VoE Thompsons Part 2 === [00:00:00] Lonnie Thompson: You don't have to have the same culture. You don't have to have the same belief system. You don't have to have the same religion to do something that is in the best interest of everyone. And to me, this is my hope for the future with climate change is that we can work together. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, and Physics. Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the College always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: This is Part Two of my interview with Ellen Mosley Thompson and Lonnie Thompson, two of the world's most renowned [00:01:00] paleoclimatologists. Please visit go.osu.edu/voices for Part One. We ended Part One discussing climate change and what happens if humanity passes a tipping point into unrecoverable environmental problems. Our conversation resumes with my question about what options we have to fight climate change. My students are always asking me, what can be done? What can we do? What can I do? What do I tell my students? Lonnie Thompson: Well, there's two things. In a democracy, you can vote, and you can decide how you spend your money. If you spend your money on ecologically friendly things, we can all make a difference, and we can drive economies and business in different directions. But I think that there are all kind of different ways, and one of which is very important, is religion, I mean religion, stewardship of the planet, I mean, [00:02:00] yeah, you need to take care of your home, the place where you live. But I think that learning to communicate to local cultures in a way that they see how, what they're doing, and how they can change what they're doing to make a difference for the future. I mean, you know, they're all of these things like use cardboard rather than plastic bags. Reuse things, don't throw them away, don't waste food. Ellen Thompson: Lonnie had mentioned dollar. I always end my class telling them that they have a vote, the vote to cast and the dollar to spend. But, there are also small things that you can do. Sitting here, look how we're lighting that room. David Staley: There's fluorescent lighting. Ellen Thompson: There's four of us here, and we need some light because, you know, and you need your electricity for the microphones and all of that, but there's the big room with two people sitting in it, [00:03:00] and yet, look how many lights we have going. Now, thank goodness they're the fluorescents. You can go through your house and change out to the compact fluorescents. They make a tremendous difference. But something simple: shorten the shower that you take, turn off the light when you when you leave the room. There's just so many things that we don't think about because we have rather become spoiled here in the U. S. If it's a little cold in the house, we just jack up the furnace, turn it up a bit. What do they do in England? They go get a sweater. There's a lot of things that we can do to lighten the human pressure on the planet. Lonnie Thompson: And the new technologies, I mean, in our freezers we have LED lighting, and it makes so much sense because the incandescence produce a lot of heat. David Staley: Heat, yeah. Lonnie Thompson: And then you have to cool the room. But the company that put 'em in wanted to test whether they would actually work at minus 30, so they put 'em in for [00:04:00] free and they worked beautifully. Ellen Thompson: And that was a win-win for them, for their product. Lonnie Thompson: And their advertising. Ellen Thompson: And for us. Lonnie Thompson: So there, I think technology is going to play a big role in our reduction or increase in efficiency. But where I really think we're making headways now is in our alternative energy. In many places now, solar and wind is cheaper than fossil fuels, and if you want to change the direction of the global economy, change the cost of the energy, and it's a lot of it scaling, getting up to the size, and I know that when we built the very first solar powered ice core drill back in the 1980s, solar panels were very expensive. NSF did not think that this was going to work. But now those same panels are 50 times cheaper than they were then. So, that continues, [00:05:00] and the cheaper they get, and the cheaper that energy gets, we make change. I mean, if you're a company, you want to use the least amount of energy possible, you want to make it the cheapest energy possible, and still produce your product that makes you more competitive. David Staley: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future? Ellen Thompson: In the long run, I'm optimistic. In the short run, I'm fairly pessimistic, because we're not doing, we're not addressing the problems. I don't think people really realize that, you know, there are other places on the planet other than the United States. We're 4 percent of the population of the planet, and we use 20 percent of the commercial energy that's produced globally. Does that seem right? No, it's not. I mean, that just tells you that we've got, if you go over and think about the countries, many of the countries in Africa, [00:06:00] there's a billion people who don't have reliable electricity 24 hours a day. How do their children become educated if they don't have light at night to read, or books to take home? And we've got to address that issue because those economies are going to grow, and we became the type of economy we are by utilization of our natural resources, not sustainable use of our natural resources. Well, they're going to do the same thing. The most populous countries in the world are the U. S. and China and India. The most populous country, probably in 20 years, that will replace the U. S. in that, is Nigeria. The birth rate is astronomical, and they're not doing anything about it. That's not necessarily their fault, but we've got all these economies that are going to be growing, and you don't grow an economy without resources. David Staley: But [00:07:00] you say you're optimistic in the long run? Ellen Thompson: In the long run, because we will hit a brick wall. And Lonnie didn't go through, you know, what are the outcomes; what can you do with regard to global climate change where you can mitigate, you can adapt, you can innovate, but he didn't mention suffering. There's going to be suffering, they're suffering now, and I'm optimistic in the long run because I believe we'll hit a brick wall just like we hit a brick wall when they bombed Pearl Harbor, that was a turning point, and we entered the war and everything changed. It was amazing, you know, we can't do this, we can't do that, and suddenly it meant we can do it. And the women went to work, and people... David Staley: You had no choice but to do it. Ellen Thompson: They did not have a choice. And I believe that we will hit a point where we're not going to have a choice, and I think at that point we'll see humans acting in their best interest and at their very best in many ways [00:08:00] because, no choice. David Staley: Optimistic or pessimistic? Lonnie Thompson: Well, I think in the short term you've got to be pessimistic. I mean, the consequences of climate change and the impacts on humans around the world, they're growing every day. I mean, those glaciers melt, water goes in the river, goes in the ocean, sea level's rising, and it's accelerating. There are millions of people who are at risk, and they will become immigrants. We have issues with not being able to deal with immigration today. Wait until you have millions of people trying to find somewhere else on this planet to live, and they will have to go because they have no choice. And so I, I think we don't understand the magnitude of the crisis that we face, and I think that our children and our grandchildren are going to have really huge challenges to overcome. But, I also am [00:09:00] optimistic in that we are at our best as human beings when we are under pressure, and we're going to be under pressure, and we're going to have to innovate. We're going to have to come up with new ideas of how we do things. But the question is, what is it going to take to move the... most Americans, 77 percent, believe that climate change is real, caused by humans, and yet, we're not really doing anything about it. Temperatures continue to rise, carbon dioxide continues to accelerate in our atmosphere. That means temperatures will continue to rise and these extreme events are going to become more and more frequent. At what stage do we look at the cost? I mean, those two hurricanes have cost over a hundred billion dollars, and we lost 550 plus lives from those events. When does the cost, and when do the people who are causing that [00:10:00] cost actually start picking up the bill rather than the taxpayer or the poor person who lost their home and has no way of rebuilding it. To me, we need to start paying the true cost of using fossil fuels, and this will accelerate our transition to these alternative energies. Ellen Thompson: I talk with my students, when you think about a product, what you really need to think of is what's it cost from cradle to grave. We build all this stuff, and then we just throw it in a landfill. That's where methane, you know, then methane builds up. We don't even try to collect that methane. What do we do? We flare it. We put it back in the atmosphere. There's a concept, it's called industrial ecology, and Bob Kates thought of this a long time ago, He was a National Academy member. The beauty of that is [00:11:00] that you think cradle to grave. You can put factories together in a location where the output of one factory can actually be the raw material of the factory next door. You have waste heat. Ohio State has been good in terms of the generation of energy, because I remember when I would take my students over to the power plant. David Staley: The McCracken. Ellen Thompson: The McCracken power plant, and they were producing tremendous amount of heat burning that coal, and you could go early in the morning and you would see the coal trucks lined up coming in to the back of McCracken, for generating that, and what were they doing with the heat? They were just venting it. Then they realized, well, gee, we can use that heat, and you can turn turbines with heat. And then they got, you know, the combined heat and power. So, you can still use the coal, that's not the best fuel, but you can use the waste product, [00:12:00] which allows you to use less of the not so great fuel. There's a lot that can be done, and it just takes people who want to think beyond what we have now and think of, you know, how we might do things in the future, but then you need the political will, you need a political system that's going to help implement those strategies and taxes to fund it. Lonnie Thompson: I think, in the short term, it will be bad. The U. S. will pull out of the Paris Accord, and they will try to pass legislation so we cannot go back into the Paris Accord. But these are, you know, these are short term, and I would say short sighted decisions. But the fact is that in the last year, we have had temperatures above 1. 5 degrees warmer. We have already exceeded what we were globally going to try to prevent. Ellen Thompson: That was called the dangerous temperature [00:13:00] beyond which you do not want to go, and we're there. And it's not that we're just there. We have another half a degree of warming stored in the ocean that will ultimately, it's going to have to go somewhere eventually and it will come back into the atmosphere. So, we're at two degrees. Not one and a half. Lonnie Thompson: This is why all the glaciers in the mountains will disappear, and the only glacier ice will be in these freezers, preserved for the future, and so that's why we're so keen on getting a new facility with the latest technology, more efficient than those old compressors we have, and also we have as part of that, alternative energy. Those freezers take a lot of electricity, and this is coming mainly from coal right now, and we need to make the transition, and I think Ohio State should be a beacon of where the future is, and so we have [00:14:00] two costs, one is if you just stay on the current power supply, the other is if you go to the alternative, and the beauty of the alternative, yes, there's a cost up front, but long term, it pays for itself. Ellen Thompson: I think one of the most valuable resources that we have are our young people. Our students, right now, they're having the COP, the Conference of the Party 29, in Azerbaijan, and we have, we meaning Ohio State, with Bart Elmore, and with Nick... David Staley: nick Breyfogle. Ellen Thompson: Yes. And they are over there with 10 of our students. And those young people are our brightest, you know, students. They compete, they get 70 applications and can take 10. But they are over there learning the politics of global climate change, the science of global climate change. They have entry into some of these meetings where [00:15:00] countries are discussing how they're going to meet their, intended reductions. And, in my honors class, these students are hungry for finding ways that they can make a difference, and one of my students got up in front of the class at the end of class just yesterday to tell her colleagues about an organization that she's working with and that they are going to have a meeting next week and that they would like the other students to come because they want to talk about what idea can they grasp and then promote. They're concerned about climate change, and they should be. But they are the future. Lonnie Thompson: And this is one of the reasons we did the documentary. The driving reason was to inspire the next generation of young people that you can make a difference. But also to tell the climate crisis story. That, yeah, we have to deal with this and [00:16:00] action is required, but I believe that the change in this country has never come from the top down, and even in our last election, neither side really was talking about climate change and how it's going to impact us. But, the bottom up, these young people are really concerned, and they should be, about their future, and I think that we need to support them, and to help guide them, so that they can make a better world for all of us. So I think this is something we all need to contribute to. David Staley: I'm curious to know how field work has changed from when you first started off as graduate students, however many years ago. Ellen Thompson: Field work for each of us is quite different. David Staley: Mm hmm. Antarctica versus... Lonnie Thompson: The high mountains. David Staley: The high mountains, yeah. Lonnie Thompson: I would say that, you know, I did my PhD comparing the very first climate record from the very first ice [00:17:00] core drilled through Greenland, Camp Century, with the very first ice core drilled through Antarctica at Byrd Station. And it was in doing that, that I realized how big the world was, and, you know, we don't think about it, but 30 percent of the surface area of this planet is between 30 north and 30 south. It's tropical. And it's also where over 50 percent of our 8 billion people live. So, you really need to understand natural and human driven changes. Well, when we first had this idea, we found these aerial photographs that a colleague of ours who made atlases of the world, glaciers of the world, and he had boxes of aerial photos, and we found in there this Quelccaya Ice Cap. Took them to polar programs in the NSF, made the case that we really needed to connect Antarctica with Greenland with something in between. He listened, and he said, Lonnie, you know, that sounds very [00:18:00] important, but you know, I can't fund it, because it's not north of the Arctic Circle, and it's not south of the Antarctic Circle. So there was no agency to fund what we wanted to do. And I was in Antarctica in the winter of 73, 74; in February, I got a telex from the program manager that said that we have funded all of our real science projects, and we have $7,000 left. What could you do on that tropical glacier for $7,000? And I telex back, I think we could get there. And I had no idea what we were getting into, because it turned out it was a two day journey by horse from the end of the nearest road, the glacier was 18,600 feet, and, you know, I had never been up a real mountain in my life. And how are you going to get six tons of equipment in there? How are you going to get those ice cores out? And there was a decade of trial and error. I [00:19:00] mean, initially I thought, okay, we bring a drill from Antarctica, generator, we get a contract with the Peruvian Air Force for a helicopter, we fly it up there. We drill, take the ice out, job done. Turns out the helicopter couldn't get up there, and that's when we really started thinking, and this is where innovation comes in, and we were able to build the very first solar powered ice core drill. It was tested here on West Campus. We put the panels on top of the parking garage, brought in blocks of ice, drilled through it, seemed to work, and with that drill, we recovered not one, but two ice cores to bedrock. And it turned out to just be a wonderful, wonderful record. But, in those early days, the logistics of getting into and getting these ice cores out of these places is truly amazing, and it takes a team of people. I mean, you think about, in these tropical locations, [00:20:00] there's palm trees at the base of the mountain. I mean, you're in the polar regions on top, but you've got to bring that ice down and through there, and you've got to do it in, what logistically are often backward parts of the world. To bring an ice core out of the Himalayas, I mean, you could use Sherpas and porters. Now, when you're up in the glacier, they can actually carry them in a backpack. You get to the edge, you're still 4, 000 feet below where, on the plateau, where you could bring in a freezer truck, and so you've got to use local logistics, and if you're in the Himalayas, these are the yaks, and yaks can, we have insulated boxes, and you can get 6 meters a core in each of those boxes, good sized yak can carry two of those, but we drill five to six hundred meters, so you have to have a whole herd of yaks. And anyone who has a cat knows how a yak thinks, and trying to get them to go in a straight line, you have to have a special whistler that [00:21:00] keeps them calm until you get to those trucks, and then there's a dash across the plateau to the first freezer, which happens to be in Lhasa. Then they're air cargoed to Beijing, they got to go through Chinese Customs. Then we air cargo to Chicago, they got to go through U. S. Customs. They got to go in a tractor trailer, and then they bring it here to the freezers at Ohio State. And that's a month in transit, and you can lose the cores, all your efforts in this process. So the logistics and the commitment of the teams of people who have done this, is truly tremendous. And one of the things that happen as the world is warmed, is that we have to go to higher and higher elevations. And, at the same time, getting older and older, and it's harder and harder to go to higher and higher elevations. But, in 2019, we drilled the highest tropical mountain on Earth, right above the Amazon Basin, 22, [00:22:00] 205 feet, and I turned 71 going up that mountain. I'll never do it again. Uh, but the commitment of the team of people to this has been tremendous, and this is one of the reasons I am optimistic. When we drilled in the western Kunluns, far western northwest Tibet, and we had a team of 60 people. They were Americans, they were Russians, they were Chinese, they were Tibetan, they were South Americans, all working together. Ellen Thompson: And Europeans. Lonnie Thompson: And Europeans to recover ice cores at 22, 000 feet, and we were able to focus and accomplish that mission. You don't have to have the same culture. You don't have to have the same belief system. You don't have to have the same religion to do something that is in the best interest of everyone. And to me, this is my hope for the future with climate change is that we can work [00:23:00] together, and this problem will require building bridges between countries, understanding. So, those become very important. But, I just came back from an expedition in central Tibet, and the last time I was there was in 2000. I went to this same ice cap. And to get from the last town to the base camp, took five days, because there were no roads. This time, there are freeways across Tibet. The towns are solar powered. Around the towns, on the hills, are panels that drive the power for those cities. When I got to that last town, to get to base camp, took hour and a half by vehicle. We had a helicopter, took 20 minutes. And to go from that base camp up to 20, 000 feet by helicopter took 10 minutes. And at 76, that's okay. [00:24:00] So, so the logistics and the capability in getting into some of these remote areas has really changed since we started in this area. Ellen Thompson: I just showed in my honors class how the use of renewable energy is projected by the IEA to look like in 2050, and half of our power is going to come from renewables. The other half is going to come from fossil fuels. In terms of the renewables, solar is going to outstrip wind. It'll be solar and wind and then you get down to geothermal or hydro and then et cetera. But you looked at the top five countries investing in those, the United States was not listed. The number one country was China, and they're making this investment. The hotel that you were in was powered by solar panels. Lonnie Thompson: Truly amazing. I mean, even the room had an oxygen system, at 9 p. [00:25:00] m., would come on because you're at 5, 000 meters and people coming in on that freeway, they're not acclimatized to that elevation. But, you know, to me this is, if the U. S. wants to maintain leadership, they have to invest in their science. They have to invest in the future. That's the real future. It's not in the technologies we currently have. It's in those new ideas that will come from investing in science. And this is what I, I take my hat off to the Chinese. I mean, when I went there in 1984 when relations were just normalized, they were all on bicycles. I mean, they had nothing. No science program, nothing. And now... Ellen Thompson: The science leader at the institute where you were staying had him over for dinner, and they had to eat by candlelight because there was no electricity then. You know, now he has [00:26:00] a Tesla. Lonnie Thompson: He has three campuses. He's in the Chinese Academy of Science. I think they're doing the right thing, and we need, we need to be doing that. Ellen Thompson: Yeah, I'd like to amplify what Lonnie said, and that is, we need that investment in science. A lot of countries are investing in their young people and in technologies that, of which maybe 10 percent will be successful. Something like 90 percent of most inventions fail, but the 10 percent that make it change the world. And we need to have our students, our engineering students, and the scientists, the students need to be supported much more than they are here. Much better support for science and other countries. Lonnie Thompson: And I think we need to also integrate with our businesses, we all have to work together to find solutions. I have nothing against fossil [00:27:00] fuel companies. I mean, I grew up in West Virginia and I know how important those paychecks were for the families who depended on that work in the mine, but I also believe that these fossil fuel companies have to become energy companies. They have to embrace the new technologies that become much bigger than they currently are. And I think they can do that, and I think economically it will pay off for all of them and for us. Ellen Thompson: Just one more thing to add. I always have one more thing to add off of what Lonnie said, and I was talking about the support for the scientists, for science in general, but you know, we're sitting here at The Ohio State University and I cannot stress enough how important, more of the liberal arts, how important they are. No, they really, it's really important. If you think of global climate [00:28:00] change, it intersects everything. It intersects our health. We have to support our medical students. it affects our housing, it affects our transportation sector, all of that. We have a lot of territory as an educational institution that we need to cover. And so, when I say scientists, you know, I'm not just saying people like us. I'm saying the students who are studying how people think. When you think about it, what is the least predictable thing? We've got climate models that we can put data in and see what hurricanes are going to look like or what, we can project what temperatures might be 50 years from now. We can't predict how people are going to act and respond. Humans are the biggest unknown, when you think about a system. We need to study that as well. Lonnie Thompson: Yeah, we're complex. Climate is complex, but we're more [00:29:00] complex. David Staley: Ellen Moseley Thompson, Lonnie Thompson, thank you both very much. Ellen Thompson: That was a lot of fun. Lonnie Thompson: My pleasure. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.