Science Friday - Climate Report, Wind Energy, SciFri Educator Collaborative. Nov 30, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

This Monday, Mars fans rejoiced as NASA’s lander Mars InSight successfully parachuted safely onto the large, flat plain of Elysium Planitia. In the days that followed, the lander successfully has deployed its solar panels and begun to unstow its robotic arm. Learn more about the landing, plus the latest science news.  Then, wind energy development is spreading around the nation. But as developers move to identify promising locations for wind farms, however, they may need to consider more than just logistics, wind speeds, and distribution lines. Researchers report that “wake effects” from one wind farm can sap the energy of a downwind generating facility as far as 50 km away. Part II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment describes how every part of our society and every state in our country will be impacted by a warmer world. Not just by hurricanes, floods and wildfires, but by more rainfall in the Midwest, thawing permafrost in Alaska, and drier air in the Southeast.  And finally, calling all science educators! We're teaming up with science educators across the country in our Science Friday Educator Collaborative Program, in which educators work with SciFri staff to develop resources for science learners everywhere. Applications are open now.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iro Pflato. A bit later in the hour, we'll take the temperature of the latest national climate assessment. But first, on Monday, Mars fans rejoiced as Mars insights stuck the landing on a large flat plane near the Martian equator. And in the days that followed, all signs are good. The lander has deployed its solar panels. It's begun to unsteo its robotic arm, and scientists are planning where to place things. their instruments. Joining me now to talk about that space feat and other short subjects in science is Maggie Kerth Baker. She's a senior science reporter for 538. She joins me from the NPR,

MPR studios. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. This is kind of, you know, what's the lander, what's the mission of this lander? Well, so Insight, which is a tortured acronym for interior exploration using seismic investigations, geodicy and heat transport, is designed to study geologic activity or lack thereof beneath the Martian soil. So it's going to send dig down into the soil with probes? Yep. And so you know how Earth has these plates of crust that move slowly, crashing into each other, forming, reforming continents over millions of years?

Well, it turns out that Mars apparently doesn't have any of that. You know, the planet seems to be tectonically, seems to have been tectonically active in its ancient past, but it isn't anymore, and nobody really knows why. No one knows what happened. They know that there are earthquakes on Mars, and inside is going to measure some of those, but those aren't even caused by plate tectonics there. Instead, they're caused by the crust cracking

as the planet's interior cools and shrinks. And we don't even know if the planet's core is still molten or if it's solidified. Wow, that is exciting to find out. The landing was marked by a couple of tiny satellites that went along for the ride. Yeah, these little briefcase-sized cube sets that launched the same time as in sight

and traveled kind of alongside of it so that when it was landing, they were able to be flying by Mars and sending information back to Earth. So it's not like relying on a satellite that already was in orbit. You have instant new satellites. Yeah, yeah, they could have relied on a satellite

that was already in orbit, but that one was about to go around to the far side of Mars just as they were coming in, and then it would have been hours before they found out any information about it. Yeah, I hate it when that happens. All right, moving back to Earth on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court instructed the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to figure out a definition of the word habitat.

Yeah, so this is interesting because I love esoteric things like this. This is this really narrow ruling in a much bigger case that's likely going to end up determining the fate of this dusky gopher frog that once lived all across the American South but is now confined to a single pond in Mississippi. And back in 2012, the U.S. government came up. with this plan to designate some land in Louisiana as gopher frog habitat, give the animal a place to recover its numbers, and kind of let it grow there. But the people that own the land and who wanted to develop that land sued. And the catch here, and what the Supreme Court case has focused on, is what habitat really means, because no dusky gopher frogs currently live in Louisiana. In some ways, this designated habitat area isn't even ideal for them, and you'd have to do some alterations,

just to kind of make it a place they could move into. But expanding their range is critical to their survival. So the land, you know, can it be a critical habitat legally controllable by the Endangered Species Act if it's not already a habitat? And that's what the Supreme Court wants the lower courts to figure out now. Is a habitat a habitat a habitat if you have to make it a habitat? Yeah. There's a limerick in here somewhere, but I'm not sure that I'm authorized to say those on air. And you're saying this could have a wider impact for other habitats.

Well, presumably it could, yeah, because if we have a very narrow definition of what a critical habitat can be, that's going to affect other species as well. And you have another story out this week about something that's deep in my heart because I visited Antarctica many centuries ago. And what lies beneath Antarctica? Because when you're up there, you see 14,000-foot peaks. There's a real continent under there, but there's a mile of ice somewhere. in some places, two miles, and so we're finding out more now what's really beneath the ice. Yeah, and what's beneath the ice is kind of cool. So it's really hard to study the actual geology of Antarctica because, as you say,

it's under this mile-thick layer of ice. But last week, the New York Times reported that scientists had used data collected by a European satellite that crashed to Earth in the past couple of years to effectively peer through that ice by measuring variations in the gravitational field. And what they found is the remnants of at least three ancient continents that had all been kind of smushed together. One of them has a lot in common geologically with Australia. There's another one that's similar to India.

And a third that's probably ancient seafloor. And all three of these were once part of the supercontinent Gondwana that broke apart 160 million years ago. Wow, that is cool. Yeah. It was all one panguia in Gondwanda. It was all great stuff. Finally, news of a science fiction-sounding airplane. Tell us about it.

Yeah. So scientists at MIT have flown a plane on Earth using a technology that everybody thought would only work in space. And this technology is called an ion thruster. And essentially, you know how when you're in the swimming pool, you can kind of push off the wall and you go forward. It's kind of the same sort of idea that you're pushing a charged particle out the back of the craft and that motion in one direction pushes the ship in the ship in the... other direction. And this is really cool because it's silent. It has no moving parts. There's no engine. And we already use this technology in some small ways in space exploration. There's a few deep space probes that do it. It's kind of used for effectively parking, nudging spacecraft into place. But last week marks the first time that it worked on Earth, which is really weird because our atmosphere is thick enough that that force of those ionized particles shouldn't be enough

to push much of anything forward. But this was like a toy-sized plane, right? It wasn't a regular big airplane. Right, not a regular big airplane. Something more similar to like what you would fly with your kid in a park or, you know, like, drone even. But it did travel 200 feet at about 11 miles an hour. And it worked partly because the scientist redesigned everything to be as light as humanly possible, but also because they designed this new kind of ion thrust system where they are generating particles

at the front of the plane, and then those particles are getting sucked back towards negatively charged filaments at the back of the plane, and at the same time, those particles are all sort of crashing into air molecules as they go, and that generates a wind, and the wind is the thing that's getting the plane up. 200 feet, 11 miles an hour? Was it flown at Kitty Hawk? No. It was flown in a gym, basically. A lot different. Thank you, Maggie. Yeah, thank you.

Have a happy holiday. if we don't talk to you. Maggie Kurtz-Baker, senior science reporter at 538. And now it's time to play. Good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side. Wind energy development is spreading around the nation. Installed generating capacity has tripled in the last decade, according to the American Wind Energy Association, with over 90,000 megawatts of combined capacity in the U.S. But as developers jockey for position in wind-rich areas, there may be unexpected consequences. Julie Lundquist is an associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and lead author of a report on wind farm positioning published this week in the journal Nature Energy.

She joins me from Germany. Welcome to Science Friday. It's great to be here, Ira. Thank you. Thanks for staying up late. So the good news is wind energy is booming in the U.S. U.S., right? Right, and we're building a lot more wind farms, and that's providing more renewably generated electricity.

But there's also your team found a possible downside to packing too many wind farms too close together. Yeah, just like people, wind farms aren't always good neighbors to each other. There are some circumstances where wind farms can cause adverse consequences to their neighboring wind farms. How do they do that? Well, you have to understand this phenomenon called a wind turbine. wake. And I think that we're all probably familiar with wakes if we think about water flowing past a rock and a stream, for example. You know how the water downstream is generally slower and a lot

more turbulent than the water upstream. And air is another geophysical fluid just like water. And so the air downstream or downwind from a wind turbine is also a lot slower and more turbulent. And that air makes it more difficult for the downwind turbines to generate as much electricity as they would normally like to. And that's just for one wind turbine. And if you combine in groups of 10 or 20 or 100 wind turbines together, then those individual wind turbine wakes can form a larger wind farm wake. And that's when the effect happens. Yeah, yeah. So you have a problem if you put too many wind farms together, one starts interfering wake-wise with the other ones. Yeah, but we've noticed that these wind farm wakes and actually wind turbine wakes are really only a problem in certain circumstances.

So if you think about how the air that you fly in, you know, if you're in an airplane, that changes on a daily basis. So during the day, it's very bumpy and very turbulent. And that turbulence, just like it would diffuse out a smoke plume from a smoke sack or something like that, that would diffuse out during the day. A wind turbine wake and a wind farm wake is normally not an issue for concern during daytime circumstances. We were able to talk about how, you know, in nighttime circumstances, That's when these wind farm wakes can spread for very long distances downstream and then cause adverse consequences to downwind wind farms.

So how big in effect is this then? Well, if you want to think about the spatial extent of the wake, for the complex of wind farms that we were simulating in Texas, we found wakes that extended at least 45 kilometers downstream. Yeah, and that's pretty significant. And how much does it reduce the output of the wind farms? Well, that depends a lot on the details of the construction and the orientation of the turbine. But if you want to think about how often the wake happens, that's kind of an important consideration as well. So we have these possibilities of these very large wakes extending downstream. But for the month that we simulated these wind farm wakes, we noticed that it was only 4% of the time did we find a wake that occurred such that it would impact the downwind production by 20%.

So that's not really a deal breaker then here. It's just being careful where you put your wind farms. Yeah, it's not a deal breaker at all. And one of the exciting things that we found was that the wake effects can be very well predicted. And so if you can predict a phenomenon, then you can manage it. And so it's not going to be a surprise if a wind farm is built close to another neighbor. If both parties are aware that this could happen in circumstances, then they can make the financial arrangements with the financial arrangements with

the legal arrangements to make sure that a lot of renewably generated electricity can still be produced and the weak effect can be accounted for. All right. Julie Lundquist, thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. Dr. Lundquist's associate professor at the University of Colorado and Boulder. We're going to take a break when we come back. The future looks bleak for the U.S. under climate change.

We're going to talk about how it will impact regions you don't typically think about. We're going to talk about that new study just released. and what does it do the places that don't get much news about those places? We will give it some news after the year break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last week, the government issued an important report on how climate change will affect the future of the U.S. Perhaps you heard about it. Maybe you didn't. The Fourth National Climate Assessment was buried during Thanksgiving weekend

to hide some of its most important conclusions. It describes how every area of our state, society and every state in our country will be impacted by a warmer world and not just by hurricanes and floods and wildfires, but by more rainfall in the Midwest, thawing permafrost in Alaska, drier air in the southeast. This hour will be focusing on those areas of the country where the results of climate change maybe aren't grabbing headlines but are still having a profound impact on the U.S. society. If you want to know how your area of the country will be impacted by climate change, you can check out this report for yourself.

It's super easy to read. It really is, and it's important that you do. Just go to sciencefriiday.com slash climate report. Click on your own region there, science friday.com slash climate report. Joining me now to help us break all this down is Bob Kopp, climate scientist and director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. It's a pleasure to be here.

Nice to have you. A lot of news about the report this week has centered around how President Trump tried to bury the assessment over the Thanksgiving holiday and then said he did not believe in the conclusions of the report when, in fact, the assessment is put together by 13 offices, right, of the federal government? And it's taken years to put together. Yeah, this is a report that's mandated by Congress to happen every four years. It involved about 300 authors on the second volume that came out this year. I was an author on the first volume that came out last year and underwent a very extensive review process involving the public experts, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and so really represents a state-of-the-art assessment about what the scientific literature has to say about climate change and its impacts on the United States. Give us a short synopsis. You say you were author of Volume 1. What did Volume 1? What did Volume 1?

say compared to volume two? Yeah, so volume one covered the physical science of climate change, is sort of the physical science basis for what we know about how climate change is and will impact the United States. Volume two sort of fleshes out what exactly those impacts are on people and ecosystems. And it's a little bit of a hard report to talk about because volume two is 1,600 pages of detail on how climate change is impacting the U.S. And so when you step back and ask, okay, well, what are the main main?

messages. They're the same messages that you will have heard from climate reports over the last couple decades. Climate change is real. It's caused by humans. It's happening now. It's having impacts on us now. And those impacts are becoming more severe with every ton of carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere. But it's not too late to avoid the worst possible impacts by bringing our net greenhouse gas emissions to zero and by taking proactive measures to adapt to the climate change impacts, we can't avoid. And this report really brings a lot of detail to what those impacts are here and then the future. And that's good that you say that, because I want to go to some of those places that are being impacted. And let's go first to the Midwest. Not the first thing

that comes to mind when you think of regions impacted by climate change, but how will a warmer climate impact farms and fields in these states? Here to tell us that is Jim Angel, state climatologist for Illinois, located at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He was the lead author of the report's chapter on climate change impacts in the Midwest. Welcome to Science Friday. Yes, thanks for having me. Can you see already how climate change has impacted the states in the Midwest? Oh, very much so. We've been having conversation with farm groups for a long time about climate change in the Midwest. The primary impacts right now so far have been on more rainfall and precipitation in general and more heavy rain events. So you get more rainfall, you have to deal with more wet conditions.

throughout the growing season. Heavyer rainfall events also increase the soil erosion and loss of nutrients. So a big thing that we're dealing with a lot almost every year now is that the springs are too wet, and so you get planting delays, and then sometimes if you do plant, it gets flooded out, and so we have to replant. Also, when you go back in the fields, if it's too wet, you can compact the soils. So there's a number of headaches, not only in planting, but also the cost start to go up as well. How will increase temperatures affect the types of crops that are successful in the future?

Yeah, so corn and soybeans are primary crops. We also do wheat and other things as well and a lot of specialty crops. But cord is especially sensitive to really hot weather. And as we move into the future, we'll see more of the really hot days, the heat waves that affect other parts of the country already. And those are going to drive corn production both northward and maybe a little bit westward. And we're already seeing that. You know, they're growing corn in North Dakota, which 20 or 30 years ago was pretty rare.

But now it's become much more common. And so, yeah, we're sorry starting to see the shift. Well, let me quote to you a little one of the paragraphs. It says, compared to other regions where worsening heat is also expected to occur, the Midwest is projected to have the largest increase in extreme temperature-related premature deaths under the higher scenario. So human health, just even people, you talk about the farms, people working in the fields, people living in the homes. Exactly. Yeah, that's a very big concern moving forward. We've already had issues with heat waves in the past, the infamous 1995 heat wave in Chicago that killed over 700 people. So we have had heat waves, and that's going to continue into the future, and that's very problematic.

Obviously, very hard on humans and livestock and the natural environment as well. And so that's a big concern of mine going forward is the increased heat. The Midwest, Bob, is experiencing more rain while there are droughts and wildfires further west. Are we going to continue to see that during, you know, as the world warms? Is that going to continue? Yeah, so one of the strong predictions with respect to rainfall is in the northeast and Midwest, where we all are already seen and expect to see an increase in the amount of rain that's calling, falling in this really intense events.

Jim, how do farmers feel about climate change? Are they engaged with the idea? Did they admit that it's happening? Can they deny what they see around them? Many farmers are actually very well engaged in climate change. Now, the important point is that sometimes they don't call it that. Sometimes they talk about weather trends or changing weather patterns. Sometimes they don't like to say the words climate change,

but that's what they're talking about. And so, you know, it's one of these things that it doesn't matter where you stand. If it's impacting you economically, you've got to address it. So that's what we're seeing. The response is the fact that they're already seen at the farm level. Did we learn anything good about how the Midwest is doing from the assessment? Any positives going to come out of this? There are responses.

So for heavy rain events and more wet conditions, there's increased use of tile drainage, off of fields. But there's also more projects looking at cover crops. And one I like really a lot is something out of Iowa State where they're looking at putting native plants in the waterways, the natural waterways, to help not only reduce runoff,

but also keep those nutrients on the fields. Our number 844-724-8255. We want to hear from you if you're watching climate change and the effects if you're living in the Midwest or anywhere else. 844-7-24-8-255. also you can tweet us at SciFRI. Bob, is this a mitigation strategy, you know, in the report that can be implemented at a larger scale? Yeah, so the report talks about two main rays to manage the risk of climate change, right?

So one is the sort of adaptation-type approaches that we were just talking about. The other, of course, is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, right? the most reliable way to cut off the tail of some of these most extreme outcomes is to bring our emissions down. And one of the clear messages that comes out of the volume one of the report is that to stabilize the climate at any level of warming, we ultimately need to bring our net greenhouse gas emissions to zero. So any CO2 we put into the atmosphere is balanced by CO2 we're taking out.

Yeah. Well, thank you very much for taking time to be with us, Jim. Thank you. Jim Angel is state climatologist for Illinois and one of the authors of the fourth national climate assessment. So we're going to move around the country a little bit, and now we're going to turn our attention north to Alaska, where we are following that large earthquake that struck today. And if any important updates are happening, we will bring them to you. You know, sometimes this is a reminder that part of the U.S. is actually located in the Arctic. and according to this latest national assessment, Alaska's climate is changing faster, much faster than any other states with some significant consequences.

Here to tell us about those is Dr. Victoria Hermann. She's the president and managing director of the Arctic Institute based in Washington. She reviewed the chapter on Alaska for this most recent report. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. The report mentions that Alaska's Arctic coastline is eroding. and more than 59 feet a year. It says longer sea ice-free seasons, higher ground temperatures, and relative sea level rise are expected to worsen flooding and accelerate erosion.

That's amazing. That's exactly. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. And we see because Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the continental United States, we have extraordinary sea ice melt. Usually fall storms come with big waves that can break a mile out onto that ice.

But with no ice, those waves are crashing directly into the shoreline, eroding it at an unprecedented rate. And so do these folks who are impacted have to be relocated right now? Currently, there are 31 villages across Alaska that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified as an immediate danger from erosion and flooding. Now, four of those are an imminent risk and need to be relocated. three of them are already seeking funds to relocate, and one has decided to protect in place, try to stay where they are.

And so I imagine that number is going to increase with climate change. Absolutely. There are about 40 percent of U.S. tribes located in Alaska. That's 229, most of which are in remote villages, so they don't have access to roads. That means that relocation, managed retreat, is going to be a lot harder, and you don't have any access to transportation infrastructure. Bob, do you agree this is a sign of things to come? Yeah, and thinking about how people may end up moving,

what sort of migration we expect to see associated with climate change is really one of the big factors that the research community is trying to get its hands on right now. And it's not going to be just Alaska. Alaska is sort of the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the shoreline around the country. Yeah, I mean, it's a somewhat different problem in Alaska because it's more the losing of the sea ice and the erosion than it is the effects of sea level rise. But everywhere is affected by climate change in some way. Victoria, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Just to note that there are already communities in the continental U.S. that are actively relocating. So Ildejean-Charles in Louisiana has already received funding to relocate, and you have several communities in Washington State that are seeking partial relocations due to the impacts of climate change. And it's interesting, Victoria, we've heard a lot about wildfires in California in recent weeks, but Alaska faces some of the same challenges due to climate change. Tell us about what's happening inland. That's absolutely right.

Usually when we think of Alaska and climate change, we think of the coast, we think of ice, but terrestrial systems, our inland communities in Alaska, are also seeing devastating and dramatic climate impacts. Much of that has to do with permafrost thaw and change. changing ecosystems. So because we have different rainfall patterns that are evolving with climate change and permafrost thaw, the very ground that has been frozen for centuries starting to thaw, you have different variations for climate change to affect wildfires. They're spreading farther north and they're becoming more intense like we're seeing in California. I'm Ira Plato. This is

Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And Bob and Victoria, not only when you get thawing of the permafrost, they also releases methane. That's been trapped there, correct? Yes, that's true. Yeah, so that's another part. When more of the country is under threat from wildfires, Bob, does the constraint, does that constrain the amount of resources available to fight them? I mean, if there are so many going on at once.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is also a sort of general problem. Not that it's wildfires, but it's wildfires, it's coastal flooding, It's the inland rainfall. All of these are competing demands for the resources we have to deal with disasters. So there's, you know, how do we share firefighters? There's also how do we share recovery funds. And, you know, we saw last year with the three hurricanes how easy it is to sort of tax some of those resources. Let's go to the phones.

Let's go to Moab, Utah. One of my favorite places. Welcome, John. Home went blank for a second. I almost hung up. Here, let's make this sound a little bit. better house in Moab, Utah for 30 years. And 30 years ago, when I bought the house, this was a hot, dry, desert-like place with 3% relative humidity in the summertime, not a cloud in sight

sometimes for six months. Boy, things have changed like you wouldn't believe. We get humidity in the 50 to 80% relative humidity, hot, humid summers. Actually, cooler air temperature, but, of course, you feel the heat more with humidity. I moved from back east to escape this, and it seems to have followed me out here. So I just wanted to mention the climate change I see is a change in the weather patterns that move the water around, and perhaps there are areas who are suffering from drought

and then wildfire, like out in California, we're getting their water. Gotcha. Let me get a quick comment before we have to take the break. Bob, you agree? Well, I think one of the key issues we have to focus on is where the water is moving. I don't know in the case of Moab how much of that is sort of large-scale climate trends versus, say, what you've seen in Arizona, New Mexico over the past several decades,

where you just bring in more plants that increase the amount of rain taking on the soil. But tracking humidity and the effects of combined effects of heat and humidity on human health and the ability to work outdoors, the ability to thrive is a key area that's discussed in this report and a topic of research. Victoria, what do you say about that? Yeah, I think it's, of course, a bit different in Alaska, but the changes in water availability and also the impacts on water infrastructure are only poised to get worse. So oftentimes it's not just the humidity, the water around us naturally, but also how climate change is impacted. our ability for safe and affordable water access. There is some positive note, at least in the Arctic regions,

about more economic value opening up sea lanes where ice used to be? Economic value in relation to climate change is about scales. So there is more access across the Arctic to shipping lanes, having the ability to cut shipping from eastern to western markets on a much shorter scale. But that's the global economy. How does that impact? in individual remote village that is seeing immediate climate impacts. How much of that revenue generation is going to Alaska natives?

There's a great variation in inequity between the economic value of opening sea lines and how it's impacting American citizens in the far north. Good way to put it. Victoria Herman is president and managing director of the Arctic Institute based in Washington. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. When we come back, we're going to wrap up our discussion of the climate assessment and talk about whether policymakers can be persuaded to take action.

And more of your calls, 844-724-8255. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about the Fourth National Climate Assessment and how climate change is set to impact the U.S. in ways both big and small. My guest is Bob Kopp, climate scientist, and director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmosphere. at Rutgers University.

And we've been hearing from our listeners on social media about what climate change looks like where they live. Let me give you a few tweets that came in and for other social media. Suzy on Facebook says, I love to pick blackberries in the summer in Piedmont, North Carolina. I have not seen any make it since about 1999. The summers get too hot. The berries dry up on the vine.

It's difficult to grow vegetables for some of the same reasons. Todd on Facebook says, I live in Utah. Climate changes will significantly impact the snowy mountains that support and draw many people to relocate to Utah. I am anxious to know how drought and other natural disasters will influence human migration, where there be a future

when I have to relocate my family because climate change. Well, what do you say? 844-724-8255 is our number. Bob, what do you think of those Facebook notifications there? Bob?

Oh, well, let's go to the phones because there are a lot of people who want to talk about this. Let's go to Nick in Miami. Hi, Nick. Nick and Miami are you there? Anali in Miami, are you there? Yes. I specifically wanted to ask, I was curious to know if the report covered the role of corporations on climate change, their impact. And specifically, are there policies currently that incentivize these companies?

to take a role against it. Like I just recently, it's my understanding that methane with deregulation methane is allowed to be released at a higher level and that impact. The climate change degree to group, I'm a little bit curious about that. That's a good question. And, you know, the report is the interesting thing about this report is that it's very easy to read. I mean, you know, you'd normally think about government reports as being written in bureaucratic

gobbledygook, but this report is written in such easy to read English that if you want to know any, you know, any answers to the questions that you have. And actually, the report is up on our website at sciencefrily.com slash climate report. You can read the whole report, and then you can actually click on the region where you live and see how the climate report is going to impact your region. So, you know, any of these questions you have really are going to be interesting to answer there. All right, we have some tweets that are coming in. We had a tweet coming says,

Fast ice melt at the pole. Anyone worked out the earthquakes this will spawn all that weight removed? I don't think today's earthquake in Alaska, a huge earthquake. It's 7.0. It's not quite as big as that 1964 one. That was 9.2 that created such havoc. That is an interesting question. All that snow that's going to be melting.

in the Arctic regions, which don't have land on them in the North Pole, but certainly in northern regions of the Arctic countries that surround them, Greenland. I mean, all that melting will have any real problems. Will it lead to anything? Let's go to another call. Let's go to Chris in Springfield, Missouri. Hi, Chris. Hi.

My biggest question is the climate report came from the United States. Is this going to be, you know, and India? Is it going to be, are we going to talk more about the international effect? Because of the Western winds, as you know, it's blowing a lot of that small China. They're wearing masks. They can barely see each other. India, the pollution is ungodly of the way it is. Is that going to be addressed through this particular report in any way?

You know, it's interesting because this report covers the, basically, Basically, it talks about the impact on the U.S., but the U.S. is not isolated from the rest of the world. And this report is, you know, it's a series of four reports. This is only the second one of those four reports. And it's going to, obviously the U.S., the region of the United States cannot be looked at as in a vacuum. But this basically is concentrating on regions in the United States and how it will impact them. Let's see if we can go to, let's go to Amanda in Kansas City, Missouri. Hi, Amanda.

Hi, how are you? Hi there. Hi, so, yeah, I live in Kansas City, Missouri now, but I'm from a small town in southwestern Kansas out on the Colorado border. And for years now, I think there's a National Geographic issue in 1985, predicting maybe a 20-year supply left in the Ogalala water aquifer that feeds most of the high plains. Well, here we are more than that. 20 years later, and we're still running dry wells out there.

We're coming up with nothing but sand, and now we have climate change further affecting things. And I'm wondering, this is sort of another jump, but I'm wondering about the potential effects economically and on our food supplies. We make a change from farming things like corn and wheat and other water-heavy products to doing something like solar and wind, which are in abundance out there. You know, that's a good question because what kinds of crops, what kinds of livestock use the least amount of water? There are people who are saying, you know, if we get away from a meat-based economy, we could use a lot less water because I think the number for beef. I think it thinks 50 gallons of water for every pound of beef.

Well, and even then, how much food supply is corn-based? Yeah, and, you know, we also have stories about the Saudis trying to buy up a lot of the land where their water rights to them. So what you're basically... Yeah, there are already water wars out in the West. Yeah, so you're basically growing crops that are going to suck up your water and you're going to ship them overseas. You're basically shipping water overseas. Exactly. All right.

Thanks for talking about this. Very interesting issue, of course. This is only the beginning of discussion. And what's interesting to me about this, having talked about, we've been talking about this for years, is that climate change has hardly been on the mind of people when you look at polls. that are taken during election years about the most important things that are on their minds. You normally see that climate change or global warming is way down six, seven, someplace else on the line there. But I think that this report has gotten people, and especially the media, which mostly ignores

climate change stories, finally interested in talking about the impacts of climate change and how real they're going to be. And maybe there will be a really interesting discussion starting not only in the media, not only among farmers, not only about people, but maybe in Congress where people will not be able to deny and, you know, people not bring a snowball into this end and say, how can it be warm out? Look at the snow and snowing in Washington. So I want to thank Bob Cop. We lost the line with Bob Cop. I want to thank him for taking time to be with us today. He was a climate scientist and director of the Institute of Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University. And as I say, if you want to know how you're area of the country will be impacted. We encourage you to check out this report for yourself. It's really easy to read, as I say, and we have it online. Just go to science friday.com slash climate report, and you can click on your region. Next up, next up, where did you get your first science bug? You know, the moment you knew that the science stuff is pretty cool, I want to

study it, I want to do it, I want to teach it. Well, for many of us, it was a teacher, someone who could translate the magic of physics or botany or space into something you could understand. For me, it was Mrs. Feffer, Evelyn Feffer, the late Evelyn Feffer, my eighth grade science teacher who had a science club after school every week, and we would do incredible little science experiments and bring them home. I did one that almost burned down my mom's bathroom. Well, I don't want to talk about that too much. And that's why education is so important to us at Science Friday, because we know that that's where the spark often begins. And it's why we're teaming up with you, science educators across the country on the latest season of our Science Friday Educator Collaborative program.

And here to talk about it is Ariel Zich, Science Friday's Education Director. We're going to try to get Ariel on the line. But until we do, I'd like to bring on a couple of this year's educators who can give us a better idea of the the sorts of projects they are working on. Katie Brown is a science teacher at Le Gardein Academy in Kaluwa, Hawaii. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much, Ira. Nice to have you.

Randy Otaka is a fourth and fifth grade special education teacher and robotics advisor at Waheewa Elementary School and Waheewa, Hawaii. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Randy, let me start with you. Tell us about your project. It involved modeling cephalopod skin. Yes. So I wanted to have students model some of the structures found within the first layer of cephalopod skin, which is the chromatifor layer.

So for your listeners, chromatophores are sort of like, you can imagine them as like balloons filled with pigment or paint. And in a relaxed state, they're kind of shriveled up, and they don't take up. which area, but when stimulated, they can be expanded to become a larger spot of color. And cephalopods have millions of them, so they can use them to generate all sorts of patterns in the first layer of skin. So, yeah, but the lesson was intended to have students model the chromatiform there. And how did they do that? What did they use?

I did you Well we decided to use Cocktail Umbrellas You know there are not too many things that have Not too many everyday items that have that sort of movement profile Where you have like a simple input signal that Generates like something that

That causes something to expand and contract Umbrellas are perfect for that And you know cocktail umbrellas come in all All sorts of colors Unfortunately, they don't come in brown, and that's actually one of the colors of chromatophores. But, you know, we kind of worked around it. And anyway, yeah, so basically we use cocktail umbrellas to model, like, the opening and closing of all the chromatophores in that first level of skin. That's very creative.

Very creative. Let me bring on another creative person. Ariel Zitch, our Science Friday Education Director. Hey, we finally got you on, Ariel. Hey, good to be here. Tell us about the collaborative and what's going on. Well, as Randy mentioned, I think teachers are, they come up with these great ideas. Randy's idea with these umbrellas to represent chromatophores is incredible.

And what we at Science Friday wanted to do is really invite educators to flex their creative muscles and flex their instructional muscles to co-create with one another brand new innovative STEM resources for the classroom. And, you know, as I mentioned, if you are a teacher, this may not be that surprising. teachers do this all the time. It's what makes them kind of the magic of science education. It's just they may not have an opportunity to do it with other people. They may not have an opportunity to have a full staff of digital producers and science journalists and a giant community of scientists to help them with that. And so what the Science Friday Educator Collaborative does is it's a nationally competitive program and it pairs really extraordinary teachers with that community, with Science Friday staff, with another podcast.

of really interesting and enthusiastic teachers. And so, you know, they develop these resources that are not only beautiful, but they're free to access. They're incredibly engaging and they're very low cost to implement. And it's my pleasure to help work with that program. That's great. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Ariel Zich and Katie Brown and Randy Otaka.

Randy told us about his project with cocktails, cocktail umbrellas. Katie, tell us your science teacher, La Jardin Academy in Kailua, Hawaii. Tell us about your project. Sure. My project is actually based on climate change, so interesting that we're on today to talk about that. But what I have is a resource for students to develop disaster relief structures

that can be used after fire, flood. It actually was inspired after the Kilauea volcano eruption out here. But what the students do in my project is they basically research structural engineering and architecture and talk about the sheep that make buildings strong. And then they build a prototype disaster relief structure that can fold completely flat for transport and then be popped up into place wherever it's needed. So they basically build this prototype that they can, you know, store on the back of a flatbed truck or on a pallet. And then they have five minutes to put it into place and it has to, you know, hold enough weight for a family, and it has to be strong and

have ventilation and be raised up off the ground to prevent future flooding. And then what they do is they use their math skills to scale it up and be, you know, figure out what it would look like if it was full size. Wow, that's terrific. Ariel, we've got just a couple examples here. You've got a whole bunch more in the projects, right? We do. It's absolutely wonderful. So we've got teachers from all across the country. And, you know, as I mentioned, it's not diversity that's really extraordinary. So Molly Adams, who's an informal educator with the Wildlife Conservation Society, developed a virtual coral reef health assessment so that students can virtually dive into different coral reefs around the world, establish whether they're bleaching and how that influences biodiversity. Jeff Grant from Downers Grove High School, North High School in Illinois, in Downers Grove, Illinois. He made a resource that was inspired by one of our videos about the Sibinacci sequence, and he had his students go through, I don't know, 50 or some odd X-rays to establish whether

the digits within a vertebrate hand conform to a Sibonacci sequence or ratio, and if that influences whether they can grasp objects. So if you're thinking, as you hear these things that, like, wow, those are like really off the wall in totally cool ways of getting at scientific concepts. You're right. You know, and we work with all these teachers to make sure that their standards align, they're hitting really core concepts in the curriculum. So even though they sound kind of weird, like totally original and different, they're still building really essential science literacy and science engineering practicing. So how do teachers get involved if they want to get part of this project?

Please apply. It is an awesome program. So you visit science friday.com slash educator. There's just a few questions about yourself and about your teaching philosophy. But then we really ask you to get right to it and pitch us in your application and idea that you have for implementing some cool science concept inspired by Science Friday Media. And that pitch is really kind of what levels the playing field between educators that are newer earlier in their careers and educators that have been doing this for a long time. And those applications are due by January 4th. So don't delay. We've given you two holidays to get them in. And, you know, and there are perks, too.

We've got, there's a small stipend of $500 for accepted applicants. But I think beyond that, it's the peer group that you'll get to be a part of, and also working directly with Science Friday. That's great. Thank you, Ariel Zich, Science Friday's Education Director. And thank you to Katie Brown and Randy Otaka, who are both science teachers. Thank you very much for taking time. And good luck with your projects.

And I'll have a great holiday. And you can find out, as Ariel said, all the details on how to sign up at ScienceFriety.com slash educator. Charles Berkwist is our director, senior producer Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alex L.C.L.M., Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe. And we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. If you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So, ever, you know, considering all of us stuff that we do,

in all different places, every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York. Hey, Ira here. Just a reminder that Science Friday has lots of great swag in our online store if you're still seeking a great gift for that public radio fan in your life. You can find everything at ScienceFriety.com slash store. That's ScienceFriiday.com slash store. Happy shopping.

I mean, happy holidays.