Optional Enrichment #2: The Big Picture on Climate and Energy

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "We're going to start with a little on the value of being optimistic on climate and energy. Let's be honest in the big picture on climate and energy, uh the news is not always good. But before you start jumping to bad conclusions, uh consider this uh like many, many other people I helped the United Nations on energy and climate uh with the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change. This is us in Paris in 2007 (photo of Dr. Richard Alley and Colleagues at in Paris for the IPCC), the year the committee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. If you took the tens of thousands of pages of IPCC reports, and you squeeze them into 35 words."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Compared to business as usual, efficient responses on climate and energy will give a larger economy with more jobs, improved health, and greater national security in a cleaner environment, more consistent with the golden rule. This really is correct; this is what the scholarship says. The good news is if you're a young person today, you're part of the first generation in human history that can build a sustainable economic energy system that'll power everyone essentially forever. But we have to remember that we can solve problems and then go out and solve them. And we can solve problems this is a cell phone (holds up cell phone), and I have a picture here of a do-it-yourself cell phone kit. It's just a little bit of quartz or sand for the glass (circles photo of sand on screen), and it's a little bit of organic material such as oil for the plastic (circles photo of oil on screen), and it's the right rocks, the ones with the rarer elements and the Palladium and such (circles photo of rocks on screen). And that's all it is, is sand, oil, and rocks. And science, and engineering, and design, and marketing, and banking. There's a GPS in here that knows where you are. It has relativity special and general relativity from Einstein. If it didn't have those it would begin to get lost in 2 minutes. It has quantum mechanics in the computer. If we can do this, we can surely do energy. So, in this set of short videos, we'll discuss the big picture, the nature of the problems, and some of the possible solutions. Let's go see."

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "Here's a little bit about the value of energy. Dealing with climate and energy is hard because energy use is so valuable to us, and right now most of our energy is from fossil fuels. Here's a little bit of history and what's going on."

Dr. Richard Alley: "A human diet:, what we get from our food that allows us to do things: To run, and jump, and hoe, and what have you. We eat about 2,000 calories per day. If you burned your food over 24 hours, the energy coming off is just 100 Watts. It's one, old light bulb. A Tour de France rider can do a few hundred Watts, but they're eating 10,000 calories a day. What we can do is not that much. What is done for us though? We don't have to light our light bulbs. We don't have to cool and heat our rooms by generating the energy from our food. We have air conditioners, and we have tractors, and trucks, and all this wonderful stuff that's done for us. In the United States, what is done for us from outside is 100 times more than what we could do for ourselves. Averaged over the world, it's about 25 times. We really love this, our well-being depends on it. And it is still more than 80% fossil fuels in the US, and in the world. That's why this is hard."

Dr. Richard Alley: "You can tell the history of humanity from so many different ways. And from the common workers, and from the leaders, from our art, from our religion. You could tell the history from our use of energy. Ever since the discovery of the control of fire, we have this long history of energy crisis. We find something to burn to get energy from to do our work for us, we burn through it much faster than nature makes more, we suffer very large unintended consequences, we get sick and other sorts of things, then it becomes scarce. We have intrusive governments, we may fight wars over it, and then we find something new to burn, and we do it over again. And here's the history from Penn State's view. If you drive into State College from the East, headed towards Penn State University, you go past the reason that Penn State is there. Because Penn State was founded by the iron masters, up the hill, from the iron furnace. And the furnace was put here because there was Red Dirt that you could get iron out of, there was limestone flux, there were trees for charcoal, and there was a stream, a spring, a water source that could drive the water wheel that supplied the blast to make the furnace hotter."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This tremendous picture (Figure 11: Civil Engineering Students Taking Velocity Measurement on Thompson Run) is early on when Penn State had been founded, which has students in civil engineering in their ties and their hats, gauging the outflow of the spring, that is why the furnace was put right where it is, to learn how to do this important task before they became engineers."

Dr. Richard Alley: "We go back to the furnace (picture of iron furnace in State College). When the furnace was operating, it would have looked like this (image of Hopewell Furnace in Philidelphia, Pennsylvania). This one is Hopewell Furnace down towards Philadelphia, and it is turning that red dirt into the iron that was used to build the East. The water wheel is over here that would have been driven by our spring, and it's burning. And to do the burning you've got to be dumping in things to burn, and what was it burning? Charcoal. Near here we have something called Collier lake. Colliers or the Colliers (different pronunciation), were the people that turned trees into charcoal because charcoal was just able to burn hot enough to smelt the iron, whereas the trees were not. They make this giant pile of logs, then they'd cover it with dirt. This is actually a demonstration (picture from the US National Archives, reenactment of people making charcoal), these people did this job when they were young, and they were now showing in their old age, they were showing a photographer how they used to do it. You bury the trees in dirt, you burn them with reduced oxygen, drive off the water and some other things, hope that the dirt doesn't break so someone has to climb up there and fix it and try not to fall in and die, and eventually it makes the charcoal that allows you to smelt the iron. And it did this (photo of individuals reenacting logging for charcoal, showing a field of chopped down trees). An iron furnace, and the people who took care of it, think about a square mile of trees per year to make it go. If you had an open forest and you could walk for 20 minutes. and then turn and walk 20 minutes. and then come back. that would be enough trees for one year. And then it's maybe 50 years until enough trees would grow back that you could do it again. You need this huge quantity of trees."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now if you go to a map of Pennsylvania today, and ask where is furnace still on the map? Every line on your left here (list/graph of Pennsylvania furnaces by hometown), is a furnace that we still remember and there are many more furnaces that are back in the woods that we've forgotten on this map. And every one of those, when it's running, is a square mile of trees per year. They made something called pig iron that then was shipped to four forges, like Valley Forge, where you made valuable things from the pig iron. Every one of these on the right (circling list of forges with furnaces on Pennsylvania list/graph), is a forge another square mile of trees. And trees are being used by people who are not making iron, to make their houses, and to heat, and to cook, and so on. And what happened, this ("Penn's Woods" to "Pennsylvania Desert" Picture; indicating trees were chooped down leaving woods bare). Pennsylvania means "Penn's Woods." They said when the first European settlers arrived in Pennsylvania, a squirrel could have gone up a tree on the Atlantic Coast and stayed in trees all the way across to the Mississippi. The first Forester of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was someone named Rothrock, and around 1900 he wrote about the great Pennsylvania desert. Now it wasn't a desert, we still had rain, but we didn't have trees. We had cut them all down. We now have a million deer in Pennsylvania, there might have been a few left. We reimported elk because we got rid of them, we got rid of the bears, we got rid of the nittany lions. There wasn't a deer to eat, and there wasn't a tree to do it behind. We just use groundhogs for Groundhog Day. We couldn't use bears or something else large because we got rid of them."

Dr. Richard Alley: "It was not just us. If you know Cape Cod, you know so Cape Cod sort of sticks up there off the coast, and right about here on Cape Cod (Dr. Richard Alley indicates coast with his arms/hands) is where the pilgrims first met the native people in Eastham. They said it was so goodly a land and wooded to the brink of the sea. Still in the 1600s the town, of Eastham outlawed the ability of people to cut their own trees on their own property. There weren't any left. Deforestation was so extreme that they panicked, they didn't know what to do. It was the row walks the cape in the 1800s and he wrote: "Many of the people get all of their fuel from the beach. If there is a shipwreck, you can burn it. If a tree drifts over from Maine you can burn that, otherwise you can't cook dinner." Over in Manhattan still in the 1600s, the common council is passing many laws on rights to wood, fair trade in wood, they're paying inspectors to make sure you're getting what you paid for. If you don't like government, you better not get into scarcity, because we demand governments to help us at that time when we have shortages and we hit energy shortages very early."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now, if you've ever tried to read by fire light in a dark, Pennsylvania winter before electric lights are invented, it's not very easy. You're not going to do 12 stitches to the inch on your quilt in that flickering light of a candle or a fire. So, what did you do? Poor people burned a biofuel a mixture of alcohol and turpentine, it was fairly cheap, it was good light, but it was explosive. And there's horrible stories you know the Methodist Minister and his wife go out to visit the parishioners, and the daughters try to refill the lamp, and it blows up and burns them to death. And so rich people, burn whales. The whale oil was clean, and it was bright, and you didn't have it exploding. So, you take large quantities of money, you ship it to New England, and they put sailors on ships, and they go out and kill whales. This is the history of whale oil production from the Yankee Fleet from 1800 to 1880. And at the peak, there are 10,000 sailors out of New England trying to kill whales. This is a complicated story. The fleet got crushed in the sea ice off of Alaska, the insurance went through the roof, and that could shut down some whaling, but what were they doing in the sea ice off of Alaska? They couldn't find any whales that they could kill closer. They had basically killed all the whales they could find. There were some whales that were too fast for these sailing ships, and various other people from Japan, and from Norway, and Russia, and what have you killed them with diesel and harpoon cannons. When we finally quit whaling, there was no economic resource of whales left. We had killed so many whales that there just wasn't much left in the ocean. As they got good at whaling, they drove the price down. That low spot there (pointing at dot on graph indicating $7/gallon of whale oil) was about $7 a gallon in modern equivalent. When they hit the peak of whale oil, not when it was totally gone, but when they hit the peak, it's up to about $25 a gallon. Just this huge, huge price increase, not when it's gone but when it was half gone. If you took a hundred years of Yankee whaling, all of that oil, 10,000 sailors at the peak, you put it into modern tankers, and you replace the petroleum we're using, it would last the United States 11 hours. The idea that we go back when we run out of oil and do the things we used to do, is laughably absurd. We cannot do that; we need something better."

Dr. Richard Alley: "But we do have trees, and we have whales, because we switched to burning fossil trees and fossil algae. This is not a new idea. This is an editorial cartoon (showing photo of "Grand Ball Given by the Whales in Honor of the Discovery of the Oil Wells in Pennsylvania"), it was published in the magazine Vanity Fair in the year 1861, just before the US Civil War. And you can see the title, it was the Grand Ball Given by the Whales in Honor of the Discovery of the Oil Wells in Pennsylvania. So just before the US Civil War, the oil wells of our native land, may they never secede. Oils well that ends well, we whale no more for our blubber! We saved whales with mineral oil, with petroleum. This is a piece of sheet music (photo of the American Petroleum Polka) from the year 1864. Tt's the American Petroleum Polka. We're going to dance to oil wells. It says at one point, this oil well through pure oil 100 feet high, so there comes oil. Oil was always black. It is black. It will always be black. But with her wearing her white top here (woman in photo dancing with white top), they didn't want black oil falling on it so they made it white."

Dr. Richard Alley: "When we quit burning so many of them, a lot of the trees, and a lot of the whales, grew back in a hundred years. When we quit burning fossil fuels, nature will make more in maybe a 100 million years. The rated formation is so close to zero that you can just set it to zero. We must change. We cannot decide between say renewables and fossil fuels. Either we burn and then we learn, or we learn while we burn. And we are confident, if we burn before we learn, we will change climate in ways that we really don't like."

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "It's worth taking a little time to discuss why human-caused climate change is a problem. It is true that politicians and the public are still debating whether we humans are causing global warming, whether global warming is happening, whether it's really fossil fuel burning that's doing it. But the fossil fuel burning releasing CO2, changing the atmosphere, changing the climate, affecting us, is really undeniable fact now."

Dr. Richard Alley: "So let's take a little bit of history. We'll start over here in 1800, and run through today with a timeline, and look at a few events, some of which are connected to my cell phone and its development. So, in the year 1900, Planck introduces quantum mechanics. And you know that the computer in my cell phone is designed using the principles that come out of our understanding of quantum mechanics. In 1905, Einstein introduces the first part of relativity, special relativity. My cell phone has a GPS in it, and the GPS is using both special and general relativity because the satellites are higher in Earth's gravity well going faster than we are, and it works. You know this is a wonderful thing. In 1915, Wegener introduces his ideas on continental drift, and we geologists use our understanding of continental drift as one of many ways to help us find or deposits that go into getting the things that you use to build the cell phone. Now the cell phone has a nice person in there, there's a lady's voice that tells me where I am, and she is using filters to hear the signal from the satellite. And those filters are based on mathematical work that was done by the great French mathematician Fourier. In the year 1824, Fourier started calculating the balance of energy for the Earth, and he said the simplest model leaves us colder than we really are. But the simplest model has to be about right, so something else must be going on. And he suggested that there's something happening in the air that warms us in a way that's similar to how a glass plate on top of a sunlit box will keep that box warmer. And we now call this the greenhouse effect. So, Fourier introduces the greenhouse effect in 1824. The role of CO2 was first identified by Eunice Foote in the US, and then there's a lot more work done on this by Tyndall in the UK 1856-1859. The first calculation that's accurate of the warming of the surface that will be caused by humans burning fossil fuels, is by Arrhenius in 1896. So, climate is not some newfangled, speculative thing that's going into building the cell phone that's in your pocket, but it is really long-established science."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Arrhenius's calculation was done with classical mechanics, it was before Quantum. Our Quantum understanding is in many ways based on work that was done by the US Air Force after World War II. They wanted to do communications, and operations, and heat seeking missiles. If you're going to target the hot exhaust of an enemy bomber by looking at the infrared radiation coming from it, if you use the wrong wavelength on your sensor, CO2 absorbs the radiation, and your missile will not hit the target. And I can tell you today, wherever you are in the course of the day, there will be more infrared radiation going up from the sun-warmed Earth, than coming down from enemy bombers. And some of that radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere. Before we ever had satellites, the physicists predicted what those satellites would see when they looked down, and how it would change over time, and those predictions have been successful. So that blue line (pointing to blue line on graph showing the increase in wave number and temperature energy to space to cool Earth) is following the predicted and observed radiation going up from the sun-warmed Earth to be seen by satellite. In fact, that has changed over time as we've changed the atmosphere and the temperature of the Earth, so it's up just a little bit here's two lines on there. But maybe the most important thing here, is that that huge divot is energy that is kept in the earth system because CO2 absorbed it. And if we have more CO2, more can be absorbed. You meet the person who says oh I don't believe in this. They don't believe in the ability of the Air Force to build a heat seeking missile? This is physics, we raise CO2 in the atmosphere that has a warming influence. It's just physics. It is successfully predictive, and I'll show you just a little bit of a vast amount of data. Here's a plot starting in 1880 and coming up towards the present of different temperature records developed for the surface of the Earth, by different groups with different funding (showing temperature anomaly graph from different 5 different agencies). Including one of these groups that started from a physicist who sort of didn't believe that the other scientists had done their job right, got money including private money to demonstrate that the temperature records weren't good, and the temperature records were beautiful. This one show, (pointing to graph with arrows) that sometimes even a little more warming than the others but you can see all of the data agree with the temperature wandering up rapidly, because we're driving it up."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now, that's thermometers. If you simply restrict yourself to thermometers that are far from cities, they also show the warming. Thermometers placed in the ground, show that the ground is warming. Thermometers placed in ocean water, show that the ocean is warming. Thermometers taken up on balloons, show that there's warming above the surface. Thermometers looking down on satellites, show the warming. If you look at temperature sensitive snow and ice, not South Pole. I've been to South Pole it's minus 50 if it warms up to minus 40, it won't melt yet. But if you look at the temperature sensitive ice: springtime snow, lake ice, river ice, sea ice, temporary frozen ground, um perm frost (permanently frozen ground which is now not frozen), and places the mountain glaciers, the edges of ice sheets, all of these are being lost with warming. If you ask plants and animals where they're living and when they do things, the vast majority of the shifts are in the direction you expect from warming. So as early as the 2007 UN report, warming in the climate system is unequivocal."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now how do we know that the warming that must happen from the CO2 is what is driving the warming here? Well we've looked very hard for other causes, and no the sun has not brightened over the time we're looking at it wiggles a little. Nothing else is going on to drive this, and the CO2 predicts it beautifully. So this plot which comes from the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (showing graph of forecast evaluations for models run in 2004), has on it both data and model output, and it's it starts over here on the left where the models have been told about things like the particles from volcanoes blocking the Sun, and making that little cold divot there (showing dip in graph between 1990-2000), that was Mount Pinatubo. And then it runs into the future, we don't know when the volcanoes will erupt, so there's nothing put on there but there haven't been any really big volcanoes in this interval. So that there's not a huge volcanic influence. What the models say is that our CO2, the other changes we're making but mostly CO2, will drive warming. Every model run has in it some variability from things like El Ninos, but more than a few years in the future you can't predict El Ninos exactly, it's like predicting the weather exactly. And so what's happened in this plot (indicating Forecast graph on screen), is the models have been averaged to give the black line (on graph), and what you should expect is the black line plus a little bit of wiggling from El Ninos. What then happened after this was predicted, is just what was predicted. This is successfully predictive for the warming, for the pattern of the warming. The stratosphere cooling as CO2 holds heat down here, more warming at the Arctic, more warming on and then the ocean, and other sorts of things. The pattern the amount of warming is indeed being successfully predicted and we know this."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now this is a particularly interesting one. It starts um further back in time, it goes further into the future than we've gone. On here our projections and predictions and actual data, and this happens to be scientists who we're working with, or for funded by, oil companies. So, each of the gray lines (on graph) starts at some time well in the past. That one was way back, others are a little closer to today, and each one of them is one of these. This is what we'll get if we keep burning fossil fuels into the future for an oil company, and then the red (line on graph) is what happened. This works. It really, really, really does work. The science is solid, we are driving this."

Dr. Richard Alley: "The warming effect of our CO2 is not the least bit surprising, but what is surprising Arrhenius said I don't think we'll burn that much fossil fuel. That was what's really surprising is how good fossil fuel companies have been at getting us what we burn. There's a comparison here. You know what trash looks like, you've taken out the trash for your parents maybe, or done it for yourself, or try to get kids to do it for you. In the US, we throw away at the curb for the trash collector a half a ton of trash per person, per year. And the US averaged over sort of the early part of the 21st century was about 16 tons of CO2 per person, per year. That's dropped a little maybe even a shade below 15 now, but it's still 15 tons per person per year and it is changing the climate."

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "There really are dangers if we don't change our Energy System soon. We could exhaust the fossil fuels and go look for alternatives, but remember the prices went way up at peak whale oil, not when the whales were nearly gone. If we let scarcity arrive with fossil fuels before we find alternatives, there will be big problems. Scarcity in the past has contributed to wars, and conflict, and government interventions, and other things that we really don't like. And if we burn before we learn, climate change will make life much harder for people. And many people are already suffering from this and many more will."

Dr. Richard Alley: So I will come back to the good news of what happens if we restrain CO2 efficiently and make a good change to a better system, but if we don't there's a lot of problems that can come. The coming changes in climate and what that does to us will be bigger than the ones we've lived through already. The past changes had some winners and some losers, we had adaptive capacity to handle them. As we move outside of that it will be mostly people who are hurt by the change not helping people. The cost goes up faster than the temperature does. Each degree costs l lot more than the previous one so it's super linear. And the uncertainties are mostly on the bad side, it could be a little better a little worse or a lot worse but not a lot better. So, we'll walk through a few of these. Maybe the biggest one is going to beat heat stress on people, and crops, and animals. People are dying of heat already, but there's nowhere on Earth that has to be fatal if you're careful from the heat outside. That if you're sitting there, naked, in the shade, in the wind, drinking water, that you're going to die because your body can't lose heat. Younger people who are listening to this, could live to see the day when we make places on the Earth that are fatal for unprotected humans. You can't go out there for long because you will die. Long before that, people don't want to live there. We're going to be driving people to move. It's very difficult to get everyone on Earth an air conditioner right away, and so there's huge dangers could come from this to our animals, to our crops, to us. We'll talk about sea level rise, we are driving that, More floods, and more droughts. We'll get that. More energy for the strongest storms, loss of some protections against some diseases that can spread, stress on living things, and it especially hits poor people in hot places. So that's what we're worried about. Let's look at a couple pieces of that." 

Dr. Richard Alley: "This is a picture stolen from The Voice of America from the civil war in Syria, a drought hit (referring to photo on screen). The drought did not cause the war that killed a half a million people, other neighboring areas also had droughts, and they didn't start fighting a war. The drought clearly contributed to stress on the people living there, and the least happy country broke and went into war. We loaded the dice to come up drought. We made that drought two or three times more likely. The drought contributed to stresses, which contributed to a horrible war."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This is the future by the time today's students are old, if we do not change our energy system (graph on screen of high drought rates globally). It's a projection for medium, sort of somewhat, high release of CO2 but not the highest. Green is less drought, but no you are not farming in the Sahara, it's still the Sahara. Every other color on here is more drought, and as it goes towards reds, and purples, it's a lot more drought. And in places where drought is already implicated in causing bad outcomes, lots, and lots, and lots, more drought."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This is a NASA history and projection, beautiful little image that NASA put together (Drought history and future under strong warning photo). This is going to start in the past and run through today into the future. Blue is not drought, and Brown is drought. And so here we come. We're going to zoom in. We're going to start in 1950. And we're going to run up through today, and into the future. And this is again as if we don't change our energy system (graph of US shows most are brown shaded). And no, you are not moving all the corn fields of Iowa, and Illinois, up into Alaska. They do not have the soils for that. This is a really bad thing if it happens."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Drought can contribute to fire, and this one is pointing out great increases in the weeks that we'll have good weather for really big fires if we don't change our energy system, including fires running up the Appalachians and up the Atlantic coast (showing three graphs of climate change in the US from 1971-2071). You could see spread of what has we think of as happening out west, could be coming to the east if we don't change our energy system. Now you get the fires in part because it dries out fast. Any clothes dryer or hair dryer fire has a heating element to dry it out faster, but when it rains in a warmer world, the air has more water because it's warmer, and that gives more intense rainfall. And so, this one in the upper left (showing two graphs of increase in precipitation levels from 1958-2016, and 2070-2099). is showing the changes that have happened in intense rainfall. The most intense rainfall. And in fact, every part of the US, every big region has seen an increase in the most intense rainfall. In this plot down here (2070-2099 graph) is the changes expected if we don't change our energy system, again we're expecting lots more intense rainfall. That contributes to floods. This is something that came out of out of a group called The First Street Foundation, a non-governmental organization, and this is looking with better mapping. And this increase in intensity of rainfall, at the people who think that their property is safe from flooding, but it's really not. And regions of the US have hidden flood risk. Up to 40% of the properties in some counties, people think they're safe, but they're not."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now the sea is rising. These are the data from satellite altimetry looking at the surface of the ocean as it rises. It's not very fast yet, but it is accelerating. That already matters. This is not a canal, it's a street (photo of Fort Lauderdale Street flooded). This is not a storm, it's a high tide. They call this nuisance flooding at this point. And they call this adaptation. You don't want saltwater splashed into your front yard to kill the grass by big vehicles going through fast, so you put up a no wake zone sign in the middle of the street when the tide is high."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This one, I've stolen some of these pictures under fair use, this one is from the Miami Herald. This is not a storm, again, the octopus was not thrown here by hockey fans, it swam in on a high tide (showing photo of octopus in parking deck after nuisance flooding). Having saltwater around the base of the pillars that support the building, might make you nervous, but they still call this nuisance flooding. And then at some point, the rise in sea levels starts causing big problems. The costs go up faster than the ocean, faster than the temperature, and now it's billions, and billions, and billions, of dollars to fix the water system, and to relocate roads, and other big problems that happen."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This is another of these pictures that I've taken from out there in the real world (Police officer flooded inside the Industrial Canal after Hurricane Gustav). This, I'm glad I was not this peace officer in this hurricane. This particular hurricane did not get into New Orleans. We are already committed to enough sea level rise that this wall has to be raised to keep the water from getting over, But our work here at Penn State and elsewhere on the possibility of ice sheet collapse, says that there is a possibility in the next hundred years or so, and certainly beyond that, of sea level rise that would blast out of this picture, huge rise. The projections that people are most relying on now, that come from the United Nations, do not melt most of Antarctica in the lifetime of today's students. They have 99.8% of Antarctica surviving through 2100. Except then they say well but there is a possibility that it won't, and so then sea level rise would be much more. So the uncertainties on sea level rise, it could be a little better, it could be a little worse. There's no huge good out there, but there could be a real bad."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now, what we'll look at next, is how we use this knowledge. And how we get a response that gives us a larger economy, with more jobs, with improved health, with greater national security, in a cleaner environment that's more consistent with the golden rule, because we can do that."

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "Now, we can have a look at some of the benefits of building a sustainable energy system because there really are large benefits available if we take actions now, to avoid the worst damages from a warming climate."

Dr. Richard Alley: "If we do this well, compared to business as usual, we get a larger economy. More jobs, we're healthier, our nations are more secure, the environment is cleaner and were more ethical. I'll show you one slide on each of these. This comes from the Nobel prize in economics in 2018, William Nordhaus, I actually had the honor of serving on a committee with him, an amazing person. He was awarded for building tools that provide guidance to policymakers and the general public on how to make the economy help more for more people. We have resources, we can use those resources for consumption now to help people feed them, and clothe them, and house them, and so on. We can invest broadly in the economy to make it bigger in the future to help more people. We can target those investments on particular issues, such as climate change. When these models are run, they keep saying over, and over, and over, that we're not in investing enough in slowing down climate change now to make the economy be its best. You may meet the person who says oh yeah, the climate is changing, but we can't afford to deal with it. The Nobel prize in economics says you can't afford not to deal with it."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now a bigger economy is likely to give more jobs, and that's especially true if we shift away from fossil fuels Now, I worked for an oil company one summer, great people, many of our students have gone to work for oil companies, but it's fairly clear that any other good approach to making our energy system makes more jobs. And the reason is at least in part, that the cheapest oil in the world, which maybe from some other country, can probably be produced for about $5 a barrel. And that goes to jobs, but we may be paying $75 a barrel or some other large number, because oil is scarce. And the money is going to those people or countries that control the scarce resource, not to the workers who make that scarce resource useful. The Sun, the wind are just about everywhere, so if we switch to those, more of the money of the energy system goes to good jobs, not to controlling a scarce resource.Now if we make it too hot to live in places, that is very unhealthy. There was a recent study that found that 20% of deaths globally are linked to breathing particles that come off of burning of fossil fuels. Making more forest fires is not going to be good flooding people's houses, and then spreading diseases is not good. So, all of these medical groups in the US got together and they said, if we want to be healthy, we need to go on the inevitable transition to clean renewable energy."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Here's a picture of rear Admiral David Titley from our earthy operators manual PBS miniseries. Admiral Titley is a Penn State grad, he came back and taught at Penn State for a while, and truly amazing, brilliant wonderful person. And after his retirement he served on the CNA military Advisory board, with a large number of other military leaders. And they said, you know if we make it too hot to live in some parts of the world, this will drive climate refugees across borders. It's not good for them. It's not good for the security of the countries. If we flood our navy bases with sea level rise, that's not good for the security of our country. If we want secure nations, we need actionable agreements on ways to stabilize the climate. That's our military leaders."

Dr. Richard Alley: "We're increasingly driving climate change that forces species to move. Some of them are going up mountains and trying to track after colder conditions, and then they get shoved off the top of the mountain and they're gone. Some of them may be isolated in national parks and they need to go to a different park, but we're in the way. If we don't take actions to stabilize climate, the studies are that roughly a third of the species on Earth could be placed on the road to extinction by the time a typical college student is in the prime of their career."

Dr. Richard Alley: "And then there's the ethical thing. The top picture here (Geographic disparities and moral hazards comparing maps, pointing at CO2 map of the world), the countries in red (North America, Asia, Europe, etc.) are emitting a lot of CO2 per person, per year. The ones in blue (Africa, South America, etc.) not much down here who suffers from the warming. All future generations and poor people in hot places now. And if you notice these two plots (both maps) sort of look like they're backwards from each other. The people causing the most warming are suffering the least from it. I quoted Pope Francis here, that we can't leave this to a future generation. I could quote many other religious and ethical leaders; this does not look like the golden rule. So, if we get a handle on this, larger economy, more jobs, improved health, greater national security, cleaner environment, more consistent with the golden rule. How do we do that? Let's go take a look at a few of the many options."

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "So now, some of the possible solutions for building a sustainable energy system. The solution space is huge. And we're only going to highlight a very few things here, but I'm picking out some of those that are especially likely to help."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Start here (map of the world comparing croplands and rangelands). Everything in color on these maps, we use to get the 2,000 calories per person per day that are the human diet. On top is crop lands, on the bottom is grazing lands where animals eat grass, and we eat the animals, or we milk them. Suppose we decided to replace every bit of external energy used by every human from oil, and coal and gas, and nuclear, and everything else with a modern solar farm. And then we added a little extra to allow growth. That pink square in the Sahara (indicating on map), would be enough to replace all external human energy use. Okay now we're not going to put it all there, some of it's on the roof over my head right now, but that gives you the scale. It's a huge area. It's a huge task. But it's surely doable, and that's the really important thing, and it's small compared to what we've already done to the land."

Dr. Richard Alley: "When we made the PBS miniseries, Earth The Operators, manual we got to go talk to some Texas ranchers, they were having real economic trouble. There was danger of the town going broke, the high school being closed, people losing the ranch. They put in a wind farm, and they get what they call mailbox money. You go out to the mailbox and it's full of money. 5% of the land in and renewable energy, often pays more than 95% of the land in the old ranching. If we put a wind farm on the windy parts of the plains and deserts of the world, the places where the wind blows enough to run the turbans at least 20% of the time, that would be five times more energy than now used by all humans. So, the resource is there. The International Energy agency, they spent a lot of years sort of not being enthusiastic about renewable energy, but by 2020 they got to the point of saying hey it's the cheapest electricity in human history. Cheaper than anything else in many places. Okay? So, the cheapest electricity in human history with a resource that's far greater than what we can use at this point. But there are ways to combine this wisely. This particular experiment was done at Oregon State, it dries out there in the summer, and when they put solar cells in it held some snow underneath early in the year, it kept it a little moisture farther into the summer. They got extra hay cutting because they were also getting extra electricity from the solar cells."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This was an experiment done in Germany. They made High solar cells you could drive tractors under. They planted different crops extending outside and under, so they could compare how it worked. And this summer had a nasty drought, and in this summer, they got more food where they were also getting electricity. So, you're getting more money from the electricity, but they also got more food because of reduced evaporation in the drought. So there are ways to combine these things. Right? There are just times when it's nice to have a little shade, and because the area needed to do this is so small compared to the area we use for agriculture, you could design things that give us the best of both worlds. This particular study said, you know global energy demand would be offset by solar production if less than 1% of crop land is converted to this dual use. We grow food and we eat it. We grow food and we feed it to animals, and we eat them, or we milk them, or take their eggs. We grow food and we burn it. Some of it is ethanol in in gas tanks and we burn palm oil, and other things. Biodiesel. We use more than 1% of the crop land now for food that goes into biofuels, than we burn. We could get all of our energy from that much area. So, somebody says oh we don't have the land to do this, they're not really serious."

Dr. Richard Alley: "You go places that we irrigate. Water is evaporating from the irrigation canals, and that's food that we're not growing. If you put solar over the top of the irrigation canals, less evaporation, more water, more food, and you're getting energy from those solar cells. It's a win-win-win. This is for the US grid. This comes from Lazard, the world's largest independent Investment Bank (graph of cost of energy comparison on screen as of November 2019). They've said suppose there were no subsidies for wind and Sun, how much does electricity cost if you want to add a little to the US grid compared to other sources? And here's a blow up of this (showing from cheapest to most expensive: Utility scale solar, wind, gas peaking nuclear, coal, and gas). Cheap as is over on your left expensive is over on your right, going that way. And what you'll notice here, (circling Utility scale solar and wind) is that the renewables are the cheapest now. Gas generally costs more, coal costs a lot more, nuclear is having real troubles being competitive. Gas peaking is just you run it when you really need it. These two diamonds down here (circling gas peaking nuclear and coal) are if you have an old nuclear plant, or a coal plant, it's completely paid for. It is wired in. All the construction is done, and you're not paying it off. And that's just to operate it. Compared to building and operating new renewables this is why you're seeing coal and nuclear in looking for subsidies from state governments and elsewhere, because they're having real trouble competing with the renewables at this point. Now this would look much better for the renewables if fossil fuels were not subsidized. Because we now have authoritative statements that the fossil fuels are much more subsidized than the renewables are."

Dr. Richard Alley: "So, this is something from people working with the international monetary fund, the IMF has been updating this, and they found that now the subsidy for fossil fuels in the world is more than $7 trillion dollars a year, or more than 7% of the world economy. More or less, when we pay a dollar for fossil fuels, society pays another dollar. Some of this is direct subsidy, tax breaks and other things, mostly it's because when we burn fossil fuel, the cost of the health impacts, the cost of the change in climate, is paid by society not by the consumers of the fossil fuel. And the IMF folks found that if we eliminated this subsidy, we would cut air pollution debts, we would reduce CO2 emissions more than half, we will increase the well-being of people."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now do not kid anyone. Building a sustainable future is going to be hard, it is going to be decades. We don't really have all of the answers. But we now know that it can be done. And if you're a young person, you're part of the first generation in history that knows that you can build a sustainable energy system, and that doing so can help the economy, and health, and security, employment, environment, ethics. I took this picture in Greenland. Can we really have a world with icebergs and rainbows? Yes, we can. And I think that is really good news."

Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "So, a few thoughts on communications. If the new energy world is so wonderful, why aren't we moving forward on it faster? It's a really valid question." 

Dr. Richard Alley: "This came out in 2024 (NATO Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment), from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, you're welcome to stop this and read the text if you'd like, but the key part is at the bottom. They found that Kremlin-backed, that is Russian actors, are pushing climate change denialism. They are actively attempting to derail climate change, mitigation policies, and renewable energy Investments. Why would they do that? Well, the world bank has been tracking these things, and they said that roughly $1.5 trillion dollars per year across the world, goes to oil producers. Not for finding, drilling, pumping, and shipping the oil, but because they control a scarce resource. The extra above what's needed to produce the oil is a trillion and a half dollars a year. The cheapest oil producers can probably make it for $5 a barrel, and they're getting something vaguely like $75 a barrel, and that might be a really strong reason why some actors, Russia, and others, could be working to block progress on this. In addition to this grossness misinformation though, they really are issues, that really do matter in the energy transition. The change won't be easy there are things we have to learn yet. There are some things that won't work beautifully initially. It took us a century to learn how to handle most of the explosions, and the leaks, and the carbon monoxide, and all these other problems that come with fossil fuels. Which are really huge and dangerous. It's likely to take us at least 30 years to replace that with something even better. And for example, even though we will get more good jobs by doing the transition right, some people will lose jobs as we switch. And either we take political actions to help them, or we will have some unhappy people, mostly concentrated in certain places."

Dr. Richard Alley: "This map (Overall employment carbon footprints, by county in the United States) was published in the proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences, and it's showing how much CO2 is produced per year by a typical job in each county in the US. So, this is tons of CO2 per year from the average job in each county. The Bluer ones, as low as 1.5 tons. The redder ones, as much as 2,000 tons. Now there is a cost to society of this, the cost to health, the cost of climate change. The paper took an estimate of what this cost is, and then applied it to the CO2 from the jobs. The lowest ones below $400 for a job for the cost of society of the warming from other things from the CO2. The highest ones almost half a million dollars. Alright? So, I hope it's evident, that relatively few jobs produce most of the CO2, but those jobs are very important in some counties. And either we do things politically to help people in the transition, or there will be very strong unhappiness in some places."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Now a few thoughts on communicating this. Please note that the color scale will be different in the next plots, they were not done by the same people. Bluer now is going to be sort of rejecting climate change, and redder is accepting. This is work done by Yale Climate Communications, they are very well respected. A note here, a map is a valid way to look at the US, but it is not the only way. So, if you go up to the dot (showing population map in the United States) that's Philadelphia up there, there are almost three times as many people in Philadelphia as are in the entire state of Wyoming. The Philly metro area, which is more or less that little blue circle up there in the right, has more people than all six states that are outlined in pink there (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, South Dakota, and North Dakota). More people than all six put together. But those states have 12 Senators, Philly does not. Okay, so most Americans accept climate science, you'll see that down below which is the people part (on map). But we'll see that people in most of America, are not as sure about climate science. And so, a map based on area, and not people, can give you a very odd view of the country." 

Dr. Richard Alley: "So, this one, to ask, is global warming happening (Another map of the US, circling a county in Utah). There's a couple of counties that said no, but most places said yes, and most people certainly said yes. Is it caused mostly by humans? Most people still say yes, but now huge chunks of the country are saying no."

Dr. Richard Alley: "Do scientists agree? You learned about this from scientists, yet a lot of places think that scientists don't agree, most people still say they do. Somebody probably paid a lot of money, and a lot of effort to confuse the public about this one. Are you worried about it? The worries are actually somewhat higher, that probably reflects reality. Should we look for solutions, should we help find solutions? The moment we move from problem space to solution space, it's a very different view. When you get a job, the boss does not say bring me your problem. The boss says bring me your solution. And that's what America is saying, bring your solution. But are you talking about it with your neighbors? There are one or two counties that more than half of the people are, but that's just about it. We're not talking about it anywhere. This is, you might say this is the Uncle Ed effect. You sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, you say how about that global warming, Uncle Ed says oh it's an evil plot to take away my pickup truck, you say it's okay Uncle Ed, just calm down and pass the potatoes, and how about the Steelers. Right?"

Dr. Richard Alley: "So many people believe that we can successfully solve problems that they deny exist, and you just saw it there. Very few are talking about it. Personally, I think there's a real lesson here, and that communicating on solutions finding the good, as well as the bad, is really important. Because if we do that, we can build a sustainable energy system that will power everyone essentially forever, with a larger economy, more jobs, improved health, greater national security, in a cleaner environment, more consistent with the golden rule. And I think that's great news."