well welcome everybody thank you so thank you so much for uh coming today and helping us launch our our monthly speaker series and it's not just summer because it's going to extend a little bit into the fall and uh I'll just take a minute to explain what the the focus the theme really is about climate change and what we can do as Citizens residents um community members and so forth and what and we have different speakers coming along throughout the series all taking a little slice a little slant on something that has a climate impact or a management you know restoration impact So today we're excited to talk uh to hear about living well in a changing climate uh next month in June it's on International TSO crab day we'll have a speaker speaking uh about Porche crabs and in July we're going to talk about salt marsh resilience in Buzzard's Bay with some Hands-On project projects that are um happening in our community and then on um in August we have Laura coming to speak and she's the co-chair for climate reality so she's going to speak about Sustainable Solutions so uh what we want to the idea of this series is to basically engage people in the active ways that they can take part in spreading the word about the climate and the actions that can be taken spreading the word uh about at different levels of our community so if you have kids if you have Elders if you are friends with a a board of Select person if whatever it is if you if you are a letter writer putting it out there up to the state house uh we want to give people ideas of uh what they can do how to spread the word and we also want to let people have um sort of next steps that that in interest them at various levels so rather than dump a whole lot of you could volunteer here you could sign up for that we have a resource manual binder that we're going to be growing and we invite everybody uh who has a great idea to contribute um but what this can serve as is a reference for things that are happen happening like this summer or this year or or what have you so that there's a place at least we can go to and as this dialogue picks up speed picks up audience we can help to distribute it further and wider and it can be uh we don't know exactly where it could lead to but we are looking forward to it uh being a a way to engage more people we know that we're not doing this alone by any means Mass Adavan is a a worker and a team member of a vast array of Institutions agencies individuals nonprofit organizations neighborhood groups you name it uh who are taking a role one way or another and uh and so we're excited to have our speakers represent that slice but we also want you to you know reach out and and find whoever is in your circle and bring them make sure they come into the into the team as well um so with that I'm going to introduce tonight's speaker who is Allison smart and I first got to meet her at um a climate Cafe I mean a science Cafe the New Bedford science Cafe I don't know if any of you attend those those are once a month the first Tuesday of the month um except for two months of the summer I think they pause but um they are great uh presentations not necessarily climate focused but science focused so might be about the space or might be medical it could be all over the map but anyway I was delighted to meet Allison there and then she subsequently gave a talk there and it was really interesting so I'm glad we get to share it with all of you and um and so Allison is the executive dor of probable Futures and in that role she is committed to providing opportunities for people around the world to deeply understand climate change and take actions to prepare for and mitigate its impacts in her role she convenes leaders across science Design Technology business and culture to develop useful resonant and beautiful climate change tools and resources and given that I know we have some in the Arts here I love that you have some uh experience in the Arts uh she's been um had a a vice president role with the uh New Bedford whaling museum uh the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Jerry Herman ring theater in also in Florida so she brings a lot of diverse uh intellectual and and creative Pursuits to this and currently um she is a senior fell fellow for communications at the woodwell climate Research Center and she serves as Vice chair of the zitan theater uh which those of us local folks know well so and she's local she lives right here in our community so welcome Alison thank you so much for coming thank you so much for having me um it's uh I don't often get to do a speaking engagement that is 9 minutes down the road from my house um uh so I really appreciate that and I love the opportunity to connect with people um in my community so I uh my husband and I moved here in 2009 so we actually live in Dartmouth on fiser road um and are bringing up our kids in this community and just really have such a deep love for it um so I uh before I get started I'll just say a little bit uh about my background and and how the diversity of all those things kind of comes together um so as Gina mentioned I did start out my career in the Arts working in museums and in those Ro I worked at the New Bedford whing museum for nine years and in those roles I kind of built a career out of helping um people tell stories academics experts tell stories uh with their expertise stories that would resonate with General audiences and So eventually I was recruited to The woodwell Climate Research Center which is located um in fouth on Cape Cod it's one of the world's Premier climate research institutions and they brought me there not because I had a background in science but because I had this background in the Arts because I had this background in kind of translation and storytelling and uh climate scientists at the time recognized that they needed help from people outside of their own discipline to translate their work and to help it be uh more resonant for General audiences so probable Futures is kind of uh represents all of those themes um and so uh what we are is we are a climate literacy initiative and our goals are twofold one is to democratize climate science and the second is to build societal climate literacy and in part my colleagues and I started probable Futures because we saw a bit of a problem with the way that climate change and particularly what the future might uh uh in a changing climate might be like we saw a problem with how it was being represented in the media in uh public discourse we saw this kind of false binary being presented so often when people talk about climate change and what it'll be like in the future you hear one of two stories one where we figure out how to solve it someone somewhere figures out how to solve it we will have very little you know change in our lives we'll just continue to enjoy climate stability but with some more modern architecture and electric cars um climate change will kind of be solved behind us and then the other version is this Perpetual apocalypse but neither one of these Futures is accurate or nor are they helpful unfortunately number one is no longer accurate we are living in a changing climate now in a changed and changing climate now and we will continue to for some time even under the best case scenarios but number two is completely avoidable it is a ways off and it is even misrepresented in that so what we're trying to do is ground people in what the science tells us and help communities work towards this living well in a changing climate so what does this mean exactly well first of all it means figuring out how to live within the boundaries of uh the physics of this planet and it also means accepting the amount of warming that we are already living with and what is likely uh very likely in the near future and actually preparing for it so that we are not caught off guard by climate impacts or instability so we're going to see a lot of change in the coming decades but I want to start with something that didn't change for a very long time so this graph that I am showing here starts uh we have time on the x axis here and then we have global average temperature on the Y AIS here this graph starts at the dawn of civilization in 9500 BCE and so the way to understand this graph is that the global average temperature is being compared to the global average temperature of the late 19th century so the way to understand it is the closer the data point is to zero the more stable the global average temperature and by extension the climate was and so look at that for 12,000 years it barely even fluctuated one degree in global average temperature but it begs the question what about before 9500 BCE what about before civilization because humans had been around for a lot longer than that our first ancestors emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago so right here so I've extended this gra back further but for the first 190,000 years of our existence we were a nomadic hunting and Gathering species we did not have civilization we did not have towns and cities we did not practice Agriculture and we looking at this graph helps us understand why that was the case and for a long time anthropologists and scientists really didn't know why that was a case but climate science helped us figure it out the climate change dramatically over those 190,000 years the nice places never stayed nice you couldn't stay in a place and really know what plants and animals would Thrive there we had to keep chasing the nice climate so a changing climate at that magnitude was just not conducive to settling into one place but this green band here very much was so that stability in the climate gave us the ability to practice I agriculture to settle into one place knowing that the patterns of that place would stay the same year after year and over time long-term communities began to form because we had that stable climate and those communities eventually formed their own cultures and those cultures over time formalized into governments and then governments uh built infrastructure so anything from roads and bridg to laws and policies that figuratively and literally paved the way for industry and econ the economy and markets and and then eventually we had all kinds of specializations this incredibly complex and sophisticated society and civilization that we have today and all of these things were built on a stable climate but it happened to be that the climate wasn't just it was actually perfect for humans in all of this uh uh sophisticated civilization that we have we sometimes forget that we are animals we are a very specific species we are mammals we are warm-blooded um there were large expanses of temperate lands during the climate of civilization stable seasonal patterns so even if you lived in an extreme place where there were monsoons for example those monsoons came at the same time every year so you could plan and you could still build a society around that and importantly nowhere on Earth was it too hot for the human body again that's really important because we're warm-blooded we need to be 98° fah and there are two ways that we can do that either with the air around us being cool enough uh so that we can offload heat or uh to be able to sweat so if we can't cool down then bad things start to happen and I'm going to show this uh uh graph of wet bulb temperature here wet bulb temperature is a combination of heat and humidity uh it is not a concept that we talk about a lot because it's a concept that we haven't really needed to talk about very much we had very comfortable wet bulb temperatures around the globe um and so what I've done here is just shown the national weather service has deemed certain wet bold temperatures to be uh dangerous or extremely dangerous and at certain wet bulb temperatures that have historically not really happened um uh it can bring uh it can it can be very difficult or break down the human body what does wet bulb mean so wet bulb well it's a basically a way that they measure um the temperature is uh with a um uh um getting into the technical details here but the way wet bulb temperature is measured is with a thermometer and a wet washcloth over it so that measures um how much the you know the moisture around it is is cooling it so the easiest way to think about it is a combination of what of heat and humidity so this may be hard for you to see but um the map that we're about to look at is depicting the number of days in any given year above 90° wet bulb so 90° wet bul would be 90° F air temperature and 100% humidity there are other combinations of heat and humidity that could get you to that wet bulb temperature so it could be 112 degrees fahit and uh 75% humidity but I find that it's helpful just to think about it it's 90% or 90 degrees fenhe and 100% humidity so I'm going to I'm starting to show a map here that's available on probable futures .org um and uh what we're looking at here is a past is the past climate so as we start to think about how the climate will change we need to First Orient ourselves to the conditions around which we built Society what was that past climate like what were those conditions like and so um in this past climate the number of days above uh 90° wet bu any uh given year so gray on probable Futures Maps means zero so basically what this is telling us is that almost nowhere on Earth in a past climate did this particular combination of heat and humidity happen there's you can barely see it there's a tiny little bit of data here in the Persian Gulf where essentially no one lives so this just helps us kind of visualize how perfect the climate uh has been for us when you say in the what time frame are you talking about yep so the the time this time frame so if you I don't know if you can see the numbers here so this says 0.5 degrees Cel so these are warming scenarios or degrees of warming so if you've heard about you know we're trying to stay under two degrees of warming um that would be here so what we do is we start with a half a degree of warming that represents the time period of 1971 to 2000 so we kind of use that is a proxy for what the climate was like for those 12,000 years before it okay all right so then we can extend the graph back even further to get a a better picture of um just how hot the Earth can get it can in fact be too hot for humans in fact it was Back 40 50 60 million years ago it was perfect for large reptiles like dinosaurs not so great for humans but I'll direct your attention toward the right hand side of the graph here so what we've done is added on recent temperature observations and then this um kind of orangey is uh projections of where we're headed if we stay on the same path and so what we see here is we have broken out of that Civilization temperature band already and if we continue on the same trajectory we'll be breaking out of that human exist temperature band um uh in the next several decades so what this graph helps us understand and what um we uh teach people is that climate change isn't just about warmer temperatures it's about instability it's about the fact that we have never maintained civilization under a changing climate before that's completely unprecedented it's a paradigm shift and we need to recognize that that paradigm shift is happening think about what it means and prepare for it and thankfully we have really good tools really good science a lot of which we're going to look at today which will help us prepare for it because what we want to do is we want to keep that uh stable climate from deteriorating much further and we want to make sure that the things on top of it aren't so aren't too vulnerable because of that climate instability we've made because we've had climate stability for so long we've made a lot of assumptions that climate stability would continue okay so this is probably hard to read but I'll read it out for you here's an example of the way that we have assumed climate stability City storm sewers are designed for certain amounts of precipitation the storm sewers in New Bedford are designed for the exact amount of preit ation that New Bedford has been known to get for many many years in the past now those storm sewers will be a different size than the storm sewers in Charleston or the storm sewers in Mumbai for example every place is designed around its own climate the past of its own climate so Power Systems Were Meant to withstand certain maximum temperatures residences in many places especially mild places like Massachusetts were're are we're meant to keep heat in rather than keep it out and we even have cultural practices like schools have summer vacations and seasonal sports that correspond with certain uh certain weather and all agriculture whether it's irrigated or not is dependent on steady precipitation that was probably designed on the type of precipitation that that that a particular place gets so these are kind some really straightforward very concrete ways in which we've assumed climate stability but every location every place every Community has kind of internalized that climate stability in different ways and so what we need to do now is start to ask ourselves as communities how have we assumed climate stability where is it designed into the systems around us and then how can we update those systems how can we expand the story storm stor storm sewers or expand the um uh the uh load factors of of Power Systems how do we change School practices so that we make sure that we keep children safe and healthy these are questions that we can be asking ourselves as a community and can be working on these issues are actually tractable they are um we are able to to anticipate them and to um mitigate them so coming back to these Lind slices here um you may have heard this language in the the climate change uh lexicon mitigation and adaptation so mitigation is about reducing emissions getting our greenhouse gas emissions to zero that will help to keep that climate the climate from deteriorating any any F but everything on top of this keeping all of this together making sure it's all stable is what we call adaptation and resiliency so that's what I spend a lot of my time um talking about are the practicalities uh related to adaptation and resiliency um and so what we do uh as probable Futures is help people look ahead by creating tools and Frameworks works and systems that can help people do that I'm just I'm going to show another example of kind of how we've internalized the past climate so some of you may be familiar I imagine there are some gardeners in this uh audience some of you may be familiar with this USDA plant hardiness zone map so uh these zones are what tells you what what kind of plants will thrive in a particular area what kind of plants will thrive in a particular clim and is all based on temperature so in 2023 the USDA released a new version of this MTH to reflect the fact that the climate is changing and um uh they hadn't released a new one since 2012 so I'm going to show a comparison here between 2012 and 2020 uh or 2023 and just so this is actually let me go back zoomed in here this is bismar here and Dallas here and it's both the same same uh on each side so we're kind of in the middle of the country at um looking at at different latitudes so if we just cut out the top there um you might be able to see some of these purples change the uh the light purple here has more dark purple in this one there's more dark purple here and this lighter blue kind of starts to come in more in the newer map and then as we go on we see similar changes so good job USDA making updates to the plant hardiness zone map however there is one problem with it and that's the fact that that 2023 math has was made based on data from the 30 years that came before it so by the time that map came out it's already out of De it's already wrong okay however we have really good data about the future we have climate models that actually have been very accurate up until this point and that uh can project uh what those Zone should be in the future so I would suggest the USDA start using climate model data or even probable futures um because it really matters we do uh we base a lot of things on on that data for example all of crop insurance in the United States is based on that USDA map so if you plant um if you plant corn in a place on that map that says that corn shouldn't necessarily grow and your and your crop dies you're not getting insurance for it so we need to start examining where we've made these assumptions and start to update them and that's why we created problem Futures to help people look ahead rather than looking behind so I'll show some global maps here give you a sense of um some of the trends uh from a global point of view and we'll move through the different warming scenarios um so the way to think about these warming scenarios so I mentioned that a half a degree of warming was in the past I'll actually go over this a little bit more in a minute um uh one degree of warming we hit degree of warming in 2017 one and a half degrees of warming it looks like we actually hit that last year but um we're not really at one and a half degrees of warming until we've been there for a while so we're somewhere in between one and one and a half degrees of warming right now so as I go through these maps you can think about the one degree and the one and a half degree as being um uh realities and conditions that we should be prepared for that we need to prepare for and that we can prepare for and then two two and a half and three those are still very much choices we decide whether we get to those futures or those probable futures or not but it can be really helpful to see what those Futures might look like to understand what it is that we're trying to avoid and how different it is from the one and one and a half degree scenario so we're going to come back to this concept of wet bulb temperature again okay but we're coming down to a lower threshold so this is 82° wet bulb so 82° fhe and 100% humidity or other combinations that'll get you there and the national weather service has deemed that uh to be a dangerous uh wet bulb temperature and so you can see it's not as rare as the one that I showed you before because in the past climate there's a lot of data here um so I'll just Orient because you probably can't see the um num here but the green is 1 to 3 days a year so if you see green it means that in a past climate that place used to experience something like one to three days of this wet bulb temperature a year the blue is up to a week the light blue is up to two weeks the pink is up to a month and the dark uh red is anything over a month okay so I'll move just back and forth here between half a degree of warming and one degree of warming there big changes just in a half a degree okay here's one and a half degrees so we see really big changes in the southeastern United States huge changes in the across the tropics but uh definitely in Brazil in Africa and in Southeast Asia Northern Australia um so this is just another way to understand the different um warming scenarios so a half a degree is in the past one degre is in the past one and a half is impending and then um uh here we go two two and a half and three as potential okay so back to one and a half here so again these are the ones that we need to prepare for these conditions but two two and a half and three this is a wildly different temperature profile in many places around the world and we want to avoid uh this future as uh at all it seems very um the Western portion of the US doesn't seem to have as much impact is the Midwest Y is there um is that just because the mountains it's because of the mountains yeah yeah that's exact so there's much more humidity in the Eastern us because of the gulf so it's more the mountains and the dry okay um if we were looking at uh not heat and humidity if we were just looking at the number of days over 90 which we'll look at some more local Maps then you'd see things really light up in the west or you know when we look at other maps of drought and other other things so I I focus on heat and humidity a lot because first of all it's not something that we tend to talk about a lot when we talk about climate change you're mostly hearing about sea level rise and flooding and you're he hearing very little about heat but heat actually will affect many many more people than sea level rise or flooding because heat can happen anywhere doesn't need to be near the coast for it to happen um so the other so why does heat and humidity change so much over the course of warming well it's because warmer air holds more moisture in fact for every one degree warmer the air is it can hold 7% more moisture and that holds for the atmosphere so the warmer the atmosphere is the more moisture it can hold and what that means is that it's going to pull more moisture from the land through evaporation because it has that greater carrying capacity it'll hold that moisture up there for longer which will create elongated dry periods below and then when it does come down it'll come down in Greater quantities than it has in the past one of the really wonderful things about a stable climate in a lower global average temperature was that you would get nice showers regular showers and that was that's based on the physics because the atmosphere just couldn't hold all that much moisture but as it warms it will be it will hold more and so really what it means is that a warmer World simply has less mild weather and we can prepare for that so now we're going to look at the likelihood of drought so this is a probability of drought map and I think the the concept of drought is really interesting because it is a product an artifact of climate stability what drought is is it represents an aberration it's uh when heat and humid excuse me heat and uh and dryness happens in a place that's rare so the definition this is the the title of this map is likelihood of year plus extreme drought so it's a likelihood where 12 months or more uh where the conditions for extreme drought in that place are met the con the definition of extreme drought is a drought that happened about 5% of the time in a past climate so an extreme drought is about a one in 20 year event in any given location now drought's going to look different in Westport than it would look in um Houston or then it would look in Mumbai but this map knows that it takes that into effect so in a past climate an extreme drought everywhere is a 5% chance of end moving to one degree of warming here you see a lot of places in this green color that green color is 11 to 20% so now that uh that drought is uh something like a one in 10 year or even closer to a one in fivey year event in the places that show up in that color at 1 and A2 degree we see some of this yellow come up places that's 21 to 33% uh annual probability so now it's something like a 1 in three or 1 in four year event and at two 2 and a half and three we see widespread increased probability of drought but even some places that uh are now in that red or uh that orange or deep red color both of which is over 50% of the time so what used to be a rare event in places at 3 Dees of warming um would now be expected pretty much any any year every other year so like I said some of these maps are for Preparation some of them are understanding what we're avoiding this map packs a lot of information into one graphic it is not hard to look at this map and imagine what these conditions would do to agriculture to our global economy what it would mean for migration I have seen uh very I have seen very powerful people see these maps and have their mind completely changed on how important climate change is so while it can be sometimes scary sometimes concerning to look at these Maps it can also be an incredibly powerful motiv motivator I've seen it happen lots of times and it's the reason that I'm still doing it today um this is a similar map of the change in frequency of the one in 100e storm the one in 100e storm is just kind of a fancy way for saying a storm with a 1% chance of happening every year it's like a big rare storm and I'll just move through these and as you can see the frequency of that one in 100e storm goes up pretty much everywhere in the world and it feels kind of um uh in congruous with the drought map that I showed you right it's like getting drier and we have these uh increasing frequency of big storms but it's exactly for that reason that I talked about that warmer air holds more moisture droughts are going to increase and uh big St uh storms can in increase we're going to drill into some local areas and see how we can explore this data at the local scale and how we could potentially use it for planning and we're going to do so in the spirit of Hope because preparation in and of itself is a hopeful act it says we are going to be here we are planning to be here and uh and we know what to do in order to make uh to help our communities live well as we do okay so we'll start with heat so on um our site with the maps we have about 30 different climate variables um we won't go through all of them today but we'll go through some of them and we're going to uh look close to home but then we're going to look far farther a field too um so we'll start with the number of days above 90 Dees so this is just 90 Dees not heat and humidity um here's Providence here here's New Bedford so here's Westport I've selected a cell there so any everywhere on the map almost everywhere in the world you can zoom in each one of these cells is a 22 km area and you can see what the data behind it says so what this tells us um is that in this area in a past climate in an average year we would see something like three days above 90 does that feel right to you all it's hard to know right because because we've had climate stability so much in the past we don't really think about it just kind of comes and goes but every year is not the same right we have cooler years and we have warmer years so in a cooler year it might not happen at all in that past climate in a warmer year it might happen as many n as many as nine days so help helping people understand that climate is a range it's not going to be the same thing all the time there are going to be these swings but these swings will get bigger as the atmosphere warms so I moved to one degree of warming here 2017 around that time moved the average year moved up to five it might not happen at all again or it might be as high as two weeks at 1 and A2 degrees goes up to seven and 18 so one of the interesting things here is that this range is getting bigger and that happens in most places that that range doesn't just move and get warmer but the range gets bigger so we need to be prepared for more variability in the weather and at 2° we see 10 in an average year and 25 so what can we do we can start asking ourselves okay well what ises our community need to be able to deal with 25 days above 90° do we have good air conditioning in the city of New Bedford and in other places do we have good shade do we think about what out the uh laws and the regulations are around outdoor labor for Farm laborers fishermen um those are conversations that we can be having right now we think about kids when is recess what are they doing during summer vacation I have young kids and for most of the summer I put them in outdoor camps they're outside all summer what are we doing to prepare for that okay so let's move to a different part of the world we're going to look at the uh the um uh border between Pakistan and India here it's a very hot place always been a very hot place so the people in that place they are actually really good at dealing with heat they've lived with it forever but they're going to start reaching new thresholds of heat that they haven't had to deal with before so this is 86 degrees wet bold so 86 degrees 100% humidity so in this place in a past climate basically didn't happen super rare in a warm Year may happen one day so I'll go through the warming scenarios here now there's a big difference in warmer year could be three weeks of something that generally they have not experienced before so while this may see this is you know people farther a field we we live in a globalized very connected Society uh Global Society I think we learned that and saw that very much during Co so we need to to start thinking of these changes and preparing other communities to help them to be able to thrive in their homes where they are um so we talk a lot about heat but one really uh important impact of climate change is we're losing cold we have built a lot of our society around the existence of cold the existence of snow the fact that Lakes freeze over in the winter we even have you know roads that go over um that go over ponds and and lakes up north um so what we're looking at here and actually nights are getting warmer so one of the reasons that we know that the greenhouse effect is what is causing climate change is that nights are actually warming faster than days because the energy from the Sun comes in during the day and then that thicker blanket of you know more green gases in the atmosphere traps more of that energy and then it hangs out at night so nights are going to get a lot hotter uh nights above 77 Dees fhe is something that scientists call Tropical nights okay and your your eyes are not deceiving you we are looking at New Bedford right now or uh you know the South Coast so in a past climate 77 degrees overnight wouldn't wouldn't happen at one degree now we can start expecting it one and a half and in two degrees it might be as many as uh 2 weeks a year we know for a fact that after hot nights children's cognition and their attention goes down are we going to start having are we going to have mass on days after very hot nights um are we uh so these are the kinds of things that we can be thinking about and planning for and I do I uh do these talks and talk to people across vastly different Industries so I talk to school administrators I talk to CEOs of major companies I talk to Governors I talk to heads of Nos and I talk to teachers um often schools don't think of themselves as places that that need to start thinking about adaptation when they hear climate change they say oh yeah yeah I'm figuring out electric buses and solar panels on the roof I promise and sure that that is important but schools are responsible for a whole lot of vulnerable people retirement homes are responsible for vulnerable people so those those uh kinds of communities in particular really need to internalize this data and start to plan for it it's important to recognize that we live in systems too so this is um and that we rely on things like snow Okay so uh there are so many parts of the world that rely on snow even if they never actually see snow themselves so we're looking at the western United States here um and the Sierra Nevadas here half of America's fruits and vegetables are produced in this Valley right here at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains the map that we're looking at is the number of frost nights so Frost nights are really important because they store water for us in the form of snow we store water in snow caps all year long or all winter long and then in the spring it slowly starts to melt it irrigates field it provides drinking water for the cities below um and so the frost nights as I move through these warming scenarios will decrease significantly so we need to start thinking about how we manage and certainly the Western us has been uh dealing with drought and these issues for quite a while and they are making actually significant progress in how they manage water snow um coming back to the South Coast here I asked my husband um when I was looking at these maps how many snowy days do you think we get a year and he said I don't know like 30 um and again it's like you don't really pay attention to it right but in in the past climate um in this area we would we would only get something like a week of snowy days a year in a really snowy year like when I had a newborn and a toddler in 2012 during snow apocalypse it would be something like you know uh three weeks and so as I move through the warming scenarios you'll see how it decreases until eventually I don't go up to 3 Dees for these Maps but eventually snowy days just kind of disappear um we don't rely on snow in particular in this place but we will also still get big snowstorms we know that um I had a really interesting meeting with someone in the city of new bed for once and we were looking at these Maps together and the person said yeah this is going to be really interesting how are we going to manage snow removal we know we're still going to get it but we're not going to get it every year so are we going to pay uh people you know pay uh snow plow people on retainer every year do we get emergency you know pay for a contract where emergency management comes in um I don't know the answer to that there's not necessarily a right answer to that but I know that the wrong thing to do is to not think about it at all uh we also have precipitation so this is the change in precipitation of the one in 100e storm down in the Gulf um so we see similar Trends kind of around the gulf the uh one in 100e storm in this particular place just south of New Orleans is something like 14 and 12 Ines it's a lot of rain and at one degree of warming they can expect an additional 1 in now that may not seem like a lot but if your storm sewers are only Built for 14 and 12 Ines of rain which is what most storm sewers are built for is the one in 100e storm then um you're going to have some problems um and I'll I uh kind of start to conclude the maps here on Wildfire risk I think Wildfire risk is um under appreciated and under discussed we think about it um as being an issue for the west of course because there have always been fires in the west now there are much bigger fires they kind of get out of control in the west they're also kind of culturally uh attuned to dealing with wildfires and they have a lot of infrastructure there now they need more but what I get really concerned about are places that have never dealt with Wildfire before have no infrastructure but have forests have um Fuel and would potentially have um wildfire in the future and that is certainly the case for western Massachusetts but it's also the case for a lot of places around the US so this is wild risk and and of course if we look at Mexico and South America here um and I know that you know migration and immigration is a very hot button Topic in this country I don't have anything to say about it besides the fact that climate change is absolutely going to drive more migration so we can plan for it uh or we can pretend that it's not going to happen and be caught by surprise so I love this um quote I uh use it in every single talk that I give no matter who I'm talking to this quote is by Dorothy Fortenberry who is a writer and producer of the handmades tale and she says if climate isn't in your story it's science it is science fiction so what she's saying is we need to recognize that climate change is here and acting like it's not here is engaging in a kind of fantasy and you may say well what does that have to do with me I'm not writing uh uh writing movies for Hulu but we all engage in storytelling every day our lives are a story money is a story every annual budget is a story every when we decide where we are going to retire that is a story we need to start incorporating climate into that story and at Le and asking ourselves how does climate change affect this decision may not change the decision but it needs to be a consider ation because if it's not you leaving something very important out and I also like to have gratitude for what we have because of course there's a lot of ridiculous discourse about going to Mars let me tell you Mars is not that great it's got no liquid water cosmic rays would literally blow up your body we have this amazing beautiful planet that gives us so much it's going to be a little less perfect perfect than it was but we don't need to escape and we can still live well in a changing climate we live in the best planet on the Galaxy we understand its boundaries we can use science to help us live well in a changing climate to think ahead and imagine and prepare so that's what I've got today um and I hope you'll find us on the web at probable futures.org and uh we're a nonprofit we're not selling anything we are trying to build climate literacy and help people [Applause] prepare very inity the temperature and humidity is going up therefore the severity of drought and rainy season and things like that yep um at the time period that you showed for the stability is that Rel the same relativity as the other time periods were so where you had the instability spikes no they were different scales they were I thought they seemed to be different scales yeah so so are we in a period of more like where you've got the green there yeah that goes from like that's a period of what 10,000 years yes 12,000 years okay so if you look at the spikes those spikes are like 100,000 years MH yes Yep this is a different scale yes so if we're looking are we in a period of relative stability within a area do you think all right so first of all yeah even Within These 190,000 Years there had not been this this extent of stability first of all but um the other but the interesting thing about that is the reason that it has been that stable for so long is actually because of human activity so as you can see when it gets warm it gets really warm really fast and as it and it cools very slowly so we were on before uh the climate started to uh warm we were actually on a cooling trajectory so if humans did nothing and never burned trees had land use um the the Earth would have continued to cool and we would have been heading back towards an ice age but the people on earth Earth you know before the Industrial resol Revolution were basically burning just enough carbon to keep the atmosphere stable okay okay I I was just wondering why the it's so such dramatic instability yeah and wi this period of warm before the Industrial Revolution yeah it's a great question I have a question about food it seems like food is one of the ways that uh you know it has to be if we're talking about food climate change has to be part of the story right and so looking at those maps and seeing where um the Bread Basket like where food comes from the Central America Mexico Central America or where other products come from uh or uh I just like I I didn't tease it all out and remember it all but just like we're our food production areas are going to be so severely affected and I think about like our local food production and what can we do to prepare for that and change for adapt uh so that we can continue to produce food where we are despite intense rain events and so forth and so on yeah well I mean obviously my answer is is prepare for it you know use the data that we have at hand um and we have engaged with um people in the food industry at different scales so actually there's um a government agency uh focused on farms uh in Canada that has recently just integrated all of probable Futures data um so we also know that there are Consultants who have been working with big agricultural companies who've been using the data to help um companies prepare but then yeah we also have the small holder Farmers that don't have fancy Consultants to help them and that's the reason that we made probable Futures available and made it available for free and tried to make it as accessible and understandable as possible so that the aage farmer per se could use it and and get a lot out of it um I'm thinking more of the water sources because to me it's it's more the water source with the Dr and things like that um industry qu solutions for the future how are they dealing with this data are they are they trying to figure out solutions to produce better water or provide water to Dr areas things like that yeah so that they can do the farming yes um so obviously you know all all of this is so localized so the story is different in every place about you know what they solutions could be um so in Spain for example um don't know if you remember the drought map but the Iberian Peninsula on the drought map is really intense um and so you know look at Spain um so Spain is investing an enormous amount of money in colonization plants okay so that's that is technology that exists and that hopefully will get better over time but it's super expensive climate change is incredibly inflationary and the reason for that is because now we have to start paying for things and start creating human systems for what the climate used to give us for free so for example you know building a seaw wall when the sea just used to stay in the same place for the most part or irrigating a farm that didn't used to need irrigation because the rains came reliably or desalinization so there are yeah there are lots of solutions one of the things that's happening in the west is that they're just getting a lot better at um conserving water that is making a huge difference out there so like yeah in the west we can't have Lawns anymore it makes absolutely no sense so you know there are things like that and in general in with climate change conservation energy conservation water conservation all kinds of conservation are are are really high leverage Solutions um especially in America we don't love conservation as much as we love to build new things so you know there's much more resources going into building new power systems and and that's good too but um we could make a big big dent in Things by making the buildings more efficient and conserving more water just having less waste throughout our systems but yeah it's really different in every place um which makes it a challenge and it's one of the reasons that we made this available in the way that we did with uh global in scope but able to scale down to that local area because you know I can't parachute into Spain and know exactly what these drought maps are going to mean for them you know a particular Community is going to know best what these conditions might mean for their economy for their agriculture for their cultural practices so that's why we're focused on not we often we don't give answers we help people ask good questions we help people build their climate literacy and the tools so that they can incorporate this into managing their communities whether that Community is an actual region you know place a government or an industry we talk to particular Industries all the time um to help prepare that you know that industry a lot of them are Global um so you know we think about community in different ways and we have to and each Community is going to be dealing with this in different ways yes just sign up for youra thank so it sounds like you have a great as you say you help people ask the right questions do you have a way to link them orend to places to find help find answers because I think of I'm my my local government Community I'm not sure they know how to think yeah about what what even if they ask the right question how to think about answering that totally yep um so yes and no um so we are a small organization and there Aren't Enough of those organizations that can help with that yet but there are some that exist and so what we're focusing on is building Partnerships with organizations or companies that can build this capacity and um kind of disseminated so I'll give you an example um we've been working with the United Way worldwide so if you're familiar with the United ways they're all over the country there's actually 2,000 chapters all over the world United Way leaders are often um uh United ways are often just Community hubs where a lot of you know local organizations meet and collaborate and so um we are working with them we've been helping their disaster resiliency committee which is made up of a bunch of heads of United ways and we're working together to build a toolkit for United Way leaders to first of all be able to use this information and identify what their climate risks are um second of all have communications material so that they can help be ambassadors for it within their communities and help other people understand what the risk is and then also develop a toolkit so that they can know what resources are available to them and how they can um and what resour what resources are available to them through United Way worldwide for example so that's just one example I mean we have a lot of different institutions that can do different facets of that um I mean there is a lot of money available right now through the IRA for both mitigation adaptation and technical support for communities to actually access that money and take on these projects is a is a big issue and we need more people work short-handed on that we need more people that actually know how to navigate these things but first communities have to actually want to take on these projects um so you know this is a way to help people understand that they help communities understand that they need to do something and then they can move to the next step I hope at some point I work myself out of a job that's the that's the purpose here um is that this just becomes common knowledge and it's integrated into processes um but yeah we do need we need more people who are you know serving as consultants for governments and um local communities to help them access those those resources yes what are three things that are being done right now in our area between that are actually moving in the right signic differ well first of all say uh the city of New Bedford has a chief resiliency officer and she's very very good um and thinking really um strategically about this she would be able to better answer um you know what's happening locally um but I know that they're thinking about things like um Coastal resiliency um uh heat the heat island immigration uh New Bedford is a gateway City so uh there are really smart people that recognize that um that we will uh have more newcomers in this community uh over time um so I spend most of my time uh so I live here in this community and I try and keep up with what's happening here but I spend most of my time talking with leaders around different parts of the world so I might not be as up to speed about I don't I don't feel fully qualified to say what's happening here but there are people who are thinking about this in a really great way here and you should have some of them speak yeah Laura Gardner I think oh Lauren's amazing yeah she can speak to the local effects being or work being done so her or uh she's she well she actually is a librarian for Dartmouth schools but um Dartmouth middle school middle school a superhero yes um but she is the co-chair for climate reality Massachusetts south coast which is a great um Grassroots thing to engage in and it helps get the word out and and give people action items as well so but she has a finger on the pulse of what the city of New Bedford is doing what Fair Haven's doing with um Westport yep Bristol County she speaking in a our a speaker yes and I mean Also let's not forget that not every Community has the opportunity to generate the kind of energy the type of clean energy that we have the ability to do here with the offshore wind industry so obviously that's not you know adaptation and resiliency that's that's mitigating the problem but um but I think we're we're very fortunate to be in a place where where we actually because not every location you know has access to that that kind of natural resource to help solve the problem so I'm going to thank you again for coming thank you for having me and I want to encourage you all to come to the uh next series finish out the series and spread the word and I'd like to see this number attending grow and grow um next month June 27th uh Dr Sarah Grady who's a senior Coastal ecologist at mass aabon and prior to that she has been working on the Southshore uh for the north south river Watershed Alliance as well as math Bas and she is among a fabulous Coastal ecologist she's also a real horseshoe crab specialist and if we think about an animal that has weathered all those bump bumps for millions of years that's the Horseshoe tra so uh they could teach us a lot right um and they Al and but they are imperal they're imperal for actions we've been taking but uh and now they're having uh some challenges with SE uh with u p so come back next month U for that and she has a SE Shanty that she will sing is this are you filming this that people can see it uh yes it's for Westport but it'll be on the um Westport Westport government TV on YouTube so just look up Westport government TV so if you're outside of Westport you can see anyone who wanted to come tonight but just didn't for whatever reason tell them to go to Westport govern tv YouTube channel YouTube and I'll send if if I have your email which I probably do now um I will send that link out when it comes out thank you Valerie for doing that thank you esort