foreign if we don't act we lose time because that next big impact could come tomorrow or it could come next year Irma Michael Ian these category four and five hurricanes hit Florida within the last five years as did several smaller storms they've destroyed homes and businesses totaling over 200 billion dollars in damage it's not a fluke it's a trend strong storms are landing with increasing frequency and yet our coasts are largely unprotected so how can we strengthen Coastal communities against wind and waves that's what the University of Miami sustained lab is trying to figure out using a state-of-the-art hurricane simulator you can customize a hurricane create a hurricane build a hurricane can and study specifically what you want so this is a computer that controls wave soon face and tan will activate this 1460 horsepower fan to unleash a hurricane within this 38 000 gallon tank Basin and the rest of the sustained team are developing solutions to help communities withstand hurricane waves which on the coast cause more damage than wind first they must understand how waves form and how they transmit energy if you have a calm surface and wind starts to blow there's some initial perturbations and you know the white starts to form very small ways first this is a monochromatic wave with a seven centimeter amplitude which is like a rough wave in the ocean over time and distance the waves continue to grow as the wind pushes on the forming wave and now I think we're already in a cat one intensity right now there are tons of sprays and Bubbles all over the water surface the wind is pushing against that water and adding energy to the water energy momentum so as that wave continues to propagate and grow all that wind energy is going into those waves and it could become very large because of the weight of water the larger the wave the more energy it transmits four pounds speed of water it's basically the average weight of an NFL player now imagine an NFL player running into you and basically talking now imagine a sea of NFL players coming into you and then coming again and again we're at a cafe we intensity right now the sea sprays are going all the way out Category 5 waves may look a mess but there is an organized wave motion here propelling the weight of water towards our coasts coasts that once look like this this is Saint Vincent island in the Florida Panhandle it's a national wildlife refuge and a glimpse at what had once been one of Florida's best natural defenses against hurricanes Barrier Islands you know over the pre-settlement times in Florida the Barrier Islands were natural they basically served the function of protecting the mainland from storms and things like that Florida is further protected by other natural systems natural systems like salt marshes seagrasses oysteries Coral reliefs even mangoes they all kind of protect us but they all need space and time in much of Florida these natural systems have been replaced by human structures built directly on the coast Miami Beach for example is built right on a Barrier Island the sustained lab designs barriers to protect those hotels and condos from wave energy the challenge is to engineer a barrier that will slow down the waves in the same way natural systems would designs are tested in a hurricane simulator so what we want to avoid is that that energy transfers by impact into the structures traditional construction of things like sea walls so Seawall doesn't take any energy out it bounces energy off but sometimes this also worsens up the conditions in nearby areas the key thing for waves is they go into things like salt marshes oyster reefs seagrasses mangroves they disrupt the motion of the water if we can actually dissipate the energy by breaking the waves of turbulence and you do it on the right locations when they arrive at the shoreline you'll have less impact to do this sustain has developed a hybrid approach called sea Hive that combines engineering with natural systems the sea Hive is a way to replace a traditional sheet pile sea wall with something that is perforated something that can dissipate more energy locally as opposed to just reflective which is what happens with the sea wall the units are hexagonal hexagonal prisms hollowing the inside with a series of holes on their side faces so what happens there is we pile them up vertically on horizontally the holes slow down wave energy and can be used as planters for mangroves Marsh grasses and coral reefs which further break up the waves so create kind of like a Livingstone line a hybrid system that we can adopt sustain is working towards deploying sea Hive modules to test sites within the next year if they work they could be strategically deployed more widely over the coming decades helping to buffer the impact of storms in any year anywhere in Florida a category 5 hurricane can hit with climate change and Rising temperatures and desification of the coastlines I mean it's almost kind of like the perfect catastrophe scenario for the communities so luckily we have been doing better in terms of preparation in terms of our codes in terms of construction so whenever we develop something we want to make sure that this could be used to protect not only the vulnerable regions but also the vulnerable population foreign so I am very happy to be here with our panel so on the panel down the end as you've met Rob Diaz de Villegas the ecology producer for wfsu public media who produced that wonderful report we just saw and next to Rob is Jeffrey chanton who is the Lawton professor at Florida State University Department of Earth ocean and Atmospheric science and next to me is John Morales who you saw in the Nova clip John is an atmospheric and environmental scientist and a meteorologist and the hurricane specialist for wtvj in Miami so thank you all so much for being here so John and I wanted to start with you and I would love to talk have you talk about the relationship between climate and weather and especially about extreme weather so we touched on this a little bit in the in the clip we saw that the idea that more heat in the system can make things warmer overall that's kind of pretty intuitive and straightforward but how does it make things weirder um why is it that some areas may seem more extreme cold as well as you know warm weather or bigger snowstorms you know for some people it seems like well it's colder now so the climate change isn't a thing why doesn't it just turn up the thermostat uniformly everywhere well good evening to everybody and it's it's great to be here um well so first the basic difference between weather and climate right so uh climate is what you expect weather is what you get right so right um and and climate you know the climate averages are changing slowly or at least historically have changed slowly we're quite concerned about how rapidly the climate is changing now uh because of course you know we've supercharged the system with our greenhouse gas emissions now if there's a lot going on with a warming climate right uh so the most basic idea is okay well we are trapping more heat in the atmosphere and the oceans Because by the way the oceans are absorbing a lot of the heat as well okay and as we do that what's the first thing that that logically should happen yeah our temperature should be rising and are we seeing more intense heat waves are we seeing more frequent heat waves indeed we are and there's a concern that you know as this continues to happen the number of dangerous heat days like what was presented in the program uh in places like Atlanta and in Phoenix are going to continue to multiply so these are days when you know agricultural workers and construction workers or even folks who want to go out cycling or jogging or whatnot are in danger and those those days are multiplying and again heat is the silent killer but what else is changing well the hydrologic cycle is accelerating as well as temperatures rise we evaporate moisture faster so droughts can happen with greater ease and be prolonged by the warmer temperatures at the same time a warmer atmosphere can sustain more water vapor and events like what was seen a week or so ago down in Fort Lauderdale are happening worldwide more frequently and you know there's a lot and I'm not going to go into it right now there's a lot that impacted the uh the Fort Lauderdale situation including infrastructure just simply not being designed for that level of rainfall and who could design right something for that level of rainfall but those events are happening with greater frequency too so how about cold yeah so first off the temperature Trends in all these places incl including places where we've seen some pretty headline making uh events like the one in Texas and I think it was 2021 maybe February of 21 where they had all the the horrific cold and of the power outages and basically people becoming uh hypothermic and and and passing them away because of the cold well despite that event which might have lasted a week or or so the general Trend in temperatures in Texas over the last you know 50 plus years is up things are warming despite these short-term events you can get these extremes happening because the jet stream is wavier now than it was in the past we're getting more undulations in the jet stream which may be linked to climate but we're not sure because this is emerging science okay there's still some controversy about this but what gives us an energetic jet stream the difference in temperature between the mid-latitudes where we sit at and the polls if the poles are warming very very quickly in compared to the rest of the planet which they are because you've heard about the Arctic and how fast it's warming you've heard about the Antarctic those places are warming very quickly the difference in temperature between the poles and the mid-latitudes is not as much the jet stream is weaker a weaker jet stream what does it do it meanders more as opposed to zipping along from west to east could I add something yes please yes so first I want to say thank you to my oceanography class that came to get credit for this yeah extra credit extra credit uh email me and the secret word is subduction don't tell anybody just email me that word tomorrow or tonight and the thing I'd like to add to that is that the overall long-term mean of climate is towards warming but when you juice the system when you add all that energy to it you also increase the variability and so you're going up but you're also spikier and and that's what we see when it's cold So you you're seeing extreme cold and extreme heat there's more variability right you can't I guess a better way to express that is you can see extreme cold even though the system is warm right so you know for a person in in Miami Christmas Eve and Christmas day that just passed we we set records for the coldest maximum temperature for those two days ever experienced on on those particular dates and yet it was almost like you distilled the entire winter into those two days because the rest of winter was extremely warm and we ended up with one of the warmest Winters in Miami's history and those records date back to the 19th century so so even though we had two really cool days I mean to have somebody come out and say well you know what about this global warming look at how cold it is well I mean that just doesn't make the long-term trend is it is warming so let's talk about the sea so we saw this clip from from Louisiana and then Rob's clip looking at that floor the Florida coastline particularly around around Miami um sea level rise is this it's this Global phenomenon but the sea is not it's different depending on where you are so why is that Jeff do you want to talk about that yeah that we have Global sea level rise which is dependent on the land on Ice the glaciers melting and they run into the sea and as the temperature of the ocean warms the ocean water expands and so it takes up more room and then you also have local land change so Louisiana is subsiding and sinking because of all the oil and gas obstruct extraction and also because of the river being levied the whole way and then the third thing is there was an article that just was in The Washington Post about a nature article that just came out and here on the Gulf of Mexico over the last 10 years sea level has been rising at a rate of one centimeter per year and it's just phenomenal and it it's the the water comes in from the Caribbean and it flows into the Gulf through the Straits of the Yucatan and it goes into the Gulf and then it flows out through the Florida Straits and as the Atlantic circulation the thermohaline global conveyor belt is weakening water is piling up in the gulf and so we're having phenomenal rates of sea level rise right here right now so you might be you're having more sea level rise than other parts of the world might be happening yeah as I said Louisiana is the highest rates and now that rate is extending all the way into the whole Gulf in Miami the sea level has risen seven inches in less than 30 years and you know it may not sound like a lot but it means a lot I mean if a storm surge comes that storm surge is going to penetrate much further Inland than it would have otherwise and affect many more structures than it would have otherwise not to mention just the sunny day floods that we get in South Florida which is you know it may not have rained for three weeks and yet the Waters of the streets are full of salt water in Brickell and in Coconut Grove in Fort Lauderdale I mean there's all these neighborhoods where it's salt water is just standing there so why is that where's that where's that water coming from no it's so the tie it so the the when you get the springiest ties of the Year these are the ties that there's a big difference between the peak and the trough of the tide well that that happens a lot in the fall so between August and November or so and those King Tides as they're known uh you know there's there's spots in the Florida Keys for example which we should definitely talk about that become inaccessible you you you know there's there's homeowners that cannot access their homes unless they have one of those uh high-profile you know big Jeeps type of thing which of course they have to drive it through salt water to get to their home Lord knows what that'll do to their vehicle after a couple of years right uh so so it's it's for the keys it's existential and it's now it's not in 2070 it's now between now and 2040 that they're going to have to make some really difficult decisions and choices and and part of this is that Florida has a very low Coastal gradient if you've ever been swimming at St Mark's you can walk out a mile and you're still in waste deep water and it's the same way when you walk in learning and so a seven inches of sea level rise can correspond to tens to hundreds of feet of Shoreline retreat and and that's what we're seeing so a lot of cities around the world are working on you know thinking about and planning and potentially putting a lot of money into barriers is that realistic for the Florida coastline at all it it buys a little time but you know and state of Florida is doing a lot about mitigation and adaptation but if you know we can adapt and we can adapt but it's it's like we're in a an arms race with nature because that we keep putting these greenhouse gases CO2 methane nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and that makes it warmer and so the sea level rises so we have to build our sea walls higher we have to put out these things with the holes in them everywhere but the sea level keeps rising and say oh by the year 2100 sea level is going to be 30 inches higher well what about the year 2200 what are we thinking about you know like we're just in an arms race and so the you know there's adaptation and then there's mitigation and mitigation means doing something about all these greenhouse gases using solar power using wind power we've got to stop getting our energy from digging stuff up out of the ground and burning it that's prehistoric that's cave people so going back to the barriers and congratulations rub on your piece and I thought it was really creative I I loved the metaphor about the um the NFL players I mean just you know explaining this idea of how heavy water is and once it gets moving how powerful it is and that you know so much of storm damage is not from the wind but from the waves but give us an update of where where are they at you know in terms of that development you know have they actually installed it um you know has it ever been tested in a in a hurricane before what's going on just as I was finishing that piece uh so towards the end of March they installed a sea Hive barriers at a test site called Wahoo Bay in Pompano Beach Florida and so this is in the Hillsborough Inlet and I went on Google Earth today and measured it it's a very small little Inlet it's like maybe six or seven football fields worth of uh water in there um so it hasn't really been tested you know we don't know when he'll get tested by hurricanes um what they're going to do in the short term is uh in June they're going to launch a website with cameras and they're really focusing on right now is building that as a habitat and so you'll be able to watch these cameras and they'll have mangroves and coral reefs and they're what they hope to people will see is you know all the fish in the sea life that goes there and there's a little Marina there and they hope that it will you know help with uh with the you know fishing and I think that's a way that they're hoping to sell this this has a solution to people it's an attractive barrier that that increases you know has a lot of other value than as a barrier and you know when the hurricane comes then they'll see I guess now so you talked about that in the context of a place like Miami does something like that make sense up here in the Panhandle or what would what do you need in the Panhandle well in the Panhandle we have you know he talked about you know those natural ecosystems and you know they don't have time or space for them down there you know to to grow them we have that here we have the Saint Mark's National Wildlife Refuge and we have you know places where there's miles of marsh sometimes you know backed up by miles of forest and so we have uh you know salt marsh ecosystems and seagrass beds and even though oyster Fisheries are suffering we just have Coastal oysters you know acting as as a barrier so here at least in our our in our immediate vicinity we don't I don't think have as much of a need for you know installing the barrier so you need to keep those though yeah yeah although we're spending we're spending a tremendous amount of money on beach renourishment at the Cape San Blas and um in Gulf County and Panama City Beach we are pumping up a lot of sand on the beach and it costs millions of dollars and and the taxpayers are funding that to support the owners of property on the beaches I mean long term it's just a futile Texas last that long right yeah I've got pictures so John um knowing how destructive and dangerous these storms can be forecasting is so incredibly important how are we doing in terms of your forecasting abilities and is that changing at all with climate change is it making harder to predict what's going on with a powerful storm or is it the same you know can you talk about recent storms and are there any things that have surprised you that you think are are influenced by climate change I don't know about my forecasting ability personally but I can tell you the forecast that generally speaking uh hurricane track forecasts have improved tremendously and this is in good part not just because of our better understanding of the science and the physics of the hurricane and and the environment surrounding the hurricane but of course it's also because of the power of computing uh you know we do model what the atmosphere does and we use mathematical equations to Define in three dimensions and then try to project forward what the atmosphere will do and boy those models have gotten really good so we're good at track forecasting the intensity forecasting can still be a challenge especially those rapid intensification Cycles which is an increase in 35 miles per hour in the wind speed in 24 hours or less so uh you know going from an 80 mile per hour storm to 115 mile per hour storm that would be a rapid intensification cycle for for a hurricane I have seen however just on in my experience there's better forecasting of those type of events the National Hurricane Center dares forecast rapid intensification Cycles which they would never mention in the past and now they do because we're seeing them so much more often for me you know in practicality uh me being a on TV still not every day but as a hurricane specialist in in Miami um what this means for me is that I I get a lot more gray hairs which actually I have uh in recent years and it's because you know if there is a high-end tropical storm but you know if a high-end tropical storm is going to hit me you know 60 70 mile an hour winds we can deal with that and the storm surge is relatively minor it's not a big deal um but if if there is a high-end tropical storm that you know that there's a chance that it could go through a rapid intensification cycle and between the the the uh Central Bahamas and the east coast of Florida go from you know just a 70 mile an hour storm to 115 or 125 mile an hour hurricane that's reason to worry and I and I worry a lot more about that these days than I did in the past because yes the more hurricanes are reaching category four and five intensity around the planet it's not that there's more tropical storms necessarily despite our run in 2020 and 2021 which we had 51 name storms in two years all right so it was busy in the Atlantic despite that though Global Trends are not for more tropical Cyclones forming but Global Trends are most definitely uh showing that we're getting the ones that form are having a greater possibility of reaching those very catastrophic intensities and that's basically because the water is warmer it's that's basically it because the water is warmer yeah there might be a couple other things going on as well including less aerosols in the atmosphere which is helping uh to warm the waters uh but but you know you all have to realize that when you get an Ian when you get a Michael an Irma a harvey a Maria you know those events are the ones that that there's a before that and there's an after that and you can ask the people in Mexico Beach and you can ask the people in Fort Myers and Sarasota and we ask the people in Puerto Rico it's it's if there's a before that event and an after because those catastrophic fours and fives just are absolutely devastating and have long lasting impacts Way Beyond the two or three months of you know immediate recovery the economic impacts are just tremendous and I'll I'll say one more thing um I was doing maybe we were preparing our hurricane special this is something that newsrooms do and hurricane markets like Miami and Tampa we were preparing our hurricane special I had an opportunity to go to MIT to interview Kerry Emanuel you might be familiar with that name Carrie Emmanuel is a climate scientist uh and he works a lot with hurricanes and something that really struck me I went to for this interview after Hurricane Maria and he showed me here is the return period of an event like Maria to Puerto Rico in the 20th century climate the return period of something that devastating to Puerto Rico is once every 200 years based on the 20th century climate once every 200 years the return period by the end of this Century would be one every 20 years so I rhetorically ask you know how can a society even be resilient enough you know that word resilience has limits right I don't care how much a politician tells you well we're going to be resilient yeah you know resilience has limits and how would a society be able to deal with that type of economic impact once every 20 years I think it would be very difficult well I want to talk about a different kind of resilience um we talk about drought and fire which we didn't look at tonight but there is a major uh sequence in our film about drought and fire out west and really looking at these you know huge mega fires uh that have been ravaging the West I think something like 25 of California forests have burned in I think the last 10 or 20 20 years but what's going on here Rob you've been doing some some reporting on this right well it's it's a it's built into covering ecology in North Florida it's something I I'm always covering but it is our second Nova story as well um you know it's more than once I've been reading a story on California wildfires where they say you know if California would do it the way Florida did it wouldn't be as catastrophic and it's kind of an accidental thing you know in after the Civil War a lot of wealthy Northerners came down and bought land to to hunt quail and they got into Quail thrives in this open longleaf pine landscape which is maintained with fire so their fire Crews developed really about a methodology of burning on a regular basis it became a science and uh they it's it's what we do in in Florida and South Georgia now is that to burn these ecosystems you know we're in the what we call the lightning capital of the world and so these ecosystems have evolved to to to adapt to regular fire and so what it does regular fire does other than the ecological benefits to all the animals and the diversity of plant life in the understory of a longleaf pine ecosystem what it does is uh on a regular basis if you burn regularly is it may it burns the the fuel loads and keeps the fuel loads low if you ever go to a prescribed fire on a place that's regularly burned it's a really slow creeping fire it's kind of pleasant we uh we shot our segment a couple weeks ago I brought you know our social media team and uh radio reporter and uh we had a fun it was a fun day you know it's just it's these creepy little fires when you go and and uh and it keeps these fuels from building up as they they have out west and they become catastrophic wildfires which are detrimental to the ecosystem yeah but so you've been able that's been that's a good news story and in some ways that that that's a solution to to prevent major major wildfires correct even when there's drought even when there's drought yeah yeah yeah the the biggest the biggest problem we had was uh after Hurricane Michael where we had a lot of uh Fallen trees and that was one of the first thing a lot of land managers did was to go out and clear Tim Bern was a kind of a large operation for a lot of them um and then we had that large Wildfire we did have a large wildfire in Panama City last year and it was a lot of those Fallen trees from Hurricane Michael they caught that's another kind of counter-intuitive thing that a hurricane can lead to a wildfire do you have some questions for me well well I'm looking through these I wanted to to turn the conversation to mitigation and and Jeff something that you were mentioning and I know that you do a lot of work studying nothing and we have a program I mentioned coming out next week really looking at how we could get carbon emissions down to Net Zero by 2050 and methane is a big part of that can you can you talk a little bit about what is methane and what's so special about it and why why can it make a big difference in either direction okay well methane is what we call Natural Gas and that's produced geologically by high temperatures in the earth methanes also produce biologically and like landfills and swamps and wetlands and so it's a product of anaerobic metabolism and so the other the thing about methane is that it has the greenhouse gas if Effectiveness about 80 times that of CO2 it's a much stronger infrared absorber than CO2 and it has a half-life in the atmosphere well its lifetime in the atmosphere is only about 10 years and so and and a lot of the sources of methane are Point sources and so methane is a place that we could act if we could reduce methane emissions to the atmosphere we could change the heating capacity of the atmosphere pretty rapidly you know on a human life's lifestyle lifespan because CO2 has a lifetime in the atmosphere of hundreds of years and so we could act on methane and get it down and we could start to mitigate these climate effects that are are so so uh disturbing right now and one of the things there's a famous oceanographer called Wally broker and Wally broker he's the one that discovered the global thermohaling circulation in the ocean and he talks about how human civilization really flourished in the Holocene because we had this very quiescent climate a very gentle climate we were able to start with Agriculture and and and so we really flourished in this gentle climate of the Holocene but now we're kind of going into this new geological epic the anthropocene and because of the enhanced variability of climate it it's we're going to face more challenges questions some very provocative um here's a question do you think we actually have enough time to reduce greenhouse gases and stop rising sea levels well we have to have enough time we have to assume that we do so we have to act like we have the time to do it but we need to start now and get busy yeah so I mean I think it's important to realize that you know sea levels would be rising anyway because we are in the interglacial period the problem is that they're Rising faster than they otherwise would uh just based solely on if it was only left up to Natural forcing they wouldn't be rising as quickly as they are and we wouldn't be worrying about you know not just 30 inches but the possibility in some of the more extreme uh projections of you know six feet of sea level rise by by the end of the century which is not out of the realm of possibilities all right because you know unfortunately the science science doesn't know enough to be able to tell you precisely how many centimeters of sea level rise we're going to get by 2050 and 2080 and 2100 we just we're not sure right but it'll depend on a lot of things it depends on some of the uh uh ice shelves in Antarctica you know you've heard of the Thwaites uh uh ice shelf down there some new research where some areas of thwaits underneath it where the water is are melting faster and others are melting slower than they thought but in in Balance there's still a great deal of worry about when that finally melts and then if if that detaches from the Antarctic peninsula then the glaciers that are on land are going to start to pour out a lot faster into the ocean and therefore rise our sea levels faster so I mean there's a lot of variables that we don't know and that's why it's so hard to project exactly how much sea level rise we're going to get but sea level rise for some parts of this planet are is an existential issue so this is a question that I wondered about and a lot of people talked about it during the pandemic did the reduction in human activity such as you know well so many people staying at home not driving Airlines did that create any measurable slowing of global temperatures and the other part of the next question is would a National moratorium on use of Cars one day a week make any difference yes and yes it didn't really slow down the temperature increase but it slowed down the rate of CO2 release it was still going up but it went up at a slower rate um here's what how should Florida residents prepare for stronger and more frequent hurricanes even those who may not be in evacuation zones so uh quality of construction is really really really important okay and and one of the concerns is that you know when you look of course there's there's so many strings pulling at these different important resilience aspects that we have right because it makes a lot of sense to build the strong a possible house as you can right but it also costs more money and the building Lobby you know the construction Lobby says no no don't make us build you know stronger homes because then it's going to be harder for us to sell them because they're more expensive in the first place and that's why you see construction codes being stronger in some parts of Florida weaker in others and if you just go a few miles inland the the the requirements are much much weaker than they are if you build immediately along the coast there's been Recent research I'm sure you saw this paper where we are seeing that hurricanes because a they're stronger and B they're maintaining their strength longer as they go inland it turns out hurricane winds are impacting many more communities further Inland that that have ever been affected so quality of construction is going to be really really important and I think that would be one very important way so you think the House of Bricks rather than the house of sticks or straw right right build like they do in the Caribbean I mean you know you look at homes in in the Dominican and Puerto Rico and it you know these are not wealthier places than here and yet construction there is yeah it's rebar you know cement blocks poured concrete roof with on rebar you know maybe we ought to consider that in South Florida you're starting to see some of that some of these squarish type of homes it's very stylish by the way they're fabulous but but but but they're they're much stronger instead of you know the trust the wood trusses and uh you know oftentimes not properly anchored to the tie beam which in turn is not properly anchored to the rest of the structure I mean there's there are some glaring weaknesses in construction all across the U.S but even here in a hurricane prone state like Florida all right I'm not going to read this whole question but I think this might have been a plant by Jeff because it's asking about septic tanks which I believe Now isn't that aren't you interested in Snapchat yeah septic tanks what about them well tell us about them what what are they contributing to to the climate change you know into greenhouse gas emissions um no I don't really think so is this related to algae blooms yes yes so yes they're contributing to that the sargassum all right so you can talk about nutrients you want to talk about that yeah the sargassum that we're seeing coming towards Florida is so these are these giant seaweed blobs in the Atlantic right yeah coming towards Florida well that's mostly fueled by agricultural nutrient inputs mostly in South America coming from the Amazon so I I mean septic tanks have their own issues and problems and it affects the Springs like what color springs it might affect our local Coastline but I don't think it's a global problem okay well I I I do have something yeah because septic tanks in in parts of the state are are damaging the the coastal of of wetlands you know whether it's the Bays you know the sea grasses for example in Biscayne Bay in South Florida we're getting seagrass die-offs everywhere and and and part of that is blue green algae that's forming at the surface blocking out the sunlight and not allowing the seagrass to be able to you know photosynthesize um so the manatees are starving because and the manatees are starving because of it right so septic tanks are our big problem especially in this new climate in the anthropocene because what we're seeing is that the water table is higher in well all across the state but where I'm from in South Florida the issue with a higher water table which is being pushed up by the encroaching ocean right again remember seven inches of sea level rise in less than 30 years so as the sea pushes in the water table is higher septic tanks which used to sit in dry ground as they were designed to to be are suddenly they're by the bottom of the septic tank is sitting in water and therefore the septic tank stops working like it was designed to work and all that poop is running out into the aquifer and into Biscayne Bay and and it's also producing blue-green algae outbreaks toxic algae outbreaks along the St Lucie uh River and Estuary and the the I can never pronounce the colossa Hoochie did I get that right yeah on the the one that heads West out of Lake Okeechobee that one as well so so uh sorry I I had to say something about it I'm sorry I'm sorry it was John who planted the question um okay this was someone very special handed me this card it says stop the storms and it says if the problem is the wind blowing the waves why do we not build something to block the wind from the waves seems very straightforward try to stop the wind yeah no I I mean listen uh it's a valid question uh I I don't I don't see any practical way that you could do that it's like it's like when I hear uh you know ways to eliminate hurricanes oh you know let's let's uh let's tow icebergs this is this is stuff that I get as a broadcast meteorologist people sending me ideas let's tow icebergs from the polls to cool the ocean in the tropics I mean it'd be like throwing an ice cube and it's just not going to work or of course you know not too long ago a big well-known leader uh said that we should nuke the hurricanes right but I mean the amount of energy that hurricanes put out in in just an hour blows away you know the energy that one nuclear bomb can possibly do and then of course we'd have radioactive hurricanes not not to mention the other problems so but so the but to to give a realistic Quest the realistic answer is that just these wins the particular wins that you're talking about in a hurricane are just so powerful be like spitting into the wind and how high I mean where where do you put a wall where do you is this a mobile wall I mean it's just I I don't see the science behind it so but interestingly I was asking um about you know when we're talking about um reducing carbon emissions and looking at ways you know which we talk about again in our show next week you know how do we produce energy how do we live you know without burning all these fossil fuels and but Jeffy when you can address this but um whether we can in here in Florida whether wind is much of an option or not well we have plenty of sunlight so I think we should do the solar power route and some good news is that this year energy production from wind and solar outpaced energy production from coal so we're moving in the right direction and we just have to keep going that way we have to stop methane emissions we have to reduce CO2 emissions we have to take on nitrous oxide which comes from agricultural production and all these things can be done and you know the the current Administration in Washington has gone a long way of putting money where our mouth is and we're doing things about climate change there's a methane tax and um in the new bill that they passed last Congress and so the Congress has really stepped up and I think that we're on the right track yeah I mean listen I mean you're right the IRA uh that that piece of legislation is the biggest action on on climate that's ever been taken by Congress uh in this country and I think it's really important Europe is doing a lot as well probably more than we are uh to mitigate uh greenhouse gas emissions um but there are also tremendous challenges right uh you know we're talking about getting to Net Zero by 2050 it means a lot of renewable energy Renewables has its challenges because it's intermittent so we need a lot of battery storage that technology needs to ramp up and scale up at a better cost so that we can store that power and use it 24 7.

I think this is my very personal opinion I think people need to um and keep in mind uh you know I'm an atmospheric scientist but I haven't a masters in environmental science I mean as much an environmentalist as anyone else in this room but folks in my very personal opinion nuclear power needs to be part of this portfolio because we need to get from point A to point B and we need to do it quickly and yes it's expensive but there's ways to uh uh build a modular nuclear power plants that are not as costly as the others and are safer because they're cooled by sodiums by salt instead of being cooled by water Plus Fusion may not be too far away and that's and that's uh you know just a couple of decades away potentially and it might be for rich countries that you know the rich countries will do fusion and maybe the not so rich countries can still do fission which is the traditional nuclear energy but I think it needs to be a part of the portfolio if we're going to be realistic about you know getting away from fossil fuels my very personal opinion you don't all have to agree with that Rob your final hope what are you hopeful about what am I hopeful about oh I can I can say what I'm what I'm hopeful about I'm hopeful about great science and climate communication and the local reporting you're doing and all the work the wfsu is doing thank you um you know doing this work one of the things again what I'm hopeful about is seeing the number of people who are studying this issue who are working on it who are making progress please check out our film next week which really does show how far we've come already in this work in reducing client in reducing um uh greenhouse gas emissions so next Wednesday check out wfsu will broadcast chasing carbon zero on Wednesday night at nine check out these films weathering the future is streaming right now on pbs.org Noba the PBS app and Nova's YouTube channel I want to recognize Kiki kapani who was the director and producer of the show uh next week we are having a virtual event with with Kiki and others from the film if you want to check it out check out the Nova website for a link there also please fill out a survey let us know give us this feedback on the event it really makes a difference it should only take you a few minutes it would mean a lot for us I also want to mention we recently published a collection of pre-educational resources from weathering the future accessible for free on PBS learning media that are for teachers and students and we'll be hosting a virtual field trip next week check out the Nova Education website that's a wonderful way for students in classrooms to you know talk to scientists directly on Zoom I want to thank all the panelists I also just want to take a moment to thank everyone who supports this important work for these films and this project it's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting the gbh planet future fund the Nova science Trust and you thank you to all of you especially those who you know support public broadcasting who support wfsu who support the Challenger Learning Center and really any of you who watch and listen and value our work it we could not do this without you and now I will pass things over to Kim to say good night foreign thank you so much what a great discussion and thank you for you all taking time to come and be part of the conversation you can take a picture of that and that will take the survey right to your phone if you don't want to do the paper version save paper um Alan thank you do I get the last word I'll give it back to you I just want to thank everyone for coming out tonight I know there's a lot of things going on and this is really important I want to thank the Nova wfsu The Corporation for Public Broadcasting I especially want to thank everybody behind the scenes especially my folks here who worked really hard to make this happen so hopefully you enjoyed the experience of seeing this incredible content on the largest screen in Tallahassee it's a that's a big deal mostly I just want to add so this is really important and we can make an impact all of us can make an impact but we're not likely to solve this the folks who are going to solve this are the Next Generation and I saw a couple of young folks here and that's who I'm looking at to solve these problems and that's why I'm I'm so passionate about what we do here at the Challenger Learning Center every day inspiring young people to pursue careers in science technology G engineering and math and that's how we're going to solve these problems in the future so thank you all right Jeff one thing we were talking about at lunch is that individual actions are really really important but we need to act as a society we need to act collectively and politically to take on this task your advocacy and your votes will do a lot more than composting in your backyard okay but but also do compost in your backyard yeah don't stop yes don't stop that every tool in the shed thank you everyone oh yeah