered,
but this was a one year drought.
If we had a two, three, four year drought
like California's been going through,
the Southwest, the South Central US,
multiple years of drought
and that's certainly is characteristic
of the climate of this area.
There's no reason why another Dust Bowl-type drought
or '50s-type drought wouldn't,
will not occur again in the future
and this is actually being projected.
This is a huge, huge issue.
Consecutive years of drought
and what that's gonna do to groundwater
and therefore, the potential for irrigation.
Precipitation, the trend for precipitation,
we've seen and I've shown you maps earlier,
this trend will continue with maybe more precipitation
in the Northern Plains.
Decrease in the Southern Plains.
Little change in winter and spring
precipitation in Nebraska.
Small projected changes in summer and fall in Nebraska.
In general, the models are showing,
maybe a drying trend for the Central Great Plain states
and there are projections of mega-droughts
in the near future in the Great Plains region,
so a mega-drought is like a drought of 10 years or more.
This increase in heavy precipitation that we've seen,
this trend's going to continue
and so again, that raises issues for urban areas
and flooding and all kinds of issues.
So we don't know, it's much harder to predict
what's going to happen with regards to precipitation
and the distribution and how that
may change from season to season,
but when you consider the increase in temperature,
even if we have a slight increase in precipitation,
it's going to be ineffective because the temperature's
gonna overwhelm that and so,
we're gonna be losing more of
that moisture to the atmosphere.
Soil moisture expected to decrease.
Flood magnitudes, we've already seen
an increase in flood magnitudes
along the Eastern Great Plains
associated with these high-intensity rainfall events.
This is expected to continue into the future.
Snow cover is a huge issue.
There's a lot of variability in snow cover,
but generally what we've seen is snow cover
decreasing in the Western United States,
decreasing in those areas that feed the Platte,
the Missouri River and so forth.
This year's an exception, but this reduced snow pack's
gonna mean less surface water flow across the state
and therefore, you know, the users of that water,
whether it's urban areas or agriculture,
this is going to have an impact as well.
If you look at some of the model output
predicting this sort of drying trend
for the Western United States and the Great Plains,
you can see a dramatic change here
across that particular region,
if you project it out towards the end of the century.
So, takeaway points.
Assessing the implications, or the impact
of these projected changes in Nebraska,
obviously the consequences depend upon
the sensitivity of key sectors.
So, the sensitivity of one sector versus another
is going to be variable and so,
some can adapt more readily than others
and so, we need to understand that.
How proactive these sectors are in adapting to changes.
Ronnie mentioned that farmers are already adapting
to the changes in climate that they see.
They will continue to adapt,
but one of the outcomes and one of the conclusions
of the National Climate Assessment report
is the changes that are projected for the future
are outside of the range that have anything
they've had to adapt to in the past
and so, dealing with these gradual changes
that we've been seeing is going to be
much more difficult and is gonna require
new innovations and technology and so forth.
Availability of groundwater to respond
to this increased demand that I just mentioned
and also mitigation.
What are we going to do to lessen the amount
of warming that is being projected to occur
through the reduced reliance on fossil fuels
and also the development of alternative energy sources?
Again, emphasizing this point that
even with, you know, we don't exactly know
what's gonna happen to precipitation.
It'll be a slight increase, maybe a slight decrease.
There's gonna be a change in terms of
distribution between the different seasons,
but it's gonna be overwhelmed by these
increasing temperatures and increasing
high temperature stress days
and finally, that it's really important,
while individuals can do a lot of things,
governments need to provide leadership on this issue
and that, I think, is what the
climate change action plan is about,
is the government needs, both the federal government
and the national government needs to set a tone,
need to say that these are our goals.
These are things we need to achieve
and then, work within the different agencies
and with the private sector to implement this.
Obviously, universities have tremendous research capacity,
tremendous capacity in terms of outreach,
building public awareness, which is important,
so where do we go from here?
Obviously, the University of Nebraska
and other institutions within the state
can help a lot in preparing for and adapting to changes.
Many grassroots organizations have been
very actively engaged thus far
in this process of trying to build awareness, interest.
Come in, Chuck.
There's a chair up here if you don't mind
sitting in the front row.
Chuck: Sit up front?
-: You get to sit by me (laughs).
Okay, Chuck was in here earlier.
Chuck is the Dean of Extension,
so we all introduced ourselves,
so now they know who you are, okay.
So, grassroots organizations have really taken up this cause
and are trying to build awareness,
educate the public about this and do various things.
State agencies, NRDs, communities,
obviously need to do a lot more
in terms of engaging in this process,
working within their jurisdiction and so on.
Working together across state agencies
is critically important.
NRDs, which are tasked with the job
of managing our groundwater resources in the future,
today and in the future and so far, critically important.
So, a Nebraska action, climate action plan
is an important step to mobilize,
I think, a lot of these resources that are out there,
the university resources, but the resources
of state agencies, grassroots organizations,
all of these stakeholders that participated
in our roundtables and even more than those that,
and we can, you know, I mentioned earlier
that Nebraska's really considered to be a leader
and so, people in D.C. want to use Nebraska
as an example of how you can build,
sort of awareness and expertise
to move this issue forward, in terms of discussion,
but we can learn an awful lot from other states
that have gone through the development
of climate action plans and also, other municipalities.
There are many of these that we can draw from
and I know Ken Winston's been looking at some of
these plans from other states.
Kind of a final sentence in our 2014 report
was that action now is more preferable
and cost-effective than reaction later.
So, the quicker we get onto this,
the much better we are going to be able
to deal with the issue as we move forward,
but this action requires both adapting to changes
as well as mitigating as much of the
future warming as possible through
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and so forth.
So, with that, I will stop.
I think I'm right on time, so we break in 15 minutes,
so if people have questions, I'd be glad to
try to answer your questions.
Thanks for your attention.
-: Okay.
This is one that my staff and I were
sitting and talking one day.
It was right after the big storm
in Lincoln a week or two ago
and there was hail, you know, huge chunks of hail.
Well, when I was 17, which is almost 60 years ago,
55 years ago, we had a a hailstorm in Lincoln
and I walked out in the street
and there were hailstones this big
and that was 50 years ago.
So, can we say that the storm a week ago in Lincoln
was caused by climate change?
'Cause I saw the same thing 50 years ago.
-: Well, no, we can't.
So the question is, did climate change
in any way exacerbate that particular storm?
Clint, do you want to...
Voiceover: We don't know for a single event like that.
We're gonna have thunderstorms and we had thunderstorms,
you know, hundreds of years ago.
We're gonna have thunderstorms
hundreds of years in the future
and we're gonna have hail in some of those thunderstorms.
Sometimes, it's gonna be big
and sometimes it's not gonna be big.
You know, it's just part of, that's weather.
We're gonna have weather no matter how the climate changes.
In this part of the country, part of that weather
for the foreseeable past and the foreseeable future
is going to include thunderstorms with hail.
-: So as I mentioned, it's the frequency of these things
that we're trying to get a handle on.
If these things are occurring much more frequently,
then you have to kind of take a look at that
and is that being driven by something
in the atmosphere, some of the changes that we're seeing
related to climate change?
-: By the way, we've been joined by Senator Pansing Brooks.
-: Hi.
You're one of those that snuck in as well.
(laughs)
-: Yeah, John has a question.
John: Along the lines of when we were young,
I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh
and there were days where the streetlights never went off,
that we had 110 consecutive miles
of steel mills billowing up smoke.
That's all gone.
I remember buses that used to
spew a whole bunch of Diesel fuel-smelling stuff.
We don't have that anymore,
so looks like we're making improvements and improvements
and then I look at this chart and it's going straight up.
As far as greenhouse gases, where are they comin' from?
-: Well, they're coming from all--
John: But it's hard for me to reconcile
what, that the accomplishes, the accomplishments
that we've made as far as cleaning up,
the rivers in Pittsburgh used to catch on fire.
They're now catching trout and walleye
at The Point in Pittsburgh.
Voiceover: Are they eating each other?
That's what I was gonna ask (laughs).
(everyone laughs)
John: But, I mean, I look at so much improvement
we have made in the environment
and we've really concentrated on cleaning air up,
water up, and all the rest of that stuff
and all of a sudden, wow, we've got this big crisis,
so I'm thinking, where is this coming from?
And obviously, once we figure out where it's coming from,
maybe we can do something about it.
I just look at us getting better and better.
We got scrubbers on.
I go buy the, what is it, (mumbles)
the PowerPoint, yeah.
There's nothing coming out of that.
I mean, I can't see anything
where I used to when I was a kid, would see
billowing smoke and soot
and all that kind of stuff going out.
Voiceover: I'm breathing out CO2 now
and you don't see it either.
John: Well, maybe that's where I need to be.
-: I think, you know, a lot of this is invisible
to the public in the sense that,
you know, CO2 and so on, but all the sectors,
transportation, energy, in all of these sectors,
agriculture, are contributing to
this greenhouse gas increase that
we're seeing in the atmosphere.
What we cleaned up is a lot of the pollution
and the air quality, water quality has really improved.
You know, it's really scary, not to get too political,
but really scary when Ted Cruz, for example,
in his campaign is saying,
"Well, if I'm elected President,
"I'm gonna do away with EPA."
Well, those are the regulations that
are cleaning up our air, cleaning up our water.
Do we wanna go back to rivers catching on fire?
I mean, that's really what we're talking about
and so that's a huge concern,
so there are a lot of sources that,
Clint, did you wanna--
Voiceover: Yeah, can I?
If you look back at one of the maps that Don showed,
which had the trends in temperature
over the United States and different regions,
if you look carefully, you'll notice that in the Southeast
and especially over the Tennessee Valley,
it's still showing a slight cooling trend,
but it's coming out of that now
and part of the reason for that we feel
is that during the, up until the Clean Air Act
and then a little after
'cause it was grandfathering tin,
they were burning coal that had a lot of sulfur
and a lot of sulfur particulates in the atmosphere
that created basically, sulfur clouds
and massive ray problems, from what I remember
from way back then and those types of
particles coming out actually end up
collecting sunlight, I mean, causing heat in the air,
so it's not till recently, that they cleaned up those
and now it's coming out of that flume
and showing the warming that we're seeing now in that area.
So there are, you know, the aerosols
that make up the smoke you see
and the stuff coming out of power plants,
they have different impacts than the CO2,
which mixes in and stays in the atmosphere
a lot longer than the aerosols.
The aerosols and the big particulates that cause
clouds that warm and drain out
and get washed out relatively quickly.
-: Helen, you next.
Voiceover: Yeah, I was just wondering.
Do you have ideas on
mitigation approaches that, that
would resonate in Nebraska?
-: Well, I think, you know, a big one obviously is wind power
and solar, I mean, both of those.
We have tremendous resource, in terms of,
I think we're third in the nation,
in terms of wind potential.
Solar, I think we're pretty,
I mean, we get a lot of sunshine days and so on,
so there are tremendous opportunities,
but one of the things we find
is you're battling against
the coal industry on those things
and these public power districts and so on
that wanna stay with coal and so on,
which is not a good thing
in terms of greenhouse gas emissions
and so, I mean, that's a huge solution
and one that, I think, Nebraska's gonna start
hopefully moving forward with more wind energy development,
but it's just staggering.
When I drive across Kansas, when I drive across Oklahoma,
those states, and you see the wind farms that exist
and then you get to the border of Nebraska
and you just don't see anything
and we probably have more wind potential here
than they have in Oklahoma.
Voiceover: I think some are in Washington.
-: Yeah.
Voiceover: And not to put you in a sticky spot,
the legislature, we've done it right on the minute.
(laughs) No, no, it's your comment that,
are you referencing you think that coal power
has actually held us back in terms of energy development
because of what their supposed stated goals are?
-: There's a tricky, yeah, thank you.
(everyone laughs)
The short answer is yes.
Voiceover: I don't disagree with you.
-: No, they, I mean, I,
several of them attended our
roundtable that we had on energy
and so, they were pretty engaged,
I think, in the conversation,
but when you keep getting this feedback
that says we have to stick with what we've done in the past,
well, we really need to be looking at
new paradigms for the future
in wind energy and solar,
I mean, I think back when the federal government
was subsidizing solar research and so on
back in the '70s and then the fossil fuel industry
got the federal government to pull out the subsidies,
so that that research wouldn't move forward.
You think about, well, where would we be today
in terms of solar, if in fact the federal government
had been continuing to put resources into that?
So, we've got a lot of catching up to do.
Voiceover: Oh, it's trended.
I think it's a conversation that,
no, I've had with a number of colleagues
and just the issues I have with public power,
the concept of public power.
-: Clint?
Voiceover: Yeah, if you look at,
Don mentioned, you come across the border,
you don't see anymore turbine things.
That's not quite, you come across the border,
you do see a few along the border, why?
Because they get in Nebraska and get the electricity out
to the markets in other states, you know,
so they're being done by private companies
to benefit other places using our wind.
Voiceover: My district has probably more wind,
actually, towers built than any other, so I'm familiar.
Voiceover: So, the fact that public power
has to provide low cost energy is a bit problematic,
but, you know, I think, one thing that can be done
is promote commercial ventures.
If they can get a long-term contract
in the public power district,
they could probably build wind energy sites in Nebraska,
so there are ways to think outside the box a little bit.
-: It becomes difficult too because,
you know, with our technology,
we build coal-powered plants that last for 40 years
and so, it's hard to look at closing them
or re-purposing them because they've been huge investments
and so, it gets to be a sticky problem.
I'd just like to respond quickly to John.
The other point is that we all share
the same atmosphere on this planet
and while I think in the United States,
there's been some success in cutting the amount of CO2,
in other, in the developing countries,
China and India and so on,
there has been just dramatic increases in CO2 production
and so that's one of the reasons that I think Paris was,
at least encouraging is those big developing countries
are now talking about reducing their CO2 as well.
So, we have to do our part, but the whole world
is producing more CO2 and that's the problem.
Voiceover: Well, the other piece of it is that
they've dramatically decreased the amount of
other kinds of pollution, but at this point,
carbon capture from fossil fuel emissions
is not really, it's not really happening at this point,
so and I'd be glad to give you some more information.
Voiceover: We don't have anything to talk about
to reinforce rain forest depletion,
the things that are happening
around the globe with the rain forest.
Isn't that a part of this--
-: That is definitely a part of it.
I mean, the rain forest, obviously,
will pull carbon out of the atmosphere
and then you're destroying huge numbers of these
and then the only time you burn the trees,
which then releases the carbon into the atmosphere,
so you get a double whammy.
We've got Scott Josiah here from the Forest Service.
You wanna make a comment related to that?
Voiceover: Right, I mean, rain forests are great
cyclers of carbon and so,
and there's been enormous amounts of deforestation,
not just in the Amazon, but across Southeast Asia
and that continues to convert to agriculture in the pasture
and those new systems of agriculture in pastures
don't absorb and retain as much carbon,
so once that carbon gets in the atmosphere,
it's not being absorbed by trees growing back.
It's gone, it's up there now.
So, it's a big concern.
The bottom line is whether you're going back
to Dr. Roader's question, what can we do in Nebraska?
I mean, plant trees.
-: From a forester.
(everyone laughs)
Are you surprised by that answer?
(everyone laughs) We need to plant more trees.
Yeah, and we, well, I don't know
whether you're gonna show a slide,
but yeah, and he's gonna give a talk in a little while,
and so, the decline in forest in Nebraska
has really been dramatic.
Yes, Julie?
Voiceover: Do you think that
increasing the amount of grazing land
or native prairie in the state
can do the same thing as planting more trees,
is the question, as much pardon?
-: Yeah, but somebody else, maybe, that we have--
-: Well, I might make a comment.
You know, we've looked at some of these,
I work for NRCS and USDA and we have,
I'll talk about it later, a building block to,
within NRCS, they're doing studies,
looking at, you know, the impact of how many
and how much carbon is sequestered
by different practices and it seems,
you know, if you have cover crops or pasture management,
all this really does increase the carbon content,
but when you start planting trees,
there's a huge gain, so anything,
you know, repairing areas, windbreaks,
carefully manage the wood locks, you know.
If we can promote those, there is a real benefit.
-: Is it about break time or you have a question?
-: So, no, go 'head and then that'll be
the last question before we break.
-: Well, we've seen a major increase in fracking
and oil production, particularly in Northern Great Plains
and as a result, there's been a,
I think, a lot of burn off of natural gas
because it was not economically viable to capture that gas.
As we
try to transition away from coal,
are these rational step downs to oil and the natural gas
and so on instead of assuming that we're
gonna be able to get to high levels
of production of wind and solar in the next five, 10 years?
Or is it really just kind of spitting wind,
so to speak, no pun intended,
if we don't immediately try to transition more quickly
to the truly renewable, the truly carbon neutral methods?
-: Well, I think it's rational
and I know this has been a huge point
of the Obama administration and moving to more natural gas,
but natural gas is causing a tremendous increase
in methane in the atmosphere as well,
so there's a side effect of that
and we don't hear as much about that.
We tend to hear more about carbon dioxide,
but methane is much more powerful
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide
and with concerns about the permafrost,
thawing the permafrost and natural gas,
methane relieves from that and that's a huge issue,
so it's, I think we've taken a step forward
in the US by moving away from coal,
but natural gas is kind of creating
another series of issues that we're gonna
have to address as well.
I don't know, anyone else have comments about--
Voiceover: That's like switching to (mumbles).
(everyone laughs)
It's probably better, but it's still not good.
-: Depending on who's President,
we may be building a pipeline,
which some of them are talking about that, you know?
Yeah, Kim?
Voiceover: Bill Kevin had an article
that came out a couple of months ago.
I forget which magazine it was in,
but it was a big, long comprehensive piece
and his argument was that all this time
we've been battling CO2, we may have been
missing the biggest things of all,
which is all the methane released
that has come from the fracking move
and since methane is tens of times more potent than CO2,
it really is a problem, so it may be
sort of a sleeping giant that we're not really aware of
as much as we should be yet
and so, I think that makes that
kind of stare down approach that
the Obama administration has taken is kind of problematic.
-: Okay, wow.
I'll let you say very kind words.
-: Okay, we'll be back.