>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> All right.
I'm Jennifer Harpster.
I'm a reference and research
specialist for the Science,
Technology and Business Division
here at the Library of Congress.
That was perfect!
Welcome to today's program,
"Looking Homeward Toward Earth:
The Power of Perspective."
This program is the sixth and
final program in the 2012 Series,
presented through a
partnership between our division
and NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center.
We are currently planning
the 2013 Series,
which will feature NASA scientists
delving into earth and space topics,
like the Mars Curiosity Rover,
XO Planets, managing satellites,
water issues in India, and
hot towers and hurricanes.
I am honored today to introduce
today's speaker, Chief Scientist
of NASA, Dr. Walled Abdaladi.
Dr. Abdaladi began his journey
at NASA in 1996 as a researcher
for Goddard's Ocean and Ice
Branch, where he analyzed satellite
and aircraft measurements
of glaciers and ice sheets.
He subsequently became Deputy
Scientist for NASA's Ice Cloud
and Land Elevation Satellite,
otherwise known as ICESat.
In 2000, he managed
cryospheric science programs
at NASA headquarters, and
was the program scientist
for ICESat and Radarsat missions.
By 2004, he was head of the
cryospheric sciences branch
at Goddard, which focuses
on the behavior
of ice sheets, sea ice and glaciers.
In 2008, he became
director of the University
of Colorado's Earth Science
and Observation Center,
from which he is currently on leave
after being appointed NASA
Chief Scientist in 2011.
He serves as a principal advisor to
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
on science programs,
strategic planning,
and the evaluation of
related investments.
Dr. Abdaladi received his Bachelor's
degree in mechanical engineering
from Syracuse University
and a Master's
in aerospace engineering sciences
from the University of Colorado.
His doctorate was from the
Department of Geography
in Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences
at the University of Colorado,
and he was one of the first
graduates of this program.
He has published more than
50 peer-reviewed papers,
as well as book chapters and
NASA-related technical reports.
He has been the featured
lecturer and keynote for addresses
to the United Nations, the
American Institute for Aeronautics
and Astronautics, American
Geophysical Union
and the Smithsonian.
He has been recognized
with various awards,
including the NASA
Exceptional Service Medal,
and the White House
Presidential Early Career Award
for scientists and engineers.
Today we will see the Earth from
a new and larger perspective,
so please join me in welcoming
NASA's Chief Scientist,
Dr. Waleed Abdalati, to
the Library of Congress.
>> Thank you.
I appreciate that.
It's kind of weird hearing your
career on a timeline like that.
I can't help but sort
of extrapolate a little
into the future and
wonder what's next.
But right here right now I'm
in this place talking to you,
and I want to thank you for
your attention up front.
I appreciate you taking the
time out of your own days
to hear what I have to say.
I believe what I have
to say is important,
so I'm glad there are
interested parties.
I'll let you judge when I'm
done whether it was important
or worth your time, or not.
I call this talk, "Looking
Homeward Toward Earth:
The Power of Perspective,"
and the theme here is going
to be perspective, because when we
look at the Earth in different ways,
we see it in different ways.
We get a richer, more comprehensive
understanding that's really
essential to being responsible
inhabitants of this planet.
But I get a lot of
people who ask me,
NASA earth science, I don't get it.
It's not a question, actually.
They state, NASA earth
science, I don't get it.
And if you think about
what we do at NASA,
we really are about answering
fundamental questions
that are really at the
core of the human spirit.
When you break down the human
spirit to its fundamental elements,
it's really about, first
and foremost, survival.
Our most basic human instinct
is the instinct for survival.
It's about exploration,
exploring our surroundings.
From the time we could stand
upright, we've looked upward.
And it's about using what
we learn from exploration
to improve our lives, to improve
our situation or station in live.
And all of these are elements
that we do in science at NASA,
whether it's astrophysics, peering
toward the edges of the universe,
and early back toward
the beginning of time,
at least as we understand it.
Or exploring our celestial
neighbors.
A lot of you have probably heard,
we recently had a major success
on the surface of Mars, really
incredible to see and experience.
Here's little facts.
At the time of the landing,
there were 14 million households
observing the landing --
which for 1:30 in the morning
is pretty impressive --
and actually, over a
billion hits on the website.
Think about that, really capturing
human imagination, human attention.
Examining the sun that fuels us.
The sun is really the primary source
of energy for all life on Earth,
not just in terms of heat, but
photons are the key ingredient
to photosynthesis, which sets up
the food chain that you all learned
about in high school
or junior high school.
Really, the photon, the sun,
the energy that drives the Earth
and society, frankly, and
understanding the planet
on which we live and the planet our
descendants will live on tomorrow,
what they'll inherit from us.
So it all fits.
The space stage view, NASA, what
we do, it really is about getting
to the core of who we
are, what we think,
what we dream about,
what we believe.
And I like to characterize
it as science
to inspire and science to serve.
And as chief scientist,
I can't say this enough.
I really do believe we inspire
imagination, we inspire creativity,
we inspire exploration,
we inspire civilization,
and we serve divination
through our efforts.
Hey, there's one chair over here.
You can grab that one.
You're welcome to sit on the floor.
You're welcome to stand here and
give the talk if you want to.
And so let's look at this picture.
I said the talk is about
perspective, and this,
taken by the astronauts on
Apollo 8 Christmas Eve 1968,
changed the way we viewed our world.
And it was no longer, you
know, us/them nations,
nations in the state of unrest,
nations at war, nations in peace,
conflict, it was the
Earth, it was humanity--
suspended in silent darkness
together as a collective entity.
I find that both inspiring,
and I find that both a service
to humanity, to provide
this perspective.
and we've continued
to do so ever since.
But I like the words of
Carl Sagan when the voyage
of spacecraft was headed out
past Pluto and actually currently
about to leave or has left -- we
can't quite figure it out yet --
the solar system still
working on it, stay tuned.
turning back to look at Earth, and
what we saw was this pale blue dot.
And his famous words at the time,
from this distant vantage point:
"The Earth might not seem
of any particular interest.
But for us, it's different.
That's Earth, by the way, in the
box, and for those who don't know,
that's Saturn in the forefront.
But for us it's different.
That's here, that's
home, that's us."
And when you look at the
Earth from that perspective,
or from the perspective beyond
Saturn, or from the perspective
of close to Earth at night,
and we see the city lights --
I assume a lot of you have seen this
but some of you probably haven't --
we see a different kind of Earth.
What you see here from this
perspective is the human fingerprint
on the surface of Earth.
And that's the static version
of the human fingerprint.
This is the dynamic version --
sorry it's a little bit choppy.
But this is aircraft travel.
Every one of those -- this is
a snapshot of aircraft travel.
Every one of those flight, every one
of those yellow things is
an airplane in the sky.
And if you've ever played on
flightexplorer.com you've seen it.
Now, look, as night is
over the Atlantic Ocean,
we see a lot of the
transatlantic flights to Europe,
and what you'll see as
day breaks in Europe,
we start to see the flying
away from Western Europe.
I have this for the whole globe.
It's actually quite remarkable.
It's not just a static
fingerprint of lights on Earth,
it's the dynamic fingerprint.
And you know, a lot of people say to
me when I talk about earth science
and climate, a lot of times I get:
I just don't see how humans can
have an impact on the Earth.
And I look at something like this
and I just don't see how humans
cannot have an impact on the Earth.
And what that impact is, how
we view it, how we consider it,
really depends on perspective.
And that's what I'm here
to talk to you about.
And all of this, when you think
about it, happens in the context
of a very thin, thin atmosphere.
It looks thick in this picture,
but trust me, it's thin.
It sustains us, the air we
breathe, we could not survive,
there are many inhabitable planets,
uninhabitable planets out there.
This thin veneer of an atmosphere
is what allows us to live.
It's where we function,
it's where those lights are,
it's where those planes fly.
It used to be where all our
balloons flew until earlier today
or earlier this week when Felix
Baumgartner went a little beyond.
But it all happens there.
So our perspective of our world
changed dramatically with the launch
of the first TIROS
weather satellite in 1958,
and here is a little cheesy media
for you, if I can get it to play.
>> Ah, the '50s.
It gets better actually, but the
point here is that with the launch
of that satellite, we looked at
the world in a very different way.
>> "The historic launching of the
Thor-Able carrying the TIROS-1
in its bulbous nose takes place
at 6:40 a.m., a peacetime use
of a deadly war missile
that promises humanity a
new era in meteorology."
>> "Graphic animation supplied
by the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration
shows how the last stage
of the rocket shot the satellite
into orbit, a circular path
over the Earth 50 degrees north
to 50 degrees south, between 400
and 450 miles out in space.
A flying lady's hatbox that
circles the globe every 90 minutes,
during which every two seconds,
the wide-angle lens scans 800 square
miles, recordings it's directed back
to send back to this receiving
at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
Another space triumph for the
U.S., which is explained to Ike
at the White House by
Space Agency head Glenn on,
who produces a picture sequence
of the satellite scannings."
>> But the point of showing
this, aside from this walk
down memory lane for
a select few of us,
is really to drive home the point
that we did not know what
we would see from out there.
Our understanding, our
perception of the Earth was this.
This is what we thought we
might see from up there.
And since then it's become just
part of our everyday culture,
we take for granted, our ability
to observe the Earth from space
and what that allows for us.
And we have a fleet
of satellites now.
These are some of them,
that observe the Earth,
that provide the perspective,
that look at wavelengths
we can see visibly,
and that look at wavelengths
we can't see,
because there's information
contained in them as well.
So I want to talk a little
bit, focus in on certain parts
of the Earth's system now, and my
own area of research is primarily
in the Arctic, a little bit in the
Antarctic, but mostly on ice sheets,
glaciers and sea level rise, but
I dabble, I guess, in sea ice
and what's going on in sea
ice, in the area of sea ice.
And in the Arctic it's
been in the news a lot.
Sea ice, just for those who aren't
quite familiar, it's a thin veneer
of frozen seawater, a meter
thick a couple meters thick,
depending on where you
are, that traps ocean heat,
that insulates the ocean
from the atmosphere above,
and has a huge effect on
our weather and our climate.
And my theme, as I
said, is perspective.
This is one form of perspective,
kind of up close and personal.
Anyone in this room whose
been to grad school knows
that those are grad
students doing graduate work.
Anyone thinking of
graduate school, have at it.
But this is another perspective,
and both are important.
And when you look at the ice in this
way, you kind of get an appreciation
that it's very dynamic, that
it moves, that it interact5s
with the ocean, it
interacts with the atmosphere.
And what it does, it shrinks in the
summertime, grows in the winter,
shrinks in the summer, grows in the
winter, but in a very complex way.
So the three things that --
well, the two main things that sea
ice does for our planet is one,
help keep it cool by reflecting
incoming sunlight, and two,
affect the circulation of the air
and the water by trapping energy
in the ocean, serving as a
barrier, interacting with the ocean
through the exchange
of energy and salt.
And a lot of the ocean circulation
that we take for granted,
the Gulf stream, the
Kuroshio Current in Japan,
has its roots actually in Arctic
and Antarctic sea ice
growth and shrinkage.
So we watch the ice
grow, we watch it shrink,
and it's kind of initiative.
Okay, warmer temperatures
cause ice to shrink,
but also weather causes
ice to shrink.
As winds come in and move the
ice down to lower latitudes,
which you can see in this
animation here, the ice will melt
at the lower latitudes, or it
will diverge and become thinner
and become more vulnerable,
more susceptible to melt.
But one thing we've been doing is
tracking the evolution of this ice
since the satellite record
began in the late 1970s,
and we look at this with microwaves.
We look through the clouds at
wavelengths that our eyes can't see,
and we've tracked this growth.
We've tracked this shrinkage,
and over time we've been able
to monitor its evolution.
And this is what the ice has
done over the satellite record.
You see 1979 in the leftmost
and you see this year, 2012,
what we call the perennial
ice cover --
this is the stuff that
survives the summer melt.
This is the thick stuff,
this is the hearty stuff,
this is the higher inertia stuff.
It's not sort of subject
to quite immediate changes
in climate; it takes time.
And when it goes, even when it
grows back, it grows back --
it's thinner when it grows back.
It's taken years to reach the
thickness that it's reached,
so the disappearance of perennial
ice cover is of huge concern
in terms of its implication
for climate --
much more so actually than
the seasonal ice cover.
So if you look -- I'm going
to compare two years
for you, this one 1985.
It's kind of an average year.
I just pick that because
it's sort of in the middle
of the previous two decades;
didn't want to go too high,
didn't want to go too low.
And then the current year,
so that you get a sense
of the change in distribution.
So this was the perennial ice cover
at mid September in 1985, okay,
and this is what it
was this last year.
It's a very different circumstance.
And I always tell people,
don't get too wrapped
up around what happens
in a single year.
This is where perspective
comes in again.
What matters is what that
means in the broader context.
So we see the decreasing
ice cover, we see an average
and then we see the
transition to the new state
or the more recent state.
So while we don't want to get
too bogged down in a single year,
what this year means in the context
of everything else, is important.
And I want to represent it a
little bit differently here.
That's the graph you just
saw in the upper right.
What you see in the image is sort of
average ice cover, the climatology
from 1979 to 2000, and what
you see in the white is the ice
that you just saw in the
previous picture, 2012.
Now, there has been
a lot of interest
in navigating the Northwest Passage,
the fabled Northwest Passage,
because it provides potentially
a much shorter access route
between Asia and the eastern
United States, for example.
And at the cost of shipping --
airplanes tend to fly polar routes.
They try to fly the great
circle route, the more direct.
Shipping, we haven't had that
luxury because the shortest route,
the great circle route,
was blocked in by ice.
But if you look this year,
that Northwest Passage
was essentially open.
We saw this in 2007, when the
Northwest Passage had opened,
and there was a 76-year old hog
farmer, retired hog farmer --
I don't think you keep
farming hogs when you're 76 --
who sailed the Northwest
Passage with his wife
in a boat called the
Cloud Nine in 73 days.
And that's remarkable
that it was navigable.
Kudos to the couple that did it.
It's a great accomplishment.
And when I said this to
people, occasionally somebody
who knows a little history about the
Arctic would remind me that well,
that was done before in
1903, by Roald Amundsen,
who also was the first
person to the South Pole.
And that's true, kind of.
It was done in 1903, '04, and '05.
It took three years of sailing in,
freezing, waiting for the next year,
sailing in, freezing,
waiting for the next year,
and then finally sailing out.
It was a very different
circumstance.
So when I look at the happy
couple posing for their picture
in the Cloud Nine, I can't help but
wonder if Roald Amundsen is sort
of looking -- I mean,
look at that guy.
Look at the difference between
Amundsen and our happy couple.
It's a different circumstance
than at least one we've
been familiar with.
And it brings with it opportunity,
it brings with it concern,
and the only way to really
meaningfully recognize those
opportunities and address the
concerns is through perspective.
My own work is more on ice sheets.
Let's see, I'll take you
on a tour of my research --
here, here, here, here,
here, got really sick here.
And it all pretty much looks
like this, but it's beautiful.
And I'd love to share with you
if I had more time just what it's
like to be there, but suffice
to say, these areas are vast.
They're very expansive,
they're very beautiful,
they're very pristine,
really quite remarkable.
One thing I like to say, so
these were the work tent,
the kitchen tent, the sleep tents.
This was my sleep tent,
and this guy snored.
I joked that if this picture were
taken two days later there'd be one
less tent in the frame.
But these are really beautiful
places, but they're changing.
And a lot of people don't realize,
Greenland holds the equivalent
of about 23 feet of sea level wise;
Antarctica about 8
or 9 times that much.
Now, Greenland's not going
anywhere soon, but parts of it are.
Greenland is shrinking.
It is contributing to sea
level, as is Antarctica,
and the question is how much?
How fast? What does that mean?
One thing that's been in the news
quite a bit, at least in July,
right around July 13, was the
melt on the Greenland ice space.
We have ways from space
of observing melt.
This was actually what a lot of
my graduate work was dedicated to.
Now, what you see on the left, July
8, 2012, the melt areas are in red.
And that was typical.
Typically the most melt
we'd see on the ice was
about half the ice sheet, maybe 60%
of the ice sheet, but for one day
in July, we saw 97% of the ice sheet
have some wetness on the surface.
For those who don't know,
the interior is higher,
so as you get from the edges you're
going higher and higher up to
about 10,000 feet, and
that doesn't usually melt.
But in July, this happened.
And how unusual is that?
Well, we've never seen that in
the 30-year satellite record,
but if we look at ice cores we
actually can find melt layers
in the past.
The last one at the
summit of Greenland --
which isn't exactly the
coldest place, but it's close
to the coldest place, right there --
there was a little melt
layer from 120 years ago.
Before that it was a
couple hundred years.
So there have been events.
So here's where perspective
comes in.
The spatial perspective,
we looked at that, oh,
my gosh, it's melting like crazy.
Who'd have thought?
We've never seen this before.
But the temporal perspective,
actually we have --
well, we haven't seen the whole ice
sheet melt, but we've seen signs
that perhaps it did melt
for a year at a time.
So the big question is, where
are we headed with this?
Is this going to become
more and more common?
It's certainly been in our past,
so it's not a shock that it looked
like this, but what's
the future look like?
And for context, for perspective,
we look at the satellite data record
in addition to the ice
cores, and I put this figure
up because this is a microwave image
of the ice sheet, so at wavelengths
that our eyes cannot
see, energy is emitted.
In fact, our eyes cannot
see the vast majority
of energy that's emitted
from the surface or reflected
from the surface of the Earth.
At microwaves, melt
looks very, very bright.
It's the white you see
in the bottom left.
This is the area that's
melting in Greenland.
This is the dry smell up here.
And we could track this through
time, at least through 30 years
to see what the melt
extent or amount of melt,
has been over that 30-year period.
So now we see how -- get
away from the one-day event.
We've seen that before,
but what it means takes
on much more significance
in the context
of at least the last 30 years,
what the 2012 melt season
looked like in Greenland.
And okay, it's kind of intuitive.
Ice melts, it shrinks, it
contributes to sea level rise,
but there are actually
indirect effects associated
with this melt as well.
What you see here is a satellite
image of the western flank
of the Greenland ice sheet
with melt ponds on it.
The surface of the ice
has undulations in it,
and when melt water accumulates
it collects in these undulations
and it forms really
beautiful melt lakes actually.
So that's standing water, and the
dark area you see in the middle,
this is the makings of the
hole, what we call a mullion,
and you can kind of see a river.
You see this sinuous pattern at the
edge of the lake and you see areas
of stress fractures in here, but
you see kind of these conduits.
Now, why does this matter?
Well, over time, when that
water builds up, it finds a way.
It finds a way under the
pressure, the hydrostatic pressure,
to the bed where it flows along
the interface between the ice
and the bedrock and
lubricates that interface.
So the presence of melt water
actually causes ice to speed up,
goes about twice as fast in the
summer as it does in the winter
in the presence of this melt water.
Now, what does that look like?
I talk about perspective.
Here's one perspective.
So those rivers that I pointed
out, this lake has drained,
and now the melt water is
flowing in through this channel.
This is what it looks like staring
down into it -- again, perspective.
This is -- if you were
go to into that hole,
you'd have a lovely
one kilometer ride.
That's not lovely; I'm joking.
It's actually old and wet --
one kilometer ride to
the bottom of the ice.
So look at this picture again.
One of these people is my
glaciology professor from when I was
in grad school, and I'm
pretty sure it's him,
the farthest away from the ice.
And this is what we
call academic hierarchy.
We have the professor -- let's
see, we have the graduate student
and the poor unwitting undergrad
with his or her back to the ice,
enter to the water and closest
to it, and then of course,
the post doc finding his own way.
A different kind of perspective
that is hugely informed
by observations from satellite.
That's ice.
That's my thing.
That's what I do.
I want to turn now to something --
you know, ice is kind of
removed from our everyday lives.
We don't feel it, we
don't observe it,
we don't experience
it too frequently.
Something we do feel
more of is hurricanes,
and this is another
perspective shot.
This is from the perspective
of being inside a car
behind a windshield.
This is from the perspective of --
I don't know what would
possess a person,
but for taking a lovely
stroll through a hurricane.
This is a perspective
from the Space Station,
each one a little different
-- espeically this.
Each one a little bit different,
but I want to add now
layers to that perspective.
When we first started observing
hurricanes, we would watch.
We would watch the
movement of the clouds.
We could understand the structure.
You see the eye, you see the band,
you see the trajectory
that it follows.
We learn something that you
don't learn on the ground.
We're going to now add
to that another layer.
We're going to add the
perspective of temperature, again,
something your eyes don't see but
from space, we can see or sense.
And I want you to watch this now.
As the hurricane passes through,
red is warm water, blue is cool,
and you can see the blue water
in the wake of the hurricane.
What that means is energy went
from the water to the hurricane.
This is why they get strength.
Well, by stacking these
images on top of one another,
we start to understand
how they work.
We get much better insight
into the processes of work.
And now I'm going to
show you a third layer.
Using microwaves we can see into
the hurricane and estimate the term
and the precipitation
that falls out.
So what you see here now
is what's left behind.
So we can put that all into a
story, the trajectory, the energy,
the precipitation, and
start to understand
or dissect these hurricanes.
And what you're going to look at
now is something we call a CAT scan.
So here is the orbiting fleet.
And watch TRIM.
You see it coming at an angle across
your screen, it's going to come back
around the Earth, and
show you what it looks
like when we peer inside
these things.
So there's the cloud structure.
There you can see the banding.
You don't really see the eye in
this case, but as we look inside
and we look at the precipitation,
the banding becomes very evident.
The eye becomes very evident.
Where vertically in the atmosphere
this precipitation is coming
from becomes very evident, and
from that we can build models,
we can gain insight into one
of the most destructive
natural forces we know on Earth.
Hugely important information,
and one thing I try and stress
when I give talks, I'm not here
to talk about climate change.
I'm not here to convince
you of anything.
You're all intelligent people.
You found this room, which is
better than I did, so you're already
above the NASA chief scientist.
You're all intelligent,
you've all got your own ways
of gathering processing information.
I'm here to share information
about the human relationship
with the planet.
And I think this is something,
particularly in Washington,
something we can all agree on.
Let's put climate change,
manmade effects,
let's put all that aside
for the time being.
Happy to have that conversation,
but for now, wipe your mind clean
of that and just think about this.
Humans have always had a
relationship with the planet,
and the quality of that relationship
really depends on our ability
to understand the mechanisms
at work.
That's what I'm trying
to impart to you.
So this is one way we learn that.
This is another sort of
CAT scan of a hurricane,
shows it at a little more detail
with the precipitation bands.
So now I'm going to go to too
much water to too little water.
This is a photograph of Lake Powell,
again, a different perspective.
And if you're in a boat on the lake
looking, you get yet another one.
This is Landsat imagery
of Lake Powell from 1999
and 2010 -- very different.
Look at the amount of water,
which I think you can ascertain,
but it's the darker greens.
In particular, look at the area
here, look at the areas here,
and they're essentially dry, or
at least shallow and very turbid.
They look very, very different.
Well, this is about the human
relationship with the planet,
both recreational and in
terms of water resources
as rivers are diverged
to provide water
to populated areas that need it.
Well, this perspective from
space, really gives us a context
for understanding the
implications of the actions
and that relationship itself.
I'm going to go now to drought.
Again, one perspective when you're
-- you can almost sort of feel --
in fact, I get thirsty
looking at that picture.
I want to show you drought in
a little bit different way.
We have a mission called GRACE,
Gravity Recovering
Climate Experiment.
Forget the pictures for
the time being on the left.
Just look at the satellites.
I want you to understand
how GRACE works.
GRACE is a pair of satellites
that fly one behind the other,
about 100 kilometers apart from
each other, and when it comes
to a gravity anomaly,
something heavy underneath it,
could be an ice sheet, could be
a filled reservoir, something,
then the speed of the
first satellite --
so the satellites are orbiting.
Let's pretend -- actually,
let's pretend this is my mass.
The satellites are orbiting,
the first one approaches
it, it speeds up.
And the second one
approaches it, it speeds up,
and then as this one
leaves it it slows down
and as this one leaves
it it slows down.
So that the separation
of the satellites here
and here is the same; the
distance between them here depends
on how massive this
thing, this reservoir,
this ice sheet underneath it is.
And so orbit after orbit,
year after year we can tell,
are the satellites getting
further and further apart
when they pass this place,
or are they getting
closer and closer together?
If they're getting closer
and closer together,
we're losing mass from this place.
If an ice sheet is shrinking,
the satellites are not
as far apart with each pass.
If the ice sheet is growing
they're farther apart.
So the same applies to water.
Water is mass.
Water affects the orbit
of the satellite.
And so if we look at the top, what
we see is surface soil moisture
from September, actually, of this
last year, what we would measure
in terms of drought on the surface.
But what we see on the bottom
is what's under the surface.
The gravitational effect
on the satellites tells us
what the water table is doing.
Now, look at Texas.
It's a very different story
when you look at the surface
versus when you look
at the water table.
And it's that information
in that bottom figure
that's really essential
to understanding the hydrologic
state, at least at this point
in time but perhaps
more importantly,
the higher inertia signal, the
tendency of the hydrologic state
for at least the weeks
and months to come.
By looking in this way, by
acquiring this perspective,
we get something we could
never observe on the ground,
or never really observe from the
air and space in any other way,
at least in the global context.
Many of you have seen images --
this is another kind of disturbance
for vegetation -- of the
rainforest in Brazil.
I think this is very telling.
So this is Rondonia, Brazil
2000, and this is 2010.
This is just clear cutting.
And I want to stress, I don't
show you this so that you say,
it's horrible what they're
doing in Brazil; I show you this
so that you say, it's essential that
we understand what's being done.
Horrible kind of depends on a lot
of other things, not just your view
of the presence of the
forests or not, and again,
it's a separate conversation.
But from this perspective we've
got the information, at least,
to understand how and
why things are changing.
There's another perspective.
What I've talked about has
largely been spatial --
distant, far removed and observing
from afar, sometimes up close,
sometimes a little too close,
as in the case of the ice --
but I want to talk about the
temporal perspective now.
We're lucky.
We have a record of past
climates stored in ice core,
stored in tree rings, stored in the
geological structure, of the Earth.
And the one that sort of has been
perhaps most illuminating at least
in the longer term, has
been the ice core record.
And the chemistry of the ice has
very clear clues about the climate
that occurred at the time that
snow was deposited on the surface
of Greenland and Antarctica.
And we've been able to dissect them.
And this figure, actually
you got to think backwards.
The right is today, as you go
left you're going thousands
of years back into our past.
So what you see here is climate
variability, and what you see
where it says Medieval Warm
Period, right there, so it was cold
and it got warm right around 989
when the Vikings settled Greenland
and it was in fact green.
It's not a joke.
They weren't trying to get
people to stay away from Iceland.
It really was in fact a mossy
green and the tundra at the edges.
And they settled, and the Vikings
did not adopt the hunting practices
of the native people; they
were a little more agrarian.
And what happened is a few hundred
years later, you see we moved
into the Little Ice Age, and
that temperature change was
such that the Vikings
couldn't hack it in Greenland.
They packed their bags
and went home.
This change drive a
people out of the habitat.
Hearty Vikings, no
less, hearty people.
But let's go back a little further,
and what we see is these little
wiggles are pretty small compared
to things that have
been in our past,
long before coal plants,
long before SUVs.
Our Earth has change.
By the way, temperature is
green and snow accumulation,
which is not something you're
probably particularly interested in,
but that's red.
There have been big
swings, abrupt changes --
8 degrees Celsius or about 14,
14 degrees Fahrenheit,
in a decade of warming.
That's fast.
There are tipping points in our
climate's history, so when we talk
about where we are today,
we have to ask the question,
are we near a tipping point?
Are we nudging ourselves
towards one?
Are we destined for a tipping
point no matter what we do?
Those are the kinds of questions
that perspective informs.
Let's go back a few
hundred thousand years,
and what you see is
very rapid warming,
in this case temperatures
red, followed by sort
of a staggered cooling, rapid
warming, staggered cooling,
rapid warming, staggered
cooling, rapid warming.
Now, when we look at the ice core
record in this way, something jumps
out to a lot of people, and that
is that the carbon dioxide in a lot
of cases -- in almost all
cases -- lagged the warming.
The release -- and this is something
that gets conflated when people talk
about the correlation between
carbon dioxide and warming --
they point to the past and say,
when there's been carbon dioxide
there's been a lot of warming.
that's true, but the
sequence is backwards.
The warm temperatures release
carbon dioxide from the Earth,
but if we look at today,
look right there,
we're in a different place now.
We've flipped it.
It is not that temperature is
driving the carbon dioxide release.
The carbon dioxide
release is happening,
and we're past what we've seen,
at least in this climate history,
and the temperature
is what's following.
What that relationship is, what it
means, and ultimately what to do
about it, depends on information.
It depends on perspective.
It depends not just on looking
at what's happening and trying
to figure out the mechanics of it
through the observational
perspective or the spatial,
but looking back in time, what
have those relationships been,
what do they mean, how is
today different or similar?
And then I want to
talk about choices.
What this is is a -- several
different carbon emission scenarios
for the future that we use
in our models to figure
out what climate will look like
with these various scenarios.
Some of them have carbon
continuing to ramp up;
some of them have us
reaching some state
where we actually lower our
carbon, and you can see that.
This is not a graph of
temperature with time;
it's a graph of fuel C02 emissions.
The reason I'm putting
this up is just to show,
there are choices we make about our
future that impact the environment
in which we live, and this is
where science and policy converge.
And you really -- if you want to
talk about sort of positive steps
for the future, it takes
both science and policy.
It takes honest science, challenged,
science, informed science,
and it takes informed policy that
then gets wrapped up with a lot
of other stuff, like
values, like technology,
like opportunities, like goals.
What are we trying to do here?
Forward movement, and I put this
up because this is a whole
bunch of perspectives.
These are kind of all the
perspectives -- policy perspective,
science perspective,
technological perspective,
perspective on a potential,
an engineering perspective.
What can we engineer?
What can we fix?
What can we change?
How can we make it better?
Understanding, discipline,
complexity --
all of these elements come together
to shape our collective
actions as a society.
And I argue that this must be
grounded in science, in knowledge,
and that knowledge must be
acquired from the point of view
of the appropriate, or a number
of different perspectives.
And that's what we're trying to
do, with our investments at NASA,
with our investments at
NOAA, with investments
at the National Science
Foundation, Department of Energy --
these are actually your tax
dollars doing good things for you.
To get to the place where we can
be about survival, where we can be
about exploring our environment
and where we can be about thriving.
I don't like sort of focusing on
-- our very survival depends on it.
It may well, actually,
and I do believe that,
but I think the more productive
conversation to have is,
how do we make the bests
future we can make?
And when you have that conversation,
a lot of these other elements start
to align much, much better than
talking in extremes and trying
to achieve a specific outcome that
matches our own individual values.
And I want to take
you to this animation.
It's going to speed up -- well,
it's going to go in a second --
of a choice we made years ago when
we adopted the Montreal Protocol.
It was the science was
good, it was sound,
that chlorofluorocarbons were
destroying the ozone layer,
at least in the high
latitude regions.
Well, who cares about
high latitude regions.
They're so far away.
That has implications for
people on Earth, where the --
I think the statistic I was -- well,
I know the statistic I was quoted,
what I think it really
is, is that residents
of New Zealand have a 400% greater
chance of getting skin cancer,
just by virtue of being
that far south
to where the ozone
layer has been reduced.
We made a choice, we
understood the science,
we pulled the policy levers, and we
had a choice between two futures,
one with the protocol in
adopting our behavior,
or adapting our behavior,
and one without.
So this is going to
take us through 2065.
And up until now it's been
about the same, both worlds,
because it takes time for this
ozone regeneration to occur.
But just watch it and think
about what you're seeing.
Blue is bad.
Blue is low ozone levels,
high ultraviolet radiation.
So we now would see what appears
to be a world that is worse
than the worse we saw in Antarctica
when this problem was
first recognized.
Global warming climate change is
a very different, different beast
to tackle, so I don't want to
convey or imply that they're similar
or identical, but where there
are similarities are in the fact
that they were built on science,
they were built on a shared set
of values, they were built on
a collective understanding,
and they were built on
a recognition that all
of those things can come together
to make life better for people.
So I often talk about the Earth
being a mosaic of stories,
a lot of little stories
telling one great big story.
And we use our perspective to
put all the pieces together,
to put the tiles of the mosaic
together so we can step back
and look at what the picture is.
And the key to this
is really perspective.
This is one form.
This is a friend of mine with
his head in what would later --
well, never mind -- his
head in a hole in the snow.
Some of you who've gone camping
in snow can figure out what
that was later going to be.
This is one perspective.
I'll just call it up close and
personal, but you understand
that sort of the peripheral
vision is unstructured
by this sort of approach.
And this is another perspective.
What we do, we put satellites
in space, to orbit, to observe,
to look at different
parameters of the Earth's system.
And then at the end of the
day, I really want to --
I just want to close
with this final thought.
I want to come back
to where I started.
When we looked at the Earth in
this way, it changed everything.
And by still looking at the Earth
in this way or complimentary ways
that were enabled by
this kind of perspective,
we can still change everything.
what change means, what the
right change is, that's something
that requires healthy,
robust discussion.
It requires information and
it requires perspective.
And I would argue that the
perspective we provide at NASA
with our assets and in
conjunction with our partners,
is really the foundation for a
future in which we don't survive,
but we actually thrive,
we flourish, we excel.
So thank you.
I will leave it at that,
and I'm happy to take any
questions that anyone may have.
>> And I'm sure we
have lots of questions.
>> Question.
Your graphic with the satellites,
I assume they're early
scientific satellites?
>> Yes, those are the NASA
research satellites, that's correct.
>> If you were to show
all satellites going over,
what would that traffic look like?
Would there be hundreds?
>> Well, fortunately --
there wouldn't be hundreds.
Let's see--
>> And do the military intelligence
satellites ever conflict
with the scientific?
>> Generally no, because they
tend to be in different orbits.
>> Isn't there a lot of
garbage out there as well?
>> There is a lot of space
debris, because what happens is
as satellites orbit over
time they run out of fuel,
or they cease to function.
And their orbit, if you can't
keep adding thrust occasionally,
their orbit decays, so there's some
pretty cluttered areas of space.
What you're looking at, these
are the NASA research satellites,
and this actually isn't
entirely up to date.
There's one or two less and one or
two more that do different things.
The NOAA satellites,
the weather satellites,
they are also polar
orbiting satellites
that have different inclinations.
The inclination is the angle
they make with the pole.
They're at different altitudes.
So you would see this
a lot more populated,
certainly with the other -- with
the NOAA satellites it might be --
I don't know, it might be -- well,
it certainly wouldn't be doubled,
but there'd be more and a lot
of them are at 23,000 miles
out as opposed to a few
hundred miles out here,
so they're in a different place.
The intelligence satellites
are defense satellites
which are specific to defense
and intelligence needs,
I really don't know
how many there are,
but it's safe to say there's
probably a healthy number of them
up there to serve national
interests.
And other nations have satellites.
So space is actually, despite its
vastness, it can be kind of crowded.
But what this picture would
look like, I'm not sure.
It'd just have more stuff in it.
Yes?
>> I didn't miss your point
that we shouldn't pay attention
to year-to-year variation.
It's over much time that matters.
Nevertheless, I'm curious why,
when you showed the Greenland
ice accretion versus loss,
that 2010 was the last
record loss before last year,
but the year before in 2009
there was actual accretion.
It dropped down below the
midline, which was good.
And then the next year
2010 was record loss.
And I'm just wondering
why the previous record,
and the year before the pervious
record there's actually a
little gain.
And I was curious why
you see such --
why you get an aberrant year like
2000 -- I think 2009 is aberrant.
And then the other question
I had is, if you comment
on international cooperation, since
you've been speaking mainly --
you refer to the Montreal choice.
>> Um-hum.
>> But mainly that
the United States --
and obviously it's a world problem.
>> Sure.
>> You talk about the other thing,
if you talk about international
cooperation.
>> Sure. Well, you can
see, there's quite a bit
of variability in this throughout.
And if you just took sort of this
range here and slid it all up to
where these were, you
see some back and forth.
So some years it's just
either not as cold, or --
this is a big deal that I don't
think people really appreciate.
It snows a little more often, and
that snow reflects the sunlight.
When snow gets old it gets darker.
You've seen this with
your eyes, and the amount
of energy absorbed can be
2, 3, 4, 5 times greater
than that from a fresh snowfall.
So precipitation actually
slows the meltdown a little
by brightening the surface and
inhibiting the absorption of energy.
The other piece of that is
weather, and it just varies.
So I appreciate your comment
about not focusing on a year.
Now, sometimes that year, like
in 2012, is so far off the charts
that it is significant and it is
okay or proper to focus on that,
but it's really the context.
Let's remove 2012 from that figure
and you still see an upward trend.
There's going to be
wiggles on that curve;
that's just the way nature works.
Regarding commenting on
international aspects,
are you talking about
cooperation in treaties and sort
of addressing the issue,
or are you talking
about collaboration
in science endeavors?
>> Perspective.
You said we -- can you get
the same perspective --
do you find the same degree
of perspective cooperation among
scientists around the world,
espeically in very populous areas
of the world such as India, China,
where there's such
a population growth?
Do they get the same
perspective as you have?
>> Among scientists, yes,
because it's about the data.
What do the data say?
Now, where there is divergence is
what you do with that information,
because -- and this is where the
value system comes into play.
And sea level rise may look
very different to someone living
in Bangladesh than to someone
living in Vail, Colorado.
The propensity or strength
of hurricanes
or typhoons looks very different
to low-lying coastal nations
subject to storm surge.
So one -- let's take
the Amazon Rainforest.
If economic livelihood depends on a
certain relationship with the Earth,
the implications of changing
that relationship affects
some much more than others.
That's where there is divergence
and understandably, because that's
where the values come in.
And that's a part of
the equation, I think,
that doesn't get enough attention.
It could benefit from more attention
in the scientific discussions
and domain.
You want to call, or should I?
There's a couple hands back there.
We'll take you both,
at the same time -- go.
>> Is it -- I have two questions
and I'll make them real quick.
Is there -- am I making
the wrong link if I had
when you had agreement
to melt in 2012.
I was looking at the dates, and
what happened in Washington,
D.C. the weekend before
that, June 30th-July 1st,
was that huge windstorm, and
where all those trees came down.
And I was worth working in the
yard with a bunch of teenagers --
well, they were in the shade;
I was working in the yard.
So that whole it was
over 100 degrees.
>> Yeah.
>> Did that weather go up to
Greenland from here, or is it going
in the opposite direction?
>> No, it goes in that direction.
I don't know enough to
make that causal link,
but what I do know is
there was a persistent --
I think it was a persistent high
over the ice sheet for a long time
that just allows the sun to
beat down and do its thing,
without the movement in of clouds.
So it's very complicated and
it's very hard to take --
assume what's happening in one
place might move to another
and cause that relationship.
But the weather does move eastward,
and depending on how the jet stream
is dipping down and moving up,
it can also move eastward
and northward.
So those kinds of things are
actually perhaps more coupled
to the sea ice, because
you can blow ice around.
The presence of wind separates
the ice, makes it thinner,
more susceptible to melt.
So they are related, but I
can't trace this to that event.
>> What do you think -- I asked Mike
Grunsfeld once how much he thought
that if more people saw Earth from
space, would it change our view,
the overview effect,
which is we look at Earth
and we see no national boundaries.
We see the damage that's been done.
How much do you think that space
tourism, that Virgin, et etcetera,
having more people
see Earth from space,
will help promote a more planetary
concern about these (inaudible)?
>> I think it will
have a profound impact
on the individuals
that actually do it.
How that translates into
societal impact, I don't know.
It ultimately depends on what those
impacted individuals choose to do.
Presumably they would
be people with resources
or they would not have
gotten up into space anyways.
And so -- although, as time goes
on it will become more
and more within reach.
So if I extrapolate into the future
where it becomes much more
accessible to everyday individuals,
I do think there would
be a collective elevation
of consciousness.
But in the nearer term, it
will be a small group of people
and it really will kind
of depend on what they do
with however move they
may or may not be.
I can't imagine not being,
but I'm not everyone.
>> Going back to that power
craft you got up there,
I'm just curious how NASA's ability
to measure, make these measures
in space, how they change since the
beginning of satellite, '79 to now.
If you look at that craft,
we measured the same
way for 30 plus years.
Is that true?
>> This craft was generated on
the same kinds of measurements,
and this is actually
a wonderful thing.
In 1978, we launched
the NIMBA 7 satellite
with a particular microwave sensor
on it, and we learned all kinds
of great stuff we could do with it.
In 1987, the Department of Defense
took that capability and built it
into its operational Defense
Meteorological Satellite
Program activities.
So NASA stopped.
We didn't have to do this anymore.
This was a perfect what we
call research to operations,
and the great thing about that --
so the Defense Department is
always going to care about weather,
and they've launched
roughly carbon copies
of this instrument ever since.
So the great thing about it
is we get a consistent record,
where we don't have to worry too
much about changes and techniques
and how do they map to one another.
In addition to that, however
-- in Aqua was 2000, right?
Yeah, in 2000 we launched
sort of the next generation
of this capability, of
the microwave capability,
that's much higher resolution,
that's got much better fidelity
to it in terms of sensitivity,
and we have other instruments
or visible imagery and our thermal
imagery has gotten to the point
where we can see in real detail
where it hits zero degrees and when.
So we have a much more
robust capability today.
I show this, though, because it's
an apples-to-apples comparison
throughout, and it's
a consistent measure.
If I want to get really down
into and say, all right, well,
what happened right here at that
interface, then I would look
at the other sensors
in a lot more detail.
So our capability certainly has
evolved, but there's also value
to just that basic
consistent, credible record.
>> How does the melting of the
ice affect Earth's rotation,
and how does that change
the rotation at that piton?
>> It does affect the
Earth's rotation.
Basically, if you've ever
sat in a spinning chair
and you've done the experiment,
and maybe we've done this
in high school physics class,
and you get spun around
and you hold your arms out and then
you pull them in, and you're faster.
Figure skaters do this.
You've seen them go up.
The more concentrated your
mass is towards the center,
the faster you will spin.
The same is true -- it's an
extremely small amount --
but the same is true with the Earth.
So as ice grows, we're putting
more mass out at the edges,
the rotation rate slows a little
bit, as we lose ice on land.
On sea ice it's floating and
it doesn't really matter,
but as an ice sheet shrinks, we
actually accelerate our rotation.
But the amount is pretty minimal
so the impact on the climate,
I don't think is anything
we can really detect.
It's more a geophysical observation.
There's one over there
if you want to--
>> What was that site you
mentioned at the beginning
where you showed those
flight patterns?
>> Oh, well, if you want to
know what's happening right now,
I think it's flightexplorer.com.
If you want that movie, I'm
not sure where it resides.
I got it from a colleague.
Do you know where that is?
>> I got it from [inaudible].
>> Oh, did you?
>> Yeah.
>> I got it from Jim Balog.
You got to know people.
But if you go to -- actually,
it's a sad recollection,
but when I first was exposed
to flightexplorer.com was
on September 11, and they
showed sort of sequences
of the sky getting very
empty very quickly.
But now if you just go to that and
look, you'll see what's in the air
and where you can trace
Aunt Ruth's path
on her trip to Italy, or whatever.
This one in the corner over there?
>> [Inaudible] manmade
climate change.
We got the Montreal Protocol
with chlorofluorocarbons.
Is there any chance of there kind
of being a consensus at some point
that there's true raw evidence?
>> Sure, and I apologize.
I forgot to repeat the questions
as they were asked, so my apologies
to whoever's watching this
webcam or YouTube video.
Call me to complain; I'll tell
you what the questions were.
So this question was how
irrefutable is the evidence
of man-made climate
change, how does that --
is it like ozone in that regard,
where we just have this solid case?
You know, we talk in
science about consensus,
and we talk about fingerprints
of change.
And the consensus that humans
are contributing the majority
of today's climate change -- no
one can dispute the statement
that that is a consensus.
People may take issue with it,
but the consensus among scientists
who do work in this area
is that that is the case.
The nature of the change
is consistent
with anthropogenic human-made
warming, and as an example --
in simplest terms, if
you put heat-trapping gas
in the atmosphere,
it will trap heat.
Well, what does that mean?
well, if it's in the troposphere,
if it's in the first ten kilometers,
it'll keep that heat low.
And what that does is deprive
the heat from reaching higher.
So actually, the stratosphere,
the higher elevations, cool.
And that's what we're seeing,
and that's one example.
There are a number of sort of lines
of evidence that make this case.
But it's different from
ozone, and there were skeptics
about the ozone situation as well.
If we stop production
of chlorofluorocarbons,
what will that do to
industry, to business,
we've got to find more
expensive alternatives.
But it was pretty cut and dry.
There were affordable alternatives.
It was kind of an easier, more
attractive challenge to address.
This one becomes much more
complicated, and so what ends
up happening is I think, you get
the conflation of the science
and the values, and that makes
some people less reluctant to agree
with the consensus, and in fairness
that makes some people just ready
to jump onto that consensus.
Right on, that's what I thought
for 20 years, that kind of thing.
So because it's so complicated
and because the implications
of addressing it are
huge, I mean, really,
that can't be underestimated.
We have a different
scenario than ozone.
So is the evidence irrefutable?
Let me put it this way.
The evidence is very
compelling to most of us
who sit down and look at it.
How that translates into action
brings in a whole other set
of variables that require
a lot more people
who are generally smarter than I am.
>> All right, well, thank you.
>> All right, thank you.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.