Science Friday - Dog Breeds And Dog Behavior, Polar Science Update, Decarbonizing Transportation. April 29, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Your Dog’s Breed Doesn’t Always Determine How They’ll Behave The dog world abounds with stereotypes about the personalities of different breeds. The American Kennel Club describes chihuahuas as “sassy,” and malamutes as “loyal,” while breed-specific legislation in many cities target breeds like pit bulls as stereotypically aggressive. But do these stereotypes say anything true about a dog’s personality and behaviors? New research in the journal Science looked at the genomes of thousands of dogs, both purebred and mutt, plus owner reports on personality traits. And their findings were more complicated: Yes, many behaviors have a genetic or heritable component. But breed, it turns out, may be a poor predictor of many things, including aggression or friendliness. Guest host Umair Irfan talks to co-author Elinor Karlsson about the complexities of genetics, personality, and breed in our best friends.   Life At The Poles Is Changing. What Do These Frozen Regions Forecast? It’s been a spring of alarming headlines for the coldest climates on Earth, from record heat waves at both poles, to a never-before-seen ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica. But what can we say for sure about how the Arctic and Antarctic are changing under global warming? In this Zoom taping, guest host Umair Irfan talks to two scientists, Arctic climate researcher Uma Bhatt and Antarctic biological oceanographer Oscar Schofield, about the changes they’re seeing on the ice and in the water, and the complex but different ecologies of both these regions. Plus, answering listener questions about the warming polar regions.   Can Hydrogen-Fuel Cells Drive The Car Market? If you’ve been shopping for a new car recently, you may have been struck by the number of electric vehicles available from different manufacturers. According to Kelley Blue book data, Americans bought almost twice as many EVs in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the first quarter of 2021, with battery-powered electric vehicles reaching 5% of the new car market for the first time. But electric isn’t the only alternative to the traditional gasoline or diesel powered car—there are also hydrogen fuel cell car options, such as the Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell car from Toyota. In those vehicles, compressed hydrogen is used in conjunction with a catalytic fuel cell membrane to generate the electricity to drive the vehicle. Cars using the technology can have a 300-mile range, with fuel-ups taking as little as five minutes. And while today much of that hydrogen comes from fossil fuels, there is the potential for it to come from electrolysis of water via renewable energy, such as solar or wind. But there are big technological and infrastructure challenges to solve before fuel cell technology could compete with the battery-powered electric car. Joan Ogden, a professor emeritus of environmental science and policy at UC Davis, joins Umair Irfan to talk about the requirements for building the refueling infrastructure that would make fuel cell vehicles a more attractive option to consumers.   Is It Possible To Decarbonize Shipping? It’s said that 90% of all goods at some point travel on a ship. Much of that transportation is on container ships, gargantuan vessels that carry thousands of the 20-foot or 40-foot shipping containers that serve as the foundation of the global economy. But those big cargo ships have a massive energy appetite, and the “bunker oil” fuel they devour is notoriously dirty. If the global shipping industry was a country, it would be the sixth-largest greenhouse gas emitting country in the world. Lee Kindberg, head of environment and sustainability for North America for the shipping giant Maersk, joins Umair Irfan to talk about the company’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. Maersk recently placed an order for a dozen methanol-fueled cargo ships, the first of which it plans to launch next year.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. 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 Omer Erfond. Ira Flato is away this week. And today, we're going to tackle some of the prejudices and unfair stereotypes about dog breeds. Dog people out there, you know what I mean. Beagles have a reputation for howling. Poodles are needy. Labs are sweet. Certain breeds are allegedly more aggressive, while bigger dogs are calmer than smaller dogs. And the American Kennel Club website even offers you a chance to pick the perfect breed for your family. You can filter your search by how much boxers bark or how much spaniel snuggle. Well, what if I told you that breed is not, in fact, behavioral destiny? New research from a team at the University of Massachusetts

looked at thousands of dogs for genetic links to their personality traits, and they found, well, even when there is a genetic link, breed doesn't have as much to do with how a dog acts as much as people seem to think. So how much is nature, how much is nurture, and how much are we just projecting onto our best friends? Here to explain more is Dr. Eleanor Carlson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad Institute. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you very much for having me.

I just rattled off a bunch of generalizations we have about different breeds of dogs, but why did you set to disprove them in the first place? That's an interesting question. I think partly I was just curious. You know, I've been working in dog genomics since I was a graduate student, but when I entered the field, I didn't actually know anything about dogs. I never owned a dog. I still haven't owned a dog. And I immediately started hearing all of these, you know, stereotypes, just like you just explained about their behavior. But it never totally made sense to me. You know, we know that the dog breeds are only maybe 150 years old. They sort of kind of the modern breeds. with these really defined standards. And behavior is really complicated. It involves many genes. It involves your environment.

And creating and selecting on something in 150 years just isn't something you can do. And from your results, you found that breed doesn't really shape behavior as much as we thought. Could you unwrap that a little bit? Yeah. So we took a, you know, so we had 18,000 dogs that people had answered survey questions for. And then we had another out of those 18,000, 2,000 of them, we also had very detailed. genetic information for. And we kind of took this data set and asked this question in pretty much as many ways as we could think to ask it because we knew that this was going to be counterintuitive

for a lot of people. And I think at the end of the day, there's two ways of thinking about what we found. The first is kind of from the perspective of a dog's owner. So what we discovered when we surveyed a whole lot of people about their dogs, and our project was open to all dogs, so whether your dog is a pure bread or a mixed breed or you have no idea where your dog comes from, we would love to have your dog in our project. And what we discovered was that in every single breed, owners were reporting basically every type of behavior or personality that you can possibly imagine in a dog. So beagles, we found owners often reported that beagles tended to howl, but there were beagles that never howled. Labradors aren't supposed to howl at all, but there are definitely Labradors that

howl. And that was basically true of everything that we looked at. And so what that means from the point of view of a dog owner is that if you go and adopt a dog and you get a beagle, that basically you could get anything in that whole spectrum of personalities and behaviors of the owners had told us about. And in particular, you looked at muts, you know, hybrids or dogs that aren't that don't belong to any specific breed. What can a mutt tell us that a purebred, like a St. Bernard or Golden Retriever, cannot? Yeah.

So one of the most fun things I think about this project is that we were able to open it up to all dogs. In the breeds, you know, you've got this behavioral stereotype that says all labs are friendless. But at the same time, all labs also look like a lab and are yellow colored and the right size because that's what a lab is supposed to be. And so you can't actually test behavior separate from what the dog looks like. But in the mutts, that all gets mixed up because the DNA gets all shuffled up. And so you can actually kind of disconnect these things in a way that you just can't do in the purebred dogs. Interesting.

So it seems like there's a bit of a distinction here between how behavior is influenced by genetics and how behaviors attributed to bring. But it seems like there are some behaviors that do have a genetic component, right? Oh, yeah, definitely for sure. And that's what we found is that most of the behaviors were shaped by a dog's genetics. It's just that that doesn't have anything to do with their breeds because people think of breeds as being a uniform thing, but there's actually a lot of genetic diversity even within a lot of breeds. And so basically what we're saying is it's genetics, but it's not genetics is different

between the breeds. Interesting. So then are there any breed stereotypes that do hold up? Yes, sort of. So this is where scientists get annoying, where we don't give clear-cut answers on things. So what we found was that some of the things that people would expect, you know, things like the border collies test, you know, overall border collies tend to be more biddable, which is kind of whether they want, whether they'll do what it is that you want them to do, and toy directed, meaning that they like to play with toys. that's not to say that every single border collie has those characteristics. And in fact, there's many, many border collies who don't. But on average, border collies do tend to have, do tend to be more bidable and more toy directed.

And that definitely kind of lines up with the idea that people have of border collies as these dogs that are great to do kind of like agility things with where you're actually training your dog to do this whole kind of fun obstacle course with you. And there are some real world, you know, stakes to this too, because dogs also do. do important jobs for us. And I'm wondering, then, should we be selecting dogs for jobs based on breed or for behavior? So that's a tricky question. One of the things we didn't look at in our paper was the question of working dogs because it adds a whole new complexity to the story. So what we think is going on in the breeds that we talked about here, so we're talking about just modern breeds, you know, AKC, you know, those kinds of organizations where you have a very tightly defined breed standard about how the dog is supposed to look. And there we think that mostly

they're being shaped by selection on what they look like, their aesthetics, rather than selection on anything to do with their behavior. The working dogs often kind of turn that on its head. And so they don't actually care anymore what the dogs look like. What they're breeding for is how the dogs behave and how they perform. And we would expect to see in working dog populations that we are going to see more behavioral differences than what we see in the kind of regular breeds that we've looked at so far. I suspect if you talk to people in the guide dog world, they would tell you that the, you know, like with the border collies, the fact that on average the border collies tend to be a little bit more biddable and tend to be a bit more toy directed probably suggests that if you wanted

to breed a dog that was going to be really good at like hurting. If you started with a group of border collies to try and breed those dogs that you wanted, you would have an easier time than if you started with dogs from a different breed or just dogs overall. But you still would need to have that process of actually selecting on the behavior for many generations. And you can't just expect them to be what you want right out of the gate. And conversely, there's no reason to say that you couldn't get exactly the dog you want for that job by going down to the shelter and finding it there. Because that diversity is in the entire dog population. It's just that it might be at a bit higher frequency in one of the breeds.

And I'm thinking specifically about how many dog owners want to avoid aggression, particularly for certain breeds like pit bulls that have a reputation for it. I mean, is there a way that like a pit bull owner could have like a genetic test that shows that don't worry, the genes of my dog show that she's sweet? So one thing that did come out of our research is that that is entirely unnecessary. One of the, so when we, we asked people all of these questions about their dog's behavior, I think there were about 110 questions in total. And we took all of those and fed them into something called a factor analysis. And what a factor analysis does is it basically sort of identifies groups of questions that are all asking the same thing and puts them into a single score. And because you've got many different questions asking the same sort of thing, you have a lot more confidence that you measured it correctly. And so we did this and we came out with eight behavioral factors. And one of them was bitability. and another one was what we're calling toy directed motor patterns, which is sort of like how much your dog wants to play with toys.

And one of them was something that we ended up calling agonistic threshold. And if you look at the questions that go into agonistic threshold, it's basically all about whether your dog reacts aggressively to something surprising in their world. And agonistic threshold came out as being, having almost no difference between the breeds when we were looking at the survey data, And also, when we looked at the genetic data, it doesn't seem to have hardly any heritability at all. It just doesn't seem to be a particularly genetic trait.

So it seems like whatever that is, it's something that's coming from aspects of the dog's environment or the way people are perceiving the dogs rather than anything that's kind of they're born with in their DNA. So then, sort of to reiterate then, like, what are the limitations then of trying to use genetics to understand our dogs? Right now, genetics is kind of in its infancy. And so, you know, you kind of have stories like this one coming out all the time that tells you all the things that we're learning from DNA. But at the end of the day, we're not very good at predicting from genetics what an individual is going to be like, whether it's a person or a dog. And we may never be very good at that.

It might be that this kind of environment problem persists as being something that kind of dominates that. But even if we get there in dogs, it's going to be a while and we're going to need much bigger sample sizes to get there. So on the one hand, I think people should be really cautious about over interpreting what they learn about their dog's genetics. If you want to know what your dog's behavior is like, you shouldn't be basing this on what somebody says about what your dog's breed ancestry is. What you should be basing it on is the dog that you're actually living with that you know better than anybody else knows. And so I think for dog owners, that's kind of the most important message is that, you know, I'm a genetics person. I love genetics. I think that those genetic tests where you get to go figure out what breed your dog is, you know, I think that's super fun that people are interested in that. But that doesn't mean that you've

actually learned anything new about your dog, if that makes sense. So it makes more sense to pay attention to what your dog actually does than what the genetic test says about them. Exactly. I will follow up on that just briefly to say that from a, from a scientist standpoint, as I said, these subtle differences in behavior between the breeds are actually really exciting. And they're going to give us, you know, the fact that we now know that some of the breeds tend to be on average a little bit more biddable, we can actually go in and figure out why that is. Like, how do you actually change DNA to change, you know, get a dog to be obsessed over retrieving a ball or to be more interested in listening to what it is that you want them to do or to how?

Like, you know, at the end of the day that as a scientist, I'm really interested in figuring that out. And what we found in the study actually shows that that is something we are going to be able to do and that we're going to have a lot of power to do. Pretty much the one thing we've really managed to get out of this whole study is even more questions than we had when we started. So we would love for people to go to our website, which is at darwinsark.org. You can sign up your dog. You can fill out all of these surveys for your own dog.

We'll tell you how your dog scores on the eight factors that we talk about in the paper. And then if you choose to, you can order a DNA kit. And we can also tell you what breeds your dog has ancestry from. It's an open resource. We'll share it with other scientists. We don't sell this data. don't own this data. And we're really just trying to make large-scale dog genetics easier for scientists to explore. Dr. Carlson, thank you so much for joining us again. No, thank you so much

for having me. Dr. Eleanor Carlson, professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad Institute. We're going to take a short break, and when we come back, what's happening to the polls as the climate heats up? We check in on the fastest warming regions on Earth. This is Science Friday. I'm Omer Erfant. As the globe has heated up, the polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctica have become the fastest warming places on the planet. Melting sea ice, cracking ice shelves, and retreating glaciers are all changing oceans and contributing to sea level rise along shorelines around the world. Just this year, the news has been dramatic. Heat waves at both poles, a shattered ice shell for the first time in eastern Antarctica,

and last summer rain fell for the first time at the summit in Greenland. Over the last 20 years, the Arctic has lost about one-third of its winter sea ice volume. even as researchers watch fracturing ice shells with bated breath. Before the grim news felt too overwhelming, we wanted to sit down with some scientists who study the polls. We want to talk about what's happening with the ice, how else these regions have been changing in the last few decades, and what is complicating our understanding of these regions. We're here to answer your questions about the Arctic and Antarctica.

And a quick note that we're recording this in a live call in Zoom today. For more information about how you can attend a live taping of the show in the future, check out our website, Science Friday.com. com slash live streams. Let me introduce my guests. Dr. Umabat is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studying the Arctic. And Dr. Oscar Schofield is a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University. He's been working off the coast of West Antarctica for the last several decades. Hello and welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. I guess we'll start with you, Uma. You've been working as an atmospheric scientist in the Arctic.

what are some of the mysteries you've been trying to solve in your research? So my research is in the area of climate variability. So I have been applying climate understanding to understanding how tundra vegetation has changed and how wildland fire has changed due to climate change. And Oscar, you've been studying the oceans off of West Antarctica for 30 years now. What have you been doing there all this time? So I work on the West Antarctic Peninsula just south of South America. And that is one of the fastest winter warming places on the planet. So we're studying when you melt

the ice, how does that ripple through the food web from the plankton to the penguins? Can you describe some of the changes that we've been seeing as it relates to climate change? And what else is happening beyond the visible stuff of melting ice sheets and, you know, retreating glaciers? Yeah. So the big thing we're seeing in certain areas around Antarctica is real significant declines in glaciers. retreats and also declines in the sea ice, how much you get every single year. And that essentially structures the physics and chemistry for that part of the planet. And now we're seeing it ripple through a lot of the organisms that live there. So you change how much the plants grow, how well the penguins

breed year to year. And we're seeing really large differences at Palmer Station. We used to have 1,600 breeding pairs of penguins and we're down to about 500. Ouma, same question. What are some of the changes we've seen already and what are we missing in the popular conversation? So overall, the temperatures have increased by almost 6 degrees since the 60s, and that has caused a decline in sea ice, as you mentioned. So not just a decline in sea ice area, but also sea ice volume.

Sea ice has different thicknesses. And that impact of sea ice has many cascading impacts on the climate system. For example, the tundra has greened. There is increased coastal erosion because there's less sea ice. And in general, the warming of the Arctic has led to a decline in permafrost, and that has implications to human infrastructure and a variety of other cascading impacts. And kind of last item I'll mention is because the sea ice has declined, that's led to increased ship traffic in the Arctic, which has a whole host of other issues associated with it. And we have two experts here from opposite ends of the world. And I think it's a lot,

pretty easy for people to assume that the Arctic and Antarctica are mirror images of each other because they're both cold and icy, but they're not the same. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes the Arctic different from Antarctica? So I'll give the answer. I give my students as a starting point. Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land. But the ice in the Arctic is already on the ocean, and the ice on the Antarctic is on land, and I'll let Oscar talk more about that. And I think one of the other fundamental differences is the ocean interaction is very different with the global ocean in the Antarctic.

In the Arctic, there really are connections only through the Bering Strait and through the North Atlantic, whereas that's very different in Antarctica. And the final item is in the Arctic, we have permanent settlements and people that are well connected through a variety of different networks. Yeah, sort of building, I mean, Uma described it really well. You know, the Antarctic is the only continent that's surrounded by an ocean,

a circumpolar ocean. That is one of the largest current systems on the planet, and it tends to isolate that landmass. That deep ocean current is really warm by Antarctic standards. It's three to four degrees Celsius. and the areas that are melting is where that current is getting pushed close to the continent by a lot of changes in the atmospheric forcing that Uma studies. So I've been following the news a little bit about the Arctic and Antarctic recently

and seen that there's been major wildfires in Siberia, some of them north of the Arctic circle. And we've seen that in previous summers as well. Not really a region that we associate with wildfires, but, umma, can you tell us a little bit about like how unusual this is? And is this part of a broader pattern? So wildfire is a natural part of the boreal system, but over the last several decades, the incidence of large acres burnt has increased in North America as well as Siberia. So the general conclusion is that we're getting warmer, drier summers. And it doesn't take much for fires to start because it's a continental climate, so it's very dry to begin with. So when we use climate models to project what's going to happen in the future, we do see the incidence of these.

fires, bigger, longer fire seasons increasing. Certainly all the data in our analysis suggests that that is something we do need to be prepared for. And Oscar, you talked a little bit about, you know, the distinction between Eastern and Western Antarctica. Could you elaborate a little bit on why they're different? And recently we saw an ice shelf collapse in Eastern Antarctica. So, like, why is that significant? That is a big deal. So the Western Antarctic and the true Eastern Antarctica, the Totten Ice Shelf, where? represent areas that have a lot of that land ice that Buma talked about. We've been seeing that the western side has shown really dramatic declines and glacier retreat. There is some evidence

that we're starting to see it in eastern Antarctica, and it's being driven by essentially the deep ocean, that circumpolar current that's warm, getting underneath the ice sheets. And you sort of start melting the ice sheets from below. And those are the two locations. where that circumpolar current is closest to the continent. Other regions like the Waddell Sea and the Ross Sea are, you know, the current is farther offshore, and that's where we're not seeing the decline. But the Totten Ice Shelf represents a huge proportion of the freshwater on the planet.

It's frozen on the land. And while it would take a very long time, if, you know, you melt a lot of that, that is a huge contributor to global sea level. We've got an audience question from Natalie about animal adaptation. She asks, Is it possible for animals in these cold regions to adapt quickly enough to survive these massive temperature changes? I imagine that's different on the Arctic and Antarctic, but Oscar, can you talk about the Antarctica? Yeah, in the Antarctic, that's the million dollar question.

They are adapted in several ways. They have unique physiology. They show really strong seasonality. So a lot of them, like whales, will migrate down in the summertime when there's a lot of food, but migrate back towards South America to breed in the summer. And what we're seeing, if you change when the sea ice is there, you change the timing of all that. And then that affects how much food is available when the animals need it. So if you have a penguin and a deli penguin, it needs to put four kilograms of blubber fat on its chick for that chick to survive the next winter. If you change the timing and the krill availability, that ripples directly into the food web very, very quickly. And how about in the Arctic, OMA? Can animals adapt to these warming? And how about the plants?

So some of the animals are adapting. For example, polar bears and walrus are spending more time on land. But that's leading to other problems and more interactions with humans. So that's what's happening immediately. at the long-term fate is the million-dollar question. In terms of the marine ecosystem, there are whales, humpback whales, and orca whales who now come much farther into the Arctic and compete with local whales that live in the Arctic. So that, again, leads to potential instability. I mentioned up top that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet. Why is it that the coldest regions are heating up the fastest?

So the sea ice is basically a blanket in the Arctic that keeps the warm ocean from transferring its heat to the atmosphere. So when that blanket goes away, the ocean warms up because the sun shines all summer and it amplifies that signal. So it's a positive feedback and increases the warming. So we get much more warming once we decrease the sea ice. But we also get polar amplification from the transport from the tropics of moisture to the Arctic. So those are two key factors that lead to this amplified signal in the Arctic and the Antarctic. And Oscar, I've seen the term the Thwaites Glacier in the news a lot. Why is that such an important piece of ice in Antarctica?

And how worried should we be over the next few years, over the next couple decades about what's going on there? Yeah. So the Thwaites Glacier is sort of in the Bellinghaus and C. So it's sort of south of where I work. It's a large ice sheet, and it is what we call is in runaway collapse. And essentially what that means is that warm, deep ocean is underneath. And so we're watching it essentially collapse and increased speed by which that ice on the land is moving out into the ocean. It directly impacts sea level rise because that was ice on land that is now going into the ocean and melting.

and can represent, you know, not parts of an inch of sea level rise, but inches. The big science question that a lot of people are working on right now, there was a large expedition earlier this year, is sort of what's the speed of that? Is it something that happens over five, ten years, 50 years, before we see the full expression of sea level rise with that collapse? And it's sort of an example of what we expect to see more of as the planet continues to warm. Now, both the Arctic and Antarctica are regions where a lot of different governments are working together, and scientists around the world are teaming up.

But we've seen with recent current events, of course, that some of that is being disrupted. The Arctic Council, which is this overarching group of Arctic nations that teams up on things like working on science has been suspended since Russia invaded Ukraine. And I'm wondering, you know, with these geopolitical disruptions, how does that affect research and your collaboration and cooperation with other scientists around the world? I think it's been devastating for the Arctic in that people who do fieldwork in Russia have not been able to go. Russian scientists have not been able to attend meetings. And Russia is a huge part of the Arctic physically. And it's very much of concern as all scientists in the Arctic. I would argue the same thing for the Antarctic. The Antarctic is controlled by the Antarctic

treaty, which essentially sets aside that huge part of the planet as sort of a science preserve. And so collaboration among scientists is really important in data limited system. And the realities of sort of the geopolitics is that is going to stop. And, you know, right now, a lot of us are still trying to get out of the COVID pandemic where we haven't been able to get into the field. And this will be another thing that will slow our understanding. of the systems. Just a quick reminder that I'm Omerer Fon, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Today I'm talking to polar researchers Uma Baat and Oscar Schofield about the changing Arctic and Antarctic regions and their future under climate change. We've got another question from an audience member, Nina from Baltimore. She has a question about carbon at the polls. Nina, if you're there, would you mind unmuting yourself and asking your question? Hi, I was wondering, how are permafrost dynamics affecting the overall shift from carbon sink to carbon source in the Arctic versus the Antarctic? So as permafrost thaws, that's going to release carbon. And there's research going on about

the timescale at which that's happening. And at this point, that's again debated by scientists exactly when that will happen, the timing of it. For the Antarctic, because it's been covered with ice for a long time the land, we're not so much focused on the permafrost, but what we are looking at as the wind speed increases on the southern ocean,

you get very vigorous mixing. And that has the potential to essentially decrease the amount of plankton growing. And essentially, you know, we'll make the Southern Ocean less of a carbon sink. But again, like Uma was pointing out,

these are really hot topics. among the scientists these days. And both of you as experts in your respective fields who have been following these regions for decades, I wonder, is it hard to be a scientist to be seeing these changes happening firsthand at such a fast pace? Do you feel sort of an emotional response

to the science that you're doing? I think you do have an emotional reaction because you're worried. And there's times that climate scientists feel hopeless, but I don't feel hopeless because of young people, people have really kind of helped me, the students have really helped me take a more optimistic view that we're going to figure this out because we have a lot of the pieces in place in order to do that. I think the other challenges, I feel like I've never achieved total knowledge. I'm

just dumb and I have to keep learning new things. And that's actually a good thing in that it's such a complex system and it continues to challenge me with new pieces that I need to learn about. Yeah, I guess for myself, I have the same emotional reaction. My first trip down there was as I was graduating as an undergraduate. And the glacier behind the field station I've worked at has retreated almost two football fields in my professional career. And so it is sort of shocking. But my reaction is, is my mission and my job is to make sure we have the most thorough understanding. of the system so we can respond to it. And I try to keep focused on that mission rather than,

you know, getting depressed. But having kids and everything, I worry about the planet they're going to grow up on. And then finally, for both of you, looking ahead, what are some of the biggest uncertainties or unknowns that you think we need to start to resolve? Uma? I think one of the uncertainties is how the different parts of the system interact with each other, how the changes in the surface water impacts the atmosphere. And it's really increasing that interdisciplinary collaboration. I would echo that. You know, the system is incredibly complex. Where I work, if the atmosphere gets moisture, you get more snow and rain, which is counterintuitive. But that impacts the biology dramatically. A lot of the penguins have their eggs drown because they're making.

nests in gullies to protect from the wind, not worried about water that they, you know, didn't expect to have. And so there's a lot of connections that are, you know, very complicated that we need to focus on. That's all the time we have. I want to thank both of our guests for joining us today, Dr. Umabat, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Dr. Oscar Schofield, a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Thank you both very much for joining the show. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

We're going to take a short break, and when we come back, taking on the climate crisis in the world of transportation, from hydrogen cars to making cargo ships greener. This is Science Friday. I'm Umer Erfahn. If you've been shopping for a new car recently, you may have seen a surprising variety of electric vehicles available for sale. According to Kelly Blue Book data, electric vehicles made up about 5% of total car sales for the first time, and Americans bought twice as many. EVs in the first quarter of 2022 than they did in the first quarter of 2021.

However, electric isn't the only option for going green. There are also hydrogen fuel cell car options. While visiting California recently, I rode an electric motorcycle over to a dealership to test drive the Mirai, a hydrogen powered car from Toyota. The word Mirai is Japanese for future. But what would it take for hydrogen to become part of our clean energy future, particularly when it comes to transportation. There are some big technological and infrastructure challenges that hydrogen has to overcome first. Joining me now is Joan Ogden. She's a professor emeritus of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. As I mentioned, I drove this Toyota Mirai in San Francisco, and it was pretty slick.

It had a very quiet interior, very quick acceleration because it has that electric motor. But then I went to the nearest hydrogen station in San Francisco and both of the pumps were out. Then I went to another station that was further south in the Bay Area and it looked like that hydrogen pump had it run for years. So what's holding back hydrogen infrastructure? Well, introducing hydrogen vehicles, the infrastructure has to go along with it because unlike electricity where you have it at people's homes or in many spots or unlike gas stations, which are ubiquitous, with hydrogen, you need to build that system up. California has been implementing a network of stations as cars, been rolled out there. There are, I think, about eight or nine thousand fuel cell vehicles in California

now, many of them, the Toyota models. So the state of California has put a lot of effort into this design of this new system. One thing is you want to have the stations where the people are. And so they have developed a plan and have been implementing, I think it's about 51 stations are active now. They're expecting about another 120 over the next few years to be built. And if you put them in the right place near where the car owners are, that turns out to be enough of a network to support travel as you would want to travel in a hydrogen car. So the infrastructure has been the rate limiting step, though, in many ways, because you have to have these two things happen in concert. Well, tell me a little bit about the stations themselves. How different are they from conventional

gasoline stations and what makes them unique? Okay, so hydrogen stations. Hydrogen is dispensed to vehicles as a compressed gas. And gasoline, of course, is a liquid. Liquids pack a lot of energy into a small volume and weight. With a gas, you need a larger system to contain that gas, both on the car and at the station. So the equipment's a little different. You have compressors. You have a different kind of hose that goes into the car. The refueling experience, though, in some ways, is quite similar in that it doesn't take very long to fill up your hydrogen car. And that's very similar to a gasoline car. You also can have a large range with a hydrogen car. And hydrogen cars are in the 300-mile-plus range now.

So behaviorally, going to the refueling station and driving off and taking a long trip should be more similar to gasoline of hydrogen than it is with an electric battery car. Of course, it's not enough to have just the refueling station. You also have to get the hydrogen to the station. So how does that work? So in many ways, it's kind of analogous to electricity. You can make it from a lot of sources that are. or green, that is, don't produce greenhouse gases or pollutants in their production or use.

And these would be things like solar and wind. So those are the long-term goal, really, to produce hydrogen for renewables. At present, hydrogen, though, is made mostly from fossil fuels, primarily from natural gas in this country. And most hydrogen is made for industrial uses. It's used to make chemicals. It's used to make chemicals like ammonia and methanol. If we scale up transportation, those use. uses will become as large as the industrial uses or larger. And we'll need to switch from fossil fuels

to green hydrogen. There's an intermediate step where you can take a fossil fuel like natural gas and you have CH4 there. You take the H2 off and the carbon goes off as CO2. You can actually capture that CO2 and store it underground. And there are a number of projects around the world that are doing that. That's called blue hydrogen. It's an intermediate step. You capture the carbon, stored underground and use the hydrogen from a fossil fuel like natural gas. But green hydrogen is really the goal. And in California, there are actually policies that require that we move toward an increasing fraction of green hydrogen over time.

You know, a decade ago, it was kind of an open question which technology would win out when it comes to passenger cars. And now it seems that battery electric vehicles have taken a commanding lead. Do you think hydrogen can catch up? That's a great question. That's a really interesting question. I think battery cars have come a long way as have hydrogen cars in terms of the technology, in terms of the range that's achievable and the types of models that are out there now.

Batteries do have the advantage that we were talking about earlier with infrastructure, electricity is more ubiquitous than hydrogen. But the decision also rests in the hands of consumers. So one question is, will there be consumers who want to have the long range fast refuel and larger vehicle format that works better perhaps with hydrogen fuel cell than with battery. It may be that when you get to larger cars, which lots of folks in America like, that a fuel cell and hydrogen will be better suited to the kind of duty cycle they want to use that car for. And that also counts as we get into things like larger vehicles like trucks. No, that was my exact next question. Like where,

what applications does hydrogen have, you know, a distinct advantage? Well, it really helps to think about the kind of wonky concept of energy density here. Energy density means you can pack a lot of energy into a small volume and weight, and that's very desirable in a fuel on a vehicle. You don't want to carry any more weight and volume than you have to. Liquid fuels are great for that. Batteries and hydrogen take up more weight and more room to have the same amount of energy on board. If you have a vehicle, it needs a lot of onboard energy storage. Let's say you have a long-haul truck. It could be that loading up the batteries are going to take up both space, which displace is cargo, and add weight. And so above a certain size of vehicle and amount of energy storage

needed, it could be that hydrogen, which is intermediate in energy density between gasoline and batteries, somewhere in the middle, would be preferable if you want a zero-emission long-haul truck. That's one of the so-called hard-to-decarbonize sectors as long-haul trucks. And hydrogen may play a role there where electricity would be less practical. It does seem like there's a lot of potential for hydrogen, but what needs to fall into place in order to make all these things happen? To make all these things happen, we need to scale up various parts, especially of the hydrogen production and delivery system.

And we need to also bring the renewable part of it and the low carbon part of this to the fore. That switch is going to take time and scaling up with hydrogen And as the delivery system gets larger, the cost is going to come down. Fuel cells, the costs, again, are projected to come down. They have come down dramatically. I've been in this field for a long time, and the costs have come down to a point where they are competitive for certain applications. The cost can come down more.

There also are some of the components that go into fuel cells, some of the materials, things like platinum and catalysts that are needed for some types of fuel cells, finding new ways to do that, finding new membrane materials for proton exchange membrane fuel cells. There are a number of parts of the fuel cell where there could be materials, research, and so on, that could improve this. But a big part of it is manufacturing and scale up in manufacturing as well, even with the technologies we have now. So then given the recent surge of investment we've seen in hydrogen and all this interest, how soon do you think it'll be able to play ball with battery electric vehicles? Well, I think a hydrogen may take up some different segments in the transport sector than battery electric vehicles, and it may be that they serve different purposes for transportation and a low-carbon future. But I think with continued support and development of refueling systems and stations

and renewable production that we could see hydrogen by the 2030s really becoming a major player. We'll have to wrap it there. Joan Ogden is a professor emeritus, of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, thank you again for taking the time to talk with me. My pleasure. For the rest of the hour, another story on transportation and the climate. It said that 90% of all goods at some point travel on a ship.

Much of that is on container ships, these gargantuan vessels that carry tens of thousands of 20-foot shipping containers, and they serve as the foundation of the global economy. But those big cargo ships have a massive energy appetite, and the fuels they use are notoriously dirty. If the shipping industry was a country, it would rank sixth in the world in greenhouse gas emissions. However, the industry is also constrained by scale and cost.

Is it possible, then, to clean up some of the largest vehicles on Earth? Joining me now is Lee Kinberg. She's the head of environment and sustainability for North America for the shipping giant Maersk, which recently placed an order for a dozen methanol-fueled cargo ships. Welcome to Science Friday, Lee. Well, thank you, Amer. I'm glad to be here. Picking up on that point of scale, can you talk to me about, How big cargo ships can get? What kind of fuel do they use? And what are the implications of that?

Well, the biggest container ships today are about 400 meters long, which basically means they're the length of four football fields. And they might contain 20,000 of those 20 foot containers, although today an awful lot of the containers are 40 footers. So maybe 10,000, 40 foot long containers that are the size of a city bus. And that container might hold a million Legos or 10,000 running shoes. And to get a massive vehicle like that moving, like how much energy does it take? What kind of fuel do you have to use? Well, we do use a very energy-rich fuel, and it is basically what's left over after you refine crude oil to make gasoline and diesel and jet fuel and so forth. And what's left over is sort of thick and sludgy. It's not as thick as asphalt, but it's down there in that general cut. And it's very energy-rich. Because remember, these vessels are going to be. going two and a half or even longer weeks between filling stations. So we need a fuel that is very

energy rich and quite frankly need something that is low cost. It seems then also efficiency is a key variable that you're always trying to pursue here as well. Absolutely. And vessels have been getting bigger you've probably seen. And as they get bigger, we get more and more energy efficient. But, you know, ocean shipping is the most energy efficient way to move cargo long distances. So then given that the industry is already running very efficient and very cheap, how does Merrsk plan to decarbonize its fleet? What kind of technologies is it looking at? Well, we've made a serious commitment to reducing our carbon footprint, which, by the way, for our ocean fleet is about 33 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. That's not sustainable.

And our big customers, more than half of them, have set decarbonization goals of their own, and they're now looking to us to say, we want you to move this cargo in a way that's also carbon neutral. And so we initially set a target of completely decarbonizing our fleet by 2050. Then earlier this year, once our crystal ball sort of cleared up a little bit and we could see some of the technologies that were available to us, we leaned in and said we will hit that by 2040 and we'll do it across all of our operations. So the ocean fleet, but also the marine terminals, the trucks, the warehouses, and so forth. Methanol is the way that we see that we can make an impact quickly to make an impact this decade. Because if we're going to hit 2040 with vessels that have an average lifetime of 20 years, then this has to be the decade of action.

I'm Amera Afon, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So could you tell me a little bit more about methanol, like how similar or Or different is it to the conventional heavy fuel oil that you use in conventional container ships? Well, now, the methanol that's out there today is one of the most common industrial chemicals in the world. So it's very well known and very well characterized. But that's not green methanol. And what we're planning to do is to use green methanol. So methanol that's made either from plants or from agricultural waste or from electrolysis and carbon capture.

In other words, renewable sources. That way you can actually have a net zero carbon shipping. So not only do you need a green fuel, you also need a green supply chain to provide that fuel. Absolutely. And what we're having to do, since there is not much green methanol out there today, certainly not at the scale we need to decarbonize these big ships, we're having to work with those potential future suppliers of new fuels. Some of them start up companies with new technologies,

and some of them very large producers of methanol. But we also need to let them know that if they build a refinery, we'll be there to buy the fuel. They also need to let us know that if we build the ships, there'll be a place to get the fuel for those ships. Is methanol on par in terms of energy density that you mentioned earlier with heavy fuel oil, or are there any tradeoffs there? There are some tradeoffs with methanol.

Methanol does have a lower energy density, but it is a liquid. So you can pump it around and store it in tanks that are odd shapes and put into all the nooks and crannies of the ship. It is also more flammable than standard what we call bunker fuel, but it doesn't have to be heated to pump it around. So there's some trade-offs there. Now, while you're pursuing methanol,

there's other shipping companies looking at other kinds of techniques, things like battery electric ships, ammonia-powered ships, hydrogen, some even using wind energy sales, bringing those back. I'm curious, like, what's your thought about the other options that are out there? How do they fit into the equation? You know, we've actually selected three areas to focus in. One is classic biodiesel, like what you might use in a diesel truck.

Although we have set standards that say that that fuel has to be sustainable, it can't compete with food production. It can't result in massive changes in how land is used. So we've started out with some biodiesels, and those products are available today, on a limited basis. The next fuel that we see in terms of quick implementation and reliable implementation is methanol. And so that's where we're going with these vessels that are going to be launched in 2023 and 2024. And then down the road, there is some talk about fuel cells. There's

talk about ammonia as a fuel. There are talk about a number of other technologies. Those technologies are not ready yet. They're being worked on, but they're not something you could go and build a ship around in the next couple of years. And finally, you know, we've been paying a lot closer attention to the global supply chain with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also now more recently, you know, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there's been disruption to global fuel supplies. And I'm wondering, having a more diverse fuel supply, does that help you? Does that help you hedge against other shocks? And is that part of your strategy? That absolutely is a consideration. And we've all become much more aware of, first of all, the fact that supply chains even exist. And second, that supply chains need to be not only just in time, but also just in case, that they have to have that business resilience considered in the design. These new vessels that we're building that will run on green methanol are actually what's called a dual fuel vessel. Because the reality is that as we move to these new fuels, the infrastructure,

to provide those fuels, the filling stations, if you will, will not develop uniformly around the world. So we felt we needed the capability to run on conventional fuels when we were not able to get the green methanol that we want to be running on. So we'll have more capability and more resilience for disruptions in the fuel supply chain. That way, and that way we can provide more reliable, more resilient supply chains for our customers. Well, I wish you smooth sailing on the way to your goals. Lee Kinberg, she's the head of environment and sustainability for North America for the global shipping giant Mersk.

Thank you for being with me today. Thank you. This has been a pleasure. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day is now Science Friday. Ira will be back next week. I'm Omerer Afan of Vox.

Have a great weekend.