- [Narrator] Funding provided by Connecticut Green Bank.

- From the ocean to the forest, from the Arctic to Connecticut shores climate change has gripped our planet.

Each year hurricanes and wildfires topple homes, knockout power, and cause billions of dollars of damage.

Air pollution has gripped many Northeastern cities and melting ice and rising seas have drastically altered coastal communities.

And throughout all of this change, there have been eyewitnesses.

People with firsthand insight into how the climate is changing and what it means for all of us.

For Connecticut Public, I'm Patrick Skahill.

This is "Cutline".

(upbeat music) This hour, we'll ask eye witnesses to climate change to describe what they have seen.

From the secrets buried in ancient ice cores to observations logged in the journals of Henry David Thoreau, we'll explore how scientists, government officials and medical professionals have all watched as the world changed.

We begin with one scientist who has spent more than four decades studying birds and watching as the ice melts.

(soft upbeat music) - I wonder sometimes, after 45 years on the island, why I'm here and how I got here.

And I have to look back to the summer of 1972 when I was doing a census of all the barrier islands off northern Alaska, and happened to visit Cooper Island.

And you have to be careful who and what you fall in love with in your 20s, because I found a small colony of black guillemots here and came back to study that colony.

And then once it got some momentum, it just kept going.

All of a sudden it became clear that my findings on the one island tie in very much with what's happening with global warming.

And you thought, oh, this is a little trend, but you never expect the trend to go the way it has gone, because you think, wait a minute, if that keeps going, that's going to mean that it's gonna get too warm to have ice and snow up here, which means that the Arctic is no longer the Arctic, which is still for me almost incomprehensible.

(soft upbeat music) - [Radio] This is the zone forecast for Central Beaufort Sea Coast.

Today, sunny.

Highs in the 50s.

East wind 10-20 MPH.

- Having been out here for the bulk of my life, what I knew every summer is that I would be coming back to this island to study the biology of the species, and also experience the Arctic and have that be my life for three months and not be on the grid, not be driving a car.

And unfortunately, not even taking a shower.

This is a place that is a constant in my life and gives me some stability.

But from the first days of this study, the isolation that I experienced and that is necessary for being on Cooper Island and gathering the data on the black guillemots is something that had its costs.

Many of my friends have gotten married and I have missed all the weddings.

And I realized recently that I've missed many of my weddings.

The people that I had intended to marry went on with the wedding and luckily found someone who could stand in for me to be the groom so that I didn't get married during what should have been my wedding.

Much of the time over the past 44 years I have and it's gotten to be more common recently, I wake up and I look around and go, wait a minute, it's 2019.

In the 70s and throughout the 80s, I could come out here by snow machine over sea ice up until almost mid June.

Now, one can't do that because the ice is breaking up, starting as early as late may.

And like any long-term relationship, you don't really appreciate something until it's gone.

Suddenly a place that used to be mainly white and then always had the ice just off shore, it's like blue water to the horizon.

(water roaring) There's been this major decline.

The ice that used to be close to the shore is now hundreds of miles off shore.

They see these birds that I've known for so long struggling to deal with the fact that they have a very different universe than they had in the 70s and 80s and early 90s when I was first out here.

Black guillemots, the species of seabirds I'm studying; this is a species that's adapted to the high Arctic.

It isn't migratory.

Guillemots have the problem with having predators that will take their eggs and chicks.

So they have to breed in cavities.

And the fact that I landed on an island that had no natural cavities and I found 17 nests at first, I thought, well, this is pretty amazing because they really just have used wooden boxes that the Navy happened to drop off there in the 1950s.

And I thought, well, this is excellent.

I could just put up more boxes and have a nice colony.

I can study in a way that I couldn't study most other seabirds.

For the first few decades, I was just the somewhat strange person on the island studying this population of birds.

And I am following their mating and breeding habits every year.

I'm out here alone for much of the summer.

And I'm experiencing all the data on a day-to-day basis at a level that is very different than most climate change scientists.

This is heightened by the fact that birds that I had banded as chicks have come back to breed here for up to 33 years.

So I've had this connection with the colony that was so exciting to find.

It was the first record of black guillemots breeding in the area that I thought, well, this is really something.

And it's also something that no one else was doing.

I go out and walk through the colony and I go through these nest checks, going up to the site, seeing that it's okay and peeking in to see who's back at each nest site.

I look at the color bands on the birds and write that down.

If there are eggs in the nest, if there's a parent bird attending them, if they've been incubated for a while to see if those eggs have hatched.

And then once the chicks are hatched in August, when I visit nest, I take the chicks out of the nest and weigh them and measure them so I can look at their growth rates.

My data showed the fact that the spring was getting warmer and birds were laying their eggs earlier, and many of the chicks are dying and they're certainly growing at a slower rate.

So however widespread guillemots used to be, whereas in the past 10% of the chicks might die in the nest.

Now up to 60% of them would die.

Over the past two decades, as it's become clear that I am studying the Canary in the coal mine, I think about what canaries in the coal mine were meant to do.

They were meant to be a warning.

Once you see that the Canary is under stress or close to dying, you realize we might be under stress.

So it's meant to be an indicator that humans need to do something.

One could expect now based on what we're seeing on Cooper, this is now an important data set for something that's happening globally.

I didn't wanna study climate change.

Climate change found this study and found me and said, okay, you are no longer doing the standard bird study.

You're now studying the fact that the Arctic is melting.

(soft upbeat music) - I met George Divoky 18 years ago, in 2001.

I was assigned by a major magazine to take a look at George and his bird studies.

One of the main reasons I came back to Cooper what's to recreate a photograph I did with George back in 2001.

In that photograph, he's standing on solid ice framed by the Arctic sky.

George has told me that if he went back to that exact same spot and stood there for a photograph, he will be up to his waist in water.

(dramatic music) Anybody home?

- Joe.

- [Joe] Dude, what are you doing, man?

- 18 years.

- 18 years.

- 18 years.

- I knew you'd come back.

You said you would come back.

- I did say it and I meant it.

It took a while.

- [George] It took a while, but- - You've made some improvements.

- Yeah, the cabin?

- Yeah.

- Oh yeah, why don't you come inside and take a load off.

- All right, thanks man.

(dramatic music) As a photographer, you shoot thousands and thousands of pictures, only a few stick to you, really.

That photograph that we made on the ice all those years ago has been one of those photographs.

- When I first saw it, I was just blown away.

It captured so much.

It just brings me a great deal of pleasure and your work has played a major part in this.

It is nice that I am noticed as someone who's doing work that's important.

It makes all the difference to me.

- Yeah, and what we're gonna do is recreate that one photograph though, what are we up against?

- Well, you and I were walking down to north beach and there was this great light to the north.

And you said, hey, could you stand out there on the ice a little bit, I'll get a picture of you.

And neither of us had any idea what that would mean in terms of that image and things like that.

Now, the north beach has water from the beach out to probably 400 miles.

So having me be where I was standing, but that spot is now it's open ocean.

And again, to have that major change, and even back then, if you look at the models of how sea ice was gonna disappear, nobody predicted this rate of loss.

- The speed of it is astonishing.

- Yeah, the speed.

People were saying by the end of the century, sea ice may be gone.

And now they're saying maybe in six years, it'll be gone.

- Do you ever think about it if you were not on the island how small the colony might be?

- Oh, I know what I see that's it like if I hadn't pursued it, it would have been maybe 25 pairs and when the polar bear showed up, it would have been wiped out.

- It's remarkable 'cause you've helped these birds adapt.

- Yes.

- George is a remarkable individual, incredibly tenacious.

What he's chosen to do in the face of this gloom and doom that we hear about all the time in terms of global warming is he's chosen to focus on the specific elements that are in front of him to educate all of us and give us hope for the future that we can turn this thing around.

This exact spot used to be ice 18 years ago.

This isn't a computer module or an algorithm or prediction.

This is real life.

George has seen it and experienced it.

He's worthy of a photograph and I'm proud to take it.

(laughing) So what do you think?

- [George] That's it.

- [Joe] That's the picture.

- [George] You got it.

(dramatic music) I am hoping that my legacy will be that I gathered this data set that certainly helped some people see the climate change was happening and that there was a study that was started in 1975 of a thriving seabird colony in Arctic Alaska, and the colony is now facing extinction.

And that happened in one researcher's lifetime.

Because the longest study of an Arctic seabird, longest continuous study of an Arctic seabird is a very important resource.

And it's being seen that way by more and more people.

And it is just too valuable for it to end, no matter what might happen to me, if it continues to monitor something as important as climate change.

I have hoped that many species and most importantly, humans will get to the point where they'll go, "We need to be able to change what we're doing because of these changes in our environment."

- All right, be well, man.

- Okay.

- I'm gonna see you again in five years.

- In five years?

I'm gonna hold you to that.

- The 50th.

- Yes.

- All right.

- For sure.

- All right, stay safe.

- Yeah.

- Safe travels.

- Thanks man.

- The two or three times when I almost didn't come back to keep the study going, the reason I did was because of my personal connection to the island, because my experience has made it so much a part of my life.

What I really hope, to the extent that I set up any sort of thing that can be maintained in the future, it will be like, yes, somebody needs to go back to Cooper Island every summer and see who's trying to breed and band any chicks that are fledged from that island so that this study can be maintained.

(soft upbeat music) - Joining me now via Skype is George Divoky, Director for Cooper Island Arctic Research.

We're also joined by Mary Albert, Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and Executive Director of the US Ice Drilling Drogram, and James Carlton, Professor of Marine Sciences Emeritas at Williams College.

George I'll begin with you as we tape this, you're preparing to head out to Cooper Island in just a few days.

Describe for us what you would expect to see up there this year and how you left the island last year.

- Well, this year in the Arctic is gonna be a very interesting year because as the melt has continued, my population has been on a downward trajectory ever since 1990 and the last year was a year where we only had 25 pairs breeding versus the 225 pairs so we had in the late 80s.

So I'm afraid of what I'm gonna be seeing.

I'm very concerned about what I'm gonna be seeing.

But I'm also having that pre-field excitement because I'll be seeing some birds that I've been following for 20 years, coming back to breed and seeing how they're coping with a melting Arctic.

- Do you find that you get that excitement every year?

- Yes, I do, I do.

People say, how can you keep going back there every year?

And I say, well, because I really want to.

I've been fortunate to have a study that is at a place in the world where what a bird population is doing is of interest to a much larger audience because of the fact that it is an indicator of a much bigger problem than just what's happening with one seabird colony.

- One of the commonalities of many among our panelists today is that you've all traveled a lot doing research.

So Mary I'll turn to you.

You visited Greenland, you visited Antarctica, you've spent a lot of time looking at ice.

George was describing some of the things he's expecting to see on Cooper Island when he goes back.

When you're in these icy regions, what are you seeing when you're out there in the field?

- Well, the cryosphere is changing a lot now.

Typically, when I've been out in the field, it's been in the center of the Greenland ice sheet or the Antarctic ice sheet where snow rarely melts.

We were in the center of Greenland ice sheet in 2012, when it had the most massive lateral extent of melting on the ice sheet that has happened since 1889.

And we were happened to be in the right place at the right time to witness that.

In the ice core record, we can see changes that have happened much further into the past, both in Greenland and Antarctica.

- And when you say cryosphere Mary, so for the non-scientist, like myself, explain what region that's referring to.

- cryosphere refers to the regions that have snow and ice for a major part of the year.

So it might be Alpine glaciers in Alaska or Switzerland.

It's also the Arctic and the Antarctic where the world's two massive ice sheets, the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheet are.

- And so James we'll turn to you now.

You've traveled the world looking at our oceans, watching how species move, how they adapt to a changing climate, what are you seeing when you're out in the field?

- I've been recently working at field sites in New England, in Chile, Galapagos Islands, Pacific Northwest.

And one of the uniform things that we see all over the world is that there are a great many species moving poleward in both hemispheres.

And if we use the Atlantic coast as an example, we have something called Caribbean Creep, where many species from the Caribbean are colonizing the Southwest Atlantic coast.

And up here in New England, we have Chesapeake Creep where a lot of species that historically occur no further north than Chesapeake or Delaware Bay are now showing up in long island sound.

Some of them turning around the corner of Cape Cod and heading up to Gulf of Maine.

- And so George, I wanna throw it back to you because I understand you've witnessed some of this creep in your research when it comes to the food sources that are out there for the birds that you're studying.

Can you talk a little bit about how those food sources have changed for black guillemots?

- Well, my subspecies of black guillemot is adapted to feeding under the ice on Arctic cod and Arctic cod are a very high calorie fish.

That forms the basis for the food web in the Arctic.

Basically all the seals are eating Arctic cod and polar bears are just basically repackaged Arctic cod.

Arctic cod are found in waters rarely above two degrees Celsius, around what 34 or five degrees Fahrenheit.

And as the ocean has warmed, the Arctic cod have disappeared.

So that the prey that my species depends on and certainly when they're feeding their young, they depend on it has disappeared.

And the alternate prey are all substandard in terms of both abundance and quality.

So that has been one of the major things that has been driving them down in the population.

But we are hoping as was mentioned in terms of the range shifts that some Arctic fish may be coming up into the area.

And when they do, then the guillemot population would very likely turn to these rather high density and actually very high caloric forage fish that are currently being documented as moving up into the Western Arctic.

- Mary, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the work you've done studying ice cores and how ice cores can preserve a very, very large scale record of climate changes around the world.

- Sure, well, as you mentioned earlier, the earth is a system of systems, and the ice core record preserves the atmospheric chemistry constituent from bubbles in the ice to atmospheric chemistries, to biological clues, all the clues that the winds take to the Greenland Antarctic or other glacial sites.

We know from ice cores, for example, that climate can change abruptly in less than 10 years, from the Greenland ice core.

We also know from ice cores that the CO2 record in the atmosphere now, we can go outside and measure it.

It's 417 parts per million.

We know from ice cores, from direct measurements of over 800,000 years that the CO2 varies naturally from 180 to 280 to 180 to 280, 180 to 280 parts per million over long-term glacial cycles.

It's now 417.

We are out of the realm of experience in terms of forcing our climate now.

And the climate is changing rapidly because of that.

- And so Mary, you mentioned the history being in some part preserved, not only in the ice core itself, but in the winds that are sort of frozen in time in those ice cores.

I'm assuming that's in sort of the bubbles that are in there and sort of the chemistry that you can define of the era from those bubbles, is that correct?

- Yes, as the snow falls on the ice sheets over years and years and centuries and decades, the thousands of years in the cold regions, it doesn't melt.

As the snow compacts into firn and glacial ice, the bubbles that become trapped in that ice are samples of ancient atmospheres.

So from ice cores, we can actually take those ice samples and through a complicated process, you get the air out of the bubbles and measure the composition of the atmosphere over a hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

- And so George turning back to you, as the climate has changed, I know you've adjusted how you reach and how you live on Cooper Island when you're there.

Can you maybe just briefly describe some of the day-to-day living arrangements that you've had to change on Cooper Island when you're there doing your work?

- Yes, well, that's been an interesting part of the study is that I've had to adapt as much as the birds have had to adapt to in melting Arctic.

One of the scariest things is that polar bears never visited the island for the first 28 years of the study.

And then in the early 2000s, I looked up and there was a polar bear back at my camp walking through the tent where I kept my shotgun.

And now polar bears are there on a regular basis.

So I had to get a cabin because the bears wrecked our tents in 2002.

And now I live in an 8 by 12 box with an electric fence around it because of the fact that polar bears are there and they're there because they are moving south.

It's one of the few things that isn't moving poleward as much 'cause of the climate change.

They're actually moving south because they are losing the substrate that they walk on, and then coming to Cooper Island and trying to find food.

And there isn't much food for them.

And they started eating my guillemot chicks in the early 2000s.

And I had to find nest cases that were polar bear proof.

The other big change is that for at least the first quarter century, I had only fresh water that I got from melting multi-year sea ice.

There's no fresh water on the island.

And I would find pieces of multi-year ice on the north side, put them in bags, melt it down.

After multiple years of freezing, the salt is driven out.

And that's what we got by with in terms of drinking water.

There is no more multi-year ice washing up on the island anymore.

So now I am forced to melt snow as soon as I get out there, cause there's some big drifts around the cabin and then hope that it rains in August and it's raining more frequently in August as a result of climate change and I catch that water.

So I've had to switch water supplies for that.

And the frost cellar that I used to have on the island to keep my yogurt and cheese and other things in, I would dig a hole down into the permafrost, the permafrost, where that frost cellar was, is gone.

And I went out a few years ago to dig that hole and dug down three feet and hit water.

So I don't have any way of keeping things.

And now I have a refrigerator on the island that I power with solar and wind power to keep things cool.

- Can you describe the weather while you're there a little bit more?

You had mentioned it's raining more frequently.

- In terms of the weather, and one of the major things about the island and probably one of the reasons I get excited about going up there is that the sun is above the horizon up until the 2nd of August.

And then it sets then, but it doesn't really get dark until later in the year.

So that one is able to go outside and see the weather on a regular basis in a way that if you have the typical daylight cycle - you don't - so that I've been able to observe how things are changing.

And there has been this major change with atmospheric circulation that is changing the ice characteristics there, where we get more moist air coming up from the north.

And as a result, more rain on the island.

In the past, Utqiagvik was thought to have four inches of rain per year.

That's been upgraded to probably six or seven, but now they're getting much more than that.

And we actually had four inches in one summer recently.

It's definitely getting warmer and it's definitely getting wetter and it's basically becoming sub-arctic.

All those characteristics are things that you find typically in the Bering sea and south of the Arctic Circle.

- James, turning back to you.

I know in addition to looking at the temperature of water, you've also looked at what's in the water in terms of man-made pollution that goes in there.

Plastics in particular have been obviously increasing in prevalence in our oceans.

I wonder if you just sort of pick that thought up and what the implications for our climate are there.

- Yeah, it's an interesting and rather complex interrelationship.

We've been looking at the role of plastics in the ocean, particularly macro plastics, form rafts as a unexpected transport vector for non-native species, literally across entire ocean bases.

That in turn is linked to the increasingly vast amount of plastic that has entered the oceans, and that actually is linked in a way to climate change.

with a number of models, under a number of models, we expect more cyclonic systems to develop, hurricanes, monsoons, cyclones, which increasing in intensity and in frequency.

That in turn sweep along coastlines where we have staged in large metropolitan areas, really truly an amazing amount of plastic material that can get then washed, injected into the world's oceans.

We saw that with a tsunami in 2011 in Japan which injected a vast amount of plastic into the north Pacific, transported nearly 400 living Japanese species to the Pacific Northwest of the US coast and to Hawaii.

And we believe this will be a pattern in the future as more plastic enters the ocean and therefore adds as a new transport vector for species, probably all over the world.

- George I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about why the average person should care about all of this.

And this is the question that all three of you probably wrestle with often and it's a question many scientists wrestle with when they're doing their work.

But why should someone here in Connecticut really care if there are fewer birds on a remote island in Alaska, or if there are more plastics in the water, or if there's ice melting in Greenland.

Academically, the reasons are compelling, but I lay that question at your feet George.

- No, and I very much realize that, there are six people in the world who care about black guillemot populations and three of them I doubt their data.

And the other two don't like me much.

So I mean, it isn't like my data on black guillemots is going to really be something that's gonna convince people.

And when I give talks to Audubon groups and various people like that, that aren't seabird people, I have frequently ended the talk, talking about rain shifts, talking about the fact that I am seeing the guillemots range moved north and the guillemots can't do there because there's no islands north of there.

And I then show a map of where wheat is currently grown, or at least recently, up until recently was grown in the US and where, given some scenarios - and this was something I pulled off the web - where wheat could be grown in North America in 2050, given certain climate change scenarios.

And I tell people, I say like, if you go home and people say, how was the black guillemot talk?

Tell them that it was a talk about wheat.

Tell them it's a talk about how, if we don't do something about climate change, ranges of food that we've been depending on and that our whole civilization is based on, will be shifting and then there'll be trouble for us just the same way there is for this obscure guillemot colony up in the Arctic.

- Mary, I understand you've researched how wildfires may exacerbate ice melt in places like Greenland where you've done a lot of your research.

Can you talk a little bit more about that connection?

- Sure, well, like we mentioned earlier, the earth is a connected system of systems.

And so we were in central Greenland when the large ice melt happened.

Our analysis showed black carbon from fires, and we trace those back to fires in Northern Canada.

There were fires in Northern Canada, and they're increasing in frequency because of climate change, because it's getting warmer because of pests moving north killing the trees, and then the fires come.

So that's soot blew over Greenland, it fell as the snow and in a warm cycle, it got warmer in Greenland that summer of 2012.

The snow probably would not have melted as much had it not had that layer of soot too small really for the human eye to see, but we can measure it.

It was enough for the albedo effect: the albedo or the reflectivity of the snow to be changed in order to create that widespread melt.

- Mary, I understand you're going to be visiting Greenland in the coming weeks heading to a community that's really, really far north there where fuel, fossil fuels are very expensive and you've been doing some work to help mitigate some of those cost burdens there.

Can you talk a bit more about that?

- Yeah, the people of the Arctic have been experiencing climate change for a long time.

And although in mid-latitude countries like the US, scientists and people who live close to the land have realized it, much of the population has not.

In the high Arctic, the population has been suffering dramatically because of the loss of sea ice, the changing fisheries, the expense of living there.

The village I'm working with is the village of Qaanaaq in Northwest Greenland.

People have lived there up to a 1000 years, and they've lived in balance with nature, with the hunting and the fishing.

They live modern lifestyles, and the cost of fossil fuels is now too high for them to afford their lifestyles.

They are worried about losing their culture.

They asked me to come to work with them and explore renewable energy where the wind and the sun and the water provide the energy that they need to live in balance with the future.

Through the National Science Foundation, I've been fortunate to have a grant to do this work, and it's really exciting.

No one there doubts climate change.

- Jim, I wonder if you have any trips planned coming up in the next few months, and if so, what you're expecting to see when you're out in the field.

- Yes in a post pandemic world we're not traveling too much, not in the very near future, but certainly in 2022, we're gonna be going back to a number of field sites where the work was delayed in both 2020, and actually for part of 2021.

So we're going back to plan trips to Chile and to the Galapagos Islands to look at the continuing movements and range expansions of quite a number of species.

And also back to the Pacific Northwest in 2022, where we're seeing a number of species moving north along the Pacific coast, that's California creep in that case where a lot of species are coming up unexpectedly in the sense of trying to predict which species will be moving.

That's one of the big challenges of looking at range expansions.

We know species are moving, we know that's going to happen.

It's when, not if.

Predicting which species are gonna be moving poleward in both hemispheres and predicting what their impacts will be.

That's really one of the big challenges of looking at the movement of species under climate change scenarios.

But again, the movement of species is one of the great indicators of climate change.

If I can say just a word about why people should care, much of what we're doing is to look at all the various indicators of climate change, whether they are chemical, biological, physical, and really it goes to understanding and trying to communicate with the public and the political world, through the media often, what that means to the quality of human life.

The quality of the environment.

What things are gonna look like in 10, 20, 50 years.

Whether it's human health, whether it's the economy, there is nothing that climate change does not touch.

And yet, as what we said earlier, there is still an embarrassingly large fraction of the public who seems not to have actually absorbed that message.

- I wanna thank our guests today.

George Divoky, Director for Cooper Island Arctic Research, Mary Albert, Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and Executive Director of the US Ice Drilling Program and James Carlton, Professor of Marine Sciences Emeritas at Williams College.

Thanks to you all so, so much for coming on.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- We've talked about Alaska and the Arctic.

We visited with ocean experts, and now we turn to New England.

The six state region we call home is in the middle of a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels, but the lingering effects of years and years of pollution have left their mark.

But before we get to that story, let's take a look at New England's past, a history preserved in the journals of one of the region's most iconic naturalists, Henry David Thoreau.

Joining me now is Richard Premack, Professor of Biology at Boston University, Katie Dykes, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

And Mark Mitchell, a physician and Associate Professor at George Mason University.

Richard, we'll start with you.

A lot of us think about Thoreau as a philosopher, but he was also a scientist making detailed observations of plants and birds in the 1850s.

So what do Thoreau journals and notes tell us, and how is that helping us understand climate change in New England today?

- During the 1850s, Thoreau made very detailed observations about when plants were flowering, when trees were leafing out and when birds were migrating.

And so what our research group has been doing is repeating the same observations and also working with residents of Concord who've been observing bird migration times, and we found that there've been very dramatic changes in Concord, which are very clearly associated with climate change.

So with a warming climate, the trees are leafing out about 14 days earlier.

The wildflowers are leaving out about 10 days earlier and the birds really aren't changing at all.

So this actually represents one of the best examples of climate change that we have from anywhere in the world and it's right here in Concord, Massachusetts.

- Can you talk about some other sources of data that you're drawing upon when you are looking at climate change in New England?

I understand there's detailed weather records here, and there's other sources particularly around where you are in Concord that have been kept up since throughout at his work.

- That's right, so when we first started this work 20 years ago, there were no good examples of the effects of climate change from anywhere in the Eastern United States.

And we found that there's a great wealth of information here in New England, because of all the universities, the culture of naturalists, and also the universities and museums in this region.

And so there are records from really all over New England region.

And we really focused on Eastern Massachusetts.

And for example, there's the Manomet Bird Observatory, where they've been observing bird migration times for 40 years.

We have all those data.

Records of when birds are migrating at Mount Auburn cemetery.

They're all the records of flowering time kept at the Arnold Arboretum and many journals kept by individual naturalists.

And all these records tell us the same thing which is that the plants of this region are responding very strongly to climate change, but that the birds are much less of a strong signal of climate change.

And that's because when the birds are migrating up from the Caribbean and South America, they don't know that the climate has changed here yet.

- And so what you're describing there Richard is in some ways sort of an ecological mismatch where plants are maybe flowering earlier as you were saying, trees are leafing out earlier, but the bird patterns haven't changed.

So what are some of the implications that could stem from that?

- Right, so this is one of the most active areas of ecological research right now in the world, which is looking to see how there might be mismatches between different species or between different groups of species, because they're different responsiveness to climate change.

And one is the example of birds and plants.

And when the birds arrive in the spring, they're eating insects.

And if they're arriving a little bit late, they might miss this big pulse of insects, which is emerging early in the spring and feeding on the plants.

And so this is something which is being very actively researched on.

And actually at the University of Connecticut is one of the leading universities to be researching this topic.

And people are looking to see how it's possible that bird populations might be declining because the birds don't have enough insects to eat when they arrive in the spring.

And they don't have enough insects to feed their nestlings when they start to develop early in the spring also.

Our research group in particular is also looking at the mismatch between trees and wild flowers, because it seems that trees are more responsive to climate change than wild flowers.

It's what might be the trees are leafing out ever earlier, and will be shading out the early spring wild flowers.

- What's it like reading Thoreau's journals?

Is it difficult, is it hard to understand?

How were his observations?

- Well, Thoreau is really great.

So, people just love reading Thoreau.

That's why the book "Walden" continues to be read even after more than 160 years.

There's always something new to read in them.

And I read "Walden" as a book about climate change.

So when I read "Walden," he's telling us to observe nature carefully and we will see the effects of climate change.

He is telling us to live simply.

In his case, he was telling us to live simply because then we would be healthier and happier.

But also as a civilization, that's really the way to deal with the problem of climate change.

If we live simply and we use less fossil fuels, that's the way of dealing with climate change.

And he's also telling us to stand up against injustice throughout the book "Walden."

In his time, he was telling us we should stand up against society for things like war and slavery.

And now these things still exist in our society, but we also have this problem of climate change.

So if he was alive today, he would tell us that we should be in addition to all the other injustices, we should also be fighting against climate change.

- So let's fast forward today.

And commissioner Dykes, I'll turn to you.

What are some of the ways that we're seeing climate change play out in Connecticut right now?

- Well, I'll tell you, Patrick that we expect that we're gonna see a lot of changes happening over the next couple of years.

We are a coastal state.

So 20 inches of sea level rise is projected by 2050.

And we expect our coastal flood risk could increase by a factor of five to 10 with no change in storm to conditions.

High water levels like what occurred during Superstorm Sandy here in Connecticut, would they be expected about every five to 10 years.

And another important change is by mid-century the number of days per year with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit is expected to increase from an average of five before the year 2000, to an average of 25 days per year.

But those are all things in the future.

I think Patrick, one of the really important things that I often or misperceptions that I often encounter when talking with folks about climate changes.

So I think people think that we can wait until it gets bad enough until it's really not tolerable anymore, and then take action (chuckles).

And that's just, unfortunately not how it works.

All of those emissions that are in the air, that are going into the air today, are gonna be with us for a long time.

And they're creating these accelerating and irreversible changes.

And that's why it's so urgent for us to reduce fossil fuel use today as quickly as possible.

- And now, while climate change obviously is affecting the earth's environment as the commissioner was outlining there, it's also affecting human health and having real impacts there.

Mark Mitchell I'll turn to you.

What are some of the health effects of climate change that you're seeing?

- Right.

So, health professionals are seeing a number of different changes from the effects of climate change.

I use a mnemonic that I call HEAT WAVE, where the H stands for direct heat related effects, such as heat exhaustion, heat stroke.

The E is for exacerbation of pre-existing respiratory disease and cardiac disease.

The A is for asthma.

We're seeing a huge rates of asthma in Connecticut and in New England.

T is for traumatic injury from severe weather during hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe weather.

The W stands for water and food borne illnesses from things like blue-green algae, red tide.

The A is for allergies.

And again, in New England, we have some of the highest rates of allergies.

The V is for vector-borne diseases, such as Lyme and West Nile disease and Zika.

And then the E is for emotional and mental health conditions that we're seeing.

That's a brief overview of the main health effects that we're seeing.

And I can of course go into detail about each one.

- Commissioner Dykes, I'll turn back to you.

The region of New England right now is in the middle of a big shift away from fossil fuels to newer sources like solar and wind.

I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the state needs to retool its energy mix to avoid some of the harsher impacts of climate change?

- Sure, Connecticut, for example, is on track to have 91% of our power supply coming from emission-free resources by 2025.

That's the good news.

But we still have a hill to climb when it comes to these other sectors and especially transportation.

Our transportation sector is responsible for 40%, the largest share of emissions in our economy.

And those emissions are growing because even though cars are more efficient, getting more miles per gallon, we're driving more.

But there's bright spots here with a lot of auto manufacturers committing to shift to electric vehicles.

- Mark, throughout your career you've been an outspoken witness to how city residents are bearing the cost of many of our planet's environmental woes.

And in the 1990s, you started the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice to educate the community about the link between pollution and communities of color.

Can you describe that link a bit more and what created it.

- Pregnant women are more likely to have babies prematurely during the heat waves if they're working outside, if they don't have access to air conditioning.

We also see the asthma in New England is very, very high compared to other parts of the country.

And we are seeing more asthma due to the air pollution.

As the commissioner said, the traffic related air pollution is concentrated in urban areas.

And then we have the urban heat islands.

That is where there is less trees shading in areas that primarily the areas that were formerly redlined, where African-American communities were not allowed to get loans to improve their neighborhoods.

So when the temperature, the nighttime temperatures don't get below 70 degrees for three days or more, then the number of people dying increases greatly.

And again, it tends to be urban shut-ins elderly residents in urban heat island areas that suffer from that.

- Richard, I wonder if he can pick up that idea of heat islands.

I know this is something that you've looked at in Boston in particular, where you're seeing the effects of global warming contributing to temperatures rising there, but also on top of that, you're seeing the impacts of the heat island effect in Boston.

So you can sort of pick that thought up and describe what you're seeing there.

- Well, certainly in the city, it's warmer than in more rural areas and you see plants flowering earlier.

So we look at the changes over time in terms of temperature, but also you can get a gradient just as you drive from Boston out into the suburbs.

But I also just wanna say that in the case of our own family, we can see the effects of climate change.

When I was growing up, I live in the same house that I grew up in, which you can see behind me.

And when I was growing up, my parents always said, you don't need air conditioning in Boston because it never gets that hot.

But now we've moved to having air conditioning in our house.

When I go for a walk in the woods, I used to think that there was nothing that could harm us in the woods of New England.

But now when I go out in the woods, I'm very, very careful about not getting ticks because ticks carry Lyme disease.

And that's again, kind of an of climate change that the ticks can survive over the winter now more easily.

And then my wife is a very enthusiastic gardener.

And when I was growing up, people always said that you can't grow figs in New England, that it's just too cold in the wintertime.

And now we grow figs very readily outside with minimal protection, and we get good crops of figs here in the Boston area.

So these are all signs of climate change.

- Are the rapidly rising temperatures that we're seeing in city areas serving as some sort of predictor for temperature rise that we're going to see writ large and other parts of the world or the country?

- There's a lot of variation in temperature and- - I'm asking you to predict the future there so I understand that's difficult (laughing).

- So cities represent kind of a model, and I think that that probably Mark would agree with that, that cities are hotter than the rural areas right now.

But they're just an indication of what's going to happen in the suburbs and in rural areas around New England.

It's just happening earlier in the cities because the cities are several degrees warmer than the surrounding areas because of all the buildings and asphalt, and also the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air above cities in still conditions.

And so these all contribute, but they're just kind of a predictor of what will be happening throughout the rest of New England in coming decades.

- Commissioner Dykes, turning back to you.

I wanted to ask you quickly about the transportation and climate initiative.

This was a proposed a multi-state agreement to cap emissions from large scale fossil fuel producers and reinvest a portion of that money into some communities that have been overburdened by air pollution.

It's had a tough road here in Connecticut.

It's had a tough road in other New England and mid Atlantic states.

Why do you think there's been sort of the pushback to the transportation climate initiative?

- Well, I'll say, we remain committed to the Transportation Climate Initiative here in Connecticut.

We know that we will not be able to meet the legislatively mandated targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030, unless we have a tool that's as impactful as the Transportation Climate Initiative or TCI to help us significantly reduce emissions.

And the terrific things about TCI is that it leverages regional action.

We have been working with Rhode Island, with Massachusetts, with DC on seeking to implement this program.

It does in Connecticut require legislative authorization.

And so that's the step we've been focused on, but the policy is so sound.

The program is so impactful that we are just continuing to work hard to get adoption of this tool, which we desperately need.

- And yet adoption still has been difficult as I don't have to tell you.

Why do you think it has been difficult to get this through the legislative hurdles that it needs to pass?

- Look, climate action is something that is still hard to do.

We have to get people focused on addressing climate change.

Sometimes people think of this as like a far off issue that we'll deal with tomorrow.

But I think as we stand here in 2021, you've just heard about all of those different observable, tangible changes that we're seeing in our environment.

It's becoming clearer and clearer that we can't delay and we can't give up, and it is so urgent to make these changes and implement these programs as quickly as we can.

And the changes that we're seeing are not just in the natural world from climate change.

I spoke with a mayor today who's rating agencies is asking them, when they're doing a municipal bond readings, about what investments the municipality is making in addressing climate change.

I hear from businesses, on the flip side, that are investing in building out electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

We have an electric vehicle charging manufacturer right here in Connecticut employing 150 people.

They're looking to expand because they see this enormous, incredibly exciting transformation and clean transportation revolution that's coming.

So these are some examples, sort of like the trees and the birds and the insects.

So too is our economy changing.

And so it's really critical that we work with policy makers to stay in line with frankly, the private sector, which is making these changes really dramatically now.

- Mark, I wanna turn back to you, maybe speak about how you think we can motivate people to care about the issue of climate change.

What gets people fired up?

What gets people passionate about this issue?

- Right, so our research at George Mason shows that people really are concerned about the health effects of climate.

They are concerned about their children having asthma, and knowing that if we address climate change, we can reduce the amount of asthma.

And that's why it's so important that we invest and that we do it in a way to benefit those who are most vulnerable.

We need to develop plans for resilience and they need to be hyper-local.

We need to identify those who are most vulnerable and most likely to die during a climate disaster and to plan to make sure that they don't die, to make sure that they can survive the changing climate.

- Richard, when you compare what Thoreau saw in the 1850s to what biologists are seeing out the field today, how does that make you feel?

- Well, one thing is it certainly convinces me that climate change is a reality.

So any naturalists that is looking at long-term records or making observations over years sees the effects of climate change.

If you've just started noting keeping a journal about the effects of climate change, then you can see the effects.

As a scientist, it's a very interesting time to live because it's a time in which we see the world changing in front of us.

Decades ago when scientists looked at natural systems, they often thought of them as being in equilibrium, as forces balancing out.

But now as biologists, we're seeing things changing in front of us, whether you're a marine biologist or an ornithologist, whether you're looking at forests or insect communities, you just see things are changing so rapidly in front of us.

So it's a time which is exciting, but it's also frightening.

- I wanna thank all our guests today.

Richard Premack, a professor of Biology at Boston University.

Katie Dykes, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

And Mark Mitchell, a physician and associate professor at George Mason University.

Thanks so much for all of you for coming on today and sharing your expertise.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- In his book, "Carrying the Fire," Apollo 11 astronaut, Michael Collins describes going to space and looking back home.

He says, "If I could use only one word "to describe the earth as seen from the moon, "I would ignore both its size and color and search "for a more elemental quality, that of fragility.

"The earth appears fragile above all else.

"I don't know why, but it does."

From the sea to the sky, our planet is in our care.

This has "Cutline".

Thanks for joining us, I'm Patrick Skahill.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding provided by Connecticut Green Bank.