like as the waves make towards the
pebbled Shore so do our minutes hasten
towards their end each one follows that
which goes before in sequent toil all
forward to contend Nativity once in the
main of light crawls to maturity
wherewith being crowned crooked eclipses
against its glory fight and time that
gave death now its gift confound time
doth transfix the flourish set on youth
delves the parallels in beauty’s brow
feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth
and nothing stands but for its scythe to
mow and yet two times in hope my verse
shall stand praising thy worth despite
its cruel hand so Shakespeare wrote this
sonnet in 1590 about ten years before
the turn of the seventeenth century and
I discovered it in about nineteen ninety
ten years before the 21st century and I
found myself in that post office sorting
parcels in the cold of the winter on my
winter break from college and I had no
idea that someday I’d be standing in
front of this beautiful crowd in
yearling Road that’s the state
climatologist of Ohio to talk about
climate change and time instead I had a
gut wrenching discontent that was
growing I chosen history major and some
fuzzy vision of a law career were just
not jiving with my passion for mountains
and glaciers and water I knew somehow
that something had to change and I found
some solidarity with the Bard
not to mention maybe some similar
highbrow questionable hairstyles but it
was an important moment almost like the
hamlet moment when I was looking at the
skull of my own life and realizing that
the limits of my own mortality were kind
of a motivational factor to get changing
but it was also those last two lines of
the sonnet really gripped my heart
because it was this courageous stand
against our more
because I really think inside each of us
there’s this eternity that reaches
beyond and so I knew that I had to do
something to change my circumstances now
I now have wonderful time markers in the
form of my kids that are standing here
on the pebbled Shore of Peru and Peru
becomes an important part of our story I
want to share tonight for bringing
together some of my passions
professionally but what I want to say is
the time is the denominator of change
and it’s not just mathematical although
it is that it’s existential and I think
there’s something about the way that we
come in common experience time and
change that has important implications
for the way that we as a society are
dealing or not with the reality of
climate change and so I think by putting
time in the denominator I want to show
how science has been able to quantify
the rate of change and show how actually
we are very uncommon right now and the
way that we’re experiencing climate
change when we compare it against all
versus history so for millennia for
thousands of years up until
Shakespeare’s time humanity had
experienced time as the seasons and the
rising and setting of the Sun the
natural progression
however round about 1590 the new urban
realities of the world were opening up
and society was going through massive
changes chocolate was getting from the
New World to England imagine that along
with coffee how radical of a change and
all of this is played off by Shakespeare
by naming his sonnet number 60 and
that’s deliberate because the number of
minutes in the hour and suddenly time
was now being quantified by an absolute
measure and reference frame I think of
the implications I mean I learned in
that post office the brutal reality of
an hourly wage we value eyes time in a
moreover once science got a hold of
absolute measures we could make
observations these observations were
going to counteract
to ative worldviews think of Galileo his
observations of the solar system we’re
gonna question our fundamental precepts
about Earth’s centrality and put the Sun
in the middle and it wasn’t going to be
easy in his transformation he suffered
coincidentally or not he also was the
first guy to measure temperature to come
up with a thermometer and he was able to
look at the change of kinetic energy and
air and come up with an absolute
reference frame and so for us as
climatologist suddenly we were able to
put a number a change in temperature to
the daily progression that we normally
had experienced just as the Sun coming
and going in at any given day the
seasons passing and there’s then a way
we could analyze these changes and
there’s all sorts of features we could
look at it in a waveform like this
climatology has a lot of waves I could
show you a graph like this as the state
climatologist Ohio here is a summary of
our daily temperatures for the month for
the whole year of 2017 and you notice
that for any given day the interval
between maximum and minimum temperatures
varies it’s quite chaotic that’s the
weather but overall you see a nice arc
and a waveform that shows our warming in
the summer and our cooling towards the
winter if we were to take a long-term
average say over 30 years which is the
climate normal period you could see how
those variations narrow and we get a
nice even waveform that shows us what we
can expect for highs and lows
temperatures in the range over the year
month to month in Ohio this is a great
moment to remind us all that weather is
not the same thing as climate so here’s
my son dressed for our first Buckeye
game just a few weeks ago when it was
the middle of a deluge we had to be
prepared for the exact conditions of the
atmosphere at a specific time and place
and that’s the weather and weather in
this regard is like the outfit so we had
to dawn these nice colorful Poncho’s to
sit and watch our first game well
if we take that same analogy climate
would be much more like the Wardrobe
that we wear okay that we have to be
prepared for the full range of
temperatures so climate by definition is
the long term statistics of weather over
many decades it’s not something we can
get instantaneously so we have to have a
long term basis of average and so here
we are in Peru as a family ready for the
full range of geographic conditions from
the desert coast to the high glacial
mountains near 20,000 feet and then back
down to the Amazon rainforest stopping
of course by Machu Picchu and we had to
pack quite a lot of clothes we also of
course brought our Buckeye pride to our
Peruvian host family climate when we
look at it globally and expand our
vision encapsulate this variability that
we see season to season and you can see
nicely in this photo montage that goes
through a year over and over again with
cloud free satellite images the growth
and decay of snow in the northern
hemisphere the greening and browning of
our Mesozoic forests in this part of the
world you can see the shift at solar
maximum around the equator well what
happens if we start to take a close
account in a quantitative measure of the
temperature change over the entire globe
and this assemblage is what we get and
this is showing you average conditions
of time in four year windows from the
point of which we started to be able to
get reliable measures of temperature
back in the 1880s and you can see
there’s warmer and cooler periods
spatially it’s variable but as that time
increment grows closer and closer to the
present notice how the colors get
yellower and redder what we’ve seeing
when we quantify the global average
conditions is a decidedly non wave form
of climate things are getting warmer if
we were to graph this as the temperature
change from the average you can see that
there is a fair bit of year-to-year
variability and waves there’s some
structure there some warm periods in the
40s and cooling off again but what’s
happening most recently since the 60s
seventy’s is an unequivocal Ryze and
that those waveforms are not coming back
down the total change we’ve seen over
this time about a degree centigrade or
1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last
hundred years and if we put that into a
longer time perspective we can see how
for example over the year 1000 to 2000
temperatures as reconstructed from
natural archives in ice cores and corals
and tree rings show what kind of cooling
but then those observations at the end
rise abruptly it’s almost like a hockey
stick on end and that’s what they call
this the hockey stick curve if we go
back to a time when natural climate was
much different 20,000 years ago we would
have been sitting here in Whitehall with
about a mile thick slab of ice over us
in the last glacial maximum and coming
out of that we would have risen up into
the Holocene that started about 10,000
years ago and you can see that that was
a mean annual temperature change for the
planet on the order about five degrees
centigrade well if you average that over
the five thousand year interval you get
about a point one degree change in
temperature per century we’ll keep in
mind what I just told you that most
recent change we’re seeing now looks
almost like a straight line up it’s
about nine times faster at about 0.9
degrees for a hundred years if we go in
and going to go into the future that
line continued to go straight up by
model projections this by the way is
called the wheelchair curve because it
kind of looks like that profile of a
wheelchair well just like climates the
long-term spatial average I personally
had to get out and travel the world to
find my kind of passion and change in my
career and it brought me to prove thanks
to the fulbright organization I lived
for a full year there is a dissertation
student literally tracing ancient
glaciers to figure out the relative
rates of change and you can see here how
we’re standing on the slope of an
ancient moraine which is a pile of
debris left by a huge extent of the
glaciers that then dammed some beautiful
colored lakes the modern glaciers are
high and steep compared to these much
larger glaciers
but when I started to then quantify the
change we saw in the ancient licious
versus the modern I could compare rates
of change and this is what I saw the
animal a glacier in 1998 when I first
got to Peru looked something like this
by 2015 when I was back there on
sabbatical it was much more decreased
and if you can look carefully you can
see not only the frontal extent of that
glacier but in the middle of the glacier
we’ve seen a hundred meters of vertical
change this is a massive volume change
in fact when we quantify this by our
best estimates of the ancient extent of
glaciers things are happening now to
rate two to twelve times faster than we
could have predicted well why is this
happening there’s many other TED talks
that can go into much more detail about
this I’m gonna do just summarize from a
trump approved report that came out last
year the climate science special report
shows unequivocally that it’s really
human forcing that’s causing us and here
when we think about what we want to do
to prevent much more warming the the
most recent report that came out this
very month from the IPCC runs a scenario
to see what it would take for us to stop
warming at one and a half degrees we’ve
already warmed a degree can you imagine
what its gonna be like to cut carbon
emissions to about zero by 2050 that’s
30 years from now well here’s what I got
to concede my limits I don’t have an
answer to this science doesn’t have an
answer to how we can change I can’t
imagine how to do this because frankly
I’m addicted to oil all of my life
trajectories showed you was premise on
cheap hydrocarbons in the form of fossil
fuels flying repeatedly to Ireland to
court and then marry the Bell of Belfast
City my beautiful bride took a lot of
fossil fuels so I want to wrap this up
by reminding us that science has certain
role here we can measure and give us
some sense about how we might change and
this is a quote from another Belfast
e’en born in Belfast moved to Glasgow
University Lord Kelvin famous for the
Cal
in temperature scale and thermodynamic
and insights really a revolutionary
thinker and he put it this way to
measure is to know if you can’t not
measure it you cannot approve it and he
had great prowess with this adage
however he’s also a good example of some
of the limitations of the imagination of
science he went to his deathbed
convinced that we’d never see flight no
balloon or no aeroplane will ever
practically be successful look at his
death was 1907 well it wasn’t just a
couple years later when a couple
hard-working bicycle brothers from Ohio
proved him wrong and so I want to bring
us back to where I started I think it
comes back to this eternal desire to be
beyond ourselves and I think change is
that commitment to a kid just everyday
persistent change inspired by something
bigger than ourselves where we lay aside
our own egos and get on with business
that’s different and just like an addict
who needs recovery through a whole
community to face those objective facts
we have to reach for some hope and now I
don’t really have the answer but I do
have a couple examples that I can share
with and you can spell hope in your own
way I think there’s a infinite variety
I’m kind of favoring this one recently
harnessing organic potential energy did
you know that the first windmill was
created right here in Ohio in 1888
Charles brush-up in Cleveland had this
wonderful monstrosity going to power his
mansion with a whole bed of batteries
for 14 years 50 feet wide was only
donating 12 kilowatts but he figured out
the Dynamo and the storage capacity for
this energy this is not beyond us
another great inspirational example Jim
Probst of West Virginia who grew his
whole life within the coal industry now
retired as a cabinet maker is inspired
to think about the world he’s leaving
behind for his grandkids
and he’s taking an active role in just
advocating for a way to price carbon to
come up with some solutions that could
equitably address this problem
he calls it climate justice well again I
think we all have our own source of hope
but it comes from this eternal part of
us that I believe extends our finite
mortality and I really think that
despite the suffering that’s upon us and
that will be upon us I have to be a
realist I do think we can never lose
sight of that infinite hope and I
believe that we can change our lives and
not our climate thank you very much [Applause]
pebbled Shore so do our minutes hasten
towards their end each one follows that
which goes before in sequent toil all
forward to contend Nativity once in the
main of light crawls to maturity
wherewith being crowned crooked eclipses
against its glory fight and time that
gave death now its gift confound time
doth transfix the flourish set on youth
delves the parallels in beauty’s brow
feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth
and nothing stands but for its scythe to
mow and yet two times in hope my verse
shall stand praising thy worth despite
its cruel hand so Shakespeare wrote this
sonnet in 1590 about ten years before
the turn of the seventeenth century and
I discovered it in about nineteen ninety
ten years before the 21st century and I
found myself in that post office sorting
parcels in the cold of the winter on my
winter break from college and I had no
idea that someday I’d be standing in
front of this beautiful crowd in
yearling Road that’s the state
climatologist of Ohio to talk about
climate change and time instead I had a
gut wrenching discontent that was
growing I chosen history major and some
fuzzy vision of a law career were just
not jiving with my passion for mountains
and glaciers and water I knew somehow
that something had to change and I found
some solidarity with the Bard
not to mention maybe some similar
highbrow questionable hairstyles but it
was an important moment almost like the
hamlet moment when I was looking at the
skull of my own life and realizing that
the limits of my own mortality were kind
of a motivational factor to get changing
but it was also those last two lines of
the sonnet really gripped my heart
because it was this courageous stand
against our more
because I really think inside each of us
there’s this eternity that reaches
beyond and so I knew that I had to do
something to change my circumstances now
I now have wonderful time markers in the
form of my kids that are standing here
on the pebbled Shore of Peru and Peru
becomes an important part of our story I
want to share tonight for bringing
together some of my passions
professionally but what I want to say is
the time is the denominator of change
and it’s not just mathematical although
it is that it’s existential and I think
there’s something about the way that we
come in common experience time and
change that has important implications
for the way that we as a society are
dealing or not with the reality of
climate change and so I think by putting
time in the denominator I want to show
how science has been able to quantify
the rate of change and show how actually
we are very uncommon right now and the
way that we’re experiencing climate
change when we compare it against all
versus history so for millennia for
thousands of years up until
Shakespeare’s time humanity had
experienced time as the seasons and the
rising and setting of the Sun the
natural progression
however round about 1590 the new urban
realities of the world were opening up
and society was going through massive
changes chocolate was getting from the
New World to England imagine that along
with coffee how radical of a change and
all of this is played off by Shakespeare
by naming his sonnet number 60 and
that’s deliberate because the number of
minutes in the hour and suddenly time
was now being quantified by an absolute
measure and reference frame I think of
the implications I mean I learned in
that post office the brutal reality of
an hourly wage we value eyes time in a
moreover once science got a hold of
absolute measures we could make
observations these observations were
going to counteract
to ative worldviews think of Galileo his
observations of the solar system we’re
gonna question our fundamental precepts
about Earth’s centrality and put the Sun
in the middle and it wasn’t going to be
easy in his transformation he suffered
coincidentally or not he also was the
first guy to measure temperature to come
up with a thermometer and he was able to
look at the change of kinetic energy and
air and come up with an absolute
reference frame and so for us as
climatologist suddenly we were able to
put a number a change in temperature to
the daily progression that we normally
had experienced just as the Sun coming
and going in at any given day the
seasons passing and there’s then a way
we could analyze these changes and
there’s all sorts of features we could
look at it in a waveform like this
climatology has a lot of waves I could
show you a graph like this as the state
climatologist Ohio here is a summary of
our daily temperatures for the month for
the whole year of 2017 and you notice
that for any given day the interval
between maximum and minimum temperatures
varies it’s quite chaotic that’s the
weather but overall you see a nice arc
and a waveform that shows our warming in
the summer and our cooling towards the
winter if we were to take a long-term
average say over 30 years which is the
climate normal period you could see how
those variations narrow and we get a
nice even waveform that shows us what we
can expect for highs and lows
temperatures in the range over the year
month to month in Ohio this is a great
moment to remind us all that weather is
not the same thing as climate so here’s
my son dressed for our first Buckeye
game just a few weeks ago when it was
the middle of a deluge we had to be
prepared for the exact conditions of the
atmosphere at a specific time and place
and that’s the weather and weather in
this regard is like the outfit so we had
to dawn these nice colorful Poncho’s to
sit and watch our first game well
if we take that same analogy climate
would be much more like the Wardrobe
that we wear okay that we have to be
prepared for the full range of
temperatures so climate by definition is
the long term statistics of weather over
many decades it’s not something we can
get instantaneously so we have to have a
long term basis of average and so here
we are in Peru as a family ready for the
full range of geographic conditions from
the desert coast to the high glacial
mountains near 20,000 feet and then back
down to the Amazon rainforest stopping
of course by Machu Picchu and we had to
pack quite a lot of clothes we also of
course brought our Buckeye pride to our
Peruvian host family climate when we
look at it globally and expand our
vision encapsulate this variability that
we see season to season and you can see
nicely in this photo montage that goes
through a year over and over again with
cloud free satellite images the growth
and decay of snow in the northern
hemisphere the greening and browning of
our Mesozoic forests in this part of the
world you can see the shift at solar
maximum around the equator well what
happens if we start to take a close
account in a quantitative measure of the
temperature change over the entire globe
and this assemblage is what we get and
this is showing you average conditions
of time in four year windows from the
point of which we started to be able to
get reliable measures of temperature
back in the 1880s and you can see
there’s warmer and cooler periods
spatially it’s variable but as that time
increment grows closer and closer to the
present notice how the colors get
yellower and redder what we’ve seeing
when we quantify the global average
conditions is a decidedly non wave form
of climate things are getting warmer if
we were to graph this as the temperature
change from the average you can see that
there is a fair bit of year-to-year
variability and waves there’s some
structure there some warm periods in the
40s and cooling off again but what’s
happening most recently since the 60s
seventy’s is an unequivocal Ryze and
that those waveforms are not coming back
down the total change we’ve seen over
this time about a degree centigrade or
1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last
hundred years and if we put that into a
longer time perspective we can see how
for example over the year 1000 to 2000
temperatures as reconstructed from
natural archives in ice cores and corals
and tree rings show what kind of cooling
but then those observations at the end
rise abruptly it’s almost like a hockey
stick on end and that’s what they call
this the hockey stick curve if we go
back to a time when natural climate was
much different 20,000 years ago we would
have been sitting here in Whitehall with
about a mile thick slab of ice over us
in the last glacial maximum and coming
out of that we would have risen up into
the Holocene that started about 10,000
years ago and you can see that that was
a mean annual temperature change for the
planet on the order about five degrees
centigrade well if you average that over
the five thousand year interval you get
about a point one degree change in
temperature per century we’ll keep in
mind what I just told you that most
recent change we’re seeing now looks
almost like a straight line up it’s
about nine times faster at about 0.9
degrees for a hundred years if we go in
and going to go into the future that
line continued to go straight up by
model projections this by the way is
called the wheelchair curve because it
kind of looks like that profile of a
wheelchair well just like climates the
long-term spatial average I personally
had to get out and travel the world to
find my kind of passion and change in my
career and it brought me to prove thanks
to the fulbright organization I lived
for a full year there is a dissertation
student literally tracing ancient
glaciers to figure out the relative
rates of change and you can see here how
we’re standing on the slope of an
ancient moraine which is a pile of
debris left by a huge extent of the
glaciers that then dammed some beautiful
colored lakes the modern glaciers are
high and steep compared to these much
larger glaciers
but when I started to then quantify the
change we saw in the ancient licious
versus the modern I could compare rates
of change and this is what I saw the
animal a glacier in 1998 when I first
got to Peru looked something like this
by 2015 when I was back there on
sabbatical it was much more decreased
and if you can look carefully you can
see not only the frontal extent of that
glacier but in the middle of the glacier
we’ve seen a hundred meters of vertical
change this is a massive volume change
in fact when we quantify this by our
best estimates of the ancient extent of
glaciers things are happening now to
rate two to twelve times faster than we
could have predicted well why is this
happening there’s many other TED talks
that can go into much more detail about
this I’m gonna do just summarize from a
trump approved report that came out last
year the climate science special report
shows unequivocally that it’s really
human forcing that’s causing us and here
when we think about what we want to do
to prevent much more warming the the
most recent report that came out this
very month from the IPCC runs a scenario
to see what it would take for us to stop
warming at one and a half degrees we’ve
already warmed a degree can you imagine
what its gonna be like to cut carbon
emissions to about zero by 2050 that’s
30 years from now well here’s what I got
to concede my limits I don’t have an
answer to this science doesn’t have an
answer to how we can change I can’t
imagine how to do this because frankly
I’m addicted to oil all of my life
trajectories showed you was premise on
cheap hydrocarbons in the form of fossil
fuels flying repeatedly to Ireland to
court and then marry the Bell of Belfast
City my beautiful bride took a lot of
fossil fuels so I want to wrap this up
by reminding us that science has certain
role here we can measure and give us
some sense about how we might change and
this is a quote from another Belfast
e’en born in Belfast moved to Glasgow
University Lord Kelvin famous for the
Cal
in temperature scale and thermodynamic
and insights really a revolutionary
thinker and he put it this way to
measure is to know if you can’t not
measure it you cannot approve it and he
had great prowess with this adage
however he’s also a good example of some
of the limitations of the imagination of
science he went to his deathbed
convinced that we’d never see flight no
balloon or no aeroplane will ever
practically be successful look at his
death was 1907 well it wasn’t just a
couple years later when a couple
hard-working bicycle brothers from Ohio
proved him wrong and so I want to bring
us back to where I started I think it
comes back to this eternal desire to be
beyond ourselves and I think change is
that commitment to a kid just everyday
persistent change inspired by something
bigger than ourselves where we lay aside
our own egos and get on with business
that’s different and just like an addict
who needs recovery through a whole
community to face those objective facts
we have to reach for some hope and now I
don’t really have the answer but I do
have a couple examples that I can share
with and you can spell hope in your own
way I think there’s a infinite variety
I’m kind of favoring this one recently
harnessing organic potential energy did
you know that the first windmill was
created right here in Ohio in 1888
Charles brush-up in Cleveland had this
wonderful monstrosity going to power his
mansion with a whole bed of batteries
for 14 years 50 feet wide was only
donating 12 kilowatts but he figured out
the Dynamo and the storage capacity for
this energy this is not beyond us
another great inspirational example Jim
Probst of West Virginia who grew his
whole life within the coal industry now
retired as a cabinet maker is inspired
to think about the world he’s leaving
behind for his grandkids
and he’s taking an active role in just
advocating for a way to price carbon to
come up with some solutions that could
equitably address this problem
he calls it climate justice well again I
think we all have our own source of hope
but it comes from this eternal part of
us that I believe extends our finite
mortality and I really think that
despite the suffering that’s upon us and
that will be upon us I have to be a
realist I do think we can never lose
sight of that infinite hope and I
believe that we can change our lives and
not our climate thank you very much [Applause]
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