Science Friday - Water Wars, Air Pollution And Fetuses, Electric Blue Clouds. Sept. 28, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

Yemen is gripped by civil war—and some experts say it could be the first of many “water wars” to come, as the planet grows hotter and drier. In This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America, Jeff Nesbit writes of the Yemeni conflict and many other geopolitical consequences of a warming world, including the precarious future of the Indus River, under the control of China, India and Pakistan, and why Saudi Arabia’s biggest dairy company is buying farmland in the Arizona desert. Nesbit joins Ira to discuss the future of our planet.  Our understanding of how protective the placenta is during pregnancy has been changing. Some ingested substances, like alcohol and pthalates, are known to cross the boundary and cause harm. And in the case of air pollution, a mother’s exposure is increasingly correlated with health problems in the infant, from cardiovascular to neurodevelopment. But how do inhaled particles lead to these problems? New research in the Journal of American Medicine this month points to one potential mechanism: changes in the thyroid hormones, which are critical to early development. What’s going on—and what can be done to protect the most vulnerable from potentially lifelong health effects?  NASA’s PMC Turbo mission sent up a balloon to capture images of one of the rarest clouds, polar mesospheric clouds. These clouds, called noctilucent clouds, only form during the summer 50 miles up in the atmosphere, and they nucleate around meteor dust. Researchers explain what these clouds tell us about climate change and the physics of gravity waves and turbulence.  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. Coming up, we're going to talk about how Pakistan's Indus River is starting to dry up, and why that could catapult the region into war. But first, in pregnancy, the placenta, as you know, is a very critical organ. It allows the fetus to obtain nutrition and oxygen, and in the process filters harmful substances from the mother's body. But our understanding of how protective that placenta is has been changed. Some ingested substances are known to cross the boundary and cause harm, but how about alcohol or phallates?

And in the case of air pollution, the mother's exposure is increasingly correlated with health problems in the infant, from cardiovascular to neurodevelopment. But how do inhaled particles lead to these problems? New research in the journal of the American Medical Association Network opened this month is pointing to one potential, mechanism, changes in the thyroid. What's going on and what can be done to protect the most vulnerable from potentially lifelong health effects? My next guest is an author on the research. Dr. Carey Breton, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the USC in Los Angeles. Welcome, Dr. Breton. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Good afternoon to you. What got you looking at air pollution and the thyroid?

Well, believe it or not, I grew up in Southern California in the 80s, and I grew up living through smoggy alert days and swimming in the summer and feeling that really icky feeling in your lungs after a bad air day. And so I've been thinking about air pollution for many years now and really want to understand how early in life does air pollution affect us. And so we wanted to look in the womb and ask the question at the earliest stage of life, can air pollution affect our health? And we started with looking at the thyroid because the thyroid is very important in metabolism and fetal brain development. Yeah. And you saw elevated levels of this hormone thyroxin in infants whose mothers were exposed to more air pollution. How could that affect the child's health later in life? Well, we know that thyroid hormones are really important, as I said, in metabolism and in brain growth.

And we already know that having either too little hormone or too much hormone can have bad effects. That's, in fact, why the state of California and other states have a newborn screening program that tests newborns for thyroid hormone because if the baby has too little hormone, they can intervene, they can give medications, and they can prevent cognitive death. from happening. So there's a lot that's already known about thyroid hormone levels and how they affect health. And so if the environment now is affecting those levels, it may be skewing our systems, making us more vulnerable for these health effects. Now, to be clear, you saw hormonal changes, but this isn't proof of direct harm yet, right? Even though we know from other work that there are harms, right? Tell us why. Well, in this study, all we measured was the thyroid hormone T4 directly, and we measured it in the newborn.

So what we showed was that higher particulate matter is associated with higher thyroid hormone levels. But we did not, in this study, relate that change in thyroid hormone levels to any child health outcome later in life. That's actually something we would like to do as a next step. Does it seem to matter what kind of air pollution we're talking about, like particulate? or chemicals or small particles, soot, whatever? Yes, it does matter. We looked at both particulate matter as well as ozone and nitrogen dioxide, so several different ambient pollutants that are very typically regulated and monitored across the nation and in Los Angeles,

and we saw these effects with particulate pollution, not with ozone or nitrogen dioxide. Do we have any clues yet of the mechanism? You know, there are a lot of theories and there are a lot of investigations into this. One of those is that air pollution in general may be increasing inflammation throughout the body, and that may have its own set of cascading effects as the baby is developing. Does it concern you any that you're seeing more and more wildfires now? That might be not a factor in years past? Yes. Wildfires emit a lot of particulate matter. It may be different sizes of particulate matter and different composition than the

exhaust and diesel exhaust, but it's still fundamentally particulates come from incomplete combustion and things that burn. And wildfires burn a lot of stuff, and we emit tons of particles into the air. Is our understanding of air pollution and health changing from what it used to be? Well, I think what I can safely say is that we know air pollution is bad for us, and we're finding, you know, that even at the earliest moments in life, it may be bad for us. What I can tell you is that in Southern California, we've been trying to reduce air pollution for, you know, decades now, and we've done, we've been successful in doing that.

The levels have come down in the last decade, in part because we've regulated emissions. And, you know, the nice thing about this is that we've also seen the corresponding increases in kids' health when air pollution levels come. down. So we know it works and we know we can do something about it. That's interesting. You really have enough data now to know that in enough years to know that it doesn't matter. Yes, yes. We have, just in our own work, we followed a cohort of children called the Children's Health Study for more than 20 years, and the whole purpose of that study was to look at air pollution's effects on kids' health. Do we know if particles are actually crossing the placenta, or is there

some intervening mechanism? We don't know that with any certainty. And I think it's going to be very dependent on what size particle we're talking about and whether the placenta can filter that out and be that barrier. Or also whether in the mom, the particles cause an indirect effect and then all those cascading chemicals and molecules that change. and the mom can pass the placenta, even if the particle itself doesn't. You know, I don't have to tell you.

You've already told me that you've grown up in Southern California where it's smoggy and polluted, and it's polluted in a lot of places now. And in those days, we always have an ozone alert, right? Yes. And we tell the elderly not to go out or to breathe the air or to stay indoors. Should we be saying that to pregnant mothers now? Be careful. Yeah, you know.

I would say it couldn't hurt. And if you're concerned and you're a pregnant mom and you can check daily the air quality index, and if you see that it's a really bad air day, you might want to change your behavior. You might want to not go out and exercise really heavily. You might want to walk your dog on a quieter street away from heavy traffic. So there are little things that you could do. No, I'm saying, you know, as part of what you see on the weather forecast at night, You know, there are these warnings.

Why not include in these, you know, these warnings to pregnant people? Well, they do say for sensitive subpopulation. So if you want to consider pregnancy-sensitive population, you know, then yes. You know, I mean, you might want to consider it. I think it's a sort of an individual-level decision. How, is there any obstacle for you to doing more studies on this? You know, I'm going to give you the $64 question I give to a lot of my researchers. If you had an unlimited blank check and I have one,

right here in my pocket for you. What would you like to study? What would you need to know? How would you do that? Well, I would continue to address the broader question of can the environment, and how can the environment affect fetal development? And what is that tied to 10 years, 20 years down the line as we become adults? Are we now going to be at increased risk and more susceptible for all of these things that we're dealing with?

And we could start with the thyroid, and there's a lot more we could do with understanding the thyroid itself, looking at it more holistically, looking at the difference between how it affects mom's thyroid and baby's thyroid together and disentangling that. But there are also other pollutants one could ask the same questions about. Possibly outgassing of rugs or things like that or plastic in the home? Absolutely. I really addressed outdoor air pollution in this particular publication. Indoor air pollutants and the sources of those is a whole other bulgain. Yeah, something we should be thinking about, though, for pregnant people. Definitely.

Yeah. Is there any phase of pregnancy, you know, I'm assuming that the earlier in pregnancy first trimester is more important than others or am I being wrong about that? Well, actually, we actually tried to address that Crescent specifically in this publication. And we looked at months-by-month exposures in pregnancy to see if we could find that one month mattered the most in terms of being exposed. And what we really found was that actually most of pregnancy mattered, that exposure anywhere from mid to late pregnancy, not quite as much in the early, very early pregnancy. And that might have something to do with the fact that the thyroid, the fetal thyroid doesn't actually develop and start kicking in and producing its own thyroid until the second trimester. Is there thoughts that you might give pregnant moms, thyroid pills or injections or anything like that to measure the level in the fetus and say, well, we need to have some more or less?

Well, I think, you know, there's a lot of monitoring of that already. And so if a pregnant woman's thyroid levels fall within what are clinically normal ranges, you wouldn't need to do anything anyway. But that's an interesting thought. I mean, some women who have a thyroid disease going into pregnancy, they are. are already monitored for that. And yes, they will be monitored and they try to adjust those levels. Have you noticed that air pollution is getting any better? I mean, better meaning less of it. Right. Well, that depends on where you are. Yeah, that depends on where you are, right? So in Southern California, yes, we've had reductions in our air pollution levels. But in many other places

around the world, the air pollution's going up. Are pregnant moms taught about this? Do they doctors know about air pollution as a potential hazard? I don't think, generally speaking, that there's a great level of discussion about environmental harms such as air pollution when you're in the doctor's office. All right. Well, maybe we started one now today, Dr. Breton. Yes, maybe. That would be great.

Dr. Carrie Breton, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine, the USC in Los Angeles, good luck to you. Thank you for being so informative with us today. Thank you very much. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about water, How the wars of the future may be fought over water, and it's going to be a really big issue, water rights. Jeff Nesbitt is author of a new book. This is the way the world ends, how droughts and die-offs, heat waves, and hurricanes are converging on America. He's going to be here with us.

Our number 84472485. You can also tweet us at SciFri. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Four years ago, Saudi Arabia's big as dairy company called Almare, started buying up land in the Arizona desert. Why would they do that? Saudi Arabia was running out of water, and the company needed alfalfa, a highly water-intensive crop, to feed their cows.

And the area where they farm has less restricted access to the Colorado River and the state. water, less restricted than places like Phoenix or Tucson, meaning it's a great place to make hay and then ship it overseas. Back to Saudi Arabia. Is this just a little foreshadowing about the future of water and about how big a commodity H2O will become in a hotter and drier world? And some places already looking at solutions like turning wastewater into drinking water. And here's our question for our listeners.

Does your city already recycle wastewater and put it back in your tap? How does it taste? Was there an ick factor? And was it a political fight to get it done? Our number 844-724-825-8-4-Sight-Talk. You can also tweet us at SciFri. And the reason I'm bringing all of this up is because my next guest writes about the future of water and other climate-related conflicts in his new book. This is the way the world ends, how droughts and die-offs, heat waves,

hurricanes are converging on America. Jeff Nesbitt is the author, Executive Director of Climate Nexus, a nonprofit that focuses on climate change communications. He's the former Director of Public Relations at the National Science Foundation, where I knew him back way back in the day. Yes. Nice to see you. Good to see you.

Let's talk first about other countries coming here to use U.S. water resources. Is that right about Saudi Arabia? It is absolutely right. and some of the folks in Arizona didn't take so kindly to it. There was a very contentious local town hall not too long ago where they had four sheriff's step that he's planted outside the hall as they were trying to explain. But the story in Saudi Arabia goes back even further. Saudi Arabia made a pretty colossally bad bet where they began to drain the water aquifer to try to grow wheat. They paid farmers to grow wheat and they essentially drained the water aquifer that has some of their fresh water.

that had been in place for thousands of years. So then you combine that with climate change sitting on top like the 800-pound gorilla. They've essentially run out of water. So they've had to go elsewhere to get crops that are water intensive so they can feed their people. And so they came to Arizona. So we're basically shipping our water as we grow it overseas. And they call it a virtual water network. The Saudis in cables that WikiLeaks has released.

China's doing the same thing. They bought up, you know, America's largest. pork producer in order to do the same thing. So both Saudi Arabia and China are going around the world to try to solve their natural resource problems. And we're going to see more and more of this as water becomes more scarce everywhere. Absolutely. And that's actually the point of this book, is that water is more scarce in lots of places on Earth. We're lucky in the United States.

We live in a temperate zone. We're lucky that some of the worst impacts of climate change aren't here yet. They're definitely here in other parts of the world. Sub-Saharan Africa, some countries simply don't have any food at all. northern Africa is suffering in the Sahel region. And in your book, you say, quote, Yemen is the first casualty of what will almost certainly be the water wars of the future. Yemen is a fascinating story.

People have already written about what happened in Syria when the farmers moved out of their, off their farms to the cities, and it triggered the civil unrest. They've looked at Egypt where the food riots led to the Arab Spring. Yemen is a more stark example. Diplomats knew that country was running out of water. They rent 14 of the 16 aquifers were drained, no water. And they were predicting to the water minister and others, you're going to have riots in the streets. You need to deal with this.

They didn't. And that's exactly what two years later, civil unrest and then the collapse of the government. So that's what a water war looks like. And you say the future is here now, meaning disruption. It is absolutely. And this is, I'll tell you, this is one of the reasons why national security analysts have looked at climate change as an imminent national security threat. because when you have wars over water, you have wars over food insecurity, and I'll tell you, half the people in the world right now are eating food that's imported into the country because there isn't enough land, arable land or others to grow it right now. So it's here now in other parts of the world. And that's what I hear you saying. And the title of your book, This is the way the world ends. That comes from not with a bang, but with a whimper. So it's a little drip, drip, drip, under the radar. Yes. Until it's no longer.

until it's, you know, and then people fight, I mean, a good example that it sort of went unnoticed is India and Pakistan almost went to war over water, less than a year ago in Kashmir when India threatened to shut off access to the Indus River and threatened to start a war over that. If India should make that decision, Pakistan would suffer downstream. If China then would make a similar decision, it would harm both India and Pakistan. So these drip, drip, drips of water as they run out of water can lead to. catastrophes, essentially.

Are we going to be talking about the future, water futures, like we talk about oil futures or commodity futures? Not only are we, I can tell you, with certainty, I just met with the, I mean, I met with a billionaire who is already planning to treat water as a commodity, where they will sell water to places like northern China and Saudi Arabia and others. It is, we're absolutely there already in some parts of the world. So you mean somebody's hoarding the water? They're not hoarding.

Like a cartel of water. I don't know if there could be a cartel. We have a cartel of maple syrup. Why not have a cartel? Exactly. I don't know how, you know, I don't know that we'll be talking about barrels of water just yet, but clearly people are looking at this as a business. Talking with Jeff Nesbid, author of This Is the Way the World Ends,

how droughts and die-offs, heat waves, and hurricanes are converging on America. Let's see if we can get a phone call or two in. Let's go to Ken and Tucson. Hi, Ken. Hi, how are you? Hi, go ahead. Yeah, so I was just going to say, we've tried, even though we're in, desert here, we have not had politically had a luck getting either recycled water or even

a Colorado river water into our water system. We still use the aquifer. They tried it back in the 90s and it destroyed the water system. And the recycled water is, it is used for golf course if it's not used for anything else. Oh, wow. Thanks for the call. So I would encourage, that's very interesting to hear. Tucson and others might want to go talk to Marigarsity in Los Angeles because they

actually are. They have figured this out how to reclaim water. A significant portion of Los Angeles's water is starting to come from reclaimed water. They have a plan. It's a pretty extensive plan for doing that. I think, and honestly, other cities need to start figuring this out. I went to, was at the American Waterworks Association speaking there a while back, and I went to the exhibit area, and there are people there who collared me and say, you know, we are recycling water. We now can supply cities on larger and larger scales. We're experimenting with it. And I said to him, can the people tell the difference. He said they certainly can. When they drink our recycled water, they notice as much tastier than their old water. So, I mean, there's good news about it. There is.

You know, interesting. I think Los Angeles's plans are the next decade. I mean, I've also talked to their Water District leadership, they think about climate change every single day in Los Angeles right now. They're planning for that right now. And they have plans, I think, a third. I don't remember the exact numbers, but a very significant portion of their water is going to come from

reclaimed water. You tell a really interesting story, and let me just lead into this by saying, you know, don't people listen to scientists anymore. They should be, man. About what the drip, drip is, but you really

uncovered a great mythology about how Albert Einstein and FDR. Tell us that story you tell in the book. So it's actually the way I opened the book. There's this myth, and you probably know the truth, I'm sure, but there's this myth that Albert Einstein writes a letter, the famous Albert Einstein, writes a letter to FDR, warns that the Nazis are about to, you know,

that scientists are about to unlock the atom and develop a nuclear bomb, and that that triggered the process. Bingo. It's simply not true. He had to write a second letter and then a third letter and then a fourth letter. And after the second letter, I think, first or second letter, they fobbed him off on a lieutenant and a little commission and threw $60,000 at Henriko Fermi to try to test the theory. Because basically, FDR had a war to prosecute. He didn't want to listen to Albert Einstein or the scientists at all.

And it was only when Britain got serious at looking at it that FDR finally said, oh, maybe we better pay attention to this. But so... Then the Manhattan Project. And then the Manhattan Project was born. So, you know... I didn't know that story. I was just with you thinking, you know, that was that one letter that did. But you're saying that's the parallel we have today.

It is. It is. There are thousands of Albert Einstein climate scientists yelling as loudly as they possibly can. Please pay attention. The wolf is at the door right now. We can't wait for 30, 40, 50 years to see how this all plays out. 844-7-24-8-25 is our number. You also point out in your book that the large international companies like Nestle and Coca-Cola and Pepsi are understanding this problem.

Correct. The Nestle chapter in this book is fascinating. People are, they did. Nestle has analyzed the water scarcity issues in every single country. They're the biggest food company in the world. The biggest food company in the world rely seriously in water for, you know, for food that they make. They've analyzed water scarcity problems in every country on earth, and they've told diplomats quietly

that this may be the biggest imminent crisis in the world is water scarcity issues, and lots and lots of countries. All right, let's see, a lot of folks from Arizona and the places where they need all this water calling. Let me see if I can get a phone call in from Brandon, and let's go to Georgia, Augusta, Georgia. Hi, Brandon. Hello.

Hi there. Go ahead. My comment is, I think you asked how water recycling would face, And the fact is that the majority of Americans are already drinking recycled water, the fact that they're drawing their waters from rivers. They're just down stream from other cities. Yeah, that's a good point. It is a good point, and he's right, actually. I mean, we sort of, like, I'm drinking a cup of water here.

I take for granted that it's clean. New York City water. Yeah, it's nothing like it. But he is right. But in other parts of the world, and I'll pick on China again, they have a severe pollution problem in the rivers. It's potentially, in some places, too polluted. too costly to clean up the pollution. But here in the United States, your caller is exactly right.

You know, much of our clean water comes from rivers where they have to clean, you know, they have to clean the chemicals and make sure that it comes to us clean. But there's a difference between that sort of normal process and actually reclaiming water as it runs off. Well, here's a tweet came in from Ben who says we wouldn't have to recycle so much water

if we stopped raising animals for food. Animal agriculture is the problem. We need to stop encouraging it. So there's absolutely some scientific and, well, I'll just say fly. Yes, there is some truth there. The using land to basically produce meat, it takes up a lot of land. And we could make some progress with natural solutions in the land, like growing more trees, growing more plants in some of those places.

It would make it, it would make an impact. That's about 15% of the climate problem. This is a very complicated question, but he's correct about that. Let's talk about the climate change. The shipping giant Muros just sent a big container ship through the Arctic for the first time. And aside from oil exploration that's been going on there, the Arctic is the world's next big economic zone. Right? It's free of ice in the summer.

It is. And I'll tell you, I talk about this in the book as well. Russia is clearly paying attention to this. They have six, seven, eight ice cutters. They're preparing to deal with an Arctic region where you can ship through the Arctic. It's like nature is building the equivalent of the Panama Canal through the Arctic right now as we're seeing it. And nobody expected that for 40, 50 years. It is happening right now.

And some countries are paying attention like Russia. Others, like the United States, simply aren't. We still don't have a modern ice cutter to even one up there. We haven't run it through the Pentagon. We need a DARPA project or something like that. We do. That will get the attention, you know. It would, actually.

The one ice cutter was a Coast Guard ice car. I spent years of my life at the National Science Foundation trying to convince Congress to do that. I rest my case. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And the Russians actually planted a flag on the, didn't they, put a little flag on the Arctic seabed about 10 years ago? They did.

And the Scandinavian countries know this? They do. They all know that. They all know this is the next big area. They all. And another one of the, and there's, then the scientists know it as well. The scientists have documented what are called regime shifts in the Arctic and what that means, and it's happening right now. It's one sort of like grasslands become another entire ecosystem.

It's all happening right before our eyes. There's a story I read today. I think it was Washington Post. I'm not quite sure. The Trump administration came out with a report last month that predicts the planet's going to warm under the 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. and much worse than we thought, but they're using the report to justify freezing auto-efficient fuel efficiency standards by basically saying, hey, you know, it's going to happen.

It is. That's actually a shock. It's shocking that that was in that report, and that's the justification. What they're doing is they're basically saying it's a fatalistic approach, and two, they're simply saying, well, the United States can't make a dent in this problem that they're now acknowledging, even as they're trying to freeze these, you know, and freeze the clean car standards. What is, well, I'll just say bluntly what's wrong about that, what's wrong-headed about

that is that America has to be a leader on this fight. And when America leads, everybody else follows on this particular issue. So just throwing up your hands and saying we can't make a dent and it doesn't make any sense. But more importantly, I think what they've acknowledged, when this gets to court and it will get to court, this probably is the linchpin for a while they'll lose. I think so. Or one of the linchpins for a while they'll lose. That combined with the fact that nobody wants cities in America to get dirtier again.

Or to be underwater. Florida would be underwater if you raise 7 degrees Fahrenheit. There are lots of places that would be underwater. Yes. What's the one message you want people to take away from this book? That climate change impacts are here right now. It's not a distant threat in space and time. It is here right now, including even in America.

We need to recognize that and that there are things that we collectively can do. And can individuals, really? Absolutely. Do something. I'll just give you one. Give me an example. I'll give you an example. Even a simple thing like science is now emerging that says if everybody starts to build green backyards and green their local part of the world, collectively, that adds up to a large carbon sink.

So that's just one example. It's the kind of thing that's in the book, Project Drawdown. But there are things like that that individuals can do that will have a means. meaningful impact collectively. They can also vote. And there are two ways to vote. You can vote for governments that act or don't act, but you can also vote as a consumer. So if there are big companies that are looking at meaningful sustainability practices, find

out who they are and vote for them as a consumer. So vote with your political vote and vote with your pocketbook. All right. We're going to have you stay through the break. Let's hang around a little bit longer with. Jeff Nesbitt is author of This Is The Way the World Ends, How Droughts and Die-Offs. heat waves and hurricanes are converging on America. And I tell you, when I read the first half of the book, I was ready to give up.

Don't give up. Don't give up. Well, you go to the second half of the book. You're a little more optimistic, but you go through all these things. It's like a physician. You present the problem, and then you give the treatment plan. But you remain optimistic. I do.

You remain optimistic that if we have enough time to write the ship? I do. Not a whole lot of time, but yes, and we are going to write this ship. There you have. We'll stay with us. We're going to have Jeff Nesbitt. Stay with us through the break. Our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFry-844-Sai Talk, if you prefer, on the telephone. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about climate change and conflict and water shortages as the new national, international problem with Jeff Nesbitt is author of This Is the Way. the world ends. And our number 844-724-8255. I said we take some phone calls.

We have a lot of interesting ones. Let's go to South Bend, Indiana. Gabriel, hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks to speaking my call. I love your show. Thank you. Go ahead.

Yeah, so I live in a city that used to have a municipal energy office. And the director of that office not only was recommending a waste-to-energy project, but a water recycling project. And it wasn't the community that was pushing back. It was actually the response from the administration a couple years ago was to eliminate the energy office. So it's not from the community that the pushback is coming from, at least in our case.

There was some sort of pushback. And so the office was eliminated, and those two ideas just died on the vine when that office once let go. Jeff, you talked about the ballot box being. Yeah, and honestly, that's really unfortunate. My organization is partially responsible for a new movement called the We Are Still in Movement that includes hundreds of mayors, and I think there are lots of mayors who are figuring this out. But what it's unfortunate about what your college has talked about is that there's lots of money to be made in both energy efficiency and water reclamation.

They, you know, if mayors are smart, they can figure out. Just as companies are, there's money to be made in sustainability. I also want to shout out to a fellow Hoosier because I grew up right down the road in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Let's shout out to Denver. Let's go to Keith in Denver, Colorado. Hi, Keith. Welcome. Hi, Keith.

Good afternoon, gentlemen. Yeah, I'm going to play with Denver. Oh, did we drop you? I'm sorry? Say again, because your phone is coming in and out. Start over. Okay. I'm an employee for Denver Water, and we have our own research.

use plant where we recycle water coming off the water treatment plant. And so that that gets goes out to areas for irrigation, uh, the city golf courses, uh, city parks, etc. Whereas prior to that occurring, that was, uh, treated water that was going out there for irrigation. So there's cost saving measures there where we're not wasting treated, treated water, potable water. Uh, potable water to put on, you know, courses and recreation areas. A couple other different things they're doing now is even inline turbines on some of our high flow conduits to produce electricity outside of our hydroelectric plants that have been in place for years.

Interesting. So he's, and I applaud what Denver Water and others are doing. There's a compact of all the states all the way down through Mexico that are all talking to each other about the Colorado River Basin. They're getting very smart about it. They're looking at appropriate uses, and they've all agreed effectively if the water tables get too low in the Colorado River, that those upstream won't drain the water, and everybody will conserve along the way. It's really heartening, and this is one of the reasons why I'm so optimistic. It's heartening to see that people are getting this now.

They're looking at potential water scarcity issues right now. The Colorado River Basin, states and compacts are leading the way in that regard. I will say others are as well. Israel, for instance, is starting to export its water desalienization technology, even to Arab countries. So Saudi Arabia may be getting its fresh water from technology that Israel companies have developed. Is desalinization at the point where it can be done efficiently and in large scale? It can be done. It can be done.

Let's put it that way. Efficiently, a large scale, I think that's still an open question. It's still awfully expensive. But for countries like Saudi Arabia, they may not have a choice. in terms of drinking water, they're going to have to do this. Saudi Arabia can afford it because they transfer their oil wealth. But countries like Yemen, no, they can't. They're out of luck. But you still remain optimistic.

I do. Yeah, go ahead. Yes. And here's why I'm optimistic. Look, the National Science Foundation where I used to work, Google was born within 10 years. The tech industry was born within 10 to 15 years. Upended other big industries and companies. Upended the media industry in a very short period of time. We're seeing two trends right now.

We're seeing potentially the end of the internal combustion engine, and we're seeing the rise of distributed solar power everywhere. Both of those things, in my opinion, will accelerate very, very quickly in the next 10 years. We need them to accelerate that quickly. And if they do, and if there's money in the system that changes the energy system, system, we can get this done. And then you combine that with my faith and scientists to look at carbon capture and even carbon drawdown out of the air. Over time, I believe we can solve this problem. It's a very wicked dilemma, but I have faith in scientists' ability to study this and come up with

answers and people's ability to make money from new energy systems and new transportation systems. You can read more about this in Jeff Nesbitt's new book. This is the way the world ends. droughts and die-offs, heat waves and hurricanes are converging on America. We only got to half of those topics, but there's a lot in this, but it's a great book, Jeff. Well, thank you. And you're also executive director of Climate Nexus, a nonprofit that focuses on climate change communications. Thanks for joining us today. Well, thank for having us.

You've probably played the game where you try to spot different shapes or animals in the clouds. Clouds are good for that because they come in all kinds of, you know, different shapes and textures from puffy cumulus to wispy, cirrus clouds. And just last week, I saw my first flying saucer cloud, the lenticular cloud. But scientists look to clouds for a different reason. They can tell us about the dynamics of the atmosphere, the physics of water droplets on a tiny scale. NASA sent up a balloon to capture images of one of the rarest clouds, something called electric blue or polar mesophobic clouds. They form way up in the sky, 50 miles up, and start around, well, specks of meteor dust for nuclei.

My next guests are here to tell us about these elusive, electric blue, polar mesophobic clouds. Let me introduce them. David Fritz is the principal investigator of NASA's PMC Turbo Mission and founder and manager of global atmospheric technologies and Sciences Inc., which is headquartered in Newport News, Virginia. Gary Thomas is co-investigator at NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere and Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you, Arroy. It's good to be with you.

Nice to have you. Gary, there are many names for these clouds. Electric blue, polar mesophobic, not a luciant. Did I get that right? What do they look? No. No, no deluscient? No. Noctalucent. Oh, noctalusian. Join the crowd of words that I have mought.

What do they look like? Can we see them here in New York? How do you find them? No, I think you have to go up past the Canadian border, roughly 50 degrees latitude. Also, you need to go up in summertime. And stay around until dusk or get up very early in the morning to see them because they're very thin, and so you can only see them when the sky background is dark.

Oh, that's interesting. And they are really electric blue? Well, yes, but they just, really is just scattered sunlight but they appear that way because the black background they just appear almost luminous it looked like almost

like they're emitting light themselves but they're not they're just scattered sunlight I gotcha and in the past there's been some debate about how these clouds form maybe from meteorite dust is that right? Yes I think maybe Dave Fritz could talk a little bit more about that

Dave well the meteors come in they ablate and high altitudes, they lead to many, many, very tiny particles. And because their sedimentation is so small, it takes a very long time for them to settle out of the atmosphere. And so nucleation sites are preferred locations for the creation of water droplets and ice particles.

And so when the temperature is sufficiently cold, that happens readily. Now, what's really unique about this portion of the atmosphere is that even though it is continuously illuminated by the sun during the summer at high latitudes, it's by far the coldest place on the planet. It's hard to think of clouds that develop 50 miles up. Isn't that like at the edge of space? Some people consider that to be the case, yes, but they're very tiny particles, and so they are buoyed up, they maintain their altitude to some degree by the larger-scale atmospheric dynamics that cause upwelling of the atmosphere. So there's a sort of a five centimeter per second general upward flow.

And so that helps preserve the particles at those altitudes. Now, I want to ask you, David, you came up with this idea sort of serendipitously, because you noticed there was gunk on a camera. Is that a scientific term, right? Yeah, that's very scientific. So, we have a, Gary and I have a colleague who is now deceased, but he did the really pioneering studies of Nocelucin clouds really 60 years ago. He actually did stereo viewing from the ground,

but his cameras were, of course, not what we have available to us now. And he remarkably identified the key dynamics and the altitude and other things that were proven later on. But what is really exciting about this particular cloud layer is that it is very thin in many cases, And so it acts as a really spectacular tracer for really small-scale motions in the atmosphere that would seem insignificant but are really globally very important. So are these clouds above the jet stream? Can you follow the way, way above the jet stream.

I'm trying to get an idea for our listeners. It's exactly how high this is. These are very high. The jet stream is sort of at aircraft altitudes. So commercial aircraft fly at around 11 kilometers. our balloon mission flew on a high-altitude balloon at 38 kilometers, so three times higher. And it had to look up another 50 kilometers to see the PMCs above it.

So why are you so interested in these clouds, a cloud layer? Well, I'm a physicist. My passion is small-scale waves and instabilities that transition to turbulence. And what is really remarkable about the PMC layer at very high altitudes is that, that I would argue that although it is very remote, it is almost certainly the very best place to study those processes on the planet. Gary, you interested for the same reason?

Well, sure. The physics certainly excites me too. I'm a physicist, but I'm also interested in the aspect of climate change because there is, I think, there's pretty strong evidence now that these things have not been around for a long time. In fact, in 1885,

they were first reported in the literature. And we've looked at a lot of reports going back into the 19th century and no reports whatsoever of anything resembling this kind of phenomenon. So our idea is that these clouds are actually produced by methane, or at least indirectly caused by methane increases, which have more than doubled over the past century, century and a half. And methane is composed of carbon and four hundred. hydrogen atoms, and this decomposes in the upper atmosphere to form water vapor, which in turn collects on the meteor dust particles.

Interesting. So that's, if methane doubled, that means that the knocklucin clouds also must have doubled. And so another aspect is that in 1885, there were a fantastic red sunset. that's during that time because of the crackatoa eruption that occurred two years before that. So we proposed that it was the crackatoa eruption that caused these things to be discovered, discovered in quotes for the first time. Interesting. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking with Gary Thomas and David Fritz. So, Gary, do you think these clouds can be used as a measure of climate change? Absolutely. the formation of ice is exquisitely sensitive to temperature changes and also to a lesser extent water vapor. So both of those quantities, temperature and water vapor, are changing in the upper atmosphere and as a result of climate change. So could it get to the point where we see them more visually for the general public? they get to be so ubiquitous? We predicted that they would advance slowly over the centuries,

but it's a pretty slow increase in activity, so it's going to take probably another generation before they can be seen. In fact, they have been seen over Southern Colorado. Occasionally, they do make an advance toward the equator. So they might move to the lower latitudes, perhaps? That's a prediction, my prediction, yeah. Sort of, wow, you know, that would be, I guess that would be sort of bitter and sweet. It's nice to have them, but we're having them because of climate change.

That's the idea, yeah. We'd like to live to see that. Yeah. What day do you hope to get out of your NASA mission? What kinds of things else do you want to know? Well, the principal processes that we're interested in studying are small-scale, waves, we call them gravity waves. They're excited by deep convection. They're excited by airflow over mountains, but they have a unique ability to propagate to very high altitudes very quickly,

and they communicate energy and momentum upward. And so they're very important in the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere, but they can't deposit the energy or the momentum until they dissipate. And so they have to do that via instabilities and turbulence, and those processes are really poorly understood. And one of the motivations for understanding, understanding them, and one of the motivations for the various agencies funding these things is that if we can better understand these processes, we likely will be in a better position to predict weather and climate. So those would be some of the very significant outputs of this down the road, potentially.

Wow. So where do you go from here? How do you follow up on this? Well, we have a gigantic amount of data. We flew seven cameras on the balloon and a lightar that was provided by the Germans. and aerospace center. So we have really exquisite measurements. We have a suite of seven cameras, four large fields of view and three narrow fields of view that span a region of the sky from about 100 kilometers across, and the high resolution of the cameras allows us to see scales as

small as about 10 or 20 meters. So this is really, I think, a remarkable experiment. It's the only place, I believe, on the planet where there's the potential to see that much variability. And the particularly exciting thing about this mission is it lets us watch the flow of energy from the waves that bring it to those altitudes all the way through the instabilities and to the turbulence. And it highlights the specific processes by which that happens, which we have a difficult time seeing anywhere else. I can't sum it up any better than that.

David Fritz, Principal Investigator of NASA's PMC Turbo Mission and, Gary Thomas, co-investigator of NASA's erroneomy of ice and the mesosphere. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's about all the time we have for this week. If you've missed any part of our program, you'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts.

BJ Leiderman composed our theme music. And, of course, every day is Science Friday. We're active all week on all kinds of smart players and all our social media. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.