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Title
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Jay Fleisher (Part 1)
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Description
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Distinguished SUNY Teaching Professor Dr. Jay Fleisher presents an informed view of climate change, beginning by making a crucial distinction between weather (immediate) and climate (long range). He points out an array of longitudinal measurements which demonstrate both the kinds and pace of change – warming of the oceans; diminishing glaciers; and hence rising sea levels. Disastrous results are already occurring, with worse to come. His takeaway is that the problem is too big and taking place too slowly for the public to accept. And, indeed, we may have already passed a tipping point.
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Contributor (Interviewer)
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Alan Donovan
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Date of interview
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2019-01-03
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Duration (Extent)
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1H12M10S
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Type
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Sound
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Subject
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educator
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Transcript
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duration:"00:50:22"
January 3, 2019
Alan Donovan – AD
Jay Fleisher – JF
AD: Greetings, this is another edition of Kitchen Table Conversations and my guest today is Jay Fleischer, doctor Jay Fleischer, who is a SUNY distinguished teaching professor and longtime chair of the Earth Sciences Department, and has made great progress in terms of glacial research. But today we're going to talk a little bit about climate change. Jay, welcome.
JF: Thank you Alan. I have been looking forward to this. This should be a lot of fun
AD: So it's weather versus climate you're talking about.
JF: Well, I think that's a topic that's on everybody's radar as of now because of the weather extremes that are being experienced in a various parts of the country and not just those places that typically in the past had extreme conditions. Now we're finding things, weather extremes, in regions that are in the past had much more uniform conditions. So, people are aware of weather, and tend to think of it as climate, but there's a world of difference between the two as you could well imagine. Climate is the long standing temperature, pressure, seasonal changes - the extremes that occur during those seasons - over a period of decades if not centuries, whereas weather is a day to day, week to week event. The whole idea that weather varies is something that everybody's accustomed to and familiar with. But the idea that the climate is changing is not necessarily in everybody's background.
AD: How come we got away from talking about global warming? Because a lot of what's happening is warming.
JF: Oh, it's definitely warming, there's no question about whether the warming’s taking place, but the warming is part of a cycle of climate change. So rather than focus just on one part of the cycle, the phrase climate change would take warming into effect, but also recognize that in the future we're going to have cooling. It may be another likely be about 10,000 years before the Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered all of the northeast and Great Lakes area returns, but in fact it will, because climate change on a scale of thousands of years is a normal thing. That's it is something that's occurred repeatedly in the geologic past. And by repeatedly, I mean several 100,000,000 years ago there was a major ice age and then a couple 100,000,000 years after that, another major ice age.
AD: How is all this measured? In other words, how do you know what the climate was like in the Pleistocene era or whatever, as far back as you can go.
JF: That's a good question. There are a number of tools that are used within the sciences and different specialists of science deal with different parts of it. For example, probably the most reported climate change results come from studies of ice cores. Ice cores that are taken from the Antarctic ice sheet and also Iceland or Greenland, excuse me, Greenland. These cores are 6 inches or so in diameter. They're removed from the ice sheet in segments so that the full thickness of the ice sheet can be represented not by a single core, but by a whole series of cores that extend from the surface all the way to the bed of the ice, and in Antarctica that's three miles, in Greenland that's about 2 miles, so there is a continuous record of the ice - sample of the ice - and within that sample there are horizontal bands of changes in density of the ice, each of which represents a change in the from one year to the next. There are seasonal changes at the polar regions, just like the seasonal changes everywhere and those seasonal seasonal changes result in snow accumulating and in different amounts and once the snow accumulates through the winter and is both compacted and changed into ice at depth, the full sequence of bands, each band representing a year. An annual accumulation can be traced from the surface all the way back to the thousands of years.
AD: Is that kind of like reading the rings on a tree?
JF: It is very much like reading the rings on a tree, but in this case, instead of simply counting the rings and measuring their thicknesses and interpreting climate from that, in this case, samples are taken from the ice, from the bubbles in the ice - air bubbles in the ice and water bubbles in the ice - and these these samples are essentially water, hydrogen and oxygen, and there are isotopes of oxygen that can be that represent different temperatures of accumulation. So the rain that falls and becomes snow and ice in the summer has a different isotope ratio than the ice the snow that falls in the winter and from that would be seasonal, but then you have changes on a broader scale of entire climate changing so, a series of a dozen bands that represent one climate condition would differ in their isotope composition from bands that are deeper in the core, representing a different climate condition. So, a good deal of what we know about the geologic past, at least the late the last 10 to 15,000 years comes from studying the oxygen isotopes that are in the ice cores retrieved from Antarctica and Greenland. But then there are other scientific investigations that are done such as, there are marine geologists that study planktonic organisms. These are the things that are living near the surface, planktonic because they're floaters -that's why they refer to that - and they make up their shells from the chemistry that's available to them, and part of the chemistry that's available is the oxygen that's in the water so individuals studying marine geology, I mean marine oceanography, would be investigating the changes in the chemical composition of the shells of the planktonic organisms which, when they die, those shells then settle to the bottom of the ocean and accumulate over a period of time, including time when climate changes, so that cores taken from the floor of the ocean can be sampled for the shells of organisms that lived thousands of years ago, died, settled on the floor of the ocean, got buried by more recent sediments, and therefore preserved. So older climates - Paleoclimates, as they're referred to - can be measured in that way as well. And also, individuals that study pollen, referred to palynologists, that study pollen will sample bogs and old lake beds and from that retrieve the pollen which is - smaller than dust size samples of pollen- which represent the plant plants that grew in the in that region at the time that the sediment was accumulating. So that a palynologist will sample a bog and take samples every few centimeters through say a 10 meter sample, every few centimeters will be sampled to study the pollen, and the pollen reflect different forest conditions and plant conditions that existed throughout the geologic past. And in this way, reconstruct a time when the climate was either warmer or colder in that particular location. But then there are a number of other tools that that can be used as well, including studies of tree rings and what conditions were responsible for the most robust tree rings versus those that are smaller, and of course, those being trees, those things can be dated with carbon 14 dating to determine how long ago the conditions that controlled the tree rings existed. So through these different tools, a record of the of the climate of the geologic past can be reconstructed.
AD: And I gather what it's shown is that the climate has changed in radical ways, geologically, in the past.
JF: I absolutely, and probably the biggest controversial issue today is how do we know that this isn't just another one of the cycles of climate change that's existed in the past? And because there have been, the Earth's position in the solar system, it's such that it's orbit around the sun is not uniform with time. Sometimes more elliptical, sometimes more circular, as well as the tilt of the earth on its axis, that's not uniform with throughout time, and also as the Earth turns it sort of wobbles a little like a top. So, when you take the periodicity of these, all of these changes and you put it together, you come up with prediction of when ice ages should occur and when the the periods of time between ice ages should occur, and right now we're experiencing a period of time globally which is an interglacial period between the last ice age and the next one to come, which may be another 10,000 years from now. But the point is, that the changes that are taking place now in the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere now, climate change being global warming, these changes are taking place at a rate much greater than the tools of the past would indicate climate change could occur, or the Earth's position in the solar system would predict they should occur. So, and this is this has been made reference to within the in, even in the common literature, not just the scientific literature, in what's referred to as the hockey stick diagram, which is a plot that shows how the Earth's temperatures have changed throughout the geologic past. And we can go back hundreds of thousands of years to see how it's changed, and what we're finding now is the changes that are occurring now are occurring much faster than they've ever changed in the natural history of those things that control.
AD: That would be the long handle of the hockey stick.
JF: That's right, the long handle. If you lay the hockey stick flat on a table and then tip it so the part that's bent points up the the long part of the hockey stick represents the normal changes in temperature over a period of time and that rapid rise in temperature is the part of the hockey stick that points upward when you tip it. So the hockey stick diagram is one that's probably the most telltale – telling - tale telling of all, because it tells us that the climate is warming faster than under normal conditions, and the abnormal condition that exists today is the human influence.
AD: Now a lot of attention to people who are novices in the scientific sense has to do with ocean temperature and then temperatures in general.
JF: Right
AD: In more recent times,
JF: Yeah. What's been found - and this is something that has matured over a period of four or five decades - increasing precision and accuracy being measured in the temperature of the oceans globally, not just in any one location. And what has been known for a long time is that there's an app- there's a a current that flows north in the Atlantic Ocean, the Bermuda current, it gets up to the vicinity of just north of Iceland, and it cools enough in the Arctic environment so that that same water, then in a cooler condition, sinks and drops deeper into the ocean. So you have warm currents going north, and then the water sinks. Well, what's, what we've now know is that that cold water that sinks returns on the ocean floor and moves South in the Atlantic Ocean. The warmer currents moving north, colder currents moving South. We've known this for a long time, but what recent information has told us, and this comes from satellite monitoring primarily, as also sampling in the oceans, physical sampling in the oceans tells us that there is actually a thermohaline - meaning temperature, the term thermohaline refers to temperature and salt - so the temperature of the salt water is a part of a circulation pattern that's not just in the Atlantic Ocean, but links to patterns in the Indian Ocean and links to patterns in the Australia region and into the Pacific. It's all part of 1 continuous network of moving water. Didn't know that until the satellites gave us an ability to measure surface water temperature throughout the globe and then sampling at depth, bringing samples up from the depth telling us what - the telling the oceanographers - what the water temperatures were at depth.
AD: So what's happening in the Arctic?
JF: Ohh well, probably the thing that gets the most attention in the Arctic right now is how little ice is retained on an annual basis in the Arctic Ocean. This is much more dramatically represented in the Arctic Ocean than in the Antarctic, because we got a continent sitting in the Antarctic position, but we have an ocean basin in the Arctic polar condition. Throughout the last several decades, the amount of ice that forms in the Arctic Ocean during the winter and then partially melts in the summer, that amount of ice is being reduced as a result of a warmer climate. The climate essentially is melting the Arctic ice much more rapidly and to a greater extent than than in the geologic past, the measurable geologic past. Well, this might seem like a rather esoteric thing: so what? There's not much going on in the Arctic anyway, except for the the Arctic animals that live there and a few individuals who are robust and can handle that kind of a climate such as the Native Americans of North America who live in the Arctic. But there's a lot more to it than that. As it turns out - and this is not my work but the work of others - as it turns out, the amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean can be directly related to the path of the jet stream that produces our weather. Without getting into the details of this, I will if you'd like, but without getting into the details of this, the warmer Arctic Ocean causes the jet stream to meander more than it normally would. Perhaps you've seen on the weather reports that you see on television of the path of the jet stream and how Arctic air is brought down into the lower latitudes of the mid US and it makes Minnesota, Wisconsin really cold, whereas the Gulf Coast regions are usually much warmer. This is the effect of the jet stream that meanders in a pattern that allows cold air to be brought down into lower latitudes. Well, because Arctic Ocean ice is diminished in its extent and time of the year the the jet stream meanders much more deeply into the South than it otherwise would and otherwise has in the past. And that means that colder conditions that otherwise wouldn't have existed in, say, Atlanta GA now do exist there because the jet stream is bringing cold air to that latitude, whereas it hadn't before. And the other effect is that jet stream moves more slowly when it meanders more, so that that unusual weather lingers longer, and this results in longer lasting deep drought conditions and heat conditions in some parts of the country and longer lasting colder conditions in other parts of the country. And the warming of the oceans contributes to the development of hurricanes. So, you compound the weather of produced by the jet stream with the weather produced by hurricanes coming off the warmer Gulf Coast, and you can get some pretty nasty weather. A part of this that really I find intriguing is when people are told that a severe weather condition is going to occur, whether it's 3 feet in central New York, 3 feet of snow in central New York, or strong winds and heavy rain in the Panhandle of Texas, People of Florida -excuse me - people react to thi,s entire communities, statewide regions react to this. People stock up on groceries and and make sure they have enough fuel to get through the storm. So
AD: A little wine too!
JF: A little yeah I would, I would imagine a little wine yes, but the part that intrigues me here is that the individuals can see the weather and it's duration. They know the hurricane isn't going to last more than perhaps a week, or the conditions related to the hurricane might last about a week, but then it'll be over so they stock up for the week their food, fuel, whatever they need. That's a time frame that they could easily identify with. There's a much more difficult time frame to deal with when you think about climate change and global warming, and that is we're talking about spans of time that generally exceed the normal frame of reference of most people. So, and we see this when when surveys are done of individuals who, these surveys have been done to determine how many people in America think that the climate is changing, and it's more than 50% think it's changing. How many people think that humans having are having an influence on that change? And more than 50% of the people think that humans can have an influence, but because the duration of that influence is beyond the normal time frame for most individuals, the thought is: well, that change isn't going to include me, I'll be long gone when all of this happens, so whatever changes are occurring - and I agree it's it's happening, and I agree we might be contributing to it - but it's not my problem.
AD: Well, the hockey stick analogy is probably the biggest argument for people to understand what's going on.
JF: They do, and those who deny the fact that it's going on will cite reports of data collected that would be contrary to what the hockey stick diagram tells us. But most often what I found is that when taken out of context, you can make just about a case for just about anything, whether it has to do with climate, or law, or human behavior - if you take it out of context, you can make it, you can come to whatever conclusion you had to start with. You predetermined notion can be strengthened as a result of that.
AD: For example, the fact of climate change will change the immediate weather so that people will say, oh, we don't have climate change, it's colder than hell here.
JF: Right, well, it's yeah, that's the that's the confusion between weather and climate. It's colder than hell here, and it's it's it can't be warm, it can't be a warming, climate, if it's colder than hell here, but it's colder than hell here because the warmer climate to reduce the Arctic ice, which changed the the jet stream, which alters the weather and how long it lasts at any given location. So all of this is related to everything is, it's like what John Muir taught us in the early 1900s. You can't touch anything without touching everything, and in this we live in a rather complex global condition. I recall distinctly when I was in Graduate School decades ago we had debates and used the books at the time and the publications at the time to build our frame of reference, and what we have learned in the last decade exceeds what we learned in the previous century. That we're just learning a lot more now, a lot faster now, because we have better tools. Some of those tools include satellites, some of them include isotope chemistry, so we know more now than we've ever known before, and it's it's pointing to an extremely complex environment globally that when you think about it globally - when you when you you look at the picture, the photographs that the astronauts sent to us of the earth in space, - beautiful photograph of this blue planet sitting in a black background - and that photograph itself should tell people that we are living within a closed system. That is to say, whatever happens in the atmosphere and below it on Earth is gonna stay on Earth and the conditions that exist there are conditions that are the sum total of all of the effects that exist, so that at times we have warmer climates, sometimes we have colder climates, and this is all part of a natural system. When you begin to upset the natural balance of that system, the system tends to adjust and the adjustments are the things that we're feeling now. In my opinion, those are the adjustments we're feeling now that the climate is warming faster than it would warm otherwise, and it's because we're changing the composition of the atmosphere, which is where our weather and our climate comes from.
AD: Now you've already mentioned some of the results. Why don’t you quickly go through some of the most obvious results of climate change.
JF: Oh well, more and more now you read in the common literature - whether it's a well-done newspaper article, or magazine report - of the the impacts that we're beginning to see as a result of a warmer climate, and what we can anticipate for the future. So from my point of view, you you can deal with these while these impacts are in a limited extent, or you can wait longer until they get to the point where you whatever you might do now, wouldn't have any effect then. So the small problem now becomes a big problem later, and some of the things that have been been projected that's been the common literature are things like crop failure, inability to maintain an agricultural society in a region of the country that previously was our bread basket. For example, there are reports from marine biologists who talk about how the warming of the oceans will eventually cause all of our coral reefs to die. Not just the coral reef being impacted here, but shellfish as well, all fish as well. There are reports that with a warmer climate there'll be more insects and more insects produce the potential for disease being spread from one place to another by those insects, and a whole variety of other other conditions that can develop as a result of a warmer climate. Some of these things don't aren't within the hard sciences, but the social sciences and I really can't speak to those very well, but there are some very real ramifications that represent changes at a scale we could deal with if we wanted to, but the powers that be feel that any changes we might do now to stem the the warming effect could have a negative impact on our economy, and that's of course a major concern of just about everybody.
AD: Well as a glacier geologist you must have seen quite significant changes in in your travels around.
JF: No, no doubt about that. Most of my experience with glaciers has been in Alaska, starting back in the late 60s with repeated visits to specific locations for data gathering and sometimes just for general observation. But I did have a research project for 20 years at the Bering Glacier in Alaska and could see a number of things change over that period of time, such as the the rate at which the glacier retreats. Everybody can visualize the front of the glacier retreating as the ice melts away, but what's also happening is the ice is thinning as the ice retreats, and you can't see that very easily without actually making field measurements. But this has been done on the Juno Ice Field in Alaska, and currently there's as much as a meter of thinning of that. That might not sound like a lot when you got 1000 feet of ice and you're losing 3 feet in a year, but this is much faster than it has thinned in the past because the research has been going on there for decades and the record shows that what's happening now is much more dramatic than before. So we do see accelerated retreat, accelerated thinning, which normally would take thousands of years to occur, is happening now in decades. So the rate of change is really the culprit here,
AD: And the water doesn't disappear.
JF: Oh, the the water then of course the melt water that comes out of the glaciers can in some places create problems in the sense that downriver from some of these glaciers there are dams that impound reservoirs - one of the shortcomings of a reservoir is how fast does the sediment accumulate within the reservoir coming from the streams that flow into it? Well, glacial meltwater carries a lot of sediment. It's the it's the material under the glacier that gets ground up that gets flushed out by the melt water and eventually flows downriver until it gets to a place where it can settle in a lake or a reservoir and that settling builds up in the reservoir to make the reservoir less effective. It's just can hold less water because it's holding more sediment. So it's all related. John Muir was right: you can't touch anything without touching everything,
AD: And then you have the the concern about the rise of the ocean.
JF: Yeah, sea level rise is an issue that will impact a certain segment of our society much more than the rest of society as as you would suspect right now. Miami, city of Miami, central or southern eastern Florida is experiencing flooding conditions even in streets that in the historic past have not been flooded. They are now high, high tide brings water in at to places that didn't flood before, not that they didn't have high, high tide before, but they didn't have high, high tide occurring with sea level being a little bit higher than it was in the past, so there's flooding going on there. This could have tremendous impact on the global economy if seaports that normally function effectively at a given level of the water now have to adjust to a higher level of the water, and that's being felt in many places as well.
AD: And if you combine that with the growing ferocity of storms, like hurricanes, that becomes a double blow.
JF: It does, and this is the this is why I think more and more people are willing to recognize that climate change in the expression of global warming is in fact with us, and indeed humans can have an influence on it. There's a lot of information to demonstrate that the CO2 in the atmosphere and the methane we put in the atmosphere changes the composition of the atmosphere, and enough so that it's not only warmer, but it's wetter and the wetter it is, the more storms we have. More people are willing to recognize that's happening and recognize that humans are having influence, but they don't seem to be willing to make any serious changes. First, because they don't think it's going to impact them directly, and secondly, because it's going to have a negative effect on our economy and disrupt our normal economic condition, so it's a it's a tough nut to crack, you you kind of have to convince individuals that the magnitude of this is not just a temporary thing, and even though it might not impact you directly, it's going to impact this global society for decades if not centuries in the future. We we had a speaker on campus this past spring of 20 - this past fall of 2018 – Who, Richard Alley, who's a climate, he's a glaciologist, actually at Penn State and he's on the International Board for Climate Change and so on. He's very well known, and he's done a lot of research in the Antarctic and on glaciers everywhere, and and I've spent time with Richard in the field, and realized just how penetrating his thoughts are about these things. And he was on campus in the fall of 2018, gave a lecture to a very large crowd of hundreds of students, and there was a question and answer period to follow and what he what he demonstrated in his presentation were all the data that represents the changes are taking place and the global reaction to how, how this is going. I asked him in that lecture if we could wave a magic wand and clean up the atmosphere tomorrow, how long would it take the atmosphere to readjust, to go back to what would be normal? And he said it could take 1000 years, so nobody projects into 1000 years from now, especially individuals who are seriously concerned about our economy and are not willing to make changes unless the scientists can say the following changes in the atmospheric temperature will produce the following result by a given date. And just recently we had a report in the I think it was in New York Times that reported that by 20 - wasn't just the Times - but by 2030, the year 2030, the following conditions are going to exist. None of those conditions were acceptable to anybody who is living on under normal conditions today, but they didn't feel like either whatever adjustments would take - would be necessary to thwart that - were worth doing, or that until you can prove to me that this amount of change quantitatively is going to take place by this time to 2030, I'm not willing to make changes. Scientists never predict things quite that specifically because they recognize it's a closed system and there are too many variables that can influence what they're studying, and those variables change with time as the term implies, so you'll never get a scientist to say by next, by the end of the next decade, the climate conditions at a given latitude are going to be so many degrees warmer or colder than they are today. You'll get general responses, but we just don't have the tools to allow us to make that level of precision.
AD: But you could say that if pattern if the pattern follows itself as it's been the last X number of years, they're going to lose so much shoreline, for example.
JF: Yes, yeah. Yeah, but the if is, if if sea level continues to rise. Well, there's no doubt in the mind of the scientific community that sea level is going to rise, it's just a question of how long will it take to rise a given amount you give it. I will estimate that if you gave it 500 years 500 to 1000 years, the lower half of Florida would be underwater, the southern half of Florida would be underwater that that sea level would come up that much. And individuals who are studying how fast Antarctic ice the ice sheet of Antarctica is diminishing in size, and the ice shelves that surround Antarctica are diminishing in size, they're they are predicting that you can have 6 feet of sea level rise, and in a matter of 100 years, and just think of what that would do to. 70% of the biggest cities of the world are at sea level. It would have a devastating effect. But so how do you stem this? How do you stop that from happening? Well, you do what you can to slow the warming by reducing the amount of impact you have on the equilibrium condition that existed in the atmosphere that it's now changing as a result of the pollutants.
AD: You mentioned Al Gore and I think you feel he exaggerated the effect, well.
JF: Well yeah, that was what 10 years ago 12 years ago when Al Gore came out with the Inconvenient Truths. Not just the book, but he, he then began a lecture series around the country to try to convince people that climate change, global warming, is a real thing and it's actually happening. Unfortunately, if you watched his presentations what you find is that he tended to use graphics to illustrate what he was saying to a greater level of exaggeration than he really should have, and when he did that, when he exaggerated the results - not because he gave data, exaggerated the data - he just illustrated that data in diagrams that would allow you to show more exaggerated change than was occurring. People then question whether he was exaggerating the facts. And then there was the the whole idea that he he put forth of a tipping point, that he was trying to tell us at that time that every system has its equilibrium condition and all of the components in that system adjust to each other, and we are one big global system. The Earth and its atmosphere. And anytime you change any part of it, they're going to be adjustments to nullify the changes you induce. And he introduced the whole notion of a tipping point, where beyond which we will not be able to correct the changes that are occurring. Nobody can say where that tipping point is or how much warmer the climate has to be before we get to that, it's a gradual change with time. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to make the corrections. Whether there's a specific point beyond which no correction would be possible, you can approach it in a more gradual way and recognize that you can stem some of those changes now with the following efforts, but if you wait two decades, you'll have to expend a hell of a lot more - excuse me - you have to expend a lot more effort to make the change.
AD: Interesting analogy there would be the predictions about peak oil.
JF: Unfortunately yes. Peak oil the phrase of peak oil, what was that, 15 years ago and when that was one of the headline items. The projection for peak oil was based on the known reserves at the time. Since then, the methods for geophysical exploration that finds oil have been refined significantly by technology, computer use, so that places that previously did not demonstrate any potential for oil reserves now do only because our technology and sensing it is more precise than it was before. The Earth isn't making oil faster than it did before, we’re using oil a lot faster than the earth makes it, but there have been more reserves discovered, so this whole notion of peak oil just had to be abandoned because the peak kept getting higher and higher and higher as new oil fields were discovered.
AD: And more use of natural gas.
JF: A lot more use of natural gas, correct. But I'm chuckling because when you think of the use when – you said natural gas, I also thought of petroleum, as in automobiles, and you think about the traffic that you encounter around any city in the United States in the morning in the afternoon is such to indicate that we in America, and I'm sure it's true in other countries as well, we're pretty much addicted to what the oil companies have provided for us, and they didn't do that just by happenstance. That's their product that's they want to satisfy their stockholders, so they want to they want to sell you as much gas as as they can, so they make it easier for you to get it. And roads go from 2 lane to three lane to accommodate more cars, and then when that gets congested, 3 lanes becomes 4 and that gets going. I think we're addicted in this country, I think there's an addiction to petroleum products and we were led to that by very careful marketing effects. It's it's now known that standard, or Exxon Exxon scientific staff recommended back in the 50s that there will be the following problems related to burning gasoline in cars, and that information never made it to the public because Exxon suppressed it and they wanted to continue to sell gas and oil. So there was more or less a violation of science even back then by the people who were more interested in the economy. I can't help wonder what will happen eventually when we reach a saturation point for the number of commercial flights that can be in the air in a given day? I was stunned when I looked this up and found out that there are 5000 commercial flights in the air at any given moment at any time. I never thought it would be, that's just commercial flights that doesn't include
AD: direct. Yes,
JF: Yeah, so. We continue to modify our atmosphere in a lot of ways, whether it's cars more cars than we – the freedom of driving your own car leads to the desire to continue to do so, so we have more and more cars. More and more flights, all of which is leading to changes in the atmosphere and from a scientific point of view, you cannot continue to stress conditions in equilibrium without seeing in a result of that,
AD: and even the development of sustainable energy is is happening, but it's not happening in a huge hurry and there's some problems there with storage, for example.
JF: Yeah, storage for sure. More and more research is being done on this and you you see this yourself when you drive from one state to another and you're bound to pass fields of solar panels, covering acres and acre miles, square miles of land in places where before it was a cultivated field. So yeah, there's more concern for renewables and how to replace what we normally would burn as gas and oil. How do we replace that with a renewable energy? Wind wind does the same thing, wind power, but and there are some countries that are using both of these far more effectively than we are. Denmark is generating a lot more energy from windmills than the United States is and and the projection for how much more there will be in the US can't compete with what's going on in Denmark. Yeah, renewables are great. You can't fly an airplane on renewables, at least now there are no battery operated airplanes. Well, I shouldn't say that, I guess there are
AD: Drones there are drones that are battery operated.
JF: Yeah, yeah
AD: Small
JF: We’re not transporting people
AD: No not yet
JF: So. It's it's impossible to look too far into the future if you just look behind and you realize how far we've come in the last decade. Not just in the amount of scientific information that's now available to us, but just the technology that that's now available. Your laptop computer is far more powerful than anything the army had in 1955, so the technology is is incredibly, is advancing at an incredible rate, and when you ask the technology people, where is this going? It's happening so fast they really can't project
AD: right
JF: They’re. It's beyond their ability to project how far it will go. It's wonderful, but it's also threatening.
AD: Well, ending on a little more optimistic note,
JF: Oh,
AD: There there is progress being made on carbon emissions and the Paris Agreement and individual states are taking up the charge on that.
JF: yeah,
AD: Whether its being done nationally or not.
JF: Yeah, and you hear the argument: why should the US curtail their industrial operations that now pollute the atmosphere when China is doing that too, and India is doing that too, and I think people lose sight of the fact that the United States needs to act as a role model for what the global climate, global society should be involved with, and I'm afraid we've drifted away from that. Now it's just too much ‘ me first ‘ attitude and too much ‘as long as I get mine, it's too bad what you don't get’ kind of an attitude. And, this from my perspective as a geologist with a concept of time including millions of years, which is not an easy thing to wrap your head around, and it it takes a while to do that - not that it takes a greater intelligence, it just takes it stretching your mind a bit to include changes that could be a million years in coming. Most people don't think that way and you can't blame them for it. I mean old for many people are their grandparents! Even even if you're if if you are a student of human history, old is what few 1000 years? It's it's just not within the human realm to think in time in a time frame that includes the rate at which the Earth - the the shall we call it the Earth's metronome - runs. And I don't think we'll ever adjust to it. I don't think a global society will ever think in terms of millions of years, let alone anything beyond that or thousands of years.
AD: But as a trained geologist, that's what you do think of in terms.
JF: Absolutely! You have to, because the the evidence is there to tell us that that's how long we've been here and this planet has been here doing what it does now, and this comes from techniques that are used to date things such as radiocarbon dating, and that's that's something that can measure maybe 70,000 years into the past, but we've got techniques that isotopes that can be used to measure millions of years into the past. And and also there's what you've learned in Sunday school doesn't always agree with what you learn in geology class, so there's a there's a problem with that too. So, I I once asked a colleague of mine who is very active in his own church, and in fact he brought his Bible, he read every night when we were at the Bering Glacier for long spans of time and and I said to him, I respect what you're doing, but you're a scientist. How do you separate what the Bible tells you about time and what science tells you about time? And he said, I just keep them in two different categories and don't let one interfere with the other, that's the way he dealt with it.
AD: Well, Jay, thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation and a good outlook and insight into climate change.
JF: Well, thank you. I'm happy to do this. I just hope it wasn't too much of a lecture and a little more of a conversation.
AD: It is. thank you,
JF: Thank you.
Jay Fleisher interviews