Moderator: Vanessa Schweizer (University of Waterloo)

 

Panel: Madhur Anand (University of Guelph)

           Chris Bauch (University of Waterloo)

             Marek Stastna (University of Waterloo)

 

Q: We have quite a distinguished panel of experts who look at the climate in different ways, using different math to do it, and also looking at different behaviors of the climate system. Would any of you say there are some uniquely Canadian aspects of climate modelling?

 

A: Canada's a vast country, but there are vast parts of the country that have almost no people. So, the experience with the climate system is actually limited to this thin strand within 150 kilometers of the US border, basically from east to west. One problem that a lot of us don't think about is the question of permafrost. Vast sections of Canada's north have all the land underlain by frozen soil. As the climate warms, a lot of that will melt and it'll melt in unusual ways and change the way the land interacts with the atmosphere. You might have large landslides, you might have changes in vegetation. It’s not a uniquely Canadian problem – Finland, Russia and northern parts of Norway would be interested in the same things – but it an almost uniquely Canadian problem.

 

The other one that's close to home is that we have all these amazing inland seas called the Great Lakes, that a lot of us live near, but perhaps don't think of very much. They have some analogies to the open ocean, which a lot of the world studies, but they have some important differences and make for one particularly Canadian aspect.

 

A: As the climate changes, we'll see a shift in the range that some species can persist in, and I think many Canadians are interested in whether species will be able to migrate or live in the warmer areas that are further north than they're used to. That's a big open question that's very relevant to Canada as well as countries like Russia and Finland.

 

Q: Once you've presented your models, what are some of the biggest barriers to getting the recommendations mobilized into climate action? It seems as though the science and math are clear, yet sufficient measures aren't being taken to mitigate impacts. How do you, as climate scientists, deal with the frustration of explaining what will happen yet not seeing enough done to prevent disaster?

 

A: We are in a climate emergency. I started collaborating with Chris [Bauch] on some modelling having to do with how we examine not just the negative impacts that humans can have, but the positive impacts as well. It's our only way out. So that's one thing scientists can do. And interdisciplinary research between scientists and social scientists and others can really help bridge the gap between science and society. And then, of course, there's interfacing with policymakers more directly through working with NGOs, working with governmental agencies.

 

A: Well, it's hard for a couple of reasons. Ideas are new and they take a while to take root. Climate change is not something that's been discussed in modern terms for hundreds of years; it's been discussed for decades. Historically, we've expected a lot of our politicians to be quite literate about the law. You have a lot of lawyers traditionally going to politics, and we've not necessarily had the same expectations of scientists. We don't even have systematic programs like they do in the US for bringing scientists to Congress. There used to be a science panel that reported to Parliament, and then that was dissolved at one point.

 

The third point is there's a pretty large amount of interest that works against climate change. There are people who have strong economic interests in doing the same things that they've always done to continue to make large sums of money, and they can spend much more than any scientists on advertising campaigns and other ways to move public opinion. Now having said all that, I think we've done remarkably well because people are really well-meaning. And it really does come down to talking to different kinds of thinkers than yourself and coming up with new angles and new ways of looking at this stuff. So people shouldn't give up hope. It is hard, but given the short amount of time in which we've had this effort going on, we've done okay. It's just that now because it's accelerating, it's really important that the rubber hit the road in the next half-decade or so.

 

Q: Susie Wen, age 13, asks if it’s possible to use climate change or its effects to our advantage, such as a source of energy, while mitigating negative effects on the environment?

 

A: We actually have recently worked on a project with another collaborator at the University of Waterloo, which is a study that looked at modelling and math applied to the synergistic effects of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing air pollution and where those two problems come together. Air pollution is another very big problem in many parts of the world, not so much in Canada yet, although we are having the forest fires in Alberta right now creating air problems.

 

But in other parts of the world, where there's stuff like coal burning and greater population density, there are a lot of really bad air pollution problems. Some of the mitigation techniques that we're going to put forward will help with other aspects of human health, like air pollution or just general changes in diet and how a more climate-friendly diet could be healthier for humans. So, I would like to think about it in those terms. But we can't just sit back and say, well, that's going to be better. Scientists have done more complex, integrated studies where they look at not just one factor in isolation, but several factors simultaneously and there's no question that we have to mitigate climate change.

 

A: The fundamental good thing that could come out of climate change is that humans learn how to put the price on common things like air and water. That's one thing we just haven't done yet as a species. If we come up with some diverse but generally accepted set of rules for putting a price on clean air, clean water, some acceptable level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, then, then that will be something good that'll come of it. You can come up with engineering examples. I mean, maybe the best current example is how much cheaper solar panels have become because of the interest in renewable energy.

 

A: Thank you for those reflections. When I was working on my Masters of Environmental Studies, I recall that sometimes people were really offended by the idea of putting a price on clean air. But the fact that we have not put a price on it is why people think it's no big deal. They think, you know, if I pollute, whatever – the atmosphere is so huge, it doesn't make an impact. And we have this long history, since the Industrial Revolution, of this kind of behavior. That's part of why we have the problem that we have now. So now if people realize, oh, actually we want to value clean air, we want to value an atmosphere that's not overloaded with greenhouse gases, we, we need to figure out how to develop those market signals.

 

Q: How does education need to change in order to prepare students to address the challenges in our climate crisis?

 

A: So much of our mathematics education is formula-based. It's about this is the right answer and this is the formula. And there are important principles of mathematics. Everybody should know how to specify the slope of a line, maybe intercept the difference between a line and a parabola and things like that. But once you get past these very basic facts, so much more of math could be exploration-based. Because a lot of climate stuff doesn't come in a nice tidy formula, it comes in data packages. And then you start getting into AI and things like that. Those are fundamentally database techniques. So, I think getting exposure to that from a young age and losing that kind of timidity that we have in mathematics class, would be a huge advancement – not just for climate, but in general for education.

 

A: I think a lot of the new mathematics is actually existing mathematics. It's just applied in a new way. And to use this to attack climate problems requires interdisciplinary work. As a mathematician, I can't just sit in my office and do mathematics on some sheet paper and then publish it and I'm done. I should really be talking to policy makers or stakeholders and saying, well, what problems are you facing? What are the questions you're interested in? And then developing research questions from that involving them throughout the whole process.

 

Q: Dennis Kulinchenko, age 13, asks if we can better predict how climate change will affect the weather forecast and whether we can adjust it using those predictions?

 

MS: It's a cool question and it's a very hard question. One of the things to remember is that when you're trying to study the climate, you're trying to study lots of things all at once: the atmosphere, the oceans, maybe a little bit of ice thrown in there, some ground, some trees and all the rest of that stuff. So, you write down some rules for this and then you have to put it into a computer. And how much detail you can specify depends on the size of your computer. When I was a little kid, my dad used to sort his punch cards at the breakfast table because he was going off to do a big calculation. I now have a thousand times more power than that very fancy computer from the 1970s right in my phone. In the same way, the computers I program on allow me to do a better job at telling me about the climate on smaller-sized boxes.

 

When you talk about climate, in a perfect world you would talk about lots and lots of weather and then average it out to tell you something about the overall pattern of how weather is changing. We can't quite afford to do that, but we're getting close. There are models where the climate model and the weather model are becoming one, so that would be the perfect answer. But the answer most of the time is a process called downscaling, which is really difficult to describe, but it's a way to try to incorporate some of the noisy parts of weather into climate models.

 

Now, what do we do with all that information? One of the things we try to do more of is provide seasonal predictions. Sometimes we're quite good at it and sometimes we're not very good at it. One big problem if you've gone on vacation in the recent past, there is large amounts of seaweed washing up around Florida and the Caribbean. We don't really know how to predict these giant sargassum blooms. So, the game plan going forward is to take the stuff we kind of know about the world as a whole and bring it down to the scales that affect us as one person at a time.

 

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