Webinar: Arctic Meltdown and Unruly Tropical Storms - How Are They Connected?

Percent in the 65 or older age range, about 17% in the 51 to 65 age range, 8%. And I'm going to go ahead so that you can see these as I rattle off these statistics and this and share the results here. About 7 or 8% of you, each in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and then about 14% of our participants today are under 18 students. Students, really welcome to you and thank you for taking the time to be here and welcome to some of our local students. It's great to see you with us today. Now I'm going to ask you one other thing which is going to become we've asked this a few times in previous webinars but would like to get a sense of where you're joining us from. Let's see if I can get to poll number two and let you answer this question. Where do you live and where are you joining us from? Because I think you're going to want to know where Jen Francis is joining us from in a few minutes and we will talk about that. But let us know where you're joining us from today. And we do have, as usual, preponderance of you joining U.S. from the U.S. northeast and Canada. Canada hovering at around 77% of you will wait for a few more people to vote here before I close this out and call these the results. But most of you from the U.S. northeast and Canada here I'll go ahead and we've got 200 votes. So I will go ahead and close this and share with you. Most from the Northeast and from Canada, but also some strong representation from the western side of the U.S. several from Europe, one person saying Asia and the Middle east, likewise another from Central or South America. We are so glad to see you joining us from around the world. That really is one of the great benefits of these webinars. While we miss our in person events, it really is great to be able to reach out to those of you in places where we wouldn't normally be having those in person events. Now I said that you were going to want to know where Jen Francis was joining us from. And so I'm going to now invite Jen to join us on video.

And.

Ask you, Jen, where are you joining us from today?

Yes, hello everyone and thank you so much for being here and thank you especially to the Kanib family for supporting these webinars. So my husband and I live on a sailboat for eight months of the year and right now we're in the U.S. virgin Islands, which isn't where we had planned to be. The virus has affected us just as much, I think, although we're probably in a better spot than some people. We expected to be down in the island of Curacao by now, where we were expecting to haul our boat out for the summer because Curacao is so far south, right off the coast of South America that hurricanes rarely get there. So it would be a good safe place. Anyway, we are planning to sail home instead because all of the islands around from somewhere else and so we really don't have much choice at this point, which is, you know, that's the way it goes. And we feel very fortunate compared to a lot of people dealing with this crazy situation that we find ourselves in.

Well, Jen, we're glad that you could join us and the wonders of modern technology that you've got WI fi on your boat as you move around. So we're glad that you can join us from where you are now. I would love. Before you jump into your presentation, I should tell our attendees that I've known Jen for several years, but it wasn't until very recently that I learned how integral this sailing part of your life. The numbers are staying pretty steady here. We've got about 55 going back to sailing around the world a couple of decades ago. Would you tell us a little bit of that story and how sailing led to your interest in the Arctic?

Sure. So yeah, back in the early 80s, my husband around the world before we had finished school, before we owned a home, before we had children, any of that stuff. And remember back in the 1980s, there was no GPS, there were no cell phones. It was a very different experience back then. So it was all by celestial navigation and much more difficult. And we took a very unusual route around the world. A lot of high latitude sailing, including around Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands, but also up to the Arctic. And when we got to the Arctic, at that point, I had pretty well decided to change my career from what it had been, which was on the path towards becoming a dentist, to going into meteorology, which was something that had always fascinated me, but I never thought that it would be a career. Towards the end of the trip, we went up to the Arctic. We were up in the islands of Svalbard, Spitsbergen, which is about 500 miles from the North Pole. And. And the weather information that we could get up there was literally worthless. That's what I ended up focusing on. So you just never know.

I think that's a great story for everyone and especially for the students with us today to hear how life and careers evolve in unexpected ways. So thank you for sharing that with us. I guess at this point, without further ado, I would love for you to launch into your presentation and help us understand a little bit more how things that seem as separate as warming in the Arctic and tropical storms might actually be connected and how climate change is pulling the strings on that connection.

Can you see my screen now, my presentation? Because that's what I see.

I'm not seeing your screen share yet. If you have your slides up, if you hit share screen again at the bottom.

Yeah, I'm not seeing that share screen, so do it over again. All right. I don't know where it went, but it disappeared. Hopefully it's okay now.

Looks great now.

Yes. Okay.

All right.

Yep. Okay, then. So. Yep. Okay, so let's get into this topic that Heather already introduced. This seemingly unrelated things like melting ice in the Arctic and how that might have anything to do with tropical storms and especially unruly tropical storms. So, as I'm sure almost everyone on this webinar realizes is that all the greenhouse gases we've been dumping into the atmosphere for the last over 100 years now really has caused the globe to warm. This is just showing one of the many graphics you could find for 2019 and comparing the global temperatures to what it used to be like before the Industrial Revolution. We like to say you can see that the entire globe is warmer than it used to be. Those numbers are all positive. But what I want you to focus on is way up in the north there, those bright pink colors, which is the Arctic, obviously. And the warming there is happening faster than anywhere else. And part of the story behind that extra warming up in the Arctic is tied to the fact that we've lost most of the sea ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean. So this animation that you're looking at here is looking down on the North Pole. I'm hoping my pointer works. There's Greenland there. There's northern Canada. Alaska's over on this side, and Europe is over on the upper right. These colors represent the thickness of the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean. And the animation starts in the late 1970s and continues right up to almost the present day. The orange and yellow colors represent very thick ice, up to 3, 4, maybe even 5 meters thick. And the purpley colors are much thinner ice. And what you can see very clearly as we go through this animation over the last 40 years is that that thick ice is gone. And what we're left with is only very thin ice left in the Arctic. And that thin ice is much more susceptible to any strange winds or situate weather patterns that let a lot of extra sun in or bring a lot of heat up from the southern latitudes. The sea ice now is extremely vulnerable to additional warming that's happening in the atmosphere. It's also magnifying the warming. It's part of the reason why the Arctic is warming so fast. That was the ice thickness. Now, if we look at how the coverage of the ice has been changing, in the upper right is what the sea ice looked like during the end of summer back in the late 1970s. And then down in the front here is the same look, but in September of 2012, about 35 years later. And these red colors here are showing you where the ice is gone. So not only have we lost the ice thickness, not only has the ice become so much thinner, but. But it's also covering a lot less area. And if you consider the thickness change in addition to this area change, and calculate how the volume of the ice has changed just in these last 40 years, 75% of it is gone now. And it's just a huge change that's happened in really the blink of an eye in terms of the Earth's lifespan. So the result of this is, or one of them is that because we've lost all of this very white ice, we now are left with open ocean, which is much, much darker. And that dark ocean absorbs much more of the sun's energy as it shines down during the spring and summer months. The result of that is that we have this warming happening that I showed you in the beginning. And it also sets up what we call a feedback where we lose some mice. We absorb some more heat from the sun, it melts more ice so that more of that sun's energy can be absorbed. And so it sets up a vicious cycle. So this loss of sea ice and the loss of really what we call the Earth's mirror, you can think of as a threat multiplier, because we are now absorbing, because the Earth is darker now, literally because of losing all of this ice and snow, too. On land, we're absorbing a lot more of the sun's energy. And that's making global warming even worse by a lot. 25 to 40% more global warming than if we didn't have that ice there. And this is causing the glaciers in the Northern hemisphere and Greenland, the Greenland ice sheet, to both melt much faster. And this is contributing to sea level rise. So you can think of this loss of ice in the Arctic and The warming that's happening up there at the as a threat multiplier. And because of this, we're putting more heat in the atmosphere. So we've increased the greenhouse gases. More heat's being absorbed by the Earth, and the globe is warming. Five of the last 10 years. The most recent five years are the hottest five years. We're already bumping up pretty close to that target that the Paris Accord was trying to meet, which was 1.5 degrees Celsius warming for the globe. We're already almost there. And the loss of the ice in the Arctic is making these bars even taller than they would be otherwise. So more heat in the atmosphere, more heat in the oceans. We know that about 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases actually goes into the oceans and not the atmosphere. And what you're looking at here is actually the ocean surface temperatures from about 10 days ago and their differences from normal for this time of year. And what you can see is those orange and yellow colors stretching all the way across the tropical Atlantic area are bad news. And that's why we're here talking about tropical cyclones is that all that warm water sitting there is like energy for those storms. And you can see it extends all the way into the Bahamas and into the Gulf of Mexico. So this is one of the ways that fuels these tropical storms. And having all that warm water there means that when one forms, it's going to have plenty of energy to work with. We already had our first tropical storm just this last few days, Tropical Storm Arthur, which formed just south of Florida and made its way up towards Cape Hatteras. So we're not even in the hurricane season yet. That starts June 1st. So we can also see that over time, that heat that's been absorbed by the oceans, the upper half of the ocean, roughly, has been increasing dramatically over the last several decades. So this is just showing the heat content of the upper 2000 meters of the ocean and how that's increased so much over these recent times. The third aspect of this is that we also have more moisture in the atmosphere now. We've got more heat in the air, more heat in the ocean, and we have more moisture in the atmosphere. This is an animation of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere from last summer. So during hurricane season last summer. And if you look carefully, you can see Hurricane Dorian spinning over the Bahama chain right there. And there's a couple of other tropical storms out in the Pacific. So you can notice very clearly that the tropical regions here of the Earth are where there's the most moisture, and that's partly why we find such severe storms happening there. That moisture is like fuel for these storms. But this is also a really fun animation to look at different aspects of it and see how these tendrils of moisture are sucked up into the higher latitudes by extratropical storms, so not tropical storms. So over time, we are seeing that the amount of moisture in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing, as we would expect it to. With the oceans warming more, they're evaporating more moisture into the air. And as the air warms, it can hold more of that moisture. So we're seeing a very, very steady increase in that atmospheric moisture. So pulling this all together and connecting it to hurricanes, that heat and that moisture, as I said, are fuel for storms. Not just tropical storms, but all storms. But we're talking about the tropical ones here. Other aspects of this, as I already alluded to, is the fact that we're increasing sea levels. The Arctic is playing a role here through that extra warming that it's causing globally, but also helping to melt the ice sheets of Greenland and also melting the glaciers on land. So the sea level rise is being caused by several factors. The biggest one lately, over the past several decades, has been the melting of those land glaciers. But also this other big contribution is just because of the fact that the oceans have been absorbing all that extra heat. And when the oceans get warmer, they expand. That's what's known as thermal expansion. The other two factors are melting ice sheets, both from Antarctica and from Greenland. And these contributions are the ones that are increasing the fastest. And the Arctic, as I said, is accelerating that melting process. What you might not know is that sea level rise is not happening uniformly around the world. This is showing the trends over the last few decades. These red colors are where sea level is rising quickly. And there's even some areas where sea levels are going down. You can see that right along the east coast here where we're located, is one of the places that's experiencing faster than normal sea level rise. There's many factors that contribute to that, but we are definitely in one of the places where it's rising the fastest. And those rising seas, of course, are connected to hurricanes by causing larger storm surges, because as the storms come ashore, they're riding on a higher ocean level, so that surge can extend farther inland. And also, the storm waves are riding on a higher ocean as well, so those waves will damage structures farther inland. The last connection to hurricanes is really getting closer to my own research, which is the Disruption of the winds that steer storms. What we're finding is that again, the Arctic is playing a role here. One of the things that's happening is because the Arctic is warming so fast, it's causing the steering winds around the Northern hemisphere to weaken. And it's because the, the difference in temperature between the Arctic and areas farther south is really the force that drives those steering wheels, steering winds. And so as the Arctic warms much faster, that difference in temperature is getting smaller. And so there's less force to drive those upper level steering winds. We're also seeing that the jet stream, which is this river of wind high over our heads, is becoming wavier as a result of these, of Arctic warming so much faster. And I'll show you an example of that in a second. And those bigger waves in the jet stream tend to move more slowly. And because they move more slowly, the wind, the weather that they are generating, and also the weather they're steering is also moving more slowly. There's been recent research suggesting that hurricanes have been moving more slowly and more are tending to stall in one place. And we've seen some great examples of that lately. So here's what I mean by a wavier jet stream. This is actually the jet stream that was in place when Sandy came along back in October of 2012. You can see this very large snaky thing over the North America here. These waves are very large for the jet stream. This is the core of the winds in the jet stream. And when these waves get big like this, that pattern tends to stay in place for a long time. And you can see that the winds south of the jet stream are very weak. So when Sandy came along, there was very little in the way of winds to steer it. And it ended up, as we know, going into the coast of New Jersey. So there have been some very unruly tropical storms lately. I just wanted to show you a couple of examples. We mentioned Irma already. It was unruly because it was so strong. Irma came through the part of the world where I am right now, which is the US Virgin Islands. And we can still see a lot of evidence of the damage that it caused here. It then continued on up into Florida and dumped almost or over 20 inches of rain in some parts of Florida and did a lot of damage there as well. We'll all remember Hurricane Harvey, how unusual that situation was. Harvey was one of those stalling storms that came in over the Gulf of Mexico. You can see these. This is the ocean temperature differences from normal over the Gulf of Mexico, when Harvey arrived in Houston, much warmer than normal temperatures. A lot of evaporation, a lot of moisture in the atmosphere and very little in the way of winds to move it along. And so it came into Houston, it stayed in one place for several days. And you can. I don't know if you can see these numbers, but there's over 40 inches of rain dumped in very flat Houston. And the residents of Houston were not pleased. Florence was a similar situation where the storm came along and then reached the coast of the Carolinas and just stopped in place and as a result, dumped over 20 inches of rain in this area of the Carolinas and the Eastern seaboard. Then there was Dorian, very recently, one of these storms again, that came along and just stayed in one place. It was also an extremely strong storm, Category 5, as it sat over the northern Bahamas here and it just demolished the communities in the northern Bahamas. They are still trying to recover from that terrible storm that hit them two summers ago. Heather's already alluded to the fact that this summer, most or all of the predictions that have come out so far agree unanimously that it is going to be a very busy year for tropical storms in the North Atlantic. The factors that contribute to that, as I've already shown you, the ocean temperatures are abnormally warm, very warm all across the areas where the hurricanes tend to develop in the tropical Atlantic. Then once they get over to Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, there's plenty of energy there for the storms to feed off of as well. There's no sign of an El Nino forming. It isn't there now, and there's really no expectation for it. And the reason we care about that is because when we do have an El Nino, it tends to create a lot of shear in the winds over the Atlantic side. So even though El Nino is in the Pacific, it tends to cause. It affects the shear over the tropical Atlantic. And shear is bad for storms. It tends to rip them apart, it prevents them from forming and tends to keep them from getting very strong. So no El Nino is actually bad news for us. We're also seeing a very low amount of sea ice up in the Arctic already this spring and very warm temperatures. So this is showing the temperatures from just last week up over the Arctic running 10 to 15 degrees above normal. So again, thinking back to what I mentioned, how the very warm Arctic is affecting the steering winds of the storms, this is also probably going to be playing a role this summer. So that's pretty much what I have for today. And looking forward to questions. But if you would like to do a bit more reading, I have two articles that I wrote recently for Scientific American magazine. One of them is more focused on the Arctic itself, but all the ways that the Arctic meltdown is affecting weather patterns. And that one came out in April 2018. And this other one called Rough Weather Ahead, is a more general look at how climate change is causing various types of extreme weather to become more frequent. So with that, I look forward to some questions.

Terrific. Thank you so much, Jen. If you want to go ahead and stop your screen share for the Q and A, and we already have a number of questions that people have submitted. Just a little point of order here. If you have questions for Jen, we would like to get as many of those to her as possible. And the best way to do that is for you to to type your question into the Q and A instead of raising your hand or putting something into the chat. I'll primarily be looking to the Q and A section. So if you're looking down at the bottom of your zoom screen, that little thought bubble Q and A icon, go ahead and type your question in there and we will see how many of these questions we can get to. I wanted to go back to one point, Jen, that you made about sea level rise. Two points that I think are often underappreciated. One, that it's not happening evenly everywhere, but also just how large the role of thermal expansion actually is. I mean, this is, we're all familiar with the idea that if you boil a pot of water and you start with the pot too full, you can boil over. But we don't often think that what seems like a relatively small change in temperature of the oceans could do something like actually expand the oceans enough to cause a change in sea level rise.

Yeah, but when you look at that amount of ocean heat content and how it's changed over time, it's really just a phenomenal amount of heat. And water can absorb a lot of heat and not change its temperature too much. It has a very high heat capacity, we say, but, you know, it's a lot of energy. There's a lot of heat that's been trapped by these greenhouse gases that we've been putting into the atmosphere and the other changes to the planet that we've been doing that have contributed to the warming. And so it is a big component of sea level rise. And it's being its proportion of the sea level rises getting smaller and smaller, though, as, as the contributions from Greenland and Antarctica ice melt are getting larger.

Another thing that a couple of people noted in your presentation was the prominent role that you talked about moisture in the atmosphere and how that, as well as heat, can be fuel for storms. And, you know, okay, heat is a form of energy that makes sense. But tell us a little bit more about how moisture acts as fuel for storms. And a couple people have also asked if that moisture is important also, not just in weather, but in enhancing the greenhouse effect for the planet overall.

Absolutely. Those are great questions. And I almost always say that I think the moisture story is never told well enough, often enough, with enough emphasis, because that extra moisture in the atmosphere plays a huge role. And as one of those questions alluded to water vapor. So that's water that's been evaporated. It's a gas in the atmosphere that is also a greenhouse gas. So it's another one of these positive feedbacks that's happening in the climate system as we add carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, get the warming started, that increases the evaporation from the ocean and. And it adds more water vapor to the atmosphere, which increases the heat trapping capacity of the air. So that's a very big deal. But also that moisture plays a big role in the storms because when you take water vapor that's evaporated from the ocean or from the land and then you condense it into liquid, which would be clouds, there's a lot of heat that gets released during that process of condensation, and that goes into the air. It increases the heat that's in the atmosphere, say, during a storm, and when it's creating those clouds in the first place. And that helps fuel the upward motions in the storm that lead to things like thunderstorms and certainly stronger hurricanes. So it plays a huge role not just in tropical storms, but all storms. And then finally, the third real big role of that water vapor is that it's perfect providing more moisture for storms to dump on us. So we are already seeing the frequency of heavy precipitation events all across the United States, but especially in the east, becoming much more frequent. And I don't mean a little bit. We're talking about 50, 60% more heavy downpours in the Northeast and somewhat less as you go westward across the country. And you might think, look at the headlines today and see that two major dams in Michigan were broken because we've had this very persistent heavy rain falling in the Midwest pretty much all spring. They've really been saturated there. And so they're looking at the biggest flooding they've ever seen in that part of the world. And that's related to this extra moisture in the atmosphere because it's evaporating from warmer oceans.

We have a lot of questions that are focused on hurricanes, because that's what your presentation focused on. I want to go off on a little bit of a tangent for a moment because you just mentioned the situation in the Midwest with flooding. I mean, how broad are the impacts of Arctic warming on our weather? It's not just hurricanes, right. But it can be all sorts of different types of weather. And I think sometimes, you know, there can kind of be this reaction to say, well, how could climate change be connected to hurricanes and to snowstorms and to flooding and to droughts? All of these different things. How could they all be tied to one process? So can you give us a little bit of insight into that?

Sure. So I alluded to it a little bit when I talked about those big waves in the jet stream. And when we weaken those upper level winds because of the Arctic warming so fast, we also make it more likely for those big waves to occur in the jet stream. Now, those big waves are what create the weather that we experience down here on the surface. Whether it's a beautiful, dry, sunny day or seeming like storm after storm coming through your part of the country. If those waves are getting bigger or they're in a big configuration more frequently, those big waves, as I said, also move much more slowly from west to east. What we're expecting and what we're starting to measure is a tendency for more persistent weather conditions. This could be any kind of weather conditions. If you happen to be in the dry part of the wave in the jet stream, then you're looking at a higher percentage or higher likelihood of droughts happening and also heat waves. But what's happening in the Midwest this winter is there in the stormy part of one of those waves, and it's been pretty stuck in place. And so basically they've been under the storm track for most of the spring and having all of this precipitation dumped on them. So we think that the rapid Arctic warming is making these types of scenarios more likely. And that's actually one of the things that I've been researching very actively in the last year or two.

I think trying to understand how winds at different levels in the atmosphere affect each other and turn into these large scale patterns can be a lot to take on. I mean, if we were to think about the jet stream as a river, as rivers come down into flatter areas, they tend to meander more and slow down because they don't have as much gravity driving them. Is that the same thing that we're talking about with the jet stream? If it's kind of like a river through the atmosphere, it doesn't have that temperature gradient driving it and it starts to meander and slow down.

Exactly. So, as I said, when the Arctic is really cold and the temperature difference between the Arctic and areas farther south is really big, then we get a very strong jet stream. And that you can think of going to your analogy as being on the side of a mountain that's very steep, so you have a lot of force basically creating that wind that becomes the jet stream. But when the Arctic warms much faster.

And it starts to meander and slow down.

Exactly. So as I said, that temperature difference gets smaller, then there's less force to drive those winds of the jet stream. And so that is similar to the river that came down that steep mountainside, hits the coastal plain and then everybody. Well, a lot of people who've flown in an airplane will look down and see these very loopy looking rivers that are flowing through, say, a very shallow grade of land. And that is a very similar situation. Yes.

We've had a number of people ask for a little bit more information on El Nino, if you could tell us. You mentioned that being a factor in what determines hurricane activity in the Atlantic. What is El Nino? How is it changing? Do we know how it's changing with climate change? And of course, how is it related to hurricane activity? If we're talking about a phenomenon in the Pacific, how is it related to Atlantic hurricane activity?

Yeah, so I should have explained El Nino a little better, obviously, because I saw a couple of questions pop up there. So El Nino is really just a natural fluctuation in patterns of ocean temperature that happen off the west coast of Ecuador, so along the equator in the Pacific Ocean, basically starting off of Ecuador and extending westward from there. An El Nino condition is when there's this tongue of much warmer than normal ocean temperatures that forms off of that coast. And it's called El Nino because when that warm water is sitting there off the coast, it tends to stop the ocean from mixing in the vertical. And that mixing is really important because it brings nutrients up from deeper layers of the ocean which fish feed on. And so when there's an El Nino, and they tend to occur around Christmas time, so that's why it got the El Nino sort of. El Nino in Spanish would be the child related to the Christmas time of year. It shuts down their fisheries, so they have very little to eat. And it's a very disturbing and disruptive event when it happens there. Of course, the opposite is a La Nina, and that is when there's colder than normal temperatures in that same general location. And the reason that it affects the Atlantic hurricane season is that whenever you have changes in temperature patterns on the ocean or on the land, it changes the wind pattern. Winds are there because of temperature differences. When we mess with the temperature differences in the Pacific Ocean or they change naturally and it's going to have downstream effects. And the downstream effect of an El Nino in the Atlantic is to create more. It causes the wind to blow from different directions at different heights in the atmosphere. And that's what we call shear. That tends to be what keeps tropical storms from forming or ripping them apart if it's bad enough. And we don't really know how El Nino is going to change in the future. It's a really open research question right now. There's not a lot of evidence for either La Ninas or El Ninos having a significant change so far. And I think the climate models are not that good at simulating some of these large scale ocean circulation patterns yet and temperature changes.

I appreciate you bringing us right to the cutting edge of where the science is of us understanding what we do and don't understand about is changing. We've gotten a number of questions asking going back to your initial temperature.

Climate models are not that good at simulating some of these large scale ocean circulation patterns yet and temperature changes.

I appreciate you bringing us right to the cutting edge of where the science is of us understanding what we do and don't understand about is changing. We've gotten a number of of questions asking going back to your initial temperature change map where you said temperatures are rising everywhere, but so much more extreme in the Arctic and there was a little bit of a similar pinkish purple blob down near Antarctica. But you don't see the same sort of extreme warming at the southern Pole as you do at the northern.

So.

So why is that? What's the difference?

So there's a lot of factors, but the biggest one and the change map.

Where you said, you know, temperatures are rising everywhere, but.

So the easiest one to understand is there is sea ice in the Southern.

Ocean, much more extreme in the Arctic, and there was a little bit of a similar pinkish purple blob down near Antarctica, but you don't see the same sort of extreme warm at the southern pole as you do at the northern.

So why is that around Antarctica? But every summer it tends to melt all the way back to the coast, because the southern, you know, Antarctica is a continent.

What's the difference?

So there's a lot of factors, but the biggest one. And whereas the Arctic is an ocean. And so because that sea ice melts back to the coast every summer, there's no opportunity for that feedback that I talked. The easiest one to understand is there is sea ice in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, but every summer it tends to melt all the way to about where you lose some ice and then you absorb some more heat from the sun and then you melt more ice, because the ice is already melted as far back as it can get. And once it gets to the coast, the ice that's sitting on top of Antarctica is very, very cold. It's very, very thick. And so it will take a lot of years of warming to melt that ice that's sitting on top of Antarctica. At least from the top. Where we're seeing the ice melting in Antarctica is actually from underneath. It's because the ocean is warming so much and it's bringing that warmer water underneath those glaciers that are coming off of the continent and sticking out into the ocean. So it's a very different place with processes happening.

We have a very, I would say, astute and informed audience here, giving us some really challenging questions today. Jen, so here's wondering, as there's more moisture in the atmosphere, does that mean more clouds in the atmosphere and what does that mean for climate and for storms?

Yeah, yeah. So that's actually a pretty difficult question to answer. Clouds are very gnarly things. Different kinds of clouds have very different effects on the climate system. So, for example, low clouds that you're apt to see, like, off the coast of California or places where it tends to be pretty much nice weather, but you just get this layer of moisture sitting there. Those clouds tend to cool the surface quite strongly. But if you look at clouds that are very high in the atmosphere, which are made of ice crystals, they let most of the sun's rays come right through, but they trap some of the heat very similar to how a greenhouse gas works. And so they actually have a warming effect on the planet. And we are expecting to see more clouds as the. As the atmosphere gains moisture in some places. But it's not clear whether the clouds are going to cause more cooling overall or more heating overall. Although the most recent research is leaning towards contributing to the heating, which is bad news. We were all kind of hoping that, oh, maybe if we get more of those low clouds, it'll actually be something that will help Slow down global warming. But it's looking like that's not the case.

Now we got one question about the kind of feedback loop that you mentioned in the Arctic that as it gets darker and absorbs more heat and then it warms more quickly and you get this vicious cycle. And one person asked if there's any way to interrupt or stop that vicious cycle.

Well, there are certainly people proposing some ideas that are aimed at that possibility. One of the ideas is to sprinkle very white particles onto the ice that's still there so that when the summer melt season comes along, the reflectivity of that ice surface becomes higher, so it makes it brighter and it reflects more of the sun's energy back to space, which would reduce the amount that's being absorbed by the Arctic as a whole. There are other ideas of putting very reflective particles up higher in the atmosphere. They could be salt particles which would help create more clouds, which may or may not have a warming or a cooling effect, as I was just describing. And there's other ideas about putting them up even higher in the atmosphere to just reflect some of the sun's energy. But all of those approaches, I think are very short sighted. They'd be expensive. And if you ever stopped doing them, even if they started to work, if you ever stopped doing them, we're still left with the underlying disease, which is the fact that we're adding all these greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So if we're not doing that, if we're not mitigating those greenhouse gases at the same time that we try to do this, geoengineering as it's called, it's really, it's not a long term solution and it could cause some very detrimental effects that probably are very difficult to predict at this point. Effects on the ecosystem, the marine biology, the food web in the ocean, changes in wind patterns. It could cause, you know, severe weather to happen in places that they're not used to it. And then, you know, they start blaming and it could, it just can turn into a big mess really fast. So I'm not a proponent of any of those ideas, but that doesn't stop people from thinking about them.

We had one person ask, how do we get this presentation that you've made today, Jen, and this information in front of our federal policymakers in Congress. And in fact, that's something you've done right, you've gone to D.C. so tell us a little bit about trying to get this into the public.

So I've actually been twice I testified at a Senate panel back in 2012, I think it was. And then I testified again for a congressional committee hearing just last year. And the two experiences couldn't have been more different. So back in 2012, it was a very antagonistic environment in the room. There were clearly people that were still not convinced that climate change was something that humans had anything to do with. And they were asking very difficult, aggressive, unhelpful questions. But even more disappointing to me in that experience was the fact that nobody was listening to each other. So the two sides of the story were just not paying attention to what the other side had to say. So that was an interesting experience, but not very satisfying. But when I testified for Congress last year, it was a completely different story. There really were very few questions that were what you'd expect from someone who didn't believe in climate change at all. And the discussion was really more about what to do about it. So I feel like we've made a lot of progress. I feel that the the Arctic story is a good one to tell to both public audiences and also policymakers, because the Arctic is changing so fast that anybody can see that animation of the changing ice thickness and, you know, really be blown away. And it's a very convincing and obvious effect of global climate change. So I continue to try to get out in front of whoever is willing to listen and use this tool and the connection to extreme weather. And people love to talk about weather, so combining those two into one story seems to be gaining some traction.

Well, I think that message of optimism and movement in the right direction is a great note to end on. And you've been very obliging with all of the questions this afternoon. So just one last question for you from a concerned member of the audience. How long is it going to take you to get home?

Not very long, actually. Of course, there's a lot of pressure on me to produce a great weather pattern to get us home. So winds from a good direction, not too much wind, no squalls, you know, making it easy. But if things went really well, we could actually be home if we went non stop in that six, seven days.

All right, well, we wouldn't want to rush. You enjoy the US Virgin Islands for as long as you're enjoying them. But we do look forward to having you back in Woods Hole. Senior Scientist Jen Francis, thank you so much for sharing all this information with us in such an engaging way. We've had over 50 questions today, and I know we didn't get to all of them, but thank you all for putting your questions out there and thank you, Jen, so much for answering so many of them. Happy to try. And again, thank you all for joining us for our webinar series. We will be back again in a couple of weeks talking about faith and science coming together in climate action. And I would like to leave you with one last message, that most of the work that happens at Woods Hole Research center is funded by a combination of. Yes. Grants from the federal government and also from foundations and also by donations. And so if what you have heard today has spurred you to want to get more engaged, to learn more and to support this kind of work, we would encourage you to consider supporting Woods Hole Research Center's work. Thank you again so much for joining us for the webinar. And we hope to see you again in a couple of weeks.