Science Friday - Election Security, Channel Islands, IPCC Report. Oct 12, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

The voting infrastructure is a vast network that includes voting machines, registration systems, e-poll books, and result reporting systems. This summer, the federal government put out a report that stated that hackers, possibly connected to Russia, targeted the election systems of twenty-one states. No changes in voter data were detected. How can we secure our voting from malicious hacks and technological errors? Lawrence Norden, Deputy Director of NYU’s Brennan Center's Democracy Program, and Charles Stewart, a political scientist at MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, discuss how to secure the voting infrastructure, and how these issues affect voting behavior. Plus: A new United Nations report published this week highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5 C compared to 2 C, or more. The conclusion: Every bit of warming of matters. Kelly Levin, senior associate with the World Resources Institute joins Ira to discuss the report. In the latest State of Science, ecologists are using tools—from captive breeding programs to ant-sniffing dogs—to restore and protect the unique ecosystem of California’s Channel Islands. KCLU's Lance Orozco joins Ira to tell him more. And Popular Science's Rachel Feltman explains the latest on the aborted Soyuz launch, plus other headlines, in this week's News Round-up. 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 Ira Flato, broadcasting today from the studios of KCLU on the campus of California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California. Later in the hour, an update on where world nations stand on curbing carbon emissions and avoiding a climate catastrophe. But first, Thursday morning, two astronauts on route to the International Space Station had to abort their launch after a booster rocket malfunction. They made an emergency descent back to Earth, and I'm happy to report both they're doing well, both landing safely. Rachel Felton, Science Editor at Popular Science is here to bring us up to date on the launch and other selected short subjects in science. Welcome back, Rachel. Thanks for having me, Ira. Anything more about what went wrong there?

Yeah, so we know that about two minutes into the launch, there was some kind of booster failure. and they had to undergo what's known as a ballistic landing, ballistic descent, which is so-called because usually they make kind of a shallow angle as they come down to create a little bit of lift and take away some of the force on the astronauts during the landing. And this is where the rocket is really coming down more like a projectile. And this has happened before, but only ever during landings, which, of course, appears a lot less dramatic because they were supposed to come back down to the ground in the first place. So this is the first time they've ever had to make such an aborted landing during a launch.

And the Russian space agency said immediately they would begin investigating. And so far, that's all we know. Well, the good news about it is that it worked, right? Right. They had done it before. Right. And again, this is rare, but the kind of thing that astronauts train for all the time. So not something that happens a lot, but certainly one of the procedures that they are expected to occasionally encounter.

So, you know, not something we want to have happen, but something that is certainly on the roster of things they have learned how to handle. Well, but with the Soyuz capsule being the only way for humans to reach the International Space Station, isn't this now, you know, a little bit of a problem? There's no other way to get up there. Right. So there are, I believe, three Soyuz missions planned that are now kind of up in the air because the Russian Space Agency, again, is undertaking this investigation. And so it's possible some of those will be put on hold. And even if they're not, you know, those two crew members who were counted on who are now on the ground instead of on ISS mean that there's probably going to be a gap in staffing. You know, we have three people on the space station right now.

but they're scheduled to come back in December. Now, they could extend their stay a bit, but the Stoia's capsule they have up there that's going to bring them home, I believe it can only stay up there through sometime in January. So that's the longest they'll be able to stay before coming back down. And that means that the space station probably will be uncrewed for some amount of time, which is something that we know should be possible. There are procedures in place for it, but I don't believe it's ever happened before. It's interesting.

We'll love to check on whether there are experiments up there that may have to be put on hold or whatever. Certainly, you know, every astronaut who goes up has a fully packed schedule of scientific experiments. So NASA and the ESA and the Russian Space Agency are certainly going to have to at least rework schedules. And I know there are a few spacewalks that are now up in the air, so to speak. So to speak. And other bad space news, the Hubble. has a problem this week, too, right? Right. But again, you know, not a totally pessimistic message from NASA on that.

So the Hubble is 28 years old and has done fantastic work and hopefully still has a lot of years left in it. But it certainly is not a new telescope. And the gyroscopes that we use to keep it in position while it, you know, looks out and takes all these amazing images of space for us, One of them is malfunctioning. It's been glitching for about a year, and the backup that was expected to replace it didn't quite act the way NASA wanted it to. So the telescope basically went to sleep on the 5th of October, which is just to say it's not collecting new images right now while NASA tries to workshop the problem. They are optimistic that they're going to figure it out. They're going to either get the gyroscope working or figure out a workaround.

for a way to position it in the meantime. They expect it to, you know, continue working into the 2020s and overlap with its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope. But what's interesting is that the big problem is that it was designed to be fixed during shuttle missions, and we don't have a shuttle program anymore. So we're kind of, you know, running out of ways to fix the Hubble. So it does have, you know, an expiration date now. Details, detail.

Let's move on some other news. And there's a really interesting advance and reproductive medicine if you're a mouse. Yes. Great news for mice. The Chinese Academy of Science put out a paper showing that they were able to use embryonic stem cells and gene editing to create mice from same-sex parents, which has been done before. But they use a slightly different method this time. And while the mice with two dads only lived about 48 hours, the mice with two moms lived to adulthood and had babies of their own. So it's just kind of like another, you know, small step forward in this, you know, growing body of work that's teaching us how mammalian reproduction works and how we might be able to alter it.

That is a question, though, about why it worked with the mice with two moms and not the two dads. Yeah, you know, it's just considered more difficult to do it with two male cells. It comes down to they're not quite parallel. I hear it referred to a lot as it's like zipping up the chromosomes, and there are certain genes that, while both parents have them, they're turned off in males and turned on in females and vice versa. And so it's about, you know, tweaking these sex chromosomes so that they zip together, properly. Finally, there's a study tip for students, a special kind of memory, tell us about that. Yeah, so this really cool font called Sansfegra, and it's actually

designed to be slightly more difficult to read than most fonts. It's like kind of tilted and broken, and it's all about this principle called desirable difficulty, which is a phenomenon in learning, where you need something to be difficult enough that it holds your interest. You you know that it doesn't bore the person trying to learn the information, but not so hard that it keeps them from retaining it. So the idea behind this font is that it kind of breaks these traditional design principles so that it gets your attention and maybe helps you retain information a little bit better. So there's no published paper on it yet, so we can't quite say how well it works,

but it is a really intriguing idea. Always interesting to have you, Rachel. Thank you. Rachel Feldman, Science Editor at Popular Science. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News.

Local science stories of national significance. California's Channel Islands, a cluster of eight islands off of the Southern California coast, have been compared to the Galapagos, isolated islands with unique ecosystems, home to some species found nowhere else. And five of the islands became a national park in the 1980s, Before that, they were home to ranching and farming and home to the Schumach people for thousands of years before that. But a cascade of ecological problems threatened the islands. Lance Roscoe, news director here at KCLU, is with me now to talk about efforts to protect and preserve the ecology there.

Welcome. Good to see you, Lange. Well, good to be with you, Ira. So tell us about the ecological problems, a little bit of the history. This is nothing new, right? No, it's really interesting. It's sort of like CSI for biologists here because we had this whole chain reaction of things. But as you mentioned, we had the ranchers moved in and they brought in cattle and sheep and pigs and other non-native things to the islands. But what happened was after World War II, a lot of DDT ended up in the ocean.

The DDT ended up in fish. Now, the reason this is significant is the bald eagles, which are native to the islands, eat these fish. And it built up to the point in the bald eagles that whenever they would nest, the eggs would crack. So they would basically, they would sit in the eggs, they would crack. and the bald eagles came to the point of extinction, so they brought in the bald eagles for a captive breeding program. So that opened another door. Golden eagles, which don't live in the islands naturally,

said, hey, this looks like a great place to live because our nemesis is gone now. So golden eagles moved out into the islands. The golden eagles, when they moved out there, started to eat the feral pigs that were out there, and also this rare species of fox. It's called the island fox. It looks like a cat.

It's a tiny little fox. They're cute. They're adorable looking. and the island fox are very curious about people, but the island fox doesn't have it in their DNA to be on the alert for the Golden Eagles. So the Golden Eagles basically started feasting on them, pushed them to the point of extinction. So you had this whole chain reaction. Biologists looked at this and said, okay, we need to grab what island foxes we have left.

We need to bring them in for a captive breeding program to try to save them. And so you had this whole cascade of events. And so the biologists had to figure out how these things were interrelated, and then they started to fix them. And it's fascinating. So what do you mean that they started to fix them? So what happened was they finally got enough of the bald eagles that they were able to reintroduce them to the islands. Then the golden eagles that had moved into the islands, they did a trapping program. They relocated them to another part of California and into Nevada as well.

And then the island foxes had gotten to the point where they could re-release them onto the islands. And they've just been growing. Now, Tim Coonan, who's a National Park Service biologist, I've talked to him for 20 years about this project, he said maybe in our life, time we could see the island fox recover. It happened in less than 20 years. It's remarkable. Biologists around the world are looking at this because humans were able to fix the problem. But wait, there's more. There is more because there's other non-native things out there. There's eucalyptus trees and there's ants, specifically Argentine ants, which you find on Santa Cruz Island. They went in

and they said, okay, we're going to dust for these ants. We're going to get rid of these ants. But the problem is, how do you know that you've gotten rid of all the ants? You have a little clip about that. Yes. We think the treatment that we did is very, very effective to the point that we cannot find any ants with us and our human abilities. We pull out over 60,000 lures. We're at a point where we think we did a really good job on the treatment, and we're bringing out this dog to try to verify our results, to ensure that we can say, yep, okay, we're done. We did the eradication.

Now, that's Christina Bozer with the Nature Conservancy. So what they did is this group called Working Dogs for Conservation in Montana, train this dog specifically to find our children. Argentine ants, the only dog of its type in the world. It went out, it checked out the islands, and it said Santa Cruz Island is ant-free. In fact, now Tobias had just checked up on Tobias. He's now looking for quagga mussels in Glacier National Park. And so he's moved on, but they were able to show that the island is now ant-free, thanks to the ant-dog.

So we have a happy ending. We do. Happy ending to the story. Thank you, Lance. Lance Orozco is a news director here at KCLU in Thousand Oaks, California. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, the countdown to the mid-term, The midterm elections is on and just a month out. How secure are our ballot boxes?

We heard that there's been some interference in the last election. We'll see how more secure they might be. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. There is less than a month until the midterm elections on November 6th. And there's a lot of talk about hacking and voter security. The federal government has said hackers targeted the election system.

of 21 states before the 2016 presidential election, but reportedly no information was changed or manipulated. Yet for the second year in a row, the DefCon Underground Hacking Conference, well, it showed how hackers could break into voting machines. So what are the real risks to our voting infrastructure? How can we secure these systems? How does all of this affect voting behavior? And our question for you listeners is,

What is your top concern about voting security heading into the midterm elections? We want to hear from you. Give us a caller number 844-724-8255-844-Sight-4-a-4-Sight-Talk. You can also tweet us at SciFry. What concerns you most about voting security heading into these midterms? Let me bring on my guest. Lawrence Norton is a deputy director of the Brennan Center Democracy Program at New York University. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks, Ira. You're welcome. Charles Stewart III is a professor of political science and the founding director of the election data and science lab at MIT. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. I'm glad to be here. And it's nice to have you. Larry, I mentioned the Russians hacking during the last presidential election. What areas were the Russians or were the hackers compromising and what were they trying to do there? I'm not sure that we know entirely what they were trying to do.

First of all, I think it's really important when we're talking about. There's a lot of conversation about Russian interference in the election in 2016. There are a couple of things that we're talking about when we mention that. One is attacks on the election infrastructure, but there's also the kind of purchase of political ads, social media propaganda, and attack on campaigns and their emails. Those are two separate things. If we're focusing on the election infrastructure itself, we saw them targeting voter registration databases. Again, not entirely clear what they were trying to do there.

And, of course, voter registration databases are the roles that have the names of people and says whether or not they're eligible to vote, where they live, where they can vote. And there were phishing attacks against election officials. We know that it looks like at least one election. Systems vendor, which manufacturer's e-pull books was attacked. But I think we don't know exactly what was going on, unclear, just that there was certainly a lot of looking around on their part. Well, was that the vendor company that was putting PC anywhere on the machines as maintenance, but the software wasn't taken off? Is that what you're talking about in that case, or is it something different. No, no. What I'm talking about is

there is a company VR systems. Actually, I think they may still they may still not have confirmed whether or not there certainly wasn't an attempt to hack them. And again they manufacture e-pull books and

deal with registration databases. Electronic pullbooks are what you kind of what are used. They're often tablets or computers that are used to check people in. And as I said, last I checked, I think they may have denied that they were actually successfully breached, but at least in one of the Mueller indictments, there was an indication that there was some vendor that sounded like them that was actually breached.

Charles Stewart, we were talking about these kind of hacks, but how else could a voting machine be compromised? Well, that's actually quite a controversial question. I mean, you mentioned, well, so let's start off by making distinctions. And Larry really helped in making the distinctions among the Russians what they were doing in various ways, you know, perhaps to influence the elections ranging from affecting the campaigns to maybe affecting the infrastructures. I think if we're asking about what can be done to hack into, say, machines and systems, the first distinction we would make is between, you know, the voter registration systems, which, Larry was just talking a bit about.

You alluded to with the 21 states that got attacked. Those are voter registration systems. And then there are the voting machines themselves, which can either be electronic voting machines that are used in several. states or potentially the scanners that are used to scan paper ballots. And if we're thinking about the voting machines themselves, either the electronic ones or the scanners, that's actually the answer to that question is actually quite controversial. You made a reference to the DEF CON activities.

And so what we do know is that if you have access to a voting machine, and especially if you have access for a long, long time, and the vulnerabilities are well known, that a decently competent computer science student can open up the machine and do things to it. What election officials will say is that, first of all, in general, the machines that have been broken into in DefCon either have been retired or in the process of being retired. And then secondly, that the types of attacks that have been demonstrated to be successful against these machines require such a degree of direct access that in order to have actually an effective attack on them, you would need some sort of inside job that would require a lot of attention to particular machines and would be easily detected. And so, but I mean, I think that's where the controversy is, that it's my sense that the computer science community think it's easier to actually affect this type of kind of brute force attack against the guts of the voting machines than the election officials do. Are they right? Well, I mean, I tend to kind of, if I have to go with one side or the other, I tend to, my take on it is I've learned a lot from DefConn.

about what the vulnerabilities are. I think that the election officials are aware of those vulnerabilities and are taking steps to try to deal with them. I think that the important thing, nonetheless, is that the election officials that are using electronic machines, especially the ones that don't have any sort of paper record of the election, I mean, they're in a position where they have to say, well, you know, given everything we do to try to protect the machines physically, we're confident that they're not being attacked, and we're confident because of the logic and accuracy testing we're doing, that there weren't mistakes made. But a skeptic can, I think, rightfully so, even if you think the election officials have done everything they could, I think there is still room for a skeptic to say, yeah, but wouldn't it be great if one could independently verify that,

that the machines weren't monkeyed with and there weren't mistakes in the programming. So, so I tend, you know, I tend to fall on the side of thinking that the machines right now for 2018 are well taken care of and are highly unlikely to be subject to the sorts of attacks that we see at DefCon, but it would behoove, it would be good for the states to move in directions to make it easier to demonstrate to skeptics that that was true. I, if I could just jump in real quick on that point. I think to build on what Charles just said, I do have a concern. I'm not sure, but I really buy the argument because these machines are generally not connected to the Internet, that we don't have to worry about problems with them and potentially somebody reaching them in various ways.

But more importantly, there's a lot of the election infrastructure, of course, that is connected to the Internet. And an example of that might an obvious example is election night reporting, which comes out. And that's how we get the unofficial results, although we don't call them that on election night very quickly. That comes up on websites and gets reported out. And we have seen, in fact, not in the United States that I know of, but in other countries, election night reporting attacked. And if you get incorrect numbers there, in the environment that we have today, the high partisan environment where there is a lot of false information put out on social media. I was talking earlier about that level of interference from the Russians in the 2016 election,

casting doubts on election outcomes. If you don't have, as we don't in 13 states, at least in some polling places in 13 states, a paper backup that you can go back to afterwards and say, yeah, maybe there's been doubt cast on these elections, but we can go back and we have something that's independent of the software to tell us the results. I think that's very dangerous, and I am hopeful that in the 13 states where we still have these paperless systems

that will be replacing them before the 2020 election. Yeah, you know, because last few weeks ago, when I voted in my primary, half the machines were down. The voting machines were down, but I was voting on an electronic paper ballot, and they just collected all the ballots

and said, we'll run them through the machines when we get them fixed. Yes. So they had that, very important paper trail to fall back on. Yeah, that's a huge important point to make. Obviously, there were only about 25 days until the election, so we're not going to be doing any massive revamping of our election infrastructure.

In fact, people are, as you point out, people are already voting. But making sure that we have redundancies in place so that people can still vote, and that if there are problems, we figure out a way to count those ballots is really important. And in some states, there are no paper ballots in parts of 23 states, I believe. There aren't a paper ballots. People are voting directly onto electronic machines. And it's really important in those states for them to have emergency paper ballots that they can break out if machines go down. And I would say they should have two to three hours worth on election day.

Yeah, yeah. And if I can just pipe in here. I mean, I think there's a big general point to what Larry is saying. it's a point that's being made a lot these days in the election space is that there's been a lot of focus on how do we secure the various selection systems, whether it be the machines or the voting registration systems. There's also the matter of building resilience into the system because we know that at some time and some place, things will be the breakdown like you experienced or there'll be mistakes or there will in fact be attacks. And so then the question is, what is the backup and what is the backup plan in the case of if you have paper ballots, although you might have electronic ballot, marking devices, that's a backup. If the voter registration system is down, if you're prepared with enough provisional ballots, or even a paper backup of an electronic voting system, then you can

move ahead. And those are the sorts of things where when I look at state and local officials, that's what I want to know about is what sort of resilience and emergency planning is going into the operations just as much as I'm interested in. Well, you know, do you have this sensor on your servers? Do you have this sort of two-factor authentication on your, on your email, et cetera? Lawrence, is the Brennan Center more concerned about the voting system or the possible suppression of the voting registration of candidates? Yeah, I mean, we're concerned about, we're concerned about both, for sure. Sure. I think, and I think both of them contribute to cynicism about the process, to concern about the process. I do think, you know, we've seen an unusual number of voter purges in the last couple of years since the Shelby decision that struck down an important part of the Voting Rights Act in states that were covered before.

had to get preclearance for doing things like purging voters. We've seen a massive increase in states like Georgia and Texas and Florida and North Carolina. And, you know, I think when people see that, people that legitimately should be entitled to vote and show up at the polls and told they're not on the rolls, for whatever reason. And it could be because there were mistakes, programming errors, or it could because they were improperly purged. that creates a lot of doubt in the integrity of the system. One thing that I would say to everybody in the run-up to the election is they should be checking their voter registration. That's an easy thing to do online. Even if they think they're registered.

They may not be. Yes, absolutely. And in fact, that can be an early warning sign for election officials that, hey, maybe I need to figure out what's going on here. Maybe there's a problem. So I think that's really important to do for the voter because it'll also remind them of where they should be going to vote. and they can feel confident about when they show up on Election Day, but I think it's also important for the system generally. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Charles, you looked at how the public sentiment towards election security, what it feels, if they think our voting systems are secured, do they? Well, actually, they do, for the most part. I did a survey just over the weekend last weekend, which replicated something I did in May, and I asked a representative sample of voters, potential voters, whether they're confident, at least that their own county or locality is prepared for this November in terms of computer hacking. And about 60% or so of the respondents said that they were at least somewhat confident in what's likely to happen in November. with not surprisingly maybe Republicans being a bit more confident the Democrats.

And that partisan divide, by the way, is one of the reasons why I always kind of put an asterisk on any public opinion research being done on public attitudes about confidence in voting, whether it be in cybersecurity or just the vote count in general, and that these days everything is partisan. and, you know, voters' expectations about what's going to happen in November and whether we're prepared on the cybersecurity side is as much as likely to be determined by their partisanship as attitudes about almost any other issue. Is voting security a politically partisan issue? A little bit. I mean, it's surprisingly nonpartisan in the sense that, I mean, there are Democratic and Republican differences on the cyber. security front. But they are, you know, they're the sort that a political scientist would write home about, but maybe everybody else would yawn at when you compare it to, you know, attitudes about abortion or health care, for instance. But when you look at other survey

research that I've done, Democrats, for instance, are more likely to be concerned about foreign attacks, foreign influence on elections. Republicans are more likely. to be concerned about internal cybersecurity problems, which is, I think, consistent with Republican concerns in general about fraud and other things that happen domestically. So there are those kind of differences that are kind of reflective of the 2016 election, but nonetheless, Republicans and Democrats alike are both concerned about cybersecurity and elections, and both of them on the whole are confident that their local officials are doing the right thing. All right. A very interesting topic. We'll have to take it up more, and maybe even before the weeks before the elections and get an analysis when the elections are over.

I want to thank both my guest, Lawrence Norton, Deputy Director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program at New York University. Charles Stewart III, Professor of Political Science, founding director of the Election Data and Science Lab at MIT. Thank you both for taking time to be with this. We're going to take a break and come back and have a progress report on how the world is doing with curbing carbon emissions, a new IPC. report. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Back in December of 2015, 195 of the world's nations took their first steps down a long, unclear road to addressing climate change in signing the Paris Climate Agreement. Nations agreed to keep the increase

in global average temperature to, quote, well below 2 degrees Celsius, a critical point at which the planet gets locked into a future of catastrophic impacts, such as rising sea levels, more devastating floods and droughts, widespread food and water shortages, and more powerful storms. And to ensure that we don't get too close to that two-degree tipping point, the agreement asks countries to limit the temperature increase to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. But how much does half a degree save us from the most devastating impacts of climate? climate change. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, this week, has shed some light on that. It highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to 2 degrees or more. The conclusion, every bit of warming, even that 0.5 degrees, matters. Here to break down the report and tell us how

world nations have been doing trying to curb emissions over the last three years is Dr. Kelly Vind. She is Senior Associate with the World Resources Institute. Dr. Levin, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you so much. Great to be with you. We want to send out a shout out to our listeners with this question as we barrel toward a one and a half degree increase in global temperature.

Are you worried? Are you worried about climate change impacting where you live? Give us a call on number 844. 724825-845-8-8-4-7-2-4-8-5-5. You can also tweet us at a sci-fry. So, Dr. Levin, the goal is to prevent a two-degree increase in average global temperatures, but this report tells us that even a 1.5 degree increase is going to bring some pretty big changes. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So the Paris Agreement actually has these two goals, as you said, to limit warming well below two degrees

and pursue efforts for 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. And that was because for some of the most vulnerable countries, you can think about small island developing states. 1.5 degrees Celsius is also going to harm well-being to a tremendous extent. So what this report did was look at what are the differences between warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius of warming, and how much harder is it to get to 1.5 degrees Celsius as opposed to 2 degrees Celsius? And they found that, indeed, we are definitely not on track, and the half a degree of warming

actually can make a tremendous difference. And for example? So, for example, what they found is they looked across a number of different systems, and they found, for example, for extreme heat, the percentage of the global population exposed to a severe heat wave, which we've already started to experience with one degree of warming, at least once every five years is two and a half times worse with two degrees of warming instead of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. If you think about sea ice-free Arctic in the summer when you don't have any ice on top of the Arctic, this could happen at least once every 100 years with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming,

but at least once every decade under 2 degrees Celsius of warming. And that can impact climate change even further because you have a dark service that opens up underneath the ice and it absorbs more warmth. Sea level rise is 0.06 meters more with 2 degrees as opposed to 1.5 degrees. And while that doesn't sound like a lot, that translates to millions more people being impacted. Species losses two times worse for both plants and vertebrates that lose at least half of their range under 2 degrees of warming. as opposed to 1.5 degrees of warming, three times worse for insects, almost 40% worse under 2 degrees versus 1.5 degrees for the amount of permafrost that would thaw in the Arctic. So these are some really big numbers. One of the most devastating and surprising ones to me was for coral reefs, where the report found that under 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, we would see 70 to 90% of a further decline in coral reefs.

with 2 degrees more than 99%, which is just tremendous. Does it look like there's any way we're going to be able to stay under that 2.0 degrees? So what the report finds is that both 2 degrees Celsius of warming and 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is technically feasible. There have been a lot of modeling studies where analysts come together and see what would have to happen to make that transition happen. Right now, emissions are roughly 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent. They're projected to increase, even with the climate change commitments that we've made under the Paris Agreement by 2030. Instead, we essentially need to have that amount and go down to 25 to 30 gigatons of carbon

dioxide per year by 2030. And then we actually need to phase out net emissions altogether by mid-century. So this is a tremendous transformation and decarbonization rates that are truly unprecedented at the scale of what we are talking about. It also would require behavioral and technological shifts across the board. So, for example, by 2050, we're talking about renewables projected to supply 70 to 85 percent of electricity to be able to meet 1.5 pathways. We're talking about reducing energy demand, increasing the efficiency of food production, changing dietary choices, a lot of different measures, which were just starting to do in certain locations, but not at the scale we need.

You know, the president said he wanted to know, quote, who drew the report? I won't go there with that. Can you answer, at least who commissioned it? What data do they use? Sure. So the way that the IPCC works is in this particular case, under the Paris Agreement, there was an accompanying decision, and that decision requested the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to put this report together. And what the scientists do, they commissioned about 100 different scientists and had a very lengthy review process of several different drafts being reviewed, publicly reviewed, and I was one of the reviewers for that.

The scientists basically assess all of the recent literature, and in this case on 1.5 degrees Celsius, and see what the science says, up to a certain cutoff point where the literature is published. And then they put together a detailed technical analysis. Interestingly, in this case, there's an accompanying summary for policymakers, which was agreed upon in Korea about a week ago. And that all of the government signed onto, including the United States. and that is actually something that negotiators come, make sure that they feel comfortable with the implications for policymakers. So in this case, part of the answer is that the United States did actually endorse this report. We have a lot of people who want to talk about it.

I'm going to go to the phones to Janice in South Carolina. Hi, Janice. Yes, hello. So I'm an agriculture, and I think what ends up confusing people, when you talk about, one and a half degrees, people aren't real excited about it. What really hurts us in agriculture is the high temperature, the record high. So, for example, in the Midwest, if corn gets over 95 degrees Fahrenheit at night, it kills the pollen and greatly reduces yield. Or in the Central Valley of California, when tomatoes, when the pollen temperatures get very high, over

100 degrees, that kills the pollen. And so this is really critical, are the highs, not just the average temperatures. And we can fix us by growing more plants. That's what the little ice age was about. The North American forest grew back for 150 years after Columbus, and all these trees took so much COTA out of the atmosphere. It's cooled to plant it off so much we had a little ice age. And I wish more of the scientists would talk about that,

because we can substitute a lot of our renewables can be biofuels, biogas, other things like that that will make us grow more plants, and we can have them for food feed and fuel. Are you a farmer? No, I'm an ag researcher, actually, but I have a small farm, and I'm the developer of the energy tuber, which makes food, feed, and fuel all in the same acre and it uses little water and nitrogen.

You know, everybody thinks we're going to have some, you know, put CO2 in an atmosphere. Well, all the plants will take it up if we switch to the renewables using plants. All right, let me get a comment. Thanks for your call. What about that? suck some of the CO2 out and reverse some of this. Thanks. Some really good points here. I think, first, as you had mentioned, the 1.5 degree goal is for a global average temperature increase,

so temperature increase at any one location, especially on any one particular moment in time, as well as its impacts are going to vary, and that's an incredibly important point. Interestingly, the report does talk extensively about carbon removal and says that, Not only do we need to pull out all the stops on emission reductions, but we actually have to remove carbon from the atmosphere and at a scale that we need to ramp up significantly. The models do look at the different ways in which that can be achieved. Some of them are with aforestation, for example, with planting trees. There are a number of technological options for carbon removal. For example, bioenergy plus carbon capture and storage, where you use bioenergy.

and capture some of the carbon associated with it and store it. Also, direct air capture and storage where basically these are huge machines that you have air passing through. You collect the carbon dioxide and then you store it. There are some challenges with bioenergy and bioenergy plus CCS. And it's important to ensure that bioenergy crops don't displace other land uses so that they have the carbon effect and don't raise food prices. disturb ecosystems. But certainly managing our lands and soils in a way that they can suck out carbon much more efficiently is going to be critically important.

But, you know, we've talked about energy usage in the past. It's cheaper to make things more efficient so they don't use up as much energy than it is mitigating the problem later. Is the same thing true of carbon? It's better to keep it from being emitted. It's much more efficient to do that than to try to suck it out of the air later? That's for sure. Absolutely. Certainly, reducing energy demand, energy efficiency, these are all going to be critically important. Efficiency of industrial processes and changing some of the behavioral changes that would lead to kind of more low-carbon society would be very critical. I reflator, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I mentioned some of the things we're watching now, rising sea levels. We have devastating floods, and we had a hurricane that's now gone off the scale this week for some measurements. Are we not seeing, is it not fair to call these consequences of climate change or evidence, more or less, of climate change? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what's important, and I think one of the reasons why this report is really hitting home to people is that everyone is seeing the devastating impacts of just one degree of warming. And now we're talking with current climate change commitments, even if they were fully implemented, we're slated for 2.7 to 3.7 degrees Celsius of warming. So that's a world that we don't know what that looks like. Certainly, that's better than without the climate change commitments, but we are talking about tremendous changes across systems.

Certainly, we have lots of evidence that the impacts unfolding around us have human fingerprints, and we can see the impacts of human activity in a number of different changes, including in storm activity, in terms of the amount of time that storms are sticking around in the Atlantic, the frequency, the intensity of storms. The sea level rise basically gives a higher onboarding for coastal inundation. So we're definitely already seeing a lot of impacts on Folder. And the amount of rainfall that's coming out of these storms. That's right.

But you scared me a little bit when you just said, we don't even know what it would look like in it above a 2 degrees Celsius increase. So what we do have is we have some models that look at what the projected impacts would be. And for some of these impacts, we have more certainty. And for others, we have less certainty. There are also these so-called wild cards that probably are low probability, but would have very high impact. And where those thresholds lie, for some of those, we are not completely sure. So if you think about shifting of ecosystems from a tropical forest to a savanna-like state because you have such extreme drought, that would be not only catastrophic for the ecosystem and biodiversity and services, but also for carbon storage.

You know, I'm frequently struck by people who say, you know, if we take, it's going to cost us money. It's going to cost taxpayers money to implement some of these things we're talking about. But the other side of the argument never gets talked about. But what's it going to cost in terms of lives and capital and movement of populations and farming if we don't do any of these things? It's just it's so totally unbalanced on the other side. That's absolutely right. And interestingly, the report found that economic losses are actually much greater as temperatures rise. And with middle income countries, so in Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Brazil, Mexico projected to be affected the most.

They looked at global GDP losses for 1.5 versus 2 degrees and found that it was significantly different. A lot of these losses sometimes aren't even in the calculations to begin with. And certainly if you have short-termism where you don't value later economic impacts, as well as those that are harder to quantify, it doesn't get into the equation. So, you know, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. because it's not a pretty picture the way we're headed. It's not a pretty picture, but there's a lot we can do and we must do. First, in terms of the international process, governments in 2020 are invited to up their commitments

and to increase the ambition of their commitments, and that's going to be really important. What we know is the current commitments are not good enough to get us on track. So I think making sure that there's an expectation and a pressure for governments to do that. But also for people not to throw up their hands because there's an incredibly important role for everyone to play, not only governments, but the private sector, and also individuals and a lot of different things that individuals can do for sure. What's the single biggest thing an individual can do? I was going to say the single biggest thing is to get out and vote because I think we need to make sure that decision makers are taking climate change incredibly serious. and really turning the emissions trajectory around. Get out there and vote.

Thank you very much, Dr. Kelly Levin. Is a senior associate with the World Resources Institute. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Heiler. We had technical and engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman in New York, and Duncan Lively here at KCLU.

We want to thank all the folks, great folks here at the KCLU who made us feel so welcome in their studios today. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. You can even ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. So every day, sort of, now is Science Friday. In Thousand Oaks, California, I'm Ira Flato. Have a great weekend.