[MUSIC] Thanks very much. I'm very glad to be here, and the story I want to tell you involves some history of both scientific and personal history, and I'm going to weave them together, the climate science has made incredibly rapid progress in recent decades. And at the same time my own career in this field, has occurred over the last 55 years. And this is the book that got me started, it came out in 1951, I was ten years old. And reading it began my lifelong fascination with weather. This book explains how to build weather instruments like rain gauges and wind vanes out of common materials like milk cartons and coat hangers. And I did that, I had a weather station in our backyard, I kept records, I made forecasts, I earned weather merit badge in Boy Scouts. And then I went to college, I knew already as a young child that I wanted to learn meteorology. I had then no idea, what science actually is or what scientists actually do, but I was crazy about the weather. I went to Penn State for a bachelor's degree, and then to NYU for a PhD, both in meteorology. This is the map wall today, at the weather center in the Penn State meteorology department. It illustrates how weather technology has been revolutionized in the last half century. The satellite observation, supercomputer forecasts, all those display screens, the rapid data transmission, the internet, everything that makes this display possible, and my research possible didn't even exist when I was a student. So my summer jobs in college were with the Weather Bureau [INAUDIBLE] of today's national weather service and I help the real weather forecasters by plotting weather maps with pen and ink. All that's now automated, so, the field has been revolutionized and so has, has climate research. My early meteorological research, not quite as early as this, was on predicting weather just a few days ahead, are using computers to solve equations. This is an old idea, an ambitious dream to make weather forecasting truly scientific. And the picture here is of the Emiac, the first computer to make successful weather predictions, which was a research break through in 1949. The Emiac had over 17,000 vacuum tubes, it weighed almost 30 tons It chewed up a lot of power, and the first 24-hour weather forecast, which was made on this machine took about 24 hours of computer time. That is, for this experiment, the computer could just barely keep pace with the actual weather, provided the Iniac did not fail by blowing a vacuum tube, which it frequently did. it's interesting that an ordinary laptop personal computer has recently re-computer this exact same one day forecast. And it took not 24 hours but 30 milliseconds, so your laptop is faster than the Eniac by a factor of about three million, which is progress. In fact, the same forecast it took 24 hours in the ENIAC can be done on a cell phone and this cell phone did it in one second instead of 24 hours. So, roughly this cell phone here, modern phone, has the raw computing speed of a Cray one supercomputer around 250 million Floating point operations per second. And that create one super computer, when I was using it for research sold for around 8 million dollars in the 1970s. The point I'm trying to make is that computing advance as well as satellites and all the other technology, have been key, to modern climate research; which I'm going to tell you about soon The is a quote from a paper. When I was meteorology student at Penn State in the late 1950s the very possibility of man-made climate change was not widely understood or accepted by most in the scientific community. Only by a few visionary scientists. And carbon dioxide, chemical symbol CO2 Occurs naturally in the atmosphere in very small quantities. It's colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, it's the bubbles in beer and champagne. But in the atmosphere it traps heat, and this quote from a 1978, scientific paper made a very powerful impression on me at the time. In it, two Smiths scientists estimated that we had only a few decades in which to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So I'll read you what they said here. For a prescribed maximum increase of 50%, above the pre-industrial carbon dioxide level or amount the production, the emission that is, of, of CO2 could grow by about 50% until the beginning of the next century, century, that's the one we're in now, but should then decrease rapidly. So CO2, if you're going to keep this level in the atmosphere to within 50% of what it had been naturally in the 1800s, the emissions that we're using, that we're doing today, that human beings and human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels are doing today, have to peak. And not, not in 50 or 100 years, but early in the 21st century. So this urgency, isn't ideological or political, but depends on how the climate system works. And actual emissions, as you may know, global emissions are still growing today. We haven't, have found a way to make them peak yet. In the, 1970s I found my own scientific interest because of papers like that, changing from improving weather forecast for a few days, which I had been doing up to understanding climate change over a few decades. And my big opportunity to change my field of research came in 1979 when I was offered a professorship at Scrip's Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, and I've been blissfully happy at Scripts ever since. It is now, and was then, one of the world's for research and education in the sciences of the earth, and it is as beautiful as you can see. An inspiring place with many superb colleagues the job that Skripps asked me to do was two fold I was supposed to direct and build up, both a climate research group and a graduate level educational program in climate science, and [COUGH] here's a bit of history this is our climate research group in 1985, it includes some of the grad students and post doctoral fellows who I'd advised, and I wish I had time to tell you something about each of the scientists in this photo. Some are very close friends today, several had very distinguished careers. Some have moved on to other institutions, and a few are no longer alive. I was the first Scripps professor in my field. And other atmospheric scientists had worked at Scripps doing research but they didn't teach courses or advise graduate students. And I loved that, this is me teaching a class in the 1980s, I haven't changed a bit as you can see. I've always loved teaching and working with students, especially the caliber of students that we get at Scripps who are brilliant and highly motivated graduate students, and I still like to teach. I also quickly met and got to know Ralph Keeling's father, Charles David Keeling, a professor at Scripps. Characteristic picture of him, here. The epical discovery that Keeling made, that the concentration, which is jargon for amount of Carbon Dioxide or CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is increasing. Was based on extremely accurate measurements beginning in 1958, the year I was a freshman meteorology student at Penn State, while still in his 20s Keeling developed and built an instrument to measure the amount of C02 in the atmosphere accurately, the first to do so. He came to Scripts in 1956 he spent his entire career here. And he began measurements both in Antarctica and in Hawaii at the Mauna Loa Observatory, which you can see in the photo here. And, and the Mauna Loa record quickly yielded important new results. And at the lower left you can see the first few years of that data. And here it's considered bad taste for anyone from Scripps to give a climate talk without showing this graph This is the graph today. The graph updated through September 2013, it's a monthly average data. So, Charles David Keeling discovered a seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2, the the wiggles every year that you can see on this graph, and proposed that plants caused it. CO2 concentrations were largest in northern spring when most plants begin to grow and then photosynthesis converts the carbon in CO2 to plant material, thus lowering the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the, in the other half of the year when plants respire, the CO2 recovers. Kumi also discovered the very marked increase, from year to year, which you can see, this data rising from 1958, on the left to the present on the right. The curve is now called the Keeling Curve, this graph is the most famous graph in earth science. Keeling also showed that the primary cause is the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas. And every discussion, today, of the possibility of global climate change, change due to human activities And it begins with this solid, empirical evidence. You can see on this graph that the number at the beginning at the bottom lower left is at 314 roughly. That number by the way is how many CO2 molecules there are in a million molecules of atmospheric air. And in 2013 the number is approaching 400 as you can see, have heard the daily values have already gotten to 400 but the monthly values, not quite yet. Scientists have long known that CO2 in the atmosphere is an important component of the natural greenhouse effect and warms the climate and this discovery can be attributed Two John Tindell, in his 1861 paper. Tindell was one of the most eminent experimental physicists in the 1800's. Born in Ireland, he worked mainly in England at the Royal Institution in London. Using an instrument of his own design, and construction, which is shown here. I don't have time to Describe it to you but we was just like Heling. He invented and built his own instrument and Tindell carefully measured the relative ability of the gases that make up the atmosphere including water vapor and carbon dioxide to absorb infrared radiation, that is to trap heat in the atmosphere. He discovered that CO2 was a powerful heat trapping gas. That the gases that make up almost all of the atmosphere and hydrogen and oxygen were not. And he immediately realized the potential implications of his discovery for climate change. This is 1861, this isn't a modern discovery. Sometimes history has a way of, of coming alive And, these are photographs of those, that actual instrument. You see this thing at the, at the lower, left here. That's a galvanometer, the [INAUDIBLE] of its day. And here's the sketch of it. As you see, this was a part of the equipment for detecting the infrared radiation. And you can, see that over here. And [COUGH] I actually had a chance to see the original instrument. That's my photograph you're looking at. The trundle used to make the discovery. We held a conference in Dublin in 2011 to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the 1861 paper. And curators from the Royal Institution of London brought these instruments over to Ireland for the conference. It was thrill for me to handle the instruments that Tindell had built with his own hands and read his lab notebooks. And frankly, I was amazed not only that the instruments were in such good shape but that they still even existed and could be located after 150 years. But the curators had a simple explanation, they told me that The custom was that every new director of their own institution, as soon as, as he arrived would quickly clean out his predecessor's laboratory and store everything away in a closet. So they said, we just went to the closet. [SOUND]
