October 10th, 2019 Posted by tp33Blog
0 thoughts on “Climate Change: What’s Likely To Happen According To Scientists And How To Be Part of the Solution”
After speaking with two meteorology experts and a chemical engineer who specializes in carbon capture technologies, it’s clear we’re not doing enough to get in front of what’s becoming a climate disaster.
A number of credible scientific publications stated that climate change puts the well-being of people around the globe at risk. And yet, most of us are not aware of what’s potentially coming nor are we planning for it from a business and personal perspective.
I spoke with Rear Admiral David Titley, who spent 32 years as the Navy’s meteorologist/oceanographer, when he appeared on my podcast Unmessable. Titley was tasked with assessing and planning for security risks our country faced with regards to global warming.
One big concern he spent a lot of time analysing is rising sea levels. He expects levels to rise up to 3 to 6 feet by the year 2100, but by the time levels stabilize (several centuries from now), we could be looking at a 30 feet increase globally.
This means ultimately Orlando becomes the southernmost point of Florida. Baton Rouge is the southernmost point of Louisiana. Everyone in Harlem, New York is elated because they now have beachfront properties. And that’s just the beginning.
In another Unmessable podcast discussion, Dr. Marshall Shepherd, a distinguished professor and Director of Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, and former Nasa meteorologist, said “Many people don’t understand that the increases we’re going to see in the next 0 to 50 years (sea level rise, ice caps melting, flooding, droughts, agricultural belt shifts, diseases, etc.) are going to happen at an exponential rate. They’re not going to be linear increases. The more time we wait on action, the further along the exponentially increasing curve of crisis we go.”
Scientists say there is an inflection point where the climate scales tip, which is when we reach an average climate increase of 2 degrees celsius. That’s where the rate of climate change will get away from our abilities to reverse it. Today, we are seeing a 1.5 degrees celsius average climate increase, which means there is still some time to be proactive.
So I asked myself, what can regular people (like me) do to help slow down this train wreck? What business opportunities exist around being part of the solution? Here’s a place to start.
Clean air: It’s likely to be very valuable
Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, a chemical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric pollution, believes CO2 carbon capture is a solution we should employ to reverse some of the damage that’s already been done.
“We have the capability to build synthetic forests that have the potential to remove some of the CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere each year, ” Dr. Wilcox said. “Ideally, we avoid CO2 emissions to begin with, but we are not doing that at the scale required to meet our climate goals and so now we have to start pulling CO2 out of the air to avoid reaching a climate change tipping point.”
It sounds simple to pull CO2 from the air, but it’s not. Far from it. It’s a complex process that requires lots of engineering and funding. There are some businesses working on clever ways to do this, but we need way more innovation happening in this space and significant capital investments. It’s a great business opportunity that will predictably be in big demand.
Get involved with Congress and local government
Titley suggests to learn about climate change, we should all get involved locally, monitor the state of affairs, and become an advocate. There are short explanations from the AAAS where you can quickly develop a basic understanding of climate change. Then, if you don’t already know, find out who your representatives are locally and make your voice heard.
But when it comes to affecting change on a larger scale, it takes advocacy to organize slow-moving government agencies. Congress and local governments can create business grants and other incentives to fuel business opportunities at all levels to work toward achievable climate goals. Staying silent while the house burns isn’t an option any longer.
Be mindful of your own daily life choices
We can all take small steps to at least slow the effects of climate change, if not reverse it, but making simple choices like using LED bulbs in the home, reducing plastic consumption (especially one-time-use plastics), traveling less (or drive less when possible), using solar powered energy, and electric cars are effective strategies. Creating competitive, environment-friendly consumer options is one area where the market can help as long as it’s provided the right incentives.
Don’t buy real estate near the water
Although local governments are taking some measures, like New York’s effort to build flood surges (which are glorified sand bags) to avoid disasters like Hurricane Sandy, or the efforts of government officials in Miami to protect against a 3-foot water-level increase, Titley says it’s likely to be insufficient. If you are looking to set up shop for personal or business reasons, avoid high-risk areas for long-term investments.
World governments and industry responded quickly in the 1980s in an effort to undo years of ozone depletion. It worked. We can do it again.
The state of our climate and the advancement of global warming is top of mind these days. It’s in the news. Just this week, crowds in the millions, around the world united (#strikeforclimate) to show our political leaders the urgency and importance of the issue. Teenage activist, Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations in an impassioned speech some days ago demanding that our leaders rise to the occasion and wake up.
On this episode, Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd — former NASA research meteorologist and deputy project scientist — who is currently the Distinguished Professor and Director of the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia, echoes the severity of the climate crisis. He explains what science is predicting and brings clarity to what most of us don’t understand.
Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about:
Changes we can expect as a result of climate change
What you can do to help
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd’s biography:
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is a leading international expert in weather and climate and is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. Dr. Shepherd was the 2013 President of American Meteorological Society (AMS), the nation’s largest and oldest professional/science society in the atmospheric and related sciences. Dr. Shepherd serves as Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program and Full Professor in the Department of Geography where he is Associate Department Head. Dr. Shepherd is also the host of The Weather Channel’s Award-Winning Sunday talk show Weather Geeks, a pioneering Sunday talk show on national television dedicated to science and a contributor to Forbes Magazine. In 2018, he was honored with the AMS Helmut Landsberg Award for his research on the urban weather-climate system and the UGA First Year Odyssey Seminary Faculty Teaching Award. In 2017, he received the AMS Brooks Award, a high honor within the field of meteorology. Ted Turner and his Captain Planet Foundation honored Dr. Shepherd in 2014 with its Protector of the Earth Award. Prior recipients include Erin Brockovich and former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. He is also the 2015 Recipient of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Media Achievement award, the Florida State University Grads Made Good Award and the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Sandy Beaver Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2015, Dr. Shepherd was invited to moderate the White House Champions for Change event. Prior to UGA, Dr. Shepherd spent 12 years as a Research Meteorologist at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center and was Deputy Project Scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, a multi-national space mission that launched in 2014. President Bush honored him on May 4th 2004 at the White House with the Presidential Early Career Award for pioneering scientific research in weather and climate science. Dr. Shepherd is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Two national magazines, the AMS, and Florida State University have also recognized Dr. Shepherd for his significant contributions. In 2016, Dr. Shepherd was the Spring Commencement speaker at his 3-time Alma Mater, Florida State University and was recently selected for the prestigious SEC Academic Leadership Fellows program.
Dr. Shepherd is frequently sought as an expert on weather, climate, and remote sensing. He routinely appears on CBS Face The Nation, NOVA, The Today Show, CNN, Fox News, The Weather Channel and several others. His TedX Atlanta Talk on “Slaying Climate Zombies” is one of the most viewed climate lectures on YouTube. Dr. Shepherd is also frequently asked to advise key leaders at NASA, the White House, Congress, Department of Defense, and officials from foreign countries. In February 2013, Dr. Shepherd briefed the U.S. Senate on climate change and extreme weather. He has also written several editorials for CNN, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and numerous other outlets and has been featured in Time Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and NPR Science Friday. He has over 90 peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Dr. Shepherd has attracted $3 million dollars in extramural research support from NASA, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and U.S. Forest Service. Dr. Shepherd was also instrumental in leading the effort for UGA to become the 78th member of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a significant milestone for UGA and establishing UGA’s Major in Atmospheric Sciences.
Dr. Shepherd currently chairs the NASA Earth Sciences Advisory Committee and was a past member of its Earth Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council. He was a member of the Board of Trustees for the Nature Conservancy (Georgia Chapter), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Science Advisory Board, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s Hazard Preparedness Advisory Group United Nations World Meteorological Organization steering committee on aerosols and precipitation, 2007 Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR4 contributing author team, National Academies of Sciences (NAS) Panels on climate and national security, extreme weather attribution, and urban meteorology. Dr. Shepherd is a past editor for both the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology and Geography Compass, respectively.
Dr. Shepherd received his B.S., M.S. and PhD in physical meteorology from Florida State University. He was the first African American to receive a PhD from the Florida State University Department of Meteorology, one of the nation’s oldest and respected. He is also the 2nd African American to preside over the American Meteorological Society. He is a member of the AMS, American Geophysical Union, Association of American Geographers (AAG), Sigma Xi Research Honorary, Chi Epsilon Pi Meteorology Honorary, and Omicron Delta Kappa National Honorary. He is also a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and serves on various National Boards associated with his alma mater. Dr. Shepherd co-authored a children’s book on weather and weather instruments called Dr. Fred’s Weather Watch. He is also the co-founder of the Alcova Elementary Weather Science Chat series that exposes K-5 students to world-class scientists. Dr. Shepherd is originally from Canton, Georgia.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Current state of that is it’s a crisis and in fact, many of us that study this call it a climate crisis now more so than climate change.
Tanya: That’s Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, who got his PhD in physical meteorology and served as research meteorologist and deputy project scientist at NASA for 13 years. Currently, Dr. Shepherd is a distinguished professor and director of the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia and contributed over a hundred peer-reviewed scholarly publications. He’s a regular guest on major media outlets like CNN, Fox, and CBS, and is relied upon as a strategic advisor by key leaders at NASA, the White House, Congress, Department of Defense, and officials from foreign countries. In addition to his widely viewed TED Talk titled “Three Kinds of Biases that Shape Your World View,” he served as a member of the board for many prestigious organizations like the Nature Conservancy, the Georgia chapter, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, just to name a few. Dr. Shepherd was honored with a Presidential Early Career Award in 2004 from George W. Bush for his cutting-edge work.
Tanya: Dr. Shepherd, what initially attracted you to meteorology?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: It’s really an interesting story: a honeybee. Let me explain that. As a young kid, I used to catch insects in the yard. I thought I wanted to be an entomologist. I was catching honeybees in the yard. I got stung by one and found out at that young age that I was highly allergic to bee stings.
Sixth grade was coming around and I needed to do a science project. I said, “Well, I can’t do honeybees anymore. I needed a plan B literally.” I did my science project on weather. The title of that sixth-grade science project was, “Can a Sixth Grader Predict the Weather?”
I made weather instruments from things around the house. We didn’t have a lot of fancy equipment at that time and predicted weather and developed little weather models for my community in northern Georgia. The rest is history. I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist at that point, but interestingly enough, I didn’t want to be the forecaster type standing in front of a green chroma key at a news station. I was more interested in the how and why of weather.
Tanya: That’s probably partly what motivated you to go into getting your PhD in meteorology and then working for NASA for 13 years. What was that journey like?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: It was really interesting because again, after sixth grade, I knew that was it. I started even as a sixth, seventh-grader, started saying, “Okay, where can I go to college to learn more about weather?” Being from the Atlanta metropolitan area in northern Georgia, I knew I wanted to stay in the south. At that time, there weren’t really many relatively speaking meteorology programs, but Florida State University had one. It turns out it was a very good one. It was one of the top programs in the nation.
I started doing things even in school, high school, to taking ecology classes and learning about measurements. Then went on to Florida State to do my undergraduate or Bachler’s Degree in Meteorology. Then I stuck around for a master’s degree. At that point, I was sick of school. I know we’ve all been there. Some people say I’ve got to go out and make some money and live a real life.
I got out; I worked for a private contractor for NASA for a while. Then actually got hired by NASA as a civil servant and realized that wow, they have these really cool programs that will pay for NASA employees to go back to school. No one ever applied for them. I did. I said, “I can’t pass that up. Go back and do your PhD on your full salary? That’s a no-brainer.”
Tanya: Wow.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Exactly, so I took two years, went back to Florida State. Did the courses, took all my exams that you need to take, the qualifying exams, and then came back to NASA, finished up my dissertation. In 1999, I was awarded my doctoral degree from Florida State.
Tanya: Wow, and while you were getting your PhD, were you still working where they gave you the freedom to just be a student 100% of the time and then you committed to going back after?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: No, for this particular program that I did, you applied for it at NASA. Any employee can apply for these. If you got accepted, you could go away to school for the two years and your job would be a student for two years to get your PhD. Then I came back for the final two years after that and did my dissertation while I was doing my “day job” as well. That was a [05:02] about a four- or five-year program, but the good news is my PhD research was very much related to some of the scientific research that I was already doing at NASA.
Tanya: What was it? What kind of research were you doing?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: The work that I did at that time, in my master’s degree work, I had looked at developing algorithms using Doppler radar data to track hurricanes. We developed some of the first-generation algorithms that actually tracked hurricanes using radar as they got close to landfall. For my dissertation doctoral work, I was looking at something called precipitation efficiency in convergence zone thunderstorms. What that simply means is some thunderstorms in Florida firer up along the sea breeze front or along outflow boundaries from other thunderstorms, these cold pools of outflow that move away from storms. We wanted to know how efficient they were at producing rainfall so that we could model them in our weather and forecasting models.
That was some of my – it’s not really the kind of work I do now or have done in my more recent career. I know this is a podcast about leadership and sometimes you are training and developing yourself for future activities. One of the things I tell my own students here at the University of Georgia, some of my doctoral students, is that a doctoral degree is a unique piece of research. It teaches you how to carry forth and manage a research program at a smaller scale so that perhaps one day, you will be a leading researcher running your own lab or research group.
Tanya: Yes, absolutely. At the peak of your career at NASA, what were you accountable for?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: It’s interesting; I did a lot of things while I was at NASA. That’s where I really grasped this idea that cities can affect weather. One of my main research agendas was related to how cities can actually initiate or enhance thunderstorm activity, and rainfall, and flooding. I developed a very robust research program using NASA satellite data sets and models.
I was fortunate enough to win the Presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers. I was given that award by President Bush at the White House in 2004 for research in that area because it was considered innovative and groundbreaking research at that time. I then took on more of a leadership position there. I became the Deputy Project Scientist for a new mission that NASA was developing called the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission or GPM, which is now in orbit. It’s a complex satellite mission and constellation that’s measuring rainfall all over the globe for use in our weather and climate models and to help us predict flooding. I was one of the leadership team of that mission for many years helping coordinate between the scientists and engineers to bring that from a scientific idea to an actual satellite that’s now in orbit.
Tanya: Wow, that’s pretty outstanding. Is that one of your most proud projects that you’ve ever worked on at NASA or is there something else?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, but I think just being in NASA is one of the more points of pride.
Tanya: It’s a pretty good point, yes.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: There are only so many people on the planet that can say they actually worked at NASA. When I decided to leave it to come to the University of Georgia, I had all these people like, are you crazy? Are you going to leave NASA? That’s a dream job. It was; I loved my time at NASA because you are literally working with some of the smartest people in the world, movers in science and technology doing really cool things. Yeah, to say that I had my hands in cutting edge research that was improving our understanding of our weather and climate, and to actually have a satellite system in orbit that’s helping in those areas, yeah, I’m pretty proud of that. I would also say that Presidential Early Career Award from the White House is a pretty big moment as well.
Tanya: Yes, that is a huge moment of recognition for the work that you’re doing or that you did. By the way, that was not the only award that you got; you got so many I can’t even go through them right now because we would run out of time. What were some of the – now that you’ve had a little distance, you’ve been some time out of NASA, what were some of the key lessons of that experience that you were able to process?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think one of the things that I learned is that we have to be very willing to get out of our comfort zones. Because now, I was trained as a scientist. When you’re doing scientific research or getting a master’s or a doctoral degree, you’re learning how to do research, and ask scientific questions, and follow the scientific method, and those types of things.
In a NASA environment, in the environment that I was in at NASA, I was asked to do a lot of things that technically I didn’t necessarily have training to do or hadn’t taken a class to do. For example, there was no class in being the Deputy Project Scientist for a major [10:05]. You just figure it out.
Also, because someone along the way figured out that I was halfway credible in front of a camera and could convey complex scientific information to non-science audiences, I was often called to go on major network television whether it be the Today Show, or NBC, or CNN, talking about mostly weather and climate, but from time to time, I’d get asked about other things: tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. I’m not a volcanologist. I’m not an oceanographer, but you have to be able to be willing to adapt and be flexible. I think a couple of the lessons for me at NASA were staying free of your comfort zones, being willing to adapt and be flexible when called upon to do something, and to always just keep learning. I always felt like no matter what level of leadership or what level of a position that I was in, I was always learning something.
Tanya: Those are really great lessons to learn. Actually, not too long ago, I interviewed Erika Hamden who is in charge of the FIREBALL project which NASA in large part funded. That’s what she was talking about as well is when you’re at the edge of what is known. It’s really there’s no forged path.
You have to get comfortable with uncertainty. In that murky uncertainty comes the possibility for breakthroughs. In absence of being out of your comfort zone like you say, you can’t get to the unknown. That’s an awesome lesson to learn. What precipitated, and no punt intended there, the decision –
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I like that. [11:39] got you in the rainstorm world.
Tanya: I know, I had to do that. What precipitated the departure from NASA and move into academia?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: That’s a great question. It really was just again one of these lessons for the listener. I often talk about that, and I gave a lecture on it, a guest lecture on this recently to a group of young, emerging leaders at the American Meteorological Society’s Young Leaders Conference this summer in Atlanta. Meteorology itself is a very complex science. It’s very physics and calculus-based.
In fact, it’s based on a lot of what we call nonlinearities; in other words, things aren’t linear. A doesn’t necessarily lead to B or C and D. There are a lot of nonlinearities in the atmospheric system. It can, in fact, be chaotic. I was telling these young leaders that careers can be nonlinear as well. In fact, you can count on them being nonlinear.
I was quite happy and content at NASA. My career was going well. I was in a very strong leadership position with a mission. My science career was prospering, but an opportunity presented itself.
A colleague of mine that I knew met at a conference. We started talking. It turns out that they possibly had an opportunity or an opening at the University of Georgia. I grew up in Georgia. I came down and talked to the folks.
They even invited me to give a guest lecture, a seminar. I did that and I still wasn’t necessarily sure if I was leaving NASA. The more I thought about it and I was like, I preach to myself about staying out of comfort zones. I had never taught. I didn’t see myself as a professor or a teacher. Quiet is kept at a major university like the University of Georgia; it’s not just about the teaching.
We certainly teach. I’ve been fortunate enough to win some of the top teaching awards here. It is about research, and about developing graduate students, and acquiring grants to do more research in the cutting edge of science and technology. I took the plunge literally and left the very safe civil servant environment to go to the University of Georgia.
Initially coming in the door not with tenor. Of course, I have tenor now and I’m a full professor. In fact, my full title is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor. I had to jump through some of the academic hoops that you do getting tenor, and publishing, and getting grants, and all those things. It just was an opportunity that presented itself and it felt right.
Tanya: I know that you’ve published – is 90 the correct number?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: A little bit more than that by now.
Tanya: I assume.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: There’s something out there that on my bio that probably says 90, but I think with my graduate students, I’m pretty much well over 100 publications by now I would suspect. Honestly, I haven’t counted.
Tanya: That contribution is enormous. Have you done that mostly in your time at Georgia University?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: No, University of Georgia. It is a combination of publications during my time at NASA and at the University of Georgia. That’s what professors do. Our metrics for success at a major research university like this is our publication record, or how many grants and grant money you’re bringing in, our leadership positions within the community. It’s honestly par for the core. I probably am one of the more productive and prolific scholars in my particular field I suppose, but it’s not certainly unusual.
Tanya: You’ve raised how much grant money so far for your research?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, good question. I don’t know; three or four million dollars over my career in various grants that I’m directly or indirectly responsible for.
Tanya: Which is amazing. That’s really outstanding. Actually, you mentioned part of what you’re interested in is really cultivating the leadership and students. Is there one person in particular throughout the last 13, 14 years that really stand out to you that you were just blown away with?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: In terms of my students?
Tanya: Uh-huh.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Honestly, I think I’ve had several students over the years and they’ve all brought something different to the table. I think as a leader in terms of educational mentorship and leadership, I think it’s my job, and I think this goes for frankly any good leader or any good administrator, it’s my job to recognize the potential talents in every individual because every individual brings different strengths and weaknesses to the table. Yeah, several of my students are now out prospering in their own careers as professors or working federal agencies, or private sector, or wherever they are. As I look back on each of them, the skillset and leadership qualities that I see – for example, there was one young man that I knew that he had just very good people and communication, as well as good academic chops as well. I knew that he would have strengths in certain areas.
All my students have solidly been academically solid. I think of another student now who he’s now a scientist with his own career in the US Forrest Service. He’s leading research now. He actually is doing some really good things. I’ve talked to him and he and I have shared that oftentimes, people may have underestimated or miscalculated his ability to go on and be a successful doctoral-level scholar and scientist. I saw some things in him very immediately from the time that I first met him.
What I’m saying is each of my students – there’s another young woman who’s at the National Weather Service. She was just so persistent. She did not let anything stop her. She was very determined. I just always tried to understand the individual strengths of a given student and then use that to help bring out their potential.
Tanya: You know what? That’s very diplomatic of you to say that. I love that you see as it as your job to really find that thing within people, that really – that potential that you can harness because that’s amazing.
I recently read a really good book called Grit by Angela something worth, really good. What it boils down to is even people that are off the charts genius, what it comes down to is their level of persistence. You were talking about a student that just didn’t stop; nothing would stop her. That element is what really gets people far beyond what anybody would experience or expect. That’s really amazing.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, and I think it’s important because I think oftentimes, we try to – some people will try to fit everyone into the same box. They don’t look at the unique talents, personalities, and tendencies of people as individuals.
Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely. What’s your favorite class to teach?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, I don’t know. I probably enjoy teaching – I don’t know that I have a favorite because again, I teach one or two courses a semester. It just depends on the semester. Again, at a major research university, professors don’t teach all day like you do at high school or those types of things. Thicker courses come around, but I teach mostly upper-level courses in our major.
I still do like the energy and vibrancy that you get from teaching younger students like freshman, for example. I do a course, a freshman odyssey seminar. It’s just a one-hour course that exposes kids to different things. My course is observing the Earth from space.
It’s a really neat course. It’s an opportunity to really plant the seeds of knowledge in terms of why we study the planet Earth from space. I enjoy that course for a lot of different reasons because those young minds that are coming into those freshman seminars, they in most cases haven’t quite figured everything out yet. They’re still trying to make their way on a big university campus. They’re sponges for knowledge.
Tanya: Yes, no, absolutely. I know for sure that your students are very lucky to have you as a professor. Your background is just off the charts. I’m sure anybody would die to have a seat in your class.
I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about climate for a second. In climate, how would you – I know everybody’s heard the word climate change, but I’m not so sure that everybody knows what it is. Can you just give us a quick what is climate change and what is the current state of that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: The current state of that is it’s a crisis. In fact, many of us that study this call it a climate crisis now more so than climate change. The climate changes naturally.
Let me put that right upfront because you do have the skeptic community that will always remind a PhD scientist like me that, you know climate changes naturally. We’ve always had hurricanes. Of course I know that, but we have – with the increases in greenhouse gases, changes in land cover, and some other things that are happening, our naturally varying and changing climate now has a human steroid on top of it in the same way that in sports whether it’s Major League Baseball or biking in the French Alps during the Tour de France. You had some athletes that were taking performance-enhancing drugs to boost their natural ability.
The climate, unfortunately, has this performance-enhancing steroid called greenhouse gases in the system now, so the naturally varying climate is actually amplified. That’s leading to changes in our weather patterns and extreme weather events. It’s leading to changes in sea level. It’s changes in ice on the polar ice sheets in Greenland, changes in where disease-carrying mosquitos can live, changes in agricultural productivity, in energy transportation. It’s a fundamental crisis of our time. That’s why many of us are concerned about it.
Tanya: Yes, and what are the Top Three or Five things that are really bad that are a direct result of this climate crisis?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, yeah, I don’t know if we could give a Top Three or Top Number One. I’m a contributor to Forbes magazine. I wrote an article several months ago back during all the discussion about whether we should declare the border situation a national emergency. I wrote an article saying we need to declare climate change a national emergency because it’s not the polar bear or the warming temperatures that’s the problem. It’s not something that’s 70 or 80 years out. We have impacts now that are affecting national security, affecting food production, affecting our water supply, affecting weather patterns, and public health.
If you as someone listening to this sit down at your kitchen table tonight and say, well, climate change doesn’t affect me, it’s something about some polar bear somewhere, you’re not paying attention because essentially every aspect of our lives, our economy, our security, our health, touches on how weather and climate patterns evolve and change. This is an issue that – for example, last year, 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida and then into Georgia. Devasted much of Florida’s tourism business, much of its oil and energy activity out in the coast from those oil rigs that lead to increased gas prices. As the storm moved inland, destroyed much of the cotton, peanut, pecan, perhaps even other agricultural activity in southwest Georgia. When you go to buy a t-shirt that’s made from cotton or you go buy some peanut butter, probably had a greater price on it because supply was reduced. Basic supply and demand from macroeconomics class. What I try to spend a lot of my time helping people to understand is that this isn’t about some esoteric scientific issue far off in the future; this is about our life right now.
Tanya: Why do you think that given the state of things right now which is a crisis, how can somebody like our President think that climate change is a hoax and actively work to dismantle very important initiatives like the Paris Accord or more recently which was reported a few days ago, the Climate Change Taskforce in the Navy was shut down, which you were talking about national security. How can that happen?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: As a scientist, as an academic, I don’t like to really call out any particular person, or anything, or politician. I stay out of the politics, but the notion that climate change is a hoax or the notion that climate change is not real, or it’s just some natural cycle, or it’s made up by scientists is flat out ridiculous. All of the major scientific organizations, the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, every major organization, every major report, the vast majority of the scientific literature that’s published by scientists all say the same thing. This notion, or this denial, or contrary imposition is very much rooted in special interests or those that stand to lose because of the changes their solutions face that need to be made. It’s a very well concerted misinformation campaign that many of us understand as well.
Up until several years ago, it was fairly effective, but I’m starting to see it erode. This whole machine of skepticism and denial is starting to come off the rails if you will. There was an article I just saw recently I believe in Vice Magazine or Vice about how the machine of climate denial is slowly falling apart.
You’re seeing that in public opinions as well. People get it. People aren’t stupid. There are some people that because of their vested interests in certain economies, they’ll say you’re not going to bite the hand that feeds you. There’s some people that have certain industries that they may live or work in that certainly aren’t going to bite that hand, but if you’re reasonable and objective about this, you understand that this is certainly something real. It’s happening right before your very eyes. There are very obtainable examples.
Tanya: Yeah, and I know you have outlined misinformation as a huge problem in your brilliant TED Talk, which anybody listening, I highly recommend that they check out. It’s been published in the media that we are past the point of no return considering the damage that we’ve already done to the planet. Is that actually real or is that misinformation?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: In climate science, we talk about these things called tipping points, these no return. If you think about a rubber band, if you snap it too much, it doesn’t have the elasticity. It has reached its point of elasticity. It’s a tipping point. I’m not convinced we’re at any tipping point yet, but I think we’re getting there.
We see substantial losses of the Greenland ice sheet. That has real implications for sea-level rise. We start seeing shifts in our Jetstream patterns. That causes more extreme events: droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc. These things are definitely happening. I’m not convinced we’re at any tipping points yet, but I think we’re in a crisis state.
Tanya: From what you can see, although, the rhetoric is starting to slow down around climate change is not real, and people are really starting to get it, do you see that people are much more conscious in taking action to stop that, governments and businesses?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I think what I’m encouraged about to get back to your question you asked me earlier about our government pulling out of the Paris Accord or Paris Agreement, the good news in all this is that it’s almost irrelevant in some sense because the Fortune 500 companies get it. The pit line gets it. Faith-based organizations get it. Local communities, and cities, and regional states, they’re getting it. There is so much action on climate change right now that it’s sadly almost irrelevant what the rhetoric is coming from the federal level because there’s – I think there’s been this resurgence or galvanizing of the problem because people recognize how ludicrous some of the higher-level denial is.
Tanya: That’s amazing that you’re echoing this because a few days ago I interviewed Dr. David Titley.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, David’s a good friend of mine.
Tanya: Oh, is he? He was saying that he echoed the same thing that in a very politically correct way, although the President is actively speaking out against climate change and taking a lot of initiatives to dismantle amazing efforts, Congress is actually going in the opposite direction and really taking action to support stabilizing climate and really getting in front of it which was encouraging.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, you see it at Congress. There’s something happening not only in Congress but at local and regional levels, too. This idea that climate change is a partisan issue that you have to be a Democrat to support climate – well, actually, you have to be a Republican to deny it is completely being shattered.
There’s a congressional climate caucus that’s equal membership Republican and Democrat. You can’t even join that caucus unless you bring someone from the opposite party. I’ve seen numerous articles from conservatives opposing things like carbon gases. If you go back and look at I think President Bush’s Treasury Secretary, his name is escaping me right now, he’s one of the leading voices out there, talking about carbon tax. Congressman Bob Inglis from South Carolina was a staunch conservative in almost every other issue, is very proactive on climate. This idea that the Republicans or Conservatives are against climate change and liberals and democrats are for it, it’s never – and David Tetley is actually very famous for saying this, “The ice doesn’t care whether you’re republican or democrat, it just melts.” I think one of the most positive things I’m seeing is that narrative is shattering.
Another thing is that the Yale Climate Communication studies America every year and they come out with this thing called the [Six] American Study. They show that America really breaks down under six different categories in terms of their perspective and worry about climate change. The last group is what they called the Nine Percent Dismissive. It’s about 9% of the population. It’s a small amount of the really dismissive types that you see arguing with people on Twitter or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. They’re really loud but there are really not that many of them, so they make you think there’s more climate denialism than there actually is.
Tanya: Well that actually makes a lot of sense. I can get that. I want to dive in a little bit to your TED Talk, which was so good, entitled Three Kinds of Bias That Shape Your Worldview. Basically, you were asking a very important question, which is how can we be so misaligned on something like climate change because it’s backed by science? Your answer was, the biases. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah that was a fun TED Talk. It’s out there on TED somewhere if you Google my name Marshall Shepherd and TED. I’ve been amazed at how well received it is. The last time I checked, it was nearly 2 million views, which is pretty surprising given that it was just a little TEDX talk that I gave here at the University of Georgia that TED picked up on in public.
What I was talking about there is that people generally, and not just in science, are informed by their biases. They’re informed by their upbringing. They’re informed by what I call their personal marinades. What kind of marinades have they been sitting in their entire lives, politically, religiously, or from an academic standpoint because that informs their perspectives on things? I talked about in the TED Talk, Dunning–Kruger effect for example. There are these people who just think they know something about everything, even though they’re not experts and they’re talking and they miscalculate their knowledge base on certain topics.
I talked about confirmation bias. How people consume information from places that already support their own beliefs. Somebody that’s watching a certain news channel is probably watching that because there’s confirmation bias there. They’re hearing things they already believe, not necessarily more objective perspectives on things, or the magazines they read or the radio personality they listen to. That’s an example of confirmation bias, and in other kinds of cognitive [dismissiveness] out there as well. As an example, I made a little joke about the fact that somebody will come up and ask me whether I believe the Groundhog Day forecast and what the Groundhog Day says about spring [33:27] the farmer’s almanac. Two things that we know that do not have a lot of scientific accuracy. Then in the next breath, they’ll doubt experts’ opinions and data on climate science, which illustrate the insanity of the biases that we carry.
Tanya: The scariest one is confirmation – well, I mean they’re all a little bit scary because in effect what your biases are doing are distorting reality. One of my favorite quotes by Anaïs, I’m forgetting her second name, “…we don’t see things how they are; we see things how we are” and that’s what you’re pointing to. The question is how do we overcome these biases?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: As I said, by making people aware that they carry them. I think we live in our tribes so often and we never come out of our [hurtful] comfort circles, we might not even see them as biases. I challenged people in the audience during that Talk that just reflect on what your biases are. How has your upbringing, how has your marinade of perspective and background shaped your bias? Why is it that you look at a degree climate scientist and don’t think that what she is saying about climate change is real, when that person is trained, they don’t have anything to personally gain, if anything they have more to lose because they get harassed and trolled and all of these types of things. It’s actually silly but yet you see people do it.
I saw something on Twitter the other day where one of the top climate scientists in the world, my colleague, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, sat down for an interview with some random guy that was a climate skeptic. Now why in the world does his opinion about climate change carry the same amount of weight as hers? It’s like me sitting on CNN with a plumber and debating with the plumber saying that I know about putting that garbage disposal in my sink than you do. I don’t know anything about that. I have an opinion about it, but the plumber’s an [35:31].
Tanya: Just to help people out there because I think that this idea of discovering or even acknowledging your biases, which can be very hard to uncover because it’s almost like we’re blind to them. We just see them; we don’t see that we see through them. What are some questions that people could ask themselves to single out biases?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I don’t know that there are questions I would ask. I would ask people to think about where they consumed them. Regarding their information, if we’re talking about science, where do they consume their information from. Are they consuming it from scientifically credible sources or are they consuming it from some confirmation bias blog or news station or website? Where do you get information from? Take a critical look at whether you are consuming bias information or are you really seeking objective information.
It’s important to understand, science doesn’t operate like journalism. People say, well I’ll need to hear both sides of the story. Well there is no both sides of the story to the fact that the sun’s coming up tomorrow or that if I jump off a building, I’m going to fall. Those are just basic science things that are truths. Those things are going to happen. There is no other side of the story to that, so climate change stuff and climate science and meteorology fall into that category as well. Yes, there are certainly scientific questions and we should be asking questions and testing and retesting and those things, that’s what science is, but to – listen, you never hear someone say, well I think that that gravity thing is a hoax, so I’m going to jump off this building and see what happens. Yeah, we’ll say climate change is a hoax, as if we have some different level of merit in terms of its science legitimacy.
Tanya: Where do you think we are going wrong as a society with climate change? Is it that we don’t understand the potential repercussions of it and that’s why there’s such a large disagreement about it that turned into whether it’s valid or not? How do we end up questioning something that is based on science?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I think that’s my point. I don’t think it’s as large as people think it is. I think there are loud voices but I think the majority of people, based on recent polling that I see and even movements that I see, I don’t think it’s as large – I just think the 9% crowd is very loud and they, in some cases, have some very influential voices. I think the majority of people get it. Now, at the end of the day it still boils down to the fact that some of the doubt and some of the skepticism is not so much related to the science as it is the fear of what has to be done.
Climate change, there’s mitigation, which is you’ve got to reduce, somehow, the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere and that takes on different forms. It can be capping trade, it can be carbon tax, it can be everyone buying an electric car. It can be eating less beef. Those are all mitigation strategies. There are adaptation strategies. You just retrofit buildings with air conditioning or build seawalls around places that flood. Those are adaptation strategies. I think a lot of the angst and denialism comes from the fact that if you, for example, go from a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable-based economy, there are winners and losers. They don’t have to be because some of the companies that are invested in fossil fuel energy is now starting to be big players in solar and [39:11] and other alternative fuel supplies. I think one of the big mistakes is that for so long, certain people saw threat or challenge in the solution space for climate change but in fact, there is opportunity as well.
Tanya: What do you think from a leadership standpoint is going to be needed to really stabilize the climate?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: This question I’ll answer from multiple perspectives. We need scientific leadership. We need scientists like me to step out and lead and be able to get out there and speak. If we’re not speaking to the media or policymakers, then people with misinformation messages are happy to fill the void. We’ve got to lead on that because part of it is a messaging. We know what the science says but we’ve got to lead on engaging. We’ve got to lead on sharing information in a way that people can understand it, instead of showing our fancy graphs and equations. We’ve got to have the message fine-tuned. That’s one layer of the leadership.
Two, we have to have leadership not just at the federal level but at state, local and regional levels. We do have that because I think that’s where a lot of the action and progress is going to take place. Ultimately, we do have to lead as a nation too. With the United States not being in the Paris agreement, for the United States to not be leading anymore on renewables, China and others are starting to really come up and, in some cases, pass us on new technology, those have direct impact on things that have nothing to do with climate. Just about our ability to maintain our leaderships in technology, sustainability, resilient systems, resilient environments and infrastructure.
There are opportunities for leaders, irrespective of your political leanings, conservative, liberal, libertarian, independent, whatever you are, we only have one planet, so it’s going to take not only leadership, it’s going to take bold leadership. It’s going to take, in some cases, going against the grain, if you will, and [technique].
Tanya: What is predictable to happen if what you just outlined doesn’t happen?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Well, I think we will start to – I think from a science standpoint, we’re trying to keep warming below 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees Celsius. Again, for those of us that live in the States, it’s an even larger number if we convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. We think we reach that 2 degree Celsius tipping point, if you will, which is what the Paris agreement was trying to prevent, then we are going to start to see some of these tipping point things start. Things are bad enough as it is, but the problem that many people don’t understand is that the increases that we’re going to see in the next zero to 50 years or going to happen in an exponential or very rapid pace. They’re not going to be incremental or linear increases. The more time we wait on action, the further along the exponentially increasing curve of crisis we go.
Tanya: When you say things are going to increase exponentially, what –
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’m talking about things like sea level rise, melting of the ice caps, the intensity of drought and rainstorms that are causing flooding. The rapid shifts in agricultural belts where we can grow certain things. The movement of a mosquito that can carry dengue that used to only live in Panama or wherever, can now live in South Georgia. These types of things. Things that we’re seeing slowing happen before our eyes are going to accelerate.
Tanya: I know that the increase, and some even call it an epidemic, of Lyme disease in some cases has been connected to climate change. What’s your view on that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah that makes sense to me. I think the vector, the tick that carries Lyme, I don’t think it could even live in parts of Canada several decades ago, but now it can. Canadian doctors, in the last several years ago, have had to learn how to treat Lyme disease. We’ve got many examples like that, it’s not just Lyme disease. That’s one that’s often cited but so many examples of changes in – even here in the State of Georgia for example, most people have allergies. Because of change in climate, pollen and trees bloom at different times of the year now, earlier, so people are suffering from allergies sooner. That has an impact on your comfort level. It has an impact on your healthcare costs.
In some cases, going back to something you asked me earlier, the mistake that we’ve probably made as a science and messaging community, is we just haven’t connected the dots for people. We’ve spent to much time talking about polar bears and 208 and 2100, when there’s plenty to talk about in 2019 and are right there in our own backyard.
Tanya: Yes, absolutely. I love that you said that because if people actually get that some of the things that are happening today are happening because of climate change, it makes it real for them. It makes it tangible and it gives them an incentive to act, so I love that. I love that you’re doing that.
Misinformation, this is something that you’ve been quite outspoken about. What is the number one or two misinformation out there about climate change?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh my gosh! Again, I [don’t know] if I can give it. Of course, you hear all the time the climate changes naturally. Well, I always respond to that by saying, grass grow naturally too but if you put fertilizer on the soil, it grows differently. That’s irrelevant. It’s not either or, it’s “and”. You have natural climate change and you have an anthropogenic or human [signal] on top of it.
The other thing we always hear and scientists want, there’s a financial interest. Science isn’t saying this. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know any climate scientist that got into this business to get rich, but I know certainly plenty of people in some of the industries that are promoting this information, certainly live in gated communities and those types of thing. That’s a false narrative that gets out there as well.
You hear these things that I call zombie theories because they’ve long been refuted by the scientists but they live on, on blogs, social media, and on radio stations. Things like it’s caused by the sun or there’s a lot of good things can happen from climate change or it hasn’t warmed since 1998. You just hear all of these zombie theories.
By the way, if you want to see scientific debunking of them, there’s a really awesome website called skepticalscience.com that is run by scientists that debunks all these climate myths.
Tanya: Okay, skepticalscience.com?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Skepticalscience.com, yes. There’s another one called realclimate.org, too. They’re both very good.
Tanya: On a lighter note, do you have any funny or interesting stories that you can share about a time that you met somebody highly influential or famous?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’ve met my share of famous people because – just in the world that I orbit in. I hosted a show on the Weather channel called Weather Geeks, which is still [out as] a podcast by the way. Check out the Weather Geek’s podcast put out by the Weather channel. We talk all things weather and climate. I’m just trying to think back. Last year, I met a member of one of probably the hottest, if not the hottest, rap group out there right now. A group called Migos was in my studio. I was really surprised to find out that I know not only – not only that met him but I’m actually pretty good friends with his parents. I thought it was just funny to see the reaction of my students when they find out I know a member of Migos.
Tanya: Yes, such a different industry but that’s amazing.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: One of the things that I try to pride myself on, I’m a scientist and I do all the things that scientists do but I’m a pretty – if you meet me outside of my science hat, I’m a pretty regular, ordinary guy that just does regular ordinary things. I think it catches people off guard sometimes when they see me and interact with me. In a way, the personality didn’t necessarily fit what I expected when I heard that you were this renowned, whatever, scientist.
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely, I would echo that. What are you mostly focused on now? Where does most of your time go to?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’m the Director of the Atmospheric Sciences program here at the University of Georgia, which is growing rapidly, so I spend a great deal of time between that, teaching my classes. I have research projects and grants from NASA from the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, US [48:03] and various others. Those research projects and mentoring my graduate students certainly keep me busy.
I do a lot of external things. I currently chair NASA’s Earth Sciences Advisory Committee. I’ve been the President of the American Meteorological Society in the past. I divide my time between those things. Then at home, I’ve got two kids, a teenager and a preteen that are very active in sports, so family life keeps me busy too.
Tanya: Well it seems like you have a full plate, a really full plate! For the folks that want to get in touch with you, how do they do that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’m pretty easy to find on Twitter @drshepherd2013. I’m pretty active on social media. I also have a public Facebook page too, if you just Google my name as well. I’m pretty easy to find. I have a website, drmarshallshepherd.com also.
Tanya: Well Dr. Shepherd, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing all of your amazing incredible knowledge.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh absolutely, I enjoyed it.
Tanya: It was a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh happy to be here and thank you for inviting me.
September 12th, 2019 Posted by tp33Podcasts
0 thoughts on “Former Naval Meteorologist and Oceanographer, Dr. David Titley, Gets Real About What To Expect From Global Warming”
If you are like most people and know something bad is happening with global warming but are not sure how it will impact you, and more importantly, how to help slow it down, this podcast episode is for you.
Retired Rear Admiral David Titley, and former Naval Meteorologist and Oceanographer was tasked with assessing and planning for security risks our country faced with regards to global warming. Having spent 32 years in the Navy, David remains especially concerned about sea levels rising. He expects sea levels to rise up to 6 feet by the year 2100. Then, he predicts that by the time the sea levels stabilize, we could be looking at a 30 feet increase in sea levels globally.
What does this mean for you or perhaps your offsprings? This means Orlando becomes the southernmost point of Florida. Baton Rouge is the southernmost point of Louisiana. Everybody in Harlem, New York are elated because they now have beachfront properties. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about:
Climate change
Global warming
Sea levels rising
Potential related security risks to come
Changes we can expect as a result of climate change
What you can do to help
Dr. David Titley’s biography:
Before retiring, David Titley was the Professor of Practice in the Department of Meteorology at the Pennsylvania State University, and founding Director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. The Center helps organizations and citizens prosper and succeed in today’s and tomorrow’s weather and climate environment by taking advantage of all the skill in weather and climate forecasts.
Mr. Titley served as a naval officer for 32 years and rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. Dr. Titley’s career included duties as commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command; oceanographer and navigator of the Navy; and deputy assistant chief of naval operations for information dominance. He also served as senior military assistant for the director, Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
In 2009, Dr. Titley initiated and led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change. After retiring from the Navy, Dr. Titley served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for Operations, the chief operating officer position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Dr. Titley serves on numerous advisory boards and National Academies of Science committees, including the CNA Military Advisory Board, the Advisory Board of the Center for Climate and Security, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the National Academy of Science Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.
Dr. Titley is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. In 2017, Dr. Titley was the recipient of the College of Earth and Mineral Science Wilson Award for excellence in service.
David W. Titley: Ladies and gents, that could be child’s play compared to what we will see if we don’t get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions pretty much now.
Tanya: That’s Dr. David William Titley, former US Navy and Rear Admiral who spent ten years at sea and served his country for over 32 years. With a PhD in Meteorology and a deep expertise as the Navy’s oceanographer. David has been asked to testify before congress on numerous occasions to discuss the state of climate change. Once neutral on the subject, David is now an avid believer that climate change is real, and immediate action should be taken to address the imminent threat to our planet.
You really had an amazing career in meteorology and oceanography, and you spent 32 years in the Navy, and then did a lot of other stuff afterwards which we’ll get into, but originally, what attracted you to meteorology?
David W. Titley: That’s a really, really good question, and as best I can tell, I have been interested in weather since four or five. My parents told me that a tornado, a small tornado, but a tornado went through our backyard when I was two or three. I have no recollection of that at all, but I’m told it took the doghouse.
Tanya: Oh, my gosh.
David W. Titley: I do remember, when we moved – we moved several times when I was young. When we moved to the house where finally us three kids could each have a bedroom each, I was the oldest, so of course I got to choose first. Seems right. The reason I chose the room I did was because it had an outside thermometer. I was finishing up kindergarten at that time. I would say at least at the end of kindergarten, first grade, I knew I was interested in weather, but to this day I’m not really sure why. It’s just been one of those things in which I’ve pretty much grown up with.
Tanya: Fast forward a little bit, and you went to get your Bachelors of Science in Meteorology at Penn State, and then you joined the Navy which is a very interesting move. What led that choice?
David W. Titley: Pretty simply, I needed a way to pay for college. Penn State like a lot of land-grant institutions if you’re an out-of-state person is not – it doesn’t cost like private colleges, but it’s not cheap especially for out-of-state. My parents basically said, congratulations, you got yourself into Penn State. Now go figure out how to pay for it. They were a little nicer than that, but that’s pretty much what they said. I needed to look at a number of different ways and I found out about this program called, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, ROTC. I first applied to the Air Force and they said no. They very rightly said no because when I think back on that interview, it was probably one of the more cringe worthy things I’ve ever done. I had zero clue. I was some 16-year-old snot-nosed kid, and I had absolutely no idea how to answer questions or anything.
At least I thought about it a little bit, so when I had the interview for the Navy two weeks later, I guess I did at least marginally better, and they said yes. Really, the reason I joined the Navy, I mean, I would love to say that my great, great, great, great grandfather was John Paul Jones, but it’s just not true. I needed a way to pay for college. It seemed like a fair trade to me. I give them four years, they get me a bachelor’s degree, and we all shake hands at four years and a day, and we go our separate paths, but as you know that’s not quite what happened.
Tanya: Exactly. How did that work? You had the interview more or less when you were 16 with the Navy and they accepted you. How do you do that? Do you first go to college and then they agree to pay for it, but then you have to give four years after you graduate?
David W. Titley: Yes. You actually enroll it. It’s another commissioning source for all the military services in addition to the better-known academies like West Point and Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. When you show up to college, you are actually enlisted in the Navy as a midshipman which is what the Navy calls their officer cadets. You are, in addition to taking all your normal classes, you take some Naval Science classes. You do labs where you learn the very basics of what it means to be in the Navy and be an officer. Every summer, they send you out basically on training cruises. By the time you get to be a senior, the same day that you graduate from college, you also are commissioned. In my case, into the United States Navy as a [00:05:33], which is the lowest ranking commissioned officer.
Tanya: Wow. The Navy has – people each have their own association of what that is and the challenges that come with that environment, but what was your experience like in the training, of joining the Navy, and then being in it for 32 years?
David W. Titley: Yeah. Probably for the training part, for ROTC, it would not surprise me if I had been voted the midshipman least likely to succeed. I can’t say I really enjoyed marching around and – this is 35, 40 years ago. There is nothing severe, but there is hazing. You’re on your back acting like a dead bug and people are yelling at you at 4:00 in the morning and stuff. I’m thinking, why am I doing this? It’s like, oh yeah, I need the money, so I’ll do this. It’s not like nobody’s getting physically harmed or anything, but anyway. You do that.
What I found was, the first time I went to sea on a naval ship and again, I was probably 17 by this point as a midshipman. I found I liked it. I was on an old frigate, and we went from San Diego, stopped at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and went out to the Philippines. It’s a 17-year-old kid, this is fun. You sail across the Pacific. I found honestly, if you pay attention, this is true in the Navy, it’s true in a lot of places, there’s no one individual step of your job that’s really that hard, but you do have to do them all. You have to do them all right each time, but I could do that. I enjoyed being at sea. I thought the mission was pretty interesting in general.
I liked working with the sailors. When you’re 17, you realize that the enlisted sailors, they’re 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, and in many ways they’re not really that different from you. Maybe they just didn’t have that opportunity to go to college for whatever reason, a lot of reasons, and they enlisted. They’re really good guys, and now guys and gals. Back then, it was only guys on the ships back in the ‘70s, but of course, that’s changed now.
Tanya: What kind of culture would you say that the Navy has?
David W. Titley: What kind of culture? I mean, it’s a military culture, right? It’s hierarchical. What does that mean? That means if your boss is interested, you’re fascinated, but it really is – I mean, not to get sloppy emotional, but there is an underlying culture of service. There is an underlying – people take their oath, the officers. We take an oath and you swear to uphold and defend the constitution, right? Not a certain political party, not a president, not a member of congress. You uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Back when I started of course – this is in the middle of the Cold War. There was, I think, a general unity in the country that we were on the side of right, if you will. Again, not to be overly simplistic. There was a sense of purpose, a sense of doing maybe somewhat larger than yourself. People work very hard and of course, what you see is – there were many professions in which people work very, very hard, but the military is one of them. It’s also not for everybody. Some people, the idea of going away from home for four, five, six, seven, eight months at a time is just – that doesn’t work for them.
Tanya: How did your wife deal with that because – or maybe you didn’t meet her at that point because you spent ten years at sea?
David W. Titley: Yeah. I wasn’t married for the first ten years.
Tanya: Ah, that helps.
David W. Titley: That’s one way to deal with it is, don’t be married, but no, my wife is very independent and she does well by herself. Part of the deal we had though was that when we were married is she would come out when it was possible, when we knew the schedules reasonably well in advance and visit me. I think my wife’s first overseas trip was to Singapore.
Tanya: Oh, wow.
David W. Titley: Her second overseas trip was to Australia. That’s not bad, right?
Tanya: No, those are big ones.
David W. Titley: There’s the old slogan, join the Navy and see the world, and you do. Now of course, what the Navy doesn’t tell you is the world is in fact 70% ocean, so you see a lot of water. You also get to see a lot of things. Back in the late ‘90s, we got to live in Japan for two years. It was just fascinating. I would argue that that was probably one of our most enjoyable tours. Probably the one in which grew professionally a tremendous amount, but also personally. Just really living in a culture in a country that is so different than ours was just fascinating.
Tanya: I have a number of Japanese friends, but just one thing that always impresses me so much is how gentle and thoughtful and just really polite they are. It’s so different. I mean, I’m in New York City and it’s a little different.
David W. Titley: Yeah, I was going to say, those are three adjectives you always think of with New York City, right?
Tanya: Yes, exactly. Having spent ten years at sea and 32 years in the Navy, what was one of the most challenging moments that you had to deal with that really stands out? Minus the cringe interview that you [00:11:57]?
David W. Titley: [00:11:58].
Tanya: That was nothing as it compares, yeah.
David W. Titley: That’s a good question. I think there were – at sea, you just get tired. You get very little sleep, and actually the Navy, in the last few years is institutionally coming to grips with that. Certainly, back when I was doing this, it was almost a badge of – pardon the term, but almost a manhood thing. It’s like, oh, you got three hours of sleep last. I got 90 minutes.
Tanya: Oh, my god.
David W. Titley: Therefore, I’m clearly a better officer than you are. It’s this weird sort of thing which all the medical guys are saying, “You know actually, this is really stupid of you guys so stop it.” It’s a job that really is 24/7 and is very irregular out. I mean, no matter how you manage your sleep cycle, there are things going on 24/7 in which you need to be able to do that. I think one of the more challenging things I had was – as I mentioned earlier before we started recording is, I tend to say yes to opportunities. As I was about six months away from finishing up my master’s degree at the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, basically our boss comes down into our common study room and says, “Hey, I need somebody to go on an aircraft carrier that’s about to deploy. Anybody want to do that?” Everybody’s looking at the guy like you must be crazy, and I raised my hand.
Tanya: Wow.
David W. Titley: Sometimes it’s like, why did you do that? Then the deal was, hey, go do the deployment and then when they’re done you can come back to postgraduate school, finish up your masters, and go on from there. I said, “Sure, why not?” I show up on an aircraft carrier which has its own subculture, and always 5,000 people, 5,000 of your closest friends. These guys had all spent basically a year the previous year working – what we call working up, getting ready, doing a lot of exercises. Everybody knows what they’re doing. I show up five days before deployment having never actually served on an aircraft carrier, so the learning curve was pretty much vertical for the first few months there.
You’re not only trying to figure out your job, you’re trying to figure out the personnel dynamics. All the different organizational facets that you need to be part of. Yeah, that was pretty challenging and there were – sometimes you just wonder, maybe the pool here is a little bit deeper than I thought it would, but it worked out. That was certainly challenging.
Tanya: Where were you deployed?
David W. Titley: This was a deployment we did immediately before Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and that was the time in which Saddam went into Kuwait. This was at the very, very end of the Cold War, so 1990, January of 1990 we got underway. Out of California and basically spent time in both the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. It was weird because all of us of course had grown up in the Cold War professionally. Then Soviets, now Russians, and at that point they were trying to figure out who they were, were not coming out. It was almost this Kabuki ritual in which the US, either Air Force or Navy, air craft carriers, whatever get within a certain distance of [00:15:54] Soviet Union and the Soviets fly up their aircraft. We escort them. Everybody knows how the game is played.
We’re out there, and they’re not playing. It’s just weird because this is what they do. This is what we do, and we were all really trying to figure out what’s going on. Is this a ruse? Are they trying to do something else? It’s like, no, they’re really not playing here. This is really different. We were doing that, got in the Indian Ocean, and ironically, it was amazingly quiet. This was like the spring of 1990. This is just before Hussein, Saddam Hussein goes into Kuwait. We come home, and I think it was the day we get back into our home port in California near San Francisco, is when Hussein goes into Kuwait.
Our ship was scheduled to go into this big expensive maintenance period, but we were for about three weeks it was – the rumors were, no you’re not going to do that. They’re going to turn you around and send you back out to the Persian Gulf. Then 30 minutes later, there’s a different rumor, and an hour later, there’s a different rumor. Long story short, we did not go. We were not one of the ultimately six carriers that ended up on that job. The powers that be decided no, we’re going to go and do the maintenance that we’ve already put hundreds of millions of dollars of expense into. That’s what happened.
Tanya: At the peak of your career, what were your accountabilities?
David W. Titley: The peak of my career. I guess, that would probably be when I was an admiral. I had a few different jobs, but probably the one in which I had the most was I was – it’s big long words, Commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, kind of a mouthful, but basically what that meant was I was responsible and accountable for all the US Navy’s weather and ocean observation and prediction programs.
Things like keeping aircraft carriers and typhoons apart from each other, so we do not ever again have the tragedy that Admiral Halsey had in December of ’44 where in fact ran his battle group in World War II right through a typhoon and sunk three ships, killed over 700 sailors, damaged and destroyed hundreds of aircraft. If somebody did that nowadays it would be a tremendous number of people being fired, but we were fighting World War II at the time and everybody loved Admiral Halsey and Nimitz basically grabbed him and said, don’t do that again, but he didn’t get fired.
Tanya: Wow.
David W. Titley: That’s an obvious one. There’s a less obvious part of the weather and ocean prediction job, and that is not only to keep ships and submarines and aircrafts safe which is a hugely important mission, but also how can you best exploit present and future weather conditions so that you can do your job better than a potential adversary. How can you use weather and ocean to let’s say hide or disguise your forces? How can you position your forces so they can take advantage of let’s say a weather hole or a weather window or something like that? All of those sorts of things I was responsible for. When I moved up to the Pentagon is when I became oceanographer and navigator of the Navy and that is – it’s an easier title to say, sounds cool. It’s more of a budget like you’re working the future budget. You’re working policies. You’re working international relations, but it’s not so much the operational job that I had that I just described. It was during that job as oceanographer and navigator at the Navy that they – head of the Navy, a gentleman we called the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, asked me to take a hard look at what was going on up in the Arctic with the ice melting out, and figuring out does the Navy need to pay attention to this.
Tanya: Yes. That’s actually a really good segue. It’s been publicized that you actually began as a climate change skeptic and as you started to really evaluate and examine the evidence, you changed your mind. I know that everybody knows what climate change is or knows the word, but I just want to – in a very simple way, what is climate change?
David W. Titley: Two words there, right, so climate and change. Really, what is climate? Climate is really just the average of some component of the weather that could be temperature, high temperatures, low temperatures. It could be amount of rainfall. It could be number of hurricanes, number of tornados. It could be some component of weather averaged over some period of time and space. We could talk about what’s the climate of the United States. We could talk about what is the climate of New York City. What is the average temperatures in July between 1950 and 2000 in New York City? What are the extremes? That would be climate.
Climate change is when those averages start to move. When we talk about climate change now, most people are implying man-made or a fancy word as anthropogenic, but basically man-made climate change or human caused climate change. That’s a shorthand for not only are those averages changing, but they are changing more than we would expect to see with small natural variations. For this purpose, the natural variations are basically plus or minus 1 degree Fahrenheit averaged over time. That accounts for El Niños and La Niñas and very small variations in the sun, plus or minus maybe a degree Fahrenheit.
We’ve already seen in the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, we’re now up to about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit change, and we’re not seeing just an oscillation or an up and down, but we’re seeing a very, very pronounced uptrend. That’s a long, long explanation, but climate is just averages of weather over some period of space or time, and climate change as it’s usually used means that the climate is changing and it’s changing not due to natural variations. It’s changing because of human activities, and that’s what’s happening.
Tanya: Thank you for explaining that. That was really good. Now what evidence did you take a look at that tipped your thinking into believing that climate change is real and it’s a threat?
David W. Titley: Actually, that’s a great question. There’s a lot of stuff in there. Not to be pedantic, but when I do my talks, I go through a lot of the evidence. Then I ask my audience, “Okay, who believes in climate change?” I got this cheesy graphic of some evangelistic guy whipping up the crowd. He was like, no, who believes in climate change? 90% of the people or whatever raise their hand, and I say, “I don’t. I don’t believe in climate change.” People look at me like, is this is a bait-and-switch or what? I don’t believe in climate change because it’s not a belief system. Science is not a belief system. I’m convinced by the evidence.
That there’s overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing, but I tell people that beliefs are things you might do on a Friday evening or a Saturday evening or a Sunday morning. Perhaps at a house of worship or some other place. Those are beliefs. We all have a lot of beliefs, but I would argue that science is fact. Not based on belief, it’s based on evidence. That may sound a bit naughty, but I do get – all the time people are asking me, do I believe in climate change? It’s like, no. It’s not a religion. In fact, I think there are some people who would like us to not do anything on this who try quite hard to paint this as a religion. You see that in the discourse.
I would also say that I was probably more of a climate agnostic than a skeptic. One, my job was really day-to-day weather. It was not looking at climate change. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. During the ‘80s and ‘90s certainly there were indications that climate was changing, but there were also, I would say, we were still well within that 1 degree Fahrenheit, and you could make the argument that perhaps we were still seeing variations of natural forcings at that point. The other part that frankly really bothered me was that whenever somebody talked about climate change, it was always, always, always gloom and doom, right? This is bad. That is bad. Everything is bad. Let me get out my hair shirt and whip myself and have all this kind of stuff. It’s like, oh my god. I was like, how much depressing talk can I take in one day, so I ignored it.
Actually, I have to think about why was it all bad because you would say, well, if this is change, no it’s not too unreasonable to say, well, it’s change. Okay, so maybe there will be some bad things, but there will also be some positive things. It’s change, right? It’s not good or evil. It’s just change. What I realized maybe ten years ago was it’s probably much more heavily weighted to the not good side. Call it a threat, call it a challenge or risk, pick your term because we have – humanity has implicitly built human civilization on climate stability. We’ve had actually amazing climate stability in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years since we came out of last Ice Age. We’ve had really very – actually, relatively unusual climate stability.
We’ve gone from basically being hunter-gatherers to of course the dawn of agriculture which led to – I mean, everybody knows the story, right? Villages to towns to cities, and the next thing you know we’re all carrying around iPhones in our pocket, and oh, by the way, we have, what, nearly 8 billion, 8 plus billion, about 8 billion people give or take on the planet right now. We can’t go back to being hunter-gatherers and just roaming the planet as conditions change anymore. We can’t do that. Now when we have kicked ourselves out of that climate stability, now how do we deal with it. How do we deal with it in our food security, in our water security? How do we deal with migration when there are now places that might have been marginal for people to live that now are much, much tougher to live? How do we have appropriate safety nets to help people do all of that, and when we don’t put those in, usually the dirty, ugly end of human civilization ends up becoming a national security issue, and the military is then asked to go and do something.
I apologize for the length of that, but it’s really – there is a reason why when you read many of the headlines that there aren’t – there’s not a lot of good news. Climate is changing, yee-haw. It’s like Maine is going to have an extra month of vacation period. There will probably be some places up north that do see let’s say extended growing seasons, but they’re probably going to have different crops. As I’ve mentioned before we started recording, I’m actually on a five-month trip of the country and right now we’re up in Michigan on the – we’re still on the Lower Peninsula, but we’re on the northern part. For miles and miles here, you see apple orchards and blueberries and cherries. People think, well geez, it’s Northern Michigan, isn’t it really cold in the winter, and yeah, it is. It’s really cold here, and wouldn’t they want it to be warmer longer.
It’s like, well, maybe they would but they probably then would not be able to grow the crops that they’re so well known for. Even in places in which you think, oh geez, it’s going to warm up and they’ll like it, it’s going to be very different for them. This is the part of change, and when I give my talk, I talk about climate in three words. People and water and change, and I tell people that of those three words the one that really worries me the most is the change part because how are we going to manage this and how are we going to manage this globally with some degree of equity and justice and doing this in a world of 8 billion people. That is to me one of the huge challenges of the 21st century.
Tanya: If you had to summarize the major changes that you are expecting to happen, what would that be?
David W. Titley: As I mentioned, I talk about these changes or climate in three words, and why three words because I’m a simple sailor, and I can only do things in threes. I can’t really digest all 2,000 pages of an IPCC report and stuff like that, but I can remember threes. When I talk about water and I think water is arguably a linchpin of so many of the climate issues. I talk about water as being it’s either too much or too little. Now it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Salty where it used to be fresh. It’s wet where it used to be dry. It’s liquid where it used to be solid. Even the very chemistry of the oceans themselves are changing as the oceans take up almost half, about 40% or so of the excess carbon dioxide emissions.
Maybe we can live without internet, at least for a little while, but it’s really hard for people to live without water. That water is changing, it’s changing its distribution. It doesn’t mean we run out, but the distribution is changing, and we’ve seen. We’ve seen these devastating floods. I call them rain bomb sometimes [00:32:13] locally. We’ve seen on bigger scales, Mississippi flooded, the most it’s been arguably since at least 1993. Some would argue even back to the 1920s. Sea level rise, I was just reading that Miami right now is flooding pretty much every day in these so-called king tides. They call it nuisance flooding and there’s sunny day flooding, and they blame it on the moon. I was like, well actually, the reason you’re now flooding and you didn’t used to 10, 20 years ago is not the moon. The moon hasn’t changed, but fact is, is we’ve melted a whole bunch of ice that was on the land.
Many of the climate implications go back to water. Wild fires, why are we seeing more wild fires? We’re heating things up, but when you heat up plants, what do they do? They dry up, so we’re taking the water out of the system. We’re heating it up and we are then just setting the stage for these catastrophic wild fires that we’ve seen now in the last several years particularly out west.
Tanya: Yes, and what is predictable to happen if nothing changes? If we continue as is?
David W. Titley: Yeah. If we continue as is, and this has been in the news a lot here in what, the summer of 2019, a lot of pushback, if you will from the current administration, but I think the National Climate Assessment recent reports here for the last year or so really pretty well captured this. There is a scenario that scientists use. We call it either business as usual or it’s got a really technical name. It’s RCP8.5 which [00:34:02] – I’m going to mess up what the C is now – path. I’m sure you’ll get comments on what the C is. I can’t remember. Basically, how much forcing? How much extra heating or forcing we have? There is a scenario which basically if we keep burning fossil fuels more or less at the rate we have, this is where we’re going, and we’re going to a world in which we will be 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. What is that in terms people understand?
Tanya: I understand Celsius, but yeah.
David W. Titley: 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average, and people will say, well, you know, it was 75 today, so if it’s 84 tomorrow, why is that a big deal? One, when you warm the planet that much, that’s almost as much warming as we saw between the depth of the Ice Age and our 20th century climate. The depth of the Ice Age, we had glaciers almost coming way down the Hudson River Valley, right? You wouldn’t be going to the Catskills for your summer vacation in New York City anymore. That’s for sure. Not unless you wanted to go climb kilometers high ice faces up in Peekskill or something like that.
That’s a massive, massive amount of heat to add. Basically, that type of heat, if we do business as usual for the rest of the century, will all but guarantee not 5 inches, not even 5 feet of sea level rise. It starts to guarantee order 30, 3-0 feet sea level rise, when we would eventually stabilize. If anything, I’m probably being conservative there. 30 feet of sea level rise, just so that your listeners understand, that means that Orlando becomes the Southernmost Point of Florida. Baton Rouge is the Southernmost Point of Louisiana. Everybody in Harlem is probably pretty happy because they now have the waterfront property, and they’re laughing at Lower Manhattan because they’re all underwater. I don’t know if – New York City has arguably some of the most valuable real estate in the world, but are we going to build a levee system or a wall big enough to keep 30 feet of sea level out? That would be quite a function.
From a security perspective, Norfolk, Virginia and what they call down there, the Tidewater area is arguably the largest naval base, but it’s not only Navy, the Air Force has a huge base, Langley Air Force Base down there. The Army and the Coast Guard have important facilities as well. All of that goes. I mean, right now the Navy is talking about, well geez, maybe I need to raise the piers at my base by a foot or something like that. I want to say, dudes, this is not going to be your problem, raising the piers by a foot because there is no Norfolk. There is no Virginia Beach. There is no Chesapeake. There is no Portsmouth. It’s gone. You got to go back up to Yorktown, Virginia to find the coast line with 30 foot of sea level.
That’s just the US. Arguably, you recreate the inland sea in the Central Valley in California. We haven’t even talked about Asia and Shanghai and Manila and Singapore and Tokyo and Yokohama, and [00:37:48]. That becomes with business as usual. I think the last time I looked, that’s about half a billion, with a B, people live where – within 30 feet, let’s say elevation 30 feet where it would be potentially flooded. That’s half a billion people that probably need to move. Not to mention every major city, and you need to do this all more or less at the same time. People say, well, we can do that and I said, well, maybe we can, but let’s also remember that in the Syrian migration, that was roughly 1 million people. That’s what, two-tenths of 1% of what I’m talking about, 1 million people. Those 1 million people moving to Europe in a relatively chaotic fashion, I would argue shook the European Union to its core. That was just 1 million, not 500 million.
It doesn’t mean that it’s a catastrophe, but it does I think mean as someone who’s kind of have to manage risks for many, many decades, this is a huge risk. You would like to say, what’s the best way to manage risk is like buy it down beforehand. Like for the pilots, for naval aviators, or anybody else, it’s like, I don’t want you doing that heroic pilot stuff. I want you to be smart so that you never put that aircraft in a position where you have to do all that heroic pilot stuff. That’s really what we should be doing. It’s like, let’s not say, hey, let’s see what happens when we move half a billion people more or less at the same time. Let’s buy down that risk so that we’re not trying to move Singapore and London and Amsterdam and New York City and San Francisco and Tokyo all at the same time because I’m not sure how that’s going to work out.
Tanya: Many things to think about here, but you said it would all happen at the same time within this century.
David W. Titley: Let me clarify that. When the seas come up, it is going to take probably centuries for them so stabilize. This is really one of the big unknowns in the science is exactly how fast do the ice sheets respond to this warming. I very recently retired from Penn State, but I’m still affiliated with there and I’m very pleased and proud to say that some of my colleagues in the College of Earth and Mineral Science, they’re really on the forefront. People like Richard Alley and some of his colleagues are really at the forefront of trying to better understand how fast these ice sheets would come in to balance with the new heat. There is just all kinds of science which I won’t bore people with but there is a lot of unknowns there.
Tanya: When you say come into balance, do you mean like finish melting and sort of incorporate in the rest of the water?
David W. Titley: Exactly. I mean, let me just do this in a very simple way. You take an ice cube out of your freezer and you put it into you into a glass of room-temperature water, and let’s say that water is 70 degrees. It doesn’t melt instantly, right? It takes some time to melt there. Even as we add this heat not only to the atmosphere but to the ocean and the ocean is actually taking up about 90, 9-0% of the excess heat. It takes a lot. Then to make it even more complicated, we’re trying to figure out, do these ice sheets just simply slide off the land? Do they get hung up? Do they collapse? Like God has this massive hammer and it’s like you’re hammering on the ice sheets and you just fracture them, and then, much, much more ice comes into the ocean much more quickly than if it is just melting, melting off.
All of these things are really at the cutting edge of science here to understand exactly how this is going to go. Let’s just say, just for a thought experiment that for whatever reason, we as humans don’t really do much to minimize our greenhouse gases for the rest of this century. We do find by the year 2100 that we’re 3 to 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. I’d say 5 to 7 degrees in Fahrenheit terms. At that point, my guess if somebody put a gun to my head and said how long is it going to take to stabilize, I’d say it’s about 100 years. Within 100 years, you could see the ice sheets coming – or the sea level rise coming up by tens of feet. No, I don’t want to leave your listeners with the impression that by the year 2100 we’re going to have 30 feet of sea level rise. We are not. We may have 3, 4, 5 even 6 which that’s a lot. If you’re in Miami, that’s a big deal.
Tanya: That’s Miami.
David W. Titley: If you’re in Norfolk, that’s a big, big deal, but what I’m concerned is, ladies and gents that could be child’s play compared to what we will see if we don’t get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions pretty much now.
Tanya: Now that you’ve retired from the Navy and Penn State, I recently read a document or news that the Navy quietly shut down their Climate Change Task Force and it is debatable when that actually happened, but sometime in 2019.
David W. Titley: It was kind of like the Baltimore Colts moving out of Baltimore. I think they did it in the snowstorm in the middle of the night.
Tanya: Yeah, exactly. Given what you’ve stated as the almost certain future, if nothing changes, and with this administration that is literally unraveling and shutting down important initiatives like the Paris support or the Climate Change Task Force in the Navy, first of all, first of all, what happened with the Navy? Do you have any idea why they would do that?
David W. Titley: I could only speculate. I can tell you that nobody in the Navy told me. I found out about this third or fourth hand, and then had my spies and moles dig around and find out that yes, they in fact did shut this down. From a bureaucratic perspective, task forces in fact should not last forever. I think the Navy, when reporter asked them said, well, we’ve incorporated all of this into the mainstream so we don’t need a task force. If they had incorporated all of this into the mainstream, I would absolutely agree with that. A task force really should live for a finite period of time. On the process side, on the mechanics side, I don’t – it’s not a here nor there to me that they shut down the task force. It was not meant to live forever.
What I’m much more concerned about is, from what I see, very frankly I don’t think the Navy is thinking about these long-term threats, not very seriously. I think there is a chill in the executive branch, no pun intended. That thoughts about man-made – the implications or impacts or let alone what to do about man-made climate change are neither encouraged or desired. Those who think about this put their careers at risk. We just saw the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats forced out of his job earlier – I think it was within the last few weeks. Mr. Coats, I think probably got on the wrong side of the president on several issues, but one of the issues he was I think forthright about and really what DNI Coats was reflecting was simply the judgment of his senior career intelligence analyst, is climate change is in fact a threat to national security.
Any of your listeners can Google, it’s called worldwide threats to intelligence. You can Google that, either 2018 or 2019, it is a unclassified document. You don’t need The New York Times to have it leaked to you or anything like that. It’s short and it is signed by Dan Coats himself. There is in each one of those, about a full page of a 20-page document devoted to the impacts of climate change. This is what our career intelligence are – most senior career intelligence analysts have come up with. This isn’t like, well, Titley, he’s a retired weather guy. He probably just likes this stuff or something like that. These are people who are paid by our country to assess future risks and warn our policymakers.
We see this but we see, as you’ve mentioned, that really much of the administration, it’s almost like they’ve gone into shell shock or they’ve dug into their fox hole and they’ve put their hand over their head. They’re hoping the artillery barrage from the White House stops at some point. I think many senior leaders in many organizations or parts of our government including, I would argue, the US Navy, has decided this is a fight they don’t’ want right now. We could argue whether that is a courageous stand or we could argue whether that is, well, you’re worried about your career more than important things or you’re just trying to save yourself for bigger fights. Reasonable people can debate which side it is. Is this the issue you take to the hill and you die on that hill on this issue. Maybe it is for some. Others are going to say, I’m going to die on another issue, but not this one.
Yeah, it’s pretty much I think undeniable that this administration has put a huge, huge chill on any discussion of man-made climate change let alone what to do. I will say that ironically, the congress even though the senate is still controlled by Republicans and even the previous congress, where both chambers were controlled by the Republicans is actually quietly doing more. If you look in the last few, what we call National Defense Authorization Act, fancy word for the Defense Bill, we are seeing more and more amendments being passed by both parties that basically direct the Department of Defense to increasingly get ready for a change in climate.
Just this morning I was reading that our National Highway Bill has a number of provisions in it that will direct various – both federal and state agencies to both use money to prepare for future climate change and also to take future climate change into account when building out our transportation system. It’s almost a mirror-image of what we saw in the second Obama administration where you had the administration led by the president talking very high profile frequently and actively about this. The congress was like, no how, no way, I’m not doing anything. Those roles have flipped. Of course, the president is very well-known for this position on this issue, but less so I think the change in the congress.
I think you’re seeing – of course, the Democrats are talking a lot about it, but you are seeing more and more Republicans I think are coming to the conclusion that straight out climate denial is really – one, it makes people look silly, and I don’t know if they care about that or not, but it’s no longer a winning political issue in more and more districts. We’re seeing changes here and I guess if I want to leave somebody with a hopeful note it’s that, if I could pick only one branch of government to be on my side, I would pick the congress.
Tanya: Right now.
David W. Titley: Congress has a [00:51:08] and they make the laws. Administrations come and go, and so, are we doing enough? No. Are we doing it fast enough? No, but the fact that we’ve seen this change in the congress, I would argue over the last two to three years to me is it’s like seeing that very first [00:51:28] after a long, hard winter. It gives me signs of hope.
Tanya: You would know this because you’ve been invited to testify many, many times in front of congress. What were you asked to testify about and what do you think the reception of that was?
David W. Titley: I’ve actually, in this session of congress, I’ve testified three times. Twice before the house before the – both the Armed Services Committee and their Budget Committee, and also before the senate. There was a special hearing by the Homeland Security Committee, that I was asked to testify at. If anybody really wants to find it, you can Google my name and congressional testimony, and all of that is in the public record. I was told by some of the staffers on the budget committee that my remarks were actually very well received. That plus $2 buys you a small cup of coffee at Starbucks or at least it used to. We’ll see what that means. I did talk about the need for almost an Apollo scale program to rapidly get ourselves on to non-carbon-based energy, and I use those words carefully because I think nuclear probably does have a role in this.
We definitely need to bring down and significantly bring down the cost of storage. We probably need better transmission. We do okay on generation with wind and solar, but they’re not a panacea, and we need to – but we don’t have time to wait for the perfect solution. There was an admiral, Admiral Gorshkov who rant the Soviet Navy for many, many years, and in fact, he was head of the Soviet Navy when I got commission. One of his sayings, it’s probably not unique to him, but it’s attributed is, better is the enemy of good enough. We need to realize that at this point in time, good enough is probably where we need to be aiming for to decarbonize. Understanding that most energy systems, when you build them, they have a 20 to 40, maybe 50-year life cycle.
Yes, you’re locking yourself in for decades, but you’re not locking yourself in for centuries. Simultaneous to doing things, I would also have a much, much more robust R&D program to really figure out how to we provide adequate non-carbon-based power not only for the US, not only for the western world, but for all the world’s people. I mean, you could set a audacious goal of how does every single human being on the planet let’s say have Western European capacity of electricity. Every single person, every person in India, every person in Africa, every person in Asia. Not just the US and Canada and Japan and Australia. How do we do that, and how do we do that let’s say within 20 or 30 or 40 years? Can we do that? Maybe it’s 50 years, but we set those big goals, and we figure out how to do this. The Apollo program was what, roughly $150 billion in today’s money. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, especially when you look at the damages that we have already seen from extreme weather just in 2018. I think we saw nearly $300 billion of damages both insured and uninsured.
Tanya: You have a personal experience of weather damage. You lost your home.
David W. Titley: Yeah. I tell people if you ever want to know what a 10-meter storm surge does coming up your street, I got some pictures of that. Back when I was a one-star admiral, we were living in Mississippi. Actually, I bought the house since Mississippi is our headquarters for the Navy’s weather and ocean operations. I was first assigned to Mississippi down in the middle of 1990s. We bought a house and it was about two houses off the Gulf of Mexico. When I bought it, I figured I was going to sell it really quickly and then of course somebody wants to rent it and their successors want to rent it. Then we’re coming back down. I’m violating my own risk management rules here as I’ve now owned this half a block longer than I thought I would.
Sure enough, along comes Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, and it makes landfall just to the west of our house. The worst of the storm is always on that, what we call the dirty side of the eastern side of the storm. Yeah, it pushed about a 30-foot wall of water up. When we say we lost our house, we actually quite literally lost our house. I hate using the term literally and awesome and epic because those seem to be the words [00:56:40], but in this case, we actually lost our house to the point where we never did find it. 13 years later, we don’t know where it went. It either went up into the railway tracks with just millions of tons of debris, or more likely, I think it got sucked out into the Gulf of Mexico, but all we found was the front door and that was about it. We didn’t have any clean up. That was good. Yeah, there was very little to clean up.
I also tell people that – I don’t tell people this out of sympathy and in many ways that I really don’t have time to go through, we were – my wife and I were actually arguably the luckiest couple in Mississippi on the coast. We did not have our personal effects in that house at that particular time for a variety of reasons. We did have insurance. This isn’t a story of woe is me, but it is a traumatic event to lose your house like that. More importantly, think of all the people who don’t have a safety net especially when you get beyond the US where insurance is nowhere near as widespread. They have nothing. If you have a whole bunch of desperate people who have nothing, in addition to being a tremendous moral and I would argue human justice issue, that can become a security issue too because they have nothing, and they have nothing to lose. How do we manage that?
Tanya: Yeah. No, absolutely. What would you recommend for people? What can I do for example or the people out there listening? What can they do to contribute or help make a difference in climate change?
David W. Titley: I get asked this all the time, and I think it’s an obvious question, and it’s a very important question. The way I answer it is, I have a picture of a llama in my public talks, although somebody came up to me afterwards and said, “It’s not a llama, it’s an alpaca.” It’s like, “I’m sorry. The internet told me it was a llama, so [00:58:54] llama.” The way I spell llama is L-L-M-A, and the first L is learn. It’s just learn the basics of climate science. There is an association called the American Association for Advancement for Science of AAAS, triple A, S. They published I think a wonderful, very short climate document called, What We Know. If anybody of any of your listeners type triple A, S, what we know into Google, it’s the first thing that comes up. It’s tremendously accessible.
I would argue any single one of your listeners would easily be able to read it. I don’t care what degree they have or they don’t have. You don’t need a degree of anything to understand this. It gives you the basics. As a citizen, that’s all you need. We’re not trying to make you into Michael Mann or Richard Alley or anybody like that. Just know the basics. Now if you have – if there are any science geeks who are listening to this podcast, and you want to know more, go to the National Academy of Science and there is a publication called Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, National Academy of Science. Again, Google that, it comes right up. Now you’re going to know more than about 98%, 99% of Americans. If you have maybe a college degree or even you just like science in high school, I think you can get through that pretty easily. That’s my first L.
My second L is local action. Do what you can within your means, and that’s going to be very different for different people. We have different lives. We have different jobs. If you’re a farmer or if you’re a contractor, you probably need a diesel truck, right? We’re not saying live in a cave in a hair shirt and turn off the power. We’re saying do what you can. I’ll give an example. About six year ago, my wife and I moved up to State College where Penn State is, and for our budget, we had a choice. We could either buy an older house that was very close to my office, and I could walk there. We could maybe save a little bit of money, and then put it into upgrading windows and insulation and things like that, or we could buy a newer, bigger house maybe five, six, seven, eight miles away and drive to work. We chose the former, and we liked the neighborhood. We like the fact that we could walk to campus and do evening things and stuff like that, but it was also frankly a lower carbon footprint. I don’t think it was a sacrifice. I think it was simply a choice.
We all have choices, big and small in our lives, and I would ask that people just think about carbon footprint as one of the considerations. This isn’t a guilt trip. I’m not trying to shame people or anything like that or harangue people. I hate it when the environmentalist harangue people. It’s a choice. Local action, learn local action. M is monitor. For my science friends, something that’s really, really important is continuous collection of data because once an event has passed, you can never go back and measure what used to happen. It’s very, very hard. Much better to measure in real time, but for my non-science friends, I say monitor can be monitor what your local leaders and politicians do. Not just what they say but what they do.
That then turns into the A, and my A is advocacy. I think this is may be the most important one. What I recommend is whenever you have a chance to talk to an elected leader or could be even a business leader, but somebody who will listen to you. You can very politely say, ma’am or sir, what are you doing to stabilize the climate? It’s an open-ended question, like dating 101. Don’t ask yes or no questions. You might get an okay answer. You might not, but at least you shouldn’t get a yes or no with that question. It registers into that politician’s brain that you as a voter, as a constituent, you could have asked about anything, but you asked about climate.
There’s this stereotype of politicians, they don’t listen. They’re this, they’re that. The vast majority of politicians I’ve worked with, they’re pretty smart people. They may or may not know a ton about science or about some types of technology, but they know a lot about people, and they know a lot about their district. I remind myself, every time you go talk to a politician, they got elected for a reason. They’re there for a reason, and they’re probably pretty cognizant about their voters, and they want to stay in touch. When their voters decide that climate is an issue, the congress will decide that too, and we’re already seeing that. I look at gay rights as it’s an imperfect analogy, but look at the change in our country, right? 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I mean, President Obama was frankly against gay marriage. Why, because that’s where back in 2008, that’s where the country was. The country changed and you watched the politicians of both parties not walking but running, running to catch up with their constituents.
Nowadays, by and large, it’s pretty much a normalized issue and you’re really pretty far out of the mainstream if you don’t understand why supporting gay rights is a basic human right, right? How do we get there with climate? We get there when you and me and everybody listening to this podcast, and really 60%, 70% of Americans say, hey, I want a stable climate. I want the climate that I grew up in. That I want my kids and grandkids to grow up in. I don’t want to think about moving every major American coastal city. I don’t want to think about what that life that we’ve never seen in human civilization is like. I expect climate stability. If that is made known to the congress, and people actually vote that way, I think you will see the congress change very, very rapidly. What can we do? We can make our concerns known because if we don’t then nothing is going to change.
Tanya: Yeah. No, absolutely. I think that there’s a lot more awareness that were really developing especially – I’m cautious about educating myself, educating my children. Leading efforts in schools about not using so much plastic and all these little micro efforts eventually. Of course, doing what you’re suggesting advocacy and learn about the issue and local action and really monitor the issue. It’s critical. David, this has been really eye-opening, and I know that there’s – actually, you have so much interesting past experiences. You also led Penn State Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk which in two minutes, what did you do because I don’t want to just not include that.
David W. Titley: Sure, I know we’re going long here. I realize that, yes.
Tanya: Yeah. No, but that’s great. Yeah, what did you do? What was the purpose of that initiative and what was accomplished?
David W. Titley: At the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, really what I was trying to do is, is in a very simple way, how could we better use tools that we already had or at least data that we already had and maybe turn it into tools that would help people make better decisions, on both weather and climate risk? As an example, I had a graduate student working for me, and we develop basically a storm surge index that’s very much like the well-known hurricane index that’s called the Saffir-Simpson index. People talk about, oh, it’s a category 2 or a category 3 or a category 4. We wanted to develop an index that was let’s say a little bit more like earthquakes in Richter scale. I could go to my mom and say, hey mom, there was a 7.3 earthquake in California last night, let’s say. She would know that’s bad. Now she didn’t really know much about P waves or S waves or the details of the geophysics, but she understood that.
We basically came up with almost a Richter-like scale of storm surge. Then that is published and it’s out in the peer-reviewed literature and things like that. I had some other projects in which we looked at, could we come up with a, what I call a Seems Like Index. I think most people are familiar with, in weather, we have a Feels Like Index. If it’s really hot and humid, maybe the thermometer says it’s 95, but it feels like it’s 105, right? My Seems Like Index is, let’s say when it’s 70 degrees in Pennsylvania in February, it seems like it’s the first of May, the 15th of May, whatever. Almost like we do feels like, could we say well, it seems like it’s two weeks – the warming is two weeks ahead or maybe it’s a week behind what we would expect. You could actually then also look at those data and aggregate them and you say, for the last decade, spring has been coming a week ahead of time from what it used to be or fall is being delayed by two weeks. We worked on a Seems Like Index.
I’ve actually worked for a major Fortune 100 company. Could we predict pollen? Could we predict allergies? Not just looking at sales of over-the-counter drugs in pharmacies, to figure out how bad people’s allergies are, but could we actually put a generation of pollen and then blow it around in the computer models and have it rain out and it falls to the ground at night and get stirred up in the day with the winds. That was pretty interesting as well. Those are just some examples, but really the overarching theme was, what could we do using today’s existing technologies to help people better understand both weather and climate risks.
Tanya: I mean, just even the examples of allergies or other risks like rising sea levels, when you think about climate change, you think it’s something – or many people might think that it’s something that’s not directly impacting them, but wrong actually. There’s a lot of things that are directly impacting them and something that we have to take action on immediately. All of us individually and collectively. David, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your lifetime of knowledge and experience with us. Also, thank you for speaking in front of congress and being a real advocate for us to take action on stabilizing the climate. It means a lot to me and I’m so grateful that you’re doing that work also for my daughters and for everybody on the planet.
David W. Titley: Thanks so much, Tanya for having me on your podcast.
Unmessable podcast explores what it takes to be a great leader via candid discussions with success business operators and renown thought leaders.
