>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] >> Tamoko Steen: Welcome. I'm Tamoko Steen, the specialist here at the Library of Congress Science, Technology, and the Business Division. Today's event is sponsored by Science, Technology, and Business Division, and we also have a partnership with NASA, and my colleagues back there, they work with NASA to, some of the topics covered on climate change. And I just wanted to show our website here and event page. You can see some of the lectures including those NASA climate change talks. I also have outside some of the guide, the related science policy and climate change or renewable energy, and we have all the guide on our website as well. So I hope you can make use of it. You can download [inaudible] guide. OK. Today's speaker is Dr. Peter Frumhoff, director of the Science Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and he's global change ecologist, and he has BA in psychology from UC San Diego and also MS [inaudible] and Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis. He has taught at Harvard [inaudible], and we had a good chat earlier, like, we know common people from Harvard, and he has been very influential for giving a talk like today, and I hope everyone enjoy that talk. His focuses little bit more policy compared to NASA talk, and we have some of the senior member from state department and directors from [inaudible], and also some of the embassies, science attaches here. So I hope we have a good discussion after the lecture. OK. So Dr. Frumhoff has a long CV, and I can go on and on, but instead of spending that time, please join me to welcome Dr. Frumhoff. [ Applause ] [ Background Talk ] [ Background Noise ] >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you Tamoko. I know this is a long time coming in trying to find time to have this conversation. I'm really delighted to be here with all of you, and particularly delighted to be here at the Library of Congress. It's a real pleasure to be at an institution that's so, more than any other embodies the application of knowledge to governance and to public understanding. The whole breath of knowledge including but not limited science. I wanted to say a few words at the beginning about my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists. We're a little newer than the Library of Congress. We were founded in 1969, also dedicated to the application of science to inform and motivate sound public policies and public understanding. Founded by a group of very senior physicists at MIT during the height of the Vietnam War who were deeply concerned about the singularity of funding for physics research coming from the Department of the Defense and its application solely for military purposes, and they saw and desired to see a much greater support for other applications of physics in support of societal benefits and the public good. So UCS was founded to be both a research organization and what I like to call a do tank to apply science to inform public understanding, starting with issues where physicists had something to say about public policy on energy, on nuclear power, on security issues and broadening out to encompass a much broader range of the sciences, including my field in ecology and biology around global change. Around climate change, around energy, transportation, sustainable agriculture, and most recently, we've had a long-standing body of work on ensuring the integrity of science and federal policy making in this country, and we've just kind of morphed that as I'll say a little more today into a wonderful new institution that's just getting off the ground within USC, what we're calling a Center for Science and Democracy. I want to say a little bit about that in the context of this conversation. Let's see. What do I need to do here? Enter, no. [ Background Talk ] No. That's just. Oh, there we go. Got it. Excellent. Excellent. So our nation, much like USC, was founded by men of science. Unfortunately, men at a time, not really men and women, but they were all sons of children of the enlightenment and not just Ben Franklin, kind of the iconic founder scientist discovering electricity in a lighting storm, but Adams and Madison and Jefferson and others were deeply grounded in the sciences and as the history of science Bernard Cone has so artfully characterized. Their sensibilities about science and the values of reason and openness and pragmatism deeply informed the design, the architecture of our founding documents and our governance. And, of course, a tradition of the furthering of science and its application and a pragmatic approach to policymaking carried on for many generations and continues in some parts today. Many of you know that the establishment of a National Academy of Sciences was authorized by President Lincoln during the height of the Civil War to inform Congress and our nation's government more broadly on issues where science had something to say about governance and public policy. And I was actually reminded in thinking about this lecture that here at the Library of Congress is Jefferson's letter to Meriwether Lewis written in 1803, you know, giving him both the charge and the funding coming from Congress for the, what became known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the scientific survey. [Inaudible] characterized in detail in Jefferson's letter of the Louisiana Purchase and the West, and it was really quite basic science intended to have much broader but unanticipated or unanticipable public benefits. That is, the understanding of the West, and, in fact, it was being sold to Congress as an opportunity to create information that could be used for the furthering of commerce. It's that combination of basic research, which is sometimes characterized as Newtonian science, and application, which is often characterized as [inaudible] science, that led the history of science Gerald Holden about a decade and a half ago to characterize federal investment in science for the public good as Jeffersonian science, and it's really an architecture and an approach to science that has characterized much of our federal support for big ideas, for investing in basic research and molecular biology with the intent of informing our understanding of how cancer operates. For example, our investment in understanding, characterizing the ozone and the atmosphere which ultimately help support a response to the impact of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer and many other domains in which science, furthered by federal funding, has an applications to the public good but for medicine and in the environment and many other domains. And one can characterize our understanding of the Earth's climate system as being in large part supported by an approach to Jeffersonian science. That is to say, investments in both basic understanding of the Earth's climate, complicated system, the impacts of humanity's action on it, and developing information that in a kind of pragmatic approach to governance could be used to address, identify, address, and help provide input into resolving societal problems. This is the classic result of the monitoring that was established in the 1950's by Dave Keling at Scripps Institution of Oceanography that became the longest record of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide as a result of increasingly fossil fuels and burning of forests in the atmosphere rising from pre-industrial levels. We now know about 280 parts per million to almost, just about 390 parts per million today, a steady accumulation of carbon, a prominent, predominant heat-trapping gas in the Earth's atmosphere. I wanted just to highlight that the application and understanding of the impact of, human impact on the atmosphere has had a history, not long after the development of the first information coming out of Mauna Los Angeles, to inform governance. In 1965, the Science [inaudible] Committee report to President Johnson said, and you can see it here, "The continued use of fossil fuels will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere at such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur." Probably one of the first times that climate science was put into the highest levels of government, and, in fact, President Johnson then took that information in a very straightforward way and included it in his report at the Congress. The first President Bush, of course, who, as some of you may recall, ran in 1988 saying that he would combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. Went on to do important things as it relates to addressing the Earth's climate system. In the early days of international architectures for climate, he signed the US onto the UN framework convention on climate change in 1992, committing absent ratification but nonetheless committing the US and other governments to take actions consistent with preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with the Earth's climate system. And, of course, since those early days of bipartisan pragmatic application of science to the understand climate science, to our understanding and to thinking about how to address it in a policy relevant way. We've had a tremendous accumulation of scientific information, much of it packaged into formalized reports. Reports of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, on which I've had the privilege of serving. Reports from the National Academy of Sciences. Reports of the US Global Change Research Program, which come out every four years now with an authorized report from, by Congress on the state of climate change impacts on the United States. The next one will be coming out this next year. We know, for example, that we have trends of changes in extreme heat, for example, that we see consistent with anthropogenic warming that we have in the continental US and is replicated in other continents instead of what you might expect under random circumstances, that is to say, not a human fingerprint or roughly an equal number of record highs and record lows. We've seen an increasing number of record highs across the United States over the recent decades, and, of course, this past year and the year before had very high extent of record heat across much of the United States in part or a function of the el nina, but demonstratively through a variety of measures, a consequence that would not have happened at the extent but for the impact of anthropogenic warming. We see a variety of indicators of human impact on the Earth's climate system. This really, most striking and sobering, to my mind anyway, what we've seen on a global scale. This is the most recent data characterizing the record decline in the extent of arctic sea ice. This record low, much greater, much lower than what you can see as the, that kind of orange line of the median record, the median lows that occurred in mid-September over the period between 1979 and 2000. We've had a much more dramatic decline in arctic sea ice, both in extent and in volume. It had been anticipated, in fact, much greater than our models project, which is an indication of the limitations of climate models. In many respects, we've, they're useful, but they're not perfect, and this is one case where they've been way too conservative. The arctic sea ice is declining much more rapidly than we anticipated, and opening up passages that really had never been opened before, and creating the anticipation that we may see an ice-free arctic in the summertime sometime in the next couple of decades. Really nothing that the climate science community had anticipated. And we've been able to develop information that projects forward at regional scale, at, if you will, decision-making relevant scale. This is a body of work that I've had the privilege of leading. I've done a number of regional assessments of climate change across the United States in collaboration with colleagues across the country. This is work from 2004 with leading climate science colleagues in California looking, among other things, at the impacts of, projected impacts of warming on Sierra snowpack. California's my home state, and I spent a lot of time working with scientific colleagues there, and then with the public and decision makers to take this kind of information and help use it to inform decision making, again, in that kind of, if you will, pragmatic sense of how science can be an input into rational decision making. This just shows that by the end of this century, really under even a, depending on the emissions choices we make, it may be more or less extent, but that just the basic effect of rising temperature with precipitation falling as rain rather than as snow, and as snow melting earlier that this hugely important resource, water resource, the Sierra snowpack, important for agriculture, for human use, for in stream use, is projected to decline. Just really a basic function of physics, and that kind of information, again, I've had the privilege of working with leaders across the political divide in California. This is Governor Schwarzenegger, then Governor Schwarzenegger in the, about six years ago, taking action consistent with the science, informed by the science, informed by a robust public discourse in that state. Action both to reduce emissions in California and to help prepare the state for impacts that are not avoidable, that is to say to adapt, and that's continued now under the leadership of Jerry Brown. There are places in this country where we are having more or less fact-based dialogues that are both public and policy relevant and informing decision making, but we're not having them everywhere, and that's really the purpose of this talk is to help think about how we can build that kind of and restore that rational approach from integrating science and decision making. The, I don't mean to pick on the good senator from Pennsylvania, but in the, in the presidential primaries, there were a number of statements made by a number of national leaders, in this case national political leaders, that like this deeply misrepresented the science of climate change. There are a whole suite of institutions. This happens to be a billboard in Chicago this spring from, funded by an organization called the Heartland Institute. One of a number of institutions in part funded by fossil industry and by others who have been putting out information. Well, you can decide what you think of it, but it's, in my view, really a disgrace to have this be all consistent with the First Amendment, but, nonetheless, a disgrace to have misrepresentations of science characterized in this way. And we've seen in, well, there are places where science is being integrated in a reasonable way, and decision making is not happening federally. We're not really having a national conversation about the facts of climate change and what to do about them. We might disagree on about what to do about them, but at least we should be getting our facts straight and consistent as the former senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, famously said, "You can, everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but no one's entitled to their own facts." But we're acting like we're entitled to our own facts, and in August, in the good state of North Carolina, there had been a body of work done by North Carolina scientists and a number of others to put forward information on protected sea level rise, which is projected, conservatively, to be about 39 inches, just a little over a meter over the course of this century. Information that can and should and is elsewhere informing, for example, zoning and development planning in a state that has, as you can probably see from the right-hand chart, all that green is, that deep green is less than a meter above sea level in the 20 coastal counties of North Carolina. But the state of North Carolina decided to, at least temporarily, at least for the next four years, require that the science of sea level rise not be incorporated into coastal planning. That is, to rely solely on the historic rates of sea level rise, which don't take into account the increasing levels that are resulting as a consequence of angry volume of ocean that happens as water warms and the beginning of the melt of land-based ice in Greenland and elsewhere. So, you know, you can pass laws, but you can't change the laws of physics, and this is an example of where science isn't just being ignored. It's being actively dismissed, and there was considerable pressure from coastal developers and others to take this action. It's lasting, I think, until 19, until 2016, and then will be revisited, and my hope is, and we're doing some work to help encourage it, that at least at that time, there may be a better place for science at the table to inform the policy discussion. Well, as a result of all of this, that we have a deeply and widely confused American public on the topic of global warming. [Inaudible] colleagues at Yale, at Yale in partnership with folks at George Mason have done some of the best polling on this. [Inaudible] may be familiar with their work on six Americas. What it characterizes is there are ends of the spectrum, there are people who are singularly alarmed. Really no matter what you tell them, they're going to become more alarmed. There are people on the, in this case, the far right end of the spectrum, of this particular spectrum, who are deeply dismissive, and a lot of folks in the middle, and this is an important point, who are just confused. They may not be paying attention because this is not an issue which is front and center for most folks most of the time, but that by a variety of quite robust questions really just don't know what's up. And for those that do have strong opinions, those opinions are divided among partisan lines. So if you ask the questions, this work done by, a couple of years ago by the Pew Research Center, you ask the question do scientists agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, there is a divide that's really a partisan divide. Democrats tend to agree with that statement, and Republicans, and particularly folks who self-identify with the Tea Party, tend to disagree with that statement. Now I want to be really clear. It is not the case that Democrats get science better than Republicans. [Inaudible] I want to come back and talk about that, and there are plenty of examples of science that is not incorporated into public understanding. Let's take the issue of autism and vaccines, for example, where we can talk about that, too, if you'd like, which doesn't divide among partisan lines. That is the misperception inconsistent with the science that vaccines are somehow a driver of childhood autism or other diseases. So not everything around science is divided among partisan lines. This is, and we can discuss why that may be. But one of the reasons why it may be is that people get their information from lots of different sources. People tend to go to the sources in this highly-diversified media environment, both digital and print, that reinforce the values that they already hold, whether it be MSNBC or Fox News or NPR. People tend to get information from folks who, with whom they already agree philosophically and culturally across a range of issues, and it's very difficult to build that kind of broader dialogue about what are the facts when everybody is so channeled into a fairly narrow spectrum of sources of information across the spectrum. This is, of course, part of a larger set of cultural trends in this country, what I like to call the disappearing center of American politics. Just over the last twenty years or so, it used to be the case that there were, this is in the Senate, Republicans who would tend to vote more liberally as consistent with many Democrats, and Democrats tend to vote more conservatively, consistent with many Republicans, and that crossover doesn't happen anymore. Alright. We've had a real separation among partisan lines of how, in this case, the Senate votes and really very few people who stay in political office for long at this level who are, might call themselves and are seen as [inaudible]. So what do you do about this? [ Laughter ] I know. I love this light. You know, you can't respond to every bit of misinformation that's out there, alright. I mean, you can. I mean, there are people who do, but it's not necessarily the most useful thing to do. And as scientists, I mean, we work a lot with folks in the scientific community. We might want to agitate for, you know, pay attention to our science, but that's not really going to help either. I mean, I should say the other broader cultural trend that's happened over the past couple of decades, I would argue, is a decline in the cultural authority of various institutions, including scientific institutions. That is to say, the National Academy came out with a report, and it doesn't have the same weight as it might have had 20, 30 years ago. People aren't, partly because of the diversification of media and partly because, for lack of a better word, elites don't have as much influence and power in the society I would argue today as they may have had, elites in this case including scientists, even though public opinion polling around scientists, what do people think about science is very positive as compared to, say, members of Congress. It, that doesn't necessarily translate into, first of all, people don't know scientists. Polling suggests that most people think, if you ask people, you know, name a living scientist, most people name Albert Einstein. It's, you know, people don't know the scientific community. They don't have that dialogue. They're going to have, it's not a large and influential community, and that's one of the things we're trying to change in a sort of, if you will, our theory of change or how to help re-establish a pragmatic and appropriate role for science in informing decision making. Now, my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, is one of many, including scientific societies. I'm pleased a colleague here, Rachel, is from the American Chemical Society doing good work on this. Federal agencies such as NOA, the National Academy, and others who are working in a variety of ways to amplify and make more effective the voices of the scientific community to inform public understanding of climate change. I want to say just a few words, really a very few words about some of what we're doing and, if you will, our approach. So kind of rule number one is get the facts right and help the media, whatever the media is, whatever sources of information people are responding to get the facts right. This is just a simple little information graphic or infographic that we put out this summer in response to. As you know, there have been a tremendous number of unusual extreme events, alright. Whether it be hurricanes or tornadoes or heat waves, and people draw their own conclusions about what they mean as it relates to climate change, and the facts are this. That some extreme events, we have much better evidence for being increasing, both in severity and frequency as a consequence of anthropogenic warming, than others. And so, although the media might report about the links between tornadoes and climate change, the data aren't there. So part of what we want to make sure we do is that we, not only get the facts right ourselves, but we help others do. So this is something that went out to reporters across the country to help them distinguish what's real from what's not because the source of this, and IPC report was virtually impenetrable in terms of what individual reporters, many of them who don't have background in the sciences or time to read large IPC reports, can actually gleam. Our second rule, if you will, is to start with where people are. There are many parts of the country where you just can't go give a talk on climate change and expect people to have open minds because people filter information and lessons from the social sciences fairly actively. And people have preset ideas about, in this case, global warming in many parts of the country that are not conducive to that kind of conversation. So, but people care in many parts of the South, for example, about football, and in the, in August of 2011, we've now had two summers of extreme record heat across much of the South. Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere. There was a lot of, there was some science that was coming out by a number of colleagues, including a professor at the University of Georgia, characterizing the health risks of extreme summer heat to high school football players who are doing two-a-day practices in August, right before school starts. Now, people care about football, and they're concerned about the health of their youth. And so what we did, again, just by starting as an example many things we've done, but just as a kind of story, truthful story, we organized a group of leading experts, many of them from the, in this case from the South where football is king. Who could speak to the health risks of extreme heat on high school football players who had the data, been producing reports, and other colleagues including [inaudible] from NOA to speak, to put this into a climate change context and held a series of press briefings around the region where we brought these local experts. [Inaudible], if you will, local, meaning that they, people could connect to them from their, in their own backyards. Talk about issues that matter in a local context. So this was the, kind of the headline of the press briefing that we organized. It got tremendous, tremendous coverage, and, importantly, coverage in the sports sections of newspapers, in the health sections of newspapers, even got, I don't know, [inaudible] coverage in the "L.A. Times". I got coverage. We followed up with radio talk show tours where the scientists talk across local radio stations across the South and Southeast and got a lot of online coverage, and it generated a conversation about extreme heat and health of football players that you simply couldn't have done if you'd just come out and said we want to tell you the facts about climate change affecting the extreme heat in the South. And what was nice about it was climate change was in the story, but it wasn't the headline. Alright. It was the second paragraph or the third paragraph. It was just kind of the normal narrative, right. So people are reading this stuff, and you have to be strategic about it and saying, oh, did you see that. Oh, and did you know that climate is a part of it, and it's not in your face. It's just part of the conversation. And in my view, it's really important to make climate change just part of the fact-based conversation in places across the country in a really, if you will, aggressive and assertive and smart and strategic way, and that's a lot of, all by any means, but a lot of what we've been doing. And I'm really pleased to say that, as a consequence of this, and we didn't really anticipate this, Texas, State of Texas actually made a set of policy decisions to scale back high school two-a-day workouts during periods of extreme summer heat. A couple months later, really quite rapidly. Now, Texas might, you could call this climate adaptation. I don't think the State of Texas was calling this climate adaptation, but it's essentially what it is. And it's a, it's one means of having the public conversation and the policy response that doesn't trip over the filters that people too often bring. Now we've been doing this across a range of issues. We've had a lot of opportunity with extreme weather this past two years, and this is just a kind of representative sample of the kinds of coverage that we've been getting. I want to talk more about what impact that's been having in a minute, but I wanted to also to say that having scientists speak out, and we do a lot of media training for scientists. We have about 18,000 scientists in a network who come to us and make themselves available to be used and deployed, if you will, in this way across the country, and we also try to get lessons from the social sciences. One of the things we've learned, this is a conference I held at the University of Michigan last January, one of the key lessons from the social sciences have been really studying the barriers to communication is that people actively filter information, and that there are other messengers, [inaudible] scientists, who may be much more effective than scientists, if you will, validators. So here on the right, for example, the bottom right is the Reverend Rick Cizik, who's the head of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, who is a deeply religious man in the evangelical, a very active leader in the evangelical community, who's been very active in engaging people of faith, people of the evangelical faith on this issue. Cares deeply about science. On the left is former Representative Bob Inglis, South Carolina. Deeply conservative former member of Congress, deeply conservative, who, for a variety of reasons had what he would call his own conversion experience on the science and is very actively engaged in speaking to Republican audiences across the country, small groups and large and really trying to build a conversation about free market approaches to addressing the challenges of climate change where, again, you can start with the facts and then really debate about what to do about it. And we've been working with each of them and many others, and there are a lot of unsung leaders like this across the country who we are working to elevate their voices. So, for example, in South Florida, we're now working with mayors and county commissioners and city planners, all of whom in a very active way and very differently than, say, North Carolina, are in conversation with scientists about how to prepare for sea level rise in Dade County and elsewhere. It's an issue which they're taking seriously. It's an issue that they're being very pragmatic about, but it's kind of under the radar screen. Right. They're just doing their work. So part of our job in collaboration with them is to raise their profile. To bring them to the attention through a variety of tools and techniques through the media at a state level, national in Florida, at a national level. Hopefully, begin to create conversations between what they're doing as local leaders with their colleagues in North Carolina, for example, or in other states. So we can elevate not just scientists' voices, but the voice of others who are taking action already to prepare for climate change and are really much more interested in having that kind of pragmatic conversation than in debating, redebating or redebating the facts of the matter. And so that's a big body of work that we're just really launching, and I think you'll see some fruits of that labor in the weeks and months ahead. Anybody remember what this image is? What's that? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. This is, those are the seven, who are the seven CEO's of the major tobacco companies in the United States. The date was April 1994. The location was the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on [inaudible] chaired by Henry Waxman, and it was a moment that was captured, but at the time on the relatively few numbered media outlets that existed. It was on the evening news on CBS and NBC and ABC and the national newspapers. Because what they were saying under oath was that nicotine's not addictive. They do not believe it was addictive. They didn't believe that cigarettes caused lung cancer, and this was 1994. At the time, people, the ground was prepared. You may have remembered the Surgeon General, the first Surgeon General report on the health risks of tobacco came out thirty years earlier, 1960, whoops, two I believe. And for a long period of time, the public was deeply confused about the health risks of tobacco, and it's statistically. It's a confusing issue. Some people smoke and don't get cancer. Some people get cancer and don't smoke, but the science was very clear. That relationship was being strengthened by smoking, and, of course, the industry, internal memo from RJ Reynolds famously said, you know, doubt is our product. Some of you may have read the book by Naomi Reskies and Art Conway on the emergence of doubt, sort of the efforts by, in this case, the tobacco industry to formulate uncertainty about the science in order to delay or deny regulation, and that worked for some time. But by 1994, there was enough work being done to prepare the ground from public health community so that, and evidence from documents that had been released from the industry that they were actively misinforming. That by the time this kind of watershed moment happened, people knew they were misspeaking, and that was a watershed moment. It really led to a bipartisan response in Congress to begin to regulate tobacco in a way that would not have happened but for this moment, and it, I have to say this gives me hope, you know, where the public is on climate now is not where we will always be. One never knows where that watershed moment will be on an issue, but the signal of climate change is further increasing from the noise of natural variation and something will happen as long as we're preparing the ground, and I think a lot of our work to help people get the science in a fundamental way, we don't expect people, the public to be scientists, but to stop debating it is, creates an opportunity that will begin to have, as we already have really in California and much of Europe a national conversation about what to do about the issue rather than whether it's a real one. And you can see this in some of the polling data. Again, I'll take optimism wherever I can get it. This is also from [inaudible] came out last fall that, in part, as a result of the extreme weather, if you ask people, they, some people say global warming made each of these following events worse. How much do you agree or disagree? Really contra to the earlier polls that I showed you, quite a remarkable majority of people across the country agree or somewhat agree that much of the extreme events that they witnessed over the past, this case, the past year, whether accurately or not in the case of Hurricane Irene, were made worse by global warming. And so I think, you know, that's an example to kind of forcing effect that is leading people to think differently about the issue than they might have otherwise. I'm going to just, I'm going to transition for a moment, though, if I can, from the specifics of climate change, and we can talk a lot more about it if you'd like. To take a step back and put this in a little bit of context. So as I said at the outset and a couple points throughout the talk, the challenge we face on climate change is not singular. We, obviously, had a similar challenge on tobacco, and we lost thirty years from the time that we knew that the health risks were serious before we were able to take regulatory action, and there are many other issues where science doesn't really have an effective seat at the table around public understanding, public discourse, and public policy. So we, at the Union of Concerned Scientists in collaboration with a number of colleagues in the academic community, decided to try to create a center, center for science democracy to look at the fundamental systematic challenges rather than the issue-specific challenges to bring pragmatic reasoning and science-based information. [Inaudible] this mission says, "To strengthen our democracy by advancing the essential role of science, evidence-based decision making constructive debate as a means to improve the health, security, and prosperity of all people." It's kind of a big topic, and we've just launched this. We've just hired my colleague, Andy Rosenberg, who was formerly the chief scientist at Conservation International and a leader at Marine Fisheries for many years and the battles over fishery stocks in New England. Used to debates about science and decision making in that domain, to lead this work. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the specifics. We're really just getting started, but I do want to talk about a couple pieces of it very briefly and open this up for a conversation. So we want to bring people across disciplines together to solve problems and do it in a public-facing way. We want to bring a much broader group of non-scientists, opinion leaders, thought leaders to speak to the values of science in our democracy and to speak to it forcefully so that, for example, if the editorial page of the "Wall Street Journal" misrepresents science, in this case, on climate change, which they've done a fair bit of recently, we'll have business leaders who are willing to stand up and say, you know, that's just not correct. Doesn't happen yet. And we want to really help further get scientists out of their cubby holes of their research labs and engage in a much more robust two-way dialogue with members of the public so that when people are asked what scientists they know, they'll actually name someone out there other than Albert Einstein and to think about scientists as members of their community and colleagues and people that have something to say as part of the democratic process. And for many scientists, this is a hard thing. All the incentives are in another direction, and there are many active disincentives and discouragement really in a cultural sense within the university system to engage in the public discourse and certainly to talk about your values. Alright, to talk about what you bring to a conversation, and I like to talk about, and certainly to advocate for anything other than research funding. And, you know, but in a lot of conversations I have with colleagues in the academic community, I like to remind them that when you get a Ph.D., you don't lose your citizenship, and scientists who are often reluctant to engage in the, if you will, in the fray have an opportunity, and I would argue as citizens an obligation to do so. I see it. Thank you. Just one word on some of the work we've been doing. Just last week, looking at these kind of cross cutting issues, we held a, what we call a science and democracy forum at the Newseum in partnership with the Newseum on improving citizen access to government scientific information. All the challenges that we have data in the government that is not often available for the public to use and understand, and some of that sometimes has serious consequences such as information that was withheld about the levels of formaldehyde and the trailers that were used, for example, after Hurricane Katrina, and looking for ways in which we can improve public access to scientific information. We held a public-facing conference with leaders across the political landscape and a group of panelists, and we're now in the process of bringing that information to bear on a set of recommendations for the next administration, which I hope no matter who's in charge will, through our work and that of many others, and I hope the work of all of you if you'd like to join us or collaborate in any possible way, whoever's in charge will be a much more forceful public advocate for science in the policy arena than we've seen in recent decades. I'm going to stop there. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] So I've been instructed by Tamoko to take questions and to repeat them so that they can be picked up by the microphone. So, yes, sir. >> A comment and a question. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah. >> I'm a sociologist, and I think you need to make sure you include sociologists because we do know some things about why people believe the things they do and how to persuade people and so on, and that's part of what you're up against. My question is what kind of energy maybe works or [inaudible] terrible effects on [inaudible]. For instance, solar you might think, but then there's all the mining and all kinds of other things that go into the production of solar panels. So what would you advocate? >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: So let me repeat back what you said succinctly if I can. So that your first point was to remark that we need to engage with sociologists and other social scientists, and I just briefly mentioned this conference at the University of Michigan, and I'm pleased to say we're doing much of that. There's some tremendous work in the social sciences including, some of you may want to go a website called cultural cognition dot net by Dan Cahan and his colleagues at Yale, but others in the sociology have been really thinking hard about how people process and filter information, and we've been working with them in collaboration. I'd be interested in your specific ideas about how we can improve that, but your question was about, you know, what our energy options given that any energy approach we take, we're going to need to power and amplify the energy available to many developing countries. What do we do? Everything at scale has side impacts that are not necessarily positive, and I agree with you. There's no silver bullet here. And so, you know, we need to start with the fact that energy, in my view, needs to be very low to zero carbon, and there a variety of ways in which we can do that. I think if we try to expand a single approach to energy, as you say solar, or wind or nuclear, at scale, it's going to, they are all have side consequences. We're always going to be managing tradeoffs. What I've seen most effective is a diverse portfolio of energy approaches, and we may need, given the scale of changes that we're now seeing, energy sources that I might not prefer because of their side impacts. I personally think we should not be subsidizing major investments, which is really high cost, in nuclear power because of the security and safety risks and literally the high cost of their adoption. Others may disagree, and, you know, if you get our prices right, and we look at finding appropriate ways to solve the side impacts, I think we can do a lot more than we do just by, do now by just, if you will, putting them out without their consideration. So I'm on the board, for example, of an organization called the American Wind Wildlife Institute. One of the biggest concerns about the rapid expansion of wind, and it is expanding relatively rapidly, is its impacts on biodiversity. So we've created an organization that brings together the leaders of most of the CEOs', much of the wind industry companies in the United States with most of the major conservation organizations, Nature Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife, Audubon, and others, so that we can partner and create, if you will, a shared vision and a mapping for how to expand wind while minimizing the impacts on birds and bats, in particular. That's just one example of thoughtful expansion of low-carbon energy, and we can go on about those, but let me stop and take other questions. Yes, ma'am. >> Thank you for your presentation. I have a question regarding your suggestion that scientists should be stronger advocates for [inaudible]. I wonder, do you see a risk that scientists who speaks up publically might be perceived by the public or even framed by certain organizations or groups as biased or maybe lose his or her spending as a, you know, unbiased [inaudible] searching truth scientist. Isn't that a risk or [inaudible] - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: So if I can the read the question, the question is really about isn't there a risk in when scientists engage in the public fray, alright, and advocate for their values being applied, not just their facts, and I agree, there is a risk, and I think there are good ways to do it and less good ways to do it. One of my personal role models and heroes in this work is a, is Mario Molina. Mario Molina, one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the role of chlorofluorocarbons in creating the ozone hole with Sherwood Roland and Paul Crutzen, and when he engaged in raising the concerns that he had understood to be a function of the signs he was discovering into the public [inaudible], he got a lot of criticism from other scientists. And, you know, what, but, ultimately, that work and his, if you, advocacy for the science being heard, alright, was one of the lynchpins of what led to, in a relatively non-contentious way, the adoption of the Montreal Protocol and what we now see as a path forward for addressing this very serious issue. And what Mario said, and I agree with this, is, you know, if, that you just need to be clear about when you're speaking as a scientist and when you're speaking about your personal values, and I agree with that. I don't think scientists should be muffled and, if you will, discouraged or not allowed to speak about their values because they're citizens, too, but I do think we need to be very clear to do science that's rigorous and to do advocacy that's science based as opposed to doing advocacy-driven science, and to make sure that when we do say, you know, as a scientist I can tell you this, and as a citizen, as a constituent, you know, I'd like you to consider something, you know, in taking this approach. That you have to be artful and careful about it. It takes a lot of discipline, but I don't think we should be asking scientists any more than any other citizens to be taking off their citizenship hat. So. In the back. >> Yes. [inaudible] questions. I'm working on a thesis [inaudible] - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah. >> Short question and then [inaudible] is this the page where we can see the broadcast? >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: The broadcast of this talk? >> Yeah - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: No, well, that's the page where you can go to look at the good things that Union of Concerned Scientists is doing. So you can look at that, but Tamoko can tell you the page. [background talk] You want to use it on the, you want to do it on the microphone? >> I mean, everybody who's watching it will know. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: That's true. >> Tamoko Steen: The Library maintains a website, and you can go to the home page loc dot gov. You have to go past the [inaudible], so to speak, down to where they feature a particular website, and under that it's all the web, all the webcasts. They feature a particular webcast. It takes about two months because we have many speakers. There are three today, for instance, and so it does take about two months for it to go through the process of vetting and the collaboration between our public office and those who do the webcasts. So you can look for those and others, and we have several science webcasts that we do throughout the year. So I hope you will visit. Thank you. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Thank you. >> [Inaudible] questions [inaudible] - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah - >> You said sea level rise is to expected rise one meter. The [inaudible] report is predicting 20 centimeters to 70 centimeters. [Inaudible] - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Well, so, there are a couple. Yes, I'm sorry. So I spoke to sea level rise on coastal North Carolina as being projected as about 39 inches, a little over a meter, and you cited, I presume that's whether the [inaudible] for the assessment report in 2007 looking at the global average. So there are two things I would say about that. One is that the IPCC report in 2007, looking at global averages explicitly didn't take into account the impact of land-based ice because the modeling was insufficiently robust at the time. More recent projection, including characterized by the IPCC and others have increased the sea level rise range when land-based ice is included. The melting is in addition to the thermal expansion of sea water. But that's global average, and actual sea level rise varies tremendously across regions for a variety of reasons, as you may well know, depending on not just what's happening in the ocean but what's happening on coastal land, whether there's subsidence in which the land is going down in elevation and, therefore, relative sea level rise is higher, or whether in some cases it may be rising. So the work done in coastal North Carolina was taking into account both the updated projections globally and a set of analyses that looks specifically at sea level rise in coastal North Carolina. It's different, for example, than the coast of California or coastal Maine or the Gulf of Mexico or elsewhere. So it's a local prediction. I'm happy to point you to the data on which that's based. Yes, sir. >> I'd like to get back to climate more particularly - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah - >> The issue of gridlock, political gridlock in Washington. Whether we're going to be looking at most [inaudible] based solutions like [inaudible] talked about in California and Florida or any kind of national thing. I teach at GW, and we hosted a salon on fracking last week, and we had a lot of the industrial leaders like the American Petroleum Institute, and [inaudible] said [inaudible] said that they own the science, too, in saying - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah - >> Well, fracking is really not that dangerous, and they're, they [inaudible], too, and then you also have this big media campaign with the energy [inaudible] and all that. So I feel like the public is being manipulated in some ways and persuaded in some ways, but the gridlock seems like it will go beyond election. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: So the question, I'm not sure, but your question, the question is really what's the prognosis for political action on climate change nationally as opposed to on the state-base level just given the complicated polarization that we see across the, both the science and also the solutions. And I would say that, my own personal view is there's very little prospect for serious Congressional action on climate change at a major scale anytime soon. Perhaps not until 2016. And there is considerable prospect for work at a state level. In fact, in November, the state of Michigan has a ballot initiative for the expansion of its renewable energy standard that increases renewable energy required to be produced from and available to the state to 30 percent by, I'm not sure if it's 2025, what the date is, but that's a, they're now, 29 I believe states plus the District of Columbia that have state-based renewable electricity standards which have not been yet adopted nationally. So that's an example of a state policy that's in the works, but there are actions at a state level both of adaptation and mitigation that are important to be supporting, and we have seen, you know, even though they may not be as major as a price on carbon or economy wide cap, and I see colleague here who have been actively engaged in this work. We did see just this past month further elaboration and, if you will, the final rule making on the expanded federal fuel economy standards that raise fuel economy to well over 50 miles per gallon as a target by the mid of the 2020's. So there are, there's, in that case, a sector-specific policy that's been adopted, and we'll see. But I don't, I think it's unrealistic to expect gridlock to disappear in, you know, February of 2013. Yes, Anna. >> Anna: Hi, Peter. So I was struck by your slide with the political crossover - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah - >> Anna: And what I was struck by is the even, by 1994, I mean, there were a couple of still crossovers, but not too many. And, but in contrast from what I recollect from some of the polling data the [inaudible] on climate change. So in 2000, say, there wasn't actually a huge difference between Republicans and Democrats, but then that has grown over time. I was late. So maybe you did that, showed that graph of early in your speech, but, yeah. That's the one that struck. And so I'm just wondering if you had views on, you know, even though there was kind of less political crossover, the climate was still not as [inaudible], and why that's changed over the, sort of the last decade. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Well, so the question, if I can repeat it, is this figure seems to indicate that American politics became highly polarized by the, by 1994. Increasing but not with a great deal of further increase over the next several decades, but by this polling data on climate suggested that this wasn't really a polarized issue, politically divided until somewhat later, and that's correct. The data I've seen suggests that by the late 1990's, after the second assessment report of the IPCC, which came out in 1988 [inaudible] I believe, and the formation of the Global Climate Coalition, which was an industry, major industry coalition dedicated to constraining policy action on climate including through misinformation on the science, that we began to see the partisan issues. As climate policy got closer to being something which had real tangible possibility, that's, you know, for a range of reasons, why or when the political divide over that issue that became evident, people began paying attention to it in a different kind of way. Showed up in polling, and we can talk about why that might be, but I think that's, in part, a reflection of the difference between. This [inaudible], which is, this graph is, obviously, very broad brush. So. Yes, sir. >> Coming from Europe, people over there wonder why the acknowledgement of climate change happening is so low and the US hasn't changed too drastically. I think in 2006, it was almost the same [inaudible] acknowledging climate change is happening in Europe and in US. Is it only the campaign or what would you say in a few sentences what is needed - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: So your question is from a European perspective, why did the public acceptance of the science of climate change so rapidly drop in the middle of the [inaudible] last decade, alright. Which happened in a way that was timed around the release of the IPCC report and the, you may recall the [inaudible] over the e-mails that were stolen from the University of East [inaudible] that purported to show scientists behaving badly. And it certainly was leveraged more than here, more than in Europe, although there was plenty of news coverage of that, certainly, in London and in the UK, toward a misinformation campaign that was quite active. You know, it's hard to know exactly why that had so much more attraction here. I mean, it played into the polarized social discourse, political discourse we were already having around the politics of it. So it was feeding into a decision set of policies that were being considered around cap in trade, for example. In this country, it was advanced, it was in advance of major policy choices that were being developed nationally. And so it was at the time, if you will, kind of ripe for that information to be put to use to further public confusion in a very active way. If you were in the business of trying to stop legislation, you use every tool you have in your toolkit. If that legislation isn't happening, or there isn't a [inaudible], then you're probably going to do something else with your time. And so I think that it was the kind of, you know, perfect storm, if you will, of information that was put to ill use for the purposes of a very near term policy decision that really latched onto the construct at the time that the science was uncertain, that scientists might have been misleading people, and another set of, all those pieces that came out. But I would say that as we paint the American public as confused on climate change, and there is legitimate information on that to support it, it's also at least worth noting to our European colleagues that confusion around the science isn't strictly an American issue, alright. So there are public perception of risks in Europe around, say, GMO's, are very different than they are in the United States. Public perception of risks over tobacco may be very different than it is in the United States. And one can argue about where that risk perception is closer to the facts [inaudible], but I would just, want to make sure that at least I'm not making the case that there's something distinctive about the American public that has a harder time assessing the scientific evidence and risks associated with information on health or environment, that it's somehow worse than public [inaudible]. I don't think that's the case. I think there are particularly cultural attributes in the US that makes this issue particularly challenging, but maybe less challenging for other issues. Yeah, Rachel. >> Rachel: You had an interesting slide, I notice that June 2011 showing the improved public opinion based on the weather, and wondering if here in October of 2012 if you have any update for us on what those numbers may be doing other than [inaudible]. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Well, we've had, that's a great question. I'd love to, maybe this polling is being, taking place. I haven't seen any more recent data. We certainly had two years of a lot of extreme weather. Who knows what next year will bring. It's not going to be a uniform accelerated increase in extreme events. And so where public opinion is on this, I just, as of October 2012, I have no idea. Sir - >> On that chart, I'm surprised that the second from the bottom item, I mean, that's encouraging. Of course, we have had some quite remarkable weather this summer in the form of a drought [inaudible]. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: That's right. That's right. So you're pointing to the perception that global warming made record snowfalls or, which is counterintuitive for many people about how that could be the case, but I would just argue that, yes, that's true, and I would take that as encouraging. There's good evidence for why there's a fingerprint of warming and more intense precipitation, whether rain or snow, over the past couple of years, but the, of course, the counter example one has to be concerned about is the, is Hurricane Irene, alright. So there's very little evidence that human warming made that hurricane worse, and I would guess, like, I've seen some data suggesting that people do attribute the kind of freakish nature of tornadoes that we've seen to warming of the, there's, you know, the [inaudible] basis for that as well as the evidentiary basis for that is very close to zero. So people are doing your own, if you will, attribution science in the absence of scientific information. We now are getting much better at closer to real-time abilities to characterize the impact of warming on extreme weather. So we know, we now know that the variety of most of these statistical technique that the extreme summer heat in 2011 in Texas, for example, which was in large part a function of the la nina, the cooling of the sea surface temperatures off the southern Pacific, off of South America, off of Peru, that that has an impact on warming in that part of the United States, but that it was likely made far worse by a combination of la nina and the anthropogenic warming. But it's very difficult to tease those apart in real time, but, of course, that's how people pay attention in real time. And so there's an interesting body of research that's now underway to try to create, if you will, as much as possible kind of real-time attribution service to begin to let people know within the limits of the science, really, what we can say about the role of warming versus all the natural variability that will continue. [inaudible] >> Tamoko Steen: The Fukoshima, after the Fukoshima incident - >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Yeah - >> Tamoko Steen: Japanese are now looking at, because the country aware of the global warming, you know, the deduction of consumption energy, that's the focus, and how about this country we can do that. You know, that because so much of side effect of some different energy productions [inaudible]. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: So the question is in Japan following Fukoshima, there's been a lot of public conversation about reducing energy consumption, which is, obviously, one way to reduce global warming, and what can we do about that. What's happening here with that regard. I think the conversation around energy in this country is less about reducing consumption than about increasing efficiency, and for a variety of reasons, that's a much easier conversation to have, and there's an awful lot that can be gained through increasing energy efficiency, and a lot of it is economically the low-hanging fruit, although often it's very difficult to get people to adopt efficiency practices. It's even difficult to get Congress to adopt standards that require more efficient light bulbs. So some very common sense issues of efficiency. Sometimes they're challenging to implement, even though they often save money. But here, there's a, again, it depends on the state. Some states, California, for example, has adopted a tremendous amount of statewide efficiency measures and the decoupling of economic development from energy consumption has really happened quite dramatically in California as opposed to some other states. So efficiency is very much a part of the mix, less so reducing consumption. >> Tamoko Steen: Because time is running out, please join me to thank you, Dr. Frumhoff. >> Dr. Peter Frumhoff: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.