[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
EARTH'S THERMOMETERS:
GLACIAL AND ICE SHEET MELT
IN A CHANGING CLIMATE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JULY 11, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-35
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
36-916PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
ZOE LOFGREN, California FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma,
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois Ranking Member
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon MO BROOKS, Alabama
AMI BERA, California, BILL POSEY, Florida
Vice Chair RANDY WEBER, Texas
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania BRIAN BABIN, Texas
LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
BRAD SHERMAN, California TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee PETE OLSON, Texas
JERRY McNERNEY, California ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
PAUL TONKO, New York JIM BAIRD, Indiana
BILL FOSTER, Illinois JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington
DON BEYER, Virginia JENNIFFER GONZALEZ-COLON, Puerto
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida Rico
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois VACANCY
KATIE HILL, California
BEN McADAMS, Utah
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
C O N T E N T S
July 11, 2019
Page
Hearing Charter.................................................. 2
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 9
Written statement............................................ 10
Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 11
Written statement............................................ 11
Witnesses:
Dr. Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences and
Associate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute,
Pennsylvania State University
Oral Statement............................................... 13
Written Statement............................................ 16
Dr. Robin E. Bell, PGI Lamont Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory, Columbia University
Oral Statement............................................... 28
Written Statement............................................ 31
Dr. Twila A. Moon, Research Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data
Center's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences
Oral Statement............................................... 43
Written Statement............................................ 45
Dr. Gabriel J. Wolken, Research Scientist and Manager, Climate
and Cryosphere Hazards Program, Division of Geological &
Geophysical Surveys, Alaska Department of Natural Resources
Oral Statement............................................... 58
Written Statement............................................ 60
Dr. W. Tad Pfeffer, Fellow, Institute of Arctic and Alpine
Research, University of Colorado Boulder
Oral Statement............................................... 67
Written Statement............................................ 69
Discussion....................................................... 78
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Dr. Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences and
Associate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute,
Pennsylvania State University.................................. 110
Dr. Robin E. Bell, PGI Lamont Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory, Columbia University......................... 116
Dr. Twila A. Moon, Research Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data
Center's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences....................................................... 120
Dr. Gabriel J. Wolken, Research Scientist and Manager, Climate
and Cryosphere Hazards Program, Division of Geological &
Geophysical Surveys, Alaska Department of Natural Resources.... 123
Dr. W. Tad Pfeffer, Fellow, Institute of Arctic and Alpine
Research, University of Colorado Boulder....................... 126
Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record
Letter submitted by Representative Suzanne Bonamici, Committee on
Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 130
EARTH'S THERMOMETERS:
GLACIAL AND ICE SHEET MELT
IN A CHANGING CLIMATE
----------
THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2019
House of Representatives,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:01 a.m., in
room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eddie
Bernice Johnson [Chairwoman of the Committee] presiding.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Good morning. This hearing will come to
order. And without objection, the Chair is authorized to
declare recess at any time.
I'd like to welcome our witnesses to the Science, Space,
and Technology Committee's hearing entitled, ``Earth's
Thermometers: Glacial and Ice Sheet Melt in a Changing
Climate.'' It seems as though we're bombarded on an almost
daily basis with news articles and reports saying that the
world's ice is melting faster than ever. As a matter of fact, I
almost invited Mr. Young from Alaska, who moved to Alaska
because it was too warm in the United States proper. Since I
read about Alaska last week, I thought he might want to hear
this.
Pictures show ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica
crashing into the oceans before our eyes. Just last month, a
piece of ice the size of the State of Delaware broke off
Antarctica, and Greenland was reported to have experienced the
biggest June ice melt event on record with temperatures 40
degrees above normal.
The rate of change in the Arctic and Antarctic has been
quickening in recent years, according to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and numerous other scientific
bodies. For example, a study published in Nature in January
that was led by an international team of more than six dozen
researchers tells us that melt rates have more than tripled in
western Antarctica in the last 25 years.
Mountain glaciers are also experiencing rapid rates of
change. Just a few weeks ago, declassified U.S. spy satellite
data clearly showed that Himalayan glaciers lost 25 percent of
their ice over the last 40 years. This is equivalent to 8
billion tons of water each year. This puts the hundreds of
millions of people in that region who depend on glacial melt as
a freshwater source at risk.
According to the 2014 IPCC Assessment Report, without
significant reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions,
mountain glaciers will lose 35 to 85 percent of their ice by
the end of the century under a high emissions scenario. Newer
reports indicate that IPCC estimates might even be conservative
and that glacial and ice sheet melt rates could even be higher.
We need to be listening to Earth's glaciers and ice sheets and
what they're telling us about the changing climate.
Glacial and ice sheet melt is responsible for two-thirds of
the 8 inches of sea-level rise that we've seen in the last 200
years from the anthropogenic warming, and that sea-level rise
is only expected to continue. The western Antarctic ice sheet,
which everyone is watching because it is thought to be the most
unstable ice sheet, could add another 11 feet of additional
sea-level rise if it collapses, which some experts expect could
happen at some point. Such an increase would mean many coastal
cities would be flooded, and the world as we know it would be
different.
What's happening in Greenland, Antarctica, and the high
mountain regions matters to us all. Glaciers and ice sheets
play vital roles in regulating Earth's climate and weather,
provide over two-thirds of the Earth's freshwater supply for
drinking and agricultural uses, support fisheries and ecosystem
health, and run hydropower plants. I'm glad we have the
opportunity to hear today from some of the Nation's leading
glacial and ice sheet experts.
And I'd like to welcome Dr. Richard Alley, who last
testified before this Committee in 2010. I also want to
announce that later today we will be hosting a screening of the
award-winning documentary ``Chasing Ice'' that documents
changing ice in the Arctic. It will be followed by a question-
and-answer session with two of our witnesses, Dr. Pfeffer, who
was a scientific advisor to the film, and Dr. Moon. The
screening is free and open to the public, and I hope all of you
will join us.
This Committee plays an important role in authorizing both
climate science and the research needed to better understand
glaciers and ice sheets. Since the 1990s, NASA's (National
Aeronautics and Space Administration's) ice-monitoring
satellites have led to major discoveries of ice sheet dynamics
and melt, while the National Science Foundation (NSF) has
funded major field expeditions in ice sheets. I look forward to
today's discussion with our distinguished panel to understand
how Congress and the Committee in particular can address the
critical research gaps in this field.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]
Good morning. I would like to welcome our witnesses to the
Science, Space, and Technology Committee's hearing entitled
``Earth's Thermometers: Glacial and Ice Sheet Melt in a
Changing Climate.''
It seems as though we're bombarded on an almost daily basis
with news articles and reports saying that the world's ice is
melting faster than ever. Pictures show ice sheets in Greenland
and Antarctica crashing into the oceans before our eyes. Just
last month, a piece of ice the size of Delaware broke off of
Antarctica, and Greenland was reported to have experienced the
biggest June ice melt event on record with temperatures 40
degrees above normal.
The rate of change in the Arctic and Antarctic has been
quickening in recent years, according to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change and numerous other scientific bodies.
For example, a study published in Nature in January that was
led by an international team of more than six dozen researchers
tells us that melt rates have more than tripled in Western
Antarctica in the last 25 years.
Mountain glaciers are also experiencing rapid rates of
change. Just a few weeks ago, declassified U.S. spy satellite
data clearly showed that Himalayan glaciers lost 25% of their
ice over the last 40 years. That is equivalent to eight billion
tons of water each year. This puts the hundreds of millions of
people in that region who depend on glacial melt as a fresh
water source at risk.
According to the 2014 IPCC Assessment Report, without
significant reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions,
mountain glaciers will lose 35 to 85% of their ice by the end
of the century under a high emissions scenario. Newer reports
indicate that the IPCC estimates might even be conservative and
that glacial and ice sheet melt rates could be even higher.
We need to be listening to Earth's glaciers and ice sheets
and what they're telling us about the changing climate. Glacial
and ice sheet melt is responsible for two-thirds of the 8
inches of sea level rise we've seen in the last 200 years from
anthropogenic warming, and that sea level rise is only expected
to continue. The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, which everyone is
watching because it is thought to be the most unstable ice
sheet, could add another 11 feet of additional sea level rise
if it collapses, which some experts expect could happen at some
point. Such an increase would mean many coastal cities would be
flooded and the world as we know it would be different.
What's happening in Greenland, Antarctica, and in high
mountain regions matters to us all. Glaciers and ice sheets
play vital roles in regulating Earth's climate and weather,
provide over two-thirds of Earth's freshwater supply for
drinking and agricultural uses, support fisheries and ecosystem
health, and run hydropower plants. I'm glad we have the
opportunity to hear today from some of the nation's leading
glacial and ice sheet experts. We're lucky to have five
distinguished glaciologists here today, and I would like to
welcome back Dr. Richard Alley, who last testified before this
Committee in 2010.
I also want to announce that later today we will be hosting
a screening of the award-winning documentary Chasing Ice that
documents changing ice in the Arctic. It will be followed by a
question and answer session with two of our witnesses, Dr.
Pfeffer (FEFF-er), who was a scientific advisor to the film,
and Dr. Moon. The screening is free and open to the public, and
I hope you can join us.
This Committee plays an important role in authorizing both
climate science and the research needed to better understand
glaciers and ice sheets. Since the 1990s, NASA's ice monitoring
satellites have led to major discoveries of ice sheet dynamics
and melt, while the National Science Foundation has funded
major field expeditions to ice sheets. I look forward to
today's discussion with our distinguished panel to understand
how Congress, and this Committee in particular, can address the
critical research gaps in this field. Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. And I now will offer our Ranking Member
his opening statement time.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this
hearing, which is another opportunity to examine the impacts of
a changing climate on our country and the world at large. While
today's hearing will examine the underlying science of this
issue and concerns about climate change, I'd like for us to
also focus on the agricultural, economic, and geopolitical
consequences we can expect from glacial and sea ice melt and,
more importantly, how we can address those.
For instance, polar ice sheets cool ocean currents, which
affect global weather patterns. As I've mentioned a time or
two, weather issues are of paramount importance to farmers and
ranchers in Oklahoma and around the world. We do not have a
firm grip on how these weather patterns will change due to
melting and how we can prepare for these changes.
I also want to consider the economic and geopolitical
consequences of glacial and sea ice melt. Five countries,
including America and Russia, border the Arctic. Territorial
disputes in this region will take on greater importance as
resource-rich land and new shipping routes are revealed.
There are significant economic implications from the energy
rights, mineral deposits, and tourism opportunities. For
instance, Russia is claiming that some newly accessible routes
should not be considered international waterways but a part of
their sovereign territory. Better research will give us greater
insights into how we can expect shipping routes to change so we
can prepare to address these issues.
As the Science Committee, we have a responsibility to
address our national research priorities, and those must be
broader than just how the climate's changing. We need to
understand the specific effects so we can adopt and continue
our economic growth.
During our first full hearing of this Congress, Members of
the Committee discussed how we could embrace a broader
portfolio of basic research, energy innovation, and competitive
technology to make energy production cleaner, more efficient,
and less costly. I hope we can spend more time considering
research into innovative technologies like nuclear reactors,
battery storage, and carbon capture.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for being here today, and I
look forward to our discussion. And I yield back, Madam Chair.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]
Chairwoman Johnson, thank you for holding this hearing,
which is another opportunity to examine the impacts of a
changing climate on our country and the world at large.
While today's hearing will examine the underlying science
of this issue and concerns about climate change, I'd like for
us to also focus on the agricultural, economic, and
geopolitical consequences we can expect from glacial and sea
ice melt and-more importantly-how we can address those.
For instance, polar ice sheets cool ocean currents which
affect global weather patterns. As I've mentioned once or
twice, weather issues are of paramount importance to farmers
and ranchers in Oklahoma and around the world. We do not have a
firm grasp of how these weather patterns will change due to
melting and how we can prepare for these changes.
I also want to consider the economic and geopolitical
consequences of glacial and sea ice melt. Five countries,
including America and Russia, border the Arctic. Territorial
disputes in this region will take on greater importance as
resource-rich land and new shipping routes are revealed.
There are significant economic implications from the energy
rights, mineral deposits, and tourism opportunities. For
instance, Russia is claiming that some newly accessible routes
should not be considered international waterways but part of
their sovereign territory. Better research will give us greater
insight into how we can expect shipping routes to change so we
can prepare to address these issues.
As the Science Committee, we have the responsibility to
address our national research priorities and those must be
broader than just how the climate is changing. We need to
understand its specific effects so we can adapt and continue
our economic growth.
During our first full committee hearing of this Congress,
members of this Committee discussed how we must embrace a broad
portfolio of basic research, energy innovation, and competitive
technology to make energy production cleaner, more efficient,
and less costly.
I hope we can spend more time considering research into
innovative technologies like nuclear reactors, battery storage
and carbon capture.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for being here today, and I
look forward to our discussion.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
I'd like to extend a warm welcome to a guest in the
audience, Maria, from Chandler, Arizona. Could you stand? We
hear you're a rising senior in high school who's interested in
studying engineering in college. And it's great to have the
next generation of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) professionals represented here today. And welcome
to all the young people over here, too. Thank you for being
here.
At this time I'd like to introduce our witnesses. Our first
distinguished witness, Dr. Richard Alley, is the Evan Pugh
Professor of Geosciences and Associate of the Earth and
Environmental Systems Institute at the Pennsylvania State
University. He has spent more than 40 years studying the great
ice sheets to help predict future changes in climate and sea
levels, and has made four trips to Antarctica, nine to
Greenland, and additional expeditions to Alaska and elsewhere.
He has authored or co-authored more than 300 scientific papers.
He was involved in the IPCC group of contributors that won the
2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He won Pennsylvania State's highest
teaching award, and has written a book on climate change and
ice cores. He holds a Ph.D. in geology from the University of
Wisconsin.
Our second witness, Dr. Robin Bell, is the PGI Lamont
Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of
Columbia University and a member of the faculty at Columbia
Earth Institute. She directs programs in ice sheet dynamics,
leads efforts to develop innovative technology, and works to
improve the scientific culture, especially for women. She has
led 10 major expeditions to the polar regions discovering an
active volcano, large, deep lakes, and hidden mountain ranges
buried by ice. She was instrumental in launching the
International Polar Year in 2007 that brought together over
50,000 scientists. Currently, she is the President of the
American Geophysical Union, the largest collection of Earth and
space scientists in the world. And her Ph.D. is in geophysics
from Columbia University.
Our third witness is Dr. Twila Moon, who is a Research
Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC),
part of the University of Colorado's Boulder Cooperative
Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. She studies
modern changes in glaciers and ice sheets and the connection
among ice, climate, ocean, and ecosystems. Her research focuses
on the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic and uses a variety of
tools, including satellite remote sensing, fieldwork, and
computer simulations. She also leads efforts to improve science
and knowledge coproduction between scientists and stakeholders.
Dr. Moon received her Ph.D. in Earth and space sciences from
the University of Washington.
Our fourth witness, Dr. Gabriel Wolken, is a Research
Scientist and Manager of the Climate and Cryosphere Hazards
Program at the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical
Surveys and a Research Assistant Professor at the International
Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There,
he is a Senior Scientist in the Climate Adaptation Science
Center. He studies snow and glacier change and their connection
to climate and natural hazards through observations, remote
sensing, and computer modeling. Dr. Wolken has a Ph.D. in Earth
and atmospheric sciences from the University of Alberta.
Our final witness, Dr. William Ted Pfeffer, is a Professor
of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering and a
Fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the
University of Colorado Boulder. He has been involved in
glaciology research for 40 years, studying the world's mountain
glaciers. He has conducted hundreds of field expeditions in the
continental USA, Alaska, Canada, Norway, Greenland, Antarctica,
the Himalayas, and Africa. He has published over 60 peer-
reviewed scientific papers and was a scientific advisor to the
Emmy-winning film ``Chasing Ice.'' Dr. Pfeffer earned his Ph.D.
in geophysics at the University of Washington.
As our witnesses should know, you will each have 5 minutes
for your spoken testimony. Your written testimony will be
included in the record of the hearing. When all of you have
completed your spoken testimony, we will begin a round of
questions. Each Member will have 5 minutes to question the
panel. And so we will begin our witnesses now with Dr. Alley.
TESTIMONY OF DR. RICHARD B. ALLEY,
EVAN PUGH PROFESSOR OF GEOSCIENCES AND
ASSOCIATE OF THE EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL
SYSTEMS INSTITUTE, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Alley. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, Ranking Member
Lucas, distinguished Members, staff, and citizens, for this
opportunity to address you.
We have high scientific confidence that the world is
warming primarily because we burn fossil fuels and release
CO2, and this is having broad-based impacts. You've
asked us to tell you about changes in snow and ice of which we
will get to some of them but not all.
We still have winter, we still have blizzards. Where and
when snow and ice care about temperature we are seeing broad-
based shrinkage, and this really is having impacts. Earlier
spring snow melt means that you can lengthen the fire season.
It affects ecosystems; it affects tourism. Loss of Arctic sea
ice, as Representative Lucas mentioned, has national security
implications, as well as weather implications. Glacier melt is
changing streamflow in some of the most overused and
politically sensitive rivers on Earth.
I will focus particularly on sea level, which is the
biggest global footprint of melting ice. Sea level is rising.
Recently, it's been about 1 inch per 8 years. It is rising not
because of natural cycles but because of warming. The ocean
expands as it warms. The mountain glaciers are melting. The
edges of Greenland are melting and putting extra water into the
ocean. And there's faster flow of non-floating ice into the
ocean from parts of Greenland and Antarctica.
We are committed to some additional sea-level rise. Just as
if you drop an ice cube into your tea, it is committed to
melting, but it takes a while to melt. The ice has not caught
up with the warming we have already caused. But by the time our
students are getting old, the decisions that we humans make now
and in the future will grow to be the dominant control on how
much sea-level rise we experience.
This sea-level rise is already having implications. You can
Google the picture of the octopus in the parking garage in
Miami on a high tide, not a storm. But the impacts could become
much larger. The general projections are that if we don't
change our energy system, we will get something like 3 feet of
sea-level rise by 2100 above the natural level, the pre-
industrial level.
And I'd like to speak about the uncertainties in that,
right? So I'd like to do an analogy first. I ride my bicycle to
work at Penn State. My wife drives our car. But I drove down
here. I saw commuters in the D.C. area. My impression is that a
commuter in D.C. expects to spend half an hour stuck in
traffic. The best thing that can happen to a commuter is no
traffic, but they might spend an hour, and they might get run
over by a drunk driver and be in the hospital or worse. What
they expect, the most likely future, is well on the good end of
the possible futures when you get in that car.
When we look at the sea-level rise, it is similar. Three
feet if we don't change our energy system, maybe 2, maybe 4,
maybe 5, 10. We're not sure. It could be much worse. And there
isn't much better to offset the much worse. There are drunk
drivers in the climate system.
I'd like to explain one of them. If you ever get the chance
to go to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska, it
is a gloriously beautiful place. You can cruise 65 miles up the
Bay and see little glaciers breaking off little icebergs in
shallow water, and it's still spectacular. When Vancouver was
on his cruise in 1796, there was no Glacier Bay. It was
entirely full of ice up to a mile thick. When John Muir went
by, less than a century later, the Bay was mostly open because
icebergs had been breaking off the front of the glacier like
dominoes at a rate of up to 7 miles a year, falling over.
That process has happened to other glaciers in Alaska. You
have world experts on that process here. It has happened in
Chile, in Svalbard. It's happening in Greenland and the
Antarctic Peninsula. It happened to ice sheets in the past. And
it's well-known that this happens when it gets too warm where
ice flows into the ocean. So far, those have been in narrow
valleys. They're spectacular locally but one collapse doesn't
raise global sea level a lot. If this starts to happen in parts
of Antarctica rather than a narrow valley, it will open into a
broad embayment. If that breaks as rapidly as we have seen
elsewhere, in the next century you might get 10 feet or so of
extra sea-level rise. It could be faster than that.
It is very clear that the uncertainties can be reduced if
you fund bright young people to work with the co-panelists up
here. That's self-serving, but it's correct. But there may be a
little irreducible uncertainty in the same way that you can
never predict where every drunk driver might be out on the
highway. If we raise temperature, we raise sea level with high
confidence, and the uncertainties are it could be a little
better, a little worse, or a lot worse. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Alley follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Bell.
TESTIMONY OF DR. ROBIN E. BELL,
LAMONT RESEARCH PROFESSOR,
LAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Dr. Bell. Thank you very much. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking
Member Lucas, Members of the Committee, I'm very pleased to be
here today. I'm going to take you on a visual tour because the
ice sheets are beautiful. I think that's why we all study them.
And we want to share a little bit of that beauty with you, so
this is a picture of what Antarctica looks like. And just to
give you a sense of scale, this is a huge iceberg with tiny
scientists in front of it.
What I'm going to show you today is the evidence for
change. I will tell anyone this who stops me anywhere on the
street--you stop me on my electric motorcycle, I'm going to
tell you this story. There are three signs of change--three
really clear signs that the ice sheets are speeding up and
changing. One is they're moving faster. In the 1990s, they were
moving 1 mile a year. In the 2000s, they're moving 2 miles a
year. They've doubled in speed.
Ice happens to be like the mozzarella cheese on top of your
pizza, so when you bite into the cheese and stretch it, it gets
thinner. So the second measurements we've made is by zapping
the ice sheet with a laser, and that's what you see forming is
that yellow on the surface is actually where the elevation,
just like the cheese is getting stretched, the ice sheet is
getting stretched, that's more than half a football field of
stretching where the ice sheet is getting lower, second
measurement.
Our third measurement is one we make and NASA makes with
partners--makes from space. Can we turn the video on--animation
on, please? You will see that this is Antarctica again--now
we're looking at a whole map of Antarctica, and you're going to
see a red dot develop. And what that red dot is showing we're
actually losing mass. And remember I showed you it sped up, it
lowered. This is a different measurement. This is basically the
ice sheet on the bathroom scale. And what you can see is the
ice sheet is losing mass predominantly in that place that
Richard referred to, the place that's furthest north and
exposed to the warming ocean. The ice sheet is losing mass.
We could show you the same things for Greenland, three very
clear signals, kind of the scientific gold standard. We like to
make independent measurements. This is the evidence that the
ice sheets are changing.
What does it mean? We go next to NOAA (National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration) and we look at NOAA's global
collection of tide gauges--so these are really high-tech
instruments. They're like pipes stuck in the water, OK? But
they measure the tides going up and down and up and down, and
they measure storms--the tide levels go way up, 12 feet in New
York during Sandy. But you can see most of those are going up.
Sea level almost everywhere on the planet is going up except
where the planet is still recovering from the ice sheet that
was more than 20,000 years ago and it's bouncing back up like a
mattress. But this predominant signal globally is it's going
up.
There's even one of those fancy pipes right here in
Southeast, Washington, and that record goes back to about when
my dad was born. And so since my dad was born right here in
Washington, D.C., sea level has gone up a foot. And we're using
Beth for scale here. Beth is, for today's purposes, 2 meters or
6 feet roughly. And you can see, sea level has risen almost a
foot, almost to my knee--I like to think of it--I put my hand
on my leg because then I realize what it really means. That's
how far sea-level has come up since my dad was born.
So what does that mean? We are working on this problem--I'm
back to the uncertainty question. Can I tell you how much sea-
level is going to go up in the next hundred years? We are
working on it as hard as we can. This is just a range of
forecasts published this year. You can see the results--they
are spread. This is again Beth for scale, about 6 feet. They
range a lot. But when we looked--that's what we're working on
is how to be able to tell our communities how much is sea level
to go up in the next hundred years because that's what we're
building infrastructure. The big bridge we just spent $4
billion on close to my house needs to know what we're going to
plan for sea level. Are we going to plan for a couple feet or a
lot more?
So when we look at the glacier melt budget altogether,
Antarctica is in the next hundred years is on the order of
maybe over our knees, maybe a little bit more. Greenland is
going to be in there, too. We're going to have warming oceans,
and we're going to have mountain glaciers. And while I have
this as roughly 4 feet, 3 feet, we don't know. This is cutting-
edge research.
And what can we do to improve it? There's a priority of
three ideas in my mind--there's three important things to do.
One is get up close and personal to the ice sheets. We need to
understand better how the ice sheets work so we can improve our
models. We used to not be able to have very good models of
weather. We do much better now. So number one is get up close
and personal.
Second is we need to invest in the workforce. Right now,
there are 1,400 scientists at the AGU who are affiliated with
ice. Do you know there are 140,000 people enrolled in law
school every year? We just don't have enough people working on
this. We need more scientists, engineers, educators, creative
minds like Maria over there. We need to talk her into studying
ice somehow.
And we also need to look at how convergent science works.
We need to figure out how to pull together the work that we do,
which is on the polar caps, to what's happening at the
coastlines around the planet because we kind of need an ice
sheet person in every community because we need to understand
what the community needs to respond to.
So am I hopeful? Yes, I am hopeful because we are in a
unique place as a species that we know how the ice sheet works,
we know how sea level rises--we are understanding how our
planet works. And we, as scientists, we're all members of the
American Geophysical Union. We're actually putting our money
where our mouth is. We have a building here in Washington that
we just renovated, so it is the first net-zero renovation
building in Washington. That means we're taking less energy
than we are generating, more energy than we are using to run
this building. We'd love to have you come visit. And we're also
very happy to look forward and that this is a time for action
among all of us, and we need to bring everybody to the table.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Bell follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Moon.
TESTIMONY OF DR. TWILA A. MOON,
RESEARCH SCIENTIST, NATIONAL SNOW AND
ICE DATA CENTER'S COOPERATIVE INSTITUTE
FOR RESEARCH IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Dr. Moon. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, Members
of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify
today.
Land ice loss has serious consequences within the United
States and across the globe, and I'm honored to share my
scientific expertise with the Committee.
Glaciers and ice sheets are Earth's water towers. Only 2.5
percent of the world's water is fresh water, and most of that
fresh water is contained within glaciers and ice sheets or land
ice. As Earth's water towers, glaciers are valuable sources of
drinking water, irrigation water, and hydropower. But land ice
is now melting at a rapid and accelerating pace, increasing
risks for hundreds of millions of people who depend on them for
survival and prosperity. And it is raising sea levels across
the globe.
Today, land ice loss is the biggest contributor to sea-
level rise. Sea-level rise can contaminate drinking water,
erode coasts, overwhelm stormwater and wastewater systems, and
cause increased or permanent flooding. Over just the last 25
years, average sea level around the globe has already risen 3
inches. But because sea-level rise is not evenly distributed,
some areas like regions of the U.S. Gulf Coast and eastern
seaboard are already dealing with more than double this amount.
The impacts we are facing today, however, may pale in
comparison to the changes we could experience in the future. If
we continue on our current path of high greenhouse gas
emissions, it's reasonable to expect 2.5 feet or more of sea-
level rise in the next 80 years. In regions of the Gulf Coast
and the eastern seaboard, that number will be significantly
higher.
The Greenland ice sheet, which is more than 2 miles thick
in its center and covers an area the size of Texas, California,
Arizona, and Nevada combined is an important player in sea-
level rise. Since the early 2000s, ice loss from Greenland has
increased rapidly, and Greenland is now a primary player in
land ice contribution to sea-level rise.
The cause of ice loss is clear. Greenland and glaciers
around the world are melting and more rapidly spilling their
ice into the sea as a direct result of warming air and warming
ocean water due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. During the
last 2 decades, the science community has made substantial
strides in understanding Greenland ice sheet behavior and
projecting future ice loss. But for any given future greenhouse
gas emissions pathway, there is still a large range in
projections for how much ice Greenland will lose.
Narrowing the range of future possibilities and our
projections of them is possible. The United States can lead by
supporting targeted research on the physical processes that
control ice sheet behavior by developing systems to collect
long-term observations and by fostering iterative research that
connects observations and computer models. Science will also
advance more quickly and better serve the public good if strong
connections are fostered among scientific disciplines and
between scientists and stakeholders. You can ensure this
happens by increasing coordinated opportunities for interagency
funding and actively funding activities that bring together
scientists and decisionmakers.
Finally, I want to emphasize a critical difference in the
roles of science and policy in addressing land ice loss and its
impacts. Increasing scientific knowledge is essential to more
accurately project what the future is likely to bring given
that we are on a particular emissions pathway. But policy has
the power to determine which emissions pathway we take.
Embarking on a lower-emissions strategy will make a fundamental
difference in how much and how quickly land ice disappears.
U.S. leadership on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions within
our lifetimes will reverberate to positively impact the world
for millennia.
Thank you for giving attention to this important topic. You
have the power to make a difference between a manageable future
and a painful one. I look forward to supporting you with
complete and accurate science and to answering your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Moon follows:]
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Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Wolken.
TESTIMONY OF DR. GABRIEL J. WOLKEN,
RESEARCH SCIENTIST AND MANAGER, CLIMATE
AND CRYOSPHERE HAZARDS PROGRAM, DIVISION OF
GEOLOGICAL & GEOPHYSICAL SURVEYS,
ALASKA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES
Dr. Wolken. Good morning. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking
Member Lucas, staff, and Members of the Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, thank you very much for the invitation
to come speak to you today.
As a citizen, I'm very pleased to be here. And I
congratulate you on selecting this topic to consider. As a
scientist, it means very much to me to be here to speak to you
about evidence-based decision making, the data that we have to
talk to you about today on glaciers and ice sheet change.
I live in Alaska, and Alaskans are very in touch with their
surroundings. The cryosphere is that place on Earth where water
is in its solid form, so snow, ice, and permafrost. Recently,
while doing some fieldwork near Valdez, Alaska, it looks much
like what you're seeing today. And so Valdez is in a fjord. It
used to be covered by ice. Now the ice is melting quickly.
Upon completing a bathymetric survey or mapping the lake
surface below the water near Valdez glacier, we were at the
shoreline and reviewing our data and very happy about what we
discovered because now we can start to find out how much water
in the lake has contributed to the melting of the glacier that
terminates into it. A woman and her dog named Elvis, a
slobbering basset hound, came up to us and she says, what are
you doing? And I said, well, we're trying to find out how deep
the lake is. She said it's 600 feet deep. We looked at each
other and said you're absolutely right. We just used $25,000 in
equipment to figure that out. What did you do? She and her
friend went out in a canoe and lowered a rope. And they
discovered that the rope wasn't long enough, so they paddled
back to shore and grabbed the rope. And then they tied the
extra rope onto it, lowered it down, and they discovered that
it was 600 feet deep near the glacier.
Now, she is a Valdez resident for 30 years. She said this
glacier is melting faster than anything I've seen in the area.
Where does all this water go? Well, the answer to that is in
the oceans. And so Alaskans are keenly aware of their
environment. They're keenly aware of the changes.
This same woman lives in an area where outburst floods
impact her house every single year. The glacier releases
tremendous amounts of water, rips out the dike, challenges the
bridge, and gives them an opportunity to see the power of
change. So the cryosphere is changing in Alaska, and glaciers
are a part of that. It's very important for us to understand
what is happening.
In Alaska we have a very large State. It's one-fifth the
size of the rest of the United States. It's huge. We have
thousands and thousands of glaciers. We know changes physically
on three of those glaciers. We have mass balance data that
began back in 1966. And with those data, we are able to
understand how glacier change is happening over long-term. That
is incredibly valuable to us.
So most of the information that we have today is built on
the shoulders of giants and the data that they were able to
start collecting a long time ago. It's important that we start
that process now. So collecting data now in various places in
state means that we can evaluate and quantify the amount of
change that we have between now and whenever we're worried
about the change. We do this so that we can build better
computer simulations so that we can plan.
As policymakers and decisionmakers, it is imperative to
have the right scientific information, and we cannot provide
that without the money, without the funding, without the
students, without the resources to be able to provide the
information that is necessary for local stakeholders such as
the woman in Valdez and her dog, as well as important federally
mandated decisions that have to be made in this country. So
evidence-based decisionmaking is what we are after in order to
have sound change and be able to communicate to the local
residents such as those in Valdez and Alaska so that we can
actually start planning for some of these changes. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Wolken follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Pfeffer.
TESTIMONY OF DR. W. TAD PFEFFER,
FELLOW, INSTITUTE OF ARCTIC AND ALPINE RESEARCH,
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER
Dr. Pfeffer. Along with my colleagues, I'd like to thank
you all, Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, all the
Members of the Committee and staff.
Like my colleagues, I was pleased, surprised, jumped at the
opportunity to come and talk to you today about subjects that
I've spent two-thirds of my life on. I've spent a long time
living on glaciers and have had a good opportunity to see the
changes and study them.
As Chair Johnson mentioned, I'm a glaciologist. I've done
this for 40 years, and I've had opportunities to work in
landscapes that have changed dramatically over time mostly in
Alaska. I work mostly on the small glaciers of the world, the
200,000 glaciers other than the Greenland and Arctic ice
sheets. And I want to talk mostly about them, and I really want
to come back and focus on Alaska, which is one of the hotspots
in the world both literally and figuratively in sea-level rise
but also in fresh water flowing into the ocean, in fires and
environmental change in the coastal regions.
These small glaciers matter for a wide variety of reasons,
and I also want to try to concentrate today on the reasons that
have direct ties to the United States. There are a number of
global issues. Water resources, water availability from the
Himalayas, for example, is going to be critical for Nepal,
India, Pakistan, Bhutan, places like that. They also produce
significant geo-hazards of landslides, flooding, what we call
outburst flooding as glaciers retreat and leave behind very
unstable steep slopes. When this happens in places like Nepal,
these are very unstable landscapes in the same valleys where a
lot of people live. It's one of the reasons that these hazards
are as great as they are in the Himalayas. It's because we've
got the mountains there, glaciers changing, and also people
living in that landscape. That's one of the reasons that that's
not quite so much of a problem in the United States because we
are not obliged to live right next door to glaciers in most
places, not at all.
They also have significant environmental impacts by
changing the temperature of the waters the glaciers drain into
and by changing the salinity of the water. One of the effects
of Alaska that we don't understand particularly well yet but we
know it's there is the fact that the ice sheet or the glacier
runoff from Alaska that flows into the Gulf of Alaska and the
Pacific, works its way up through a gap in the Aleutian Islands
and enters the Arctic basin. And it turns out that that's quite
a large chunk of the fresh water entering the Arctic basin, and
that fresh water influences, among other things, the extent of
sea ice in the Arctic.
We don't have a good handle on how much that flow is in
part because we're not making comprehensive measurements of the
water flow into the Gulf of Alaska from glaciers. As my
colleague Dr. Wolken mentioned, we're not monitoring the
glaciers in Alaska very well. We're not really keeping track of
them. So while we can see that they're melting, we can measure
their height change or we could up until recently anyway, we
don't have good observations of where the water is going. We
don't have good gauges measuring that flow.
One of the last things that I want to come back to in my
statement again, though, is sea-level rise. As Dr. Alley
pointed out, the ice sheets contain virtually all of the fresh
water that's locked up on land in ice. You take all the other
glaciers, about 200,000 glaciers, you only get about a foot of
sea-level rise out of them if you put them all into the ocean.
But they're like a big bucket with a little tiny--sorry,
they're like a small bucket with a big hole in it. That water
is leaving the small reservoir very fast. In effect, if you
look at the combined most recent measurements of where new
water coming into the ocean is coming from, more than 50
percent of it is coming from these small glaciers, and the
remaining smaller percentage is coming from the ice sheets.
Now, that's right now. That's in the short term. The longer
term, the ice sheets are certainly going to take over. But in
the short term--and this is a term, say, on the order of 30,
40, 50 years where decisionmakers, planners, policymakers
really need to have the most robust information, and they need
the greatest handle on uncertainties. We have to look at the
entire picture, the ice sheets and the glaciers and all of
their consequences of which sea-level rise is just one.
So I'll stop there for now and be happy to continue and
answer your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Pfeffer follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. That completes the
testimony of our witnesses. We'll now begin our first round of
questions. And I'll yield myself 5 minutes.
While a lot of progress has been made in understanding
current trends in glacier and ice sheet melt rates and
predicting future changes, uncertainties still exist and the
potential for tipping points. Whether major parts of the Arctic
or Greenland sheets will collapse and when and how much more
sea levels will rise is yet still out there.
So for all of the witnesses, as top experts in the field,
what are the most pressing needs in glacier research in order
to address these uncertainties? And the second question, given
the differing impacts of glacier and ice sheet melts on global
sea-level rise, ocean temperature and salinity, nutrient
cycling and ocean currents, fisheries, and even geopolitical
tensions from diminishing drinking water supplies, how can
multidisciplinary research approaches help address some of the
outstanding questions? And we can start and just go down the
panel.
Dr. Alley. OK. Thank you. You raise huge and important
issues. You will hear several things as we go along here which
are important. I'd like to highlight the people. The students
who can really solve these problems have an amazing number of
calls on them. They can go to business, they can go to finance,
they can do all sorts of things. They have skills that are
hugely in demand. We hope that a lot of them go to business and
go to finance and do useful things out there, but we would love
to have a few of the best students come to us. If those
students look at our world and say there isn't funding, there
isn't a reliable idea that you can make a career in telling the
public what's going on, they all will go elsewhere. And we
don't want all of them, but we would really like a few of them.
And that means funding for studentships and that means some
level of telling the student if you commit to 4 years as an
undergrad and maybe 7 years as a graduate student and a bit of
postdoc to become a world expert on this, we will support you
in doing that. And it is people. And we need a few of them to
help us do this.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you.
Dr. Bell. Well, I think there are three things. As I said
before, one is fostering more research, and it's research
across the agencies because the U.S. has really been leading in
understanding how the ice sheets are changing. And it's
becoming increasingly important that research, whether it's
supported by NSF, NOAA, USGS (United States Geological Survey),
NASA--DOE (Department of Energy) runs a lot of ice sheet
models. We have to recognize this incredible resource we have
to be at the cutting-edge of who's going to know and be able to
provide the answers to communities around the globe.
I echo Richard's workforce question. We really do need to
broaden the number of people working on this and not just
glaciologists. We need engineers. We need computer scientists.
We need to, you know, recognize that this is a significant
national security, a national economic issue that requires all
hands on deck.
And then the third one is really to foster what NSF is now
calling convergent science, science where you really bring
together people from different disciplines focused on a problem
so that we can address the problem. NSF just released a new
priority--they're navigating the new Arctic where that was
really the focus of how do we go in a changing arctic. Now
getting back to Ranking Member Lucas' question, how do we have
science that brings together the people who are going to look
at those problems? And NSF is really trying to foster that
collaborative problem solving. The word currently is convergent
where you actually bring people from different disciplines who
are looking to solve a problem, and that's what we absolutely
must do, both within the U.S. and globally. This is a problem
we cannot solve by ourselves.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Dr. Moon.
Dr. Moon. Yes. I'd like to emphasize first better
understanding the glaciers and ice sheets themselves, the
physical processes that we don't yet know. We've never been
able to watch ice sheets collapse, so we can't look back into
the record. And that requires going there, observing the
systems, and doing process studies and then integrating that
information with computer simulations.
The second thing is that any projects within this need to
be coordinated with other countries. Sea-level rise, ice sheet,
glacier melt are international issues, and we need
international teams working on them. And anything you can do to
help facilitate international collaboration I think is
excellent.
And finally, your question regarding connecting different
disciplines, this is a very difficult thing to do. Disciplines
have been separated for decades. It's the way many elements of
our academic system and our research system are built, and it
requires long-term investment and an understanding that we have
to create those relationships because we're taking our
information about glaciers and ice sheets and we're recognizing
that they're part of a connected Earth system that includes
people, as well as plants, animals, and other physical
components.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you.
Dr. Wolken. I will echo the comments of my colleagues in
that we do need people. It's critical that we have people on
these issues. I'll share with you just an example from one of
my other projects looking at snow distribution on glaciers in
alpine areas. We've gone through three people now in a critical
data science position because they can make more money
elsewhere. And so it's really hard to retain the people once we
have them, and it's really challenging to actually recruit
these people.
The other issue is, again, I'll emphasize Alaska is one-
fifth the size of the rest of the United States. We have a lot
of area, and we are data-poor. We have only a handful of long-
term observations in the State, and we have very few long-term
records. And when I mean long-term I mean beyond 12 years. So
it's very challenging to work in that environment. And so what
we really need is more observational information to go off of.
And, you know, we can do a tremendously better job with the
science if we have data. The only way to make the models do
better is to actually have data that drive the models. And so
we don't have that right now. So we're doing the best we can.
And one of the most important observation technologies that we
had on Operation Ice Bridge in the State that measures the
height of glaciers is now gone. It's been discontinued as a
program, and so we can't do that anymore.
And so the other thing I'll say is that I'll echo the
comments of having a mixed bag of individuals to do critical
tasks, and it's important for us to have a diversity of
individuals working on these really important issues.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Pfeffer.
Dr. Pfeffer. Well, after writing down my list of responses
to your question, I realize that all I really have to say is
I'm with them. We seem to be pretty much on the same page here,
and I promise you, we didn't rehearse this in advance. It
really boils down to people and support to train those people.
We've got these critical questions, the research questions. One
of them is the tipping points. What's actually going on in
glaciers and ice sheets that causes this occasionally very
anomalous behavior? We can't model that problem out of the way
with computers or with our knowledge of mathematics and
mechanics. We actually have to get in--literally in and under
the glaciers to see what's happening.
Decades ago when I was--we don't have to run away and leave
the building, do we? OK. Decades ago when I was a graduate
student--and Richard will remember this, too--we had programs
all through the United States with opportunities for graduate
students to work on small glaciers in Alaska, in the Pacific
Northwest, and the Scandinavia and Arctic, as well as in
Greenland and Antarctica where we could go back a number of
times while we were students, really learn what is happening on
glaciers. I'd already made 12 trips to Alaska before I finished
my Ph.D. That's really not happening anymore. Most
departments--and we have--we've got an abundance of programs.
We've got a lot of expertise out there searching for students
trying to bring them in, but we don't have the support to
really go places to train them. And so we are producing a lot
of computer modelers, very good, and they're doing very
important work, but they're waiting for this knowledge to come
in for them to put into these models. And we're really falling
behind on that.
Also, as Dr. Wolken mentioned, we're missing what's
happening in Alaska. Operation Ice Bridge, which was our best
way of tracking the loss of glaciers in Alaska, is--that's
vanished for the time being. And monitoring of fresh water
flowing into the ocean, we don't know what that is. So we need
the answers to those questions, but to get the answers, we need
people.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. I'm way over. Mr.
Lucas.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Dr. Moon, let me
turn to you first, and let's discuss for a moment Federal
Government spends a lot of money on research, we have a lot of
research dollars coming out of National Science Foundation, the
various department agencies, the DOD (Department of Defense).
We're doing a lot of things. Let's talk for a moment about from
your experiences what kind of suggestions you have about, in a
more direct way, how do we make sure that the various Federal
research activities are better coordinated, integrated, as you
noted?
Dr. Moon. Well, I can speak to one example that I think is
a nice example for how to work on this. This is a program
called IARPC, the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee
in the Arctic. And that program brings together people who are
funded and doing work supported by different agencies. They
have regular webinars, they have regular meetings, and it helps
people communicate on what's going on. I think having those
sorts of tools and having communication between agencies at the
program manager level also encourages us on the research
scientist level to be able to get information that tells us
about what different agencies are interested in so that we have
a sense of the interest, the potential funding, and how they
might be connected together.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you. And, Dr. Bell, as I mentioned in my
opening statement, I have a deep interest in weather patterns.
I represent the northwest half of the great State of Oklahoma.
I'm a product of my experiences, but I'm also impacted by the
experiences of the people who came before me in my district.
And where we are on the east side of the Rockies and the
Southern Plains, my area was one of those that suffered
dramatically in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Great
Depression.
But in addition to that horrendous drought, which had a lot
of government policy and farming practices that enhanced the
misery, we went through a drought in the 1890s, drought in the
1930s, drought in the 1950s, the horrendous drought at the
beginning of this decade. So you understand as a farmer in the
real world, where I come from, when I asked my questions, how
much does the scientific community understand about what will
happen in the lower latitudes weather-pattern-wise by what's
going on in the glaciers? Do you see where I'm coming from
here? Because glacial water changes the chemistry of the
oceans, changes the temperature. I did pay some attention in my
science portfolio at Oklahoma State.
Dr. Bell. Right. And one of the predictions, you know, one
of the very clear predictions from the climate models is we're
going to see a lot more of those extremes. We're both going to
see a lot more droughts, and we're likely to see a lot more
floods--many of your neighbors saw a lot more floods this year
because we all know we're here in Washington in the summer and
it is hot and muggy. That is because hot air holds more
moisture. And in the long run, that's going to make more
floods. So, you know, in terms of the direct linkage between
the warming climate and the weather, that's the easiest one to
think of. We are going to expect more extremes in
precipitation, and we're going to expect more extremes in
weather. The direct link between the changing land ice and
changing climate is something we're still working on is what--
we heard it from Tad Pfeffer is what will that water go into
the ocean due to the ocean circulation? Where are certainly
hypotheses out there that the changing sea ice have contributed
to some of the extreme weather we're seeing now. You know,
certainly, that's on the table. But again, it's showing how we
have not decoded the weather system and the climate system on
our planet, but we can see the impacts already.
Mr. Lucas. Please, Dr. Alley.
Dr. Alley. Yes, Representative Lucas, I'm sorry to
interrupt. As you know, the great State of Oklahoma is
fantastic in educating meteorologists. And you probably also
know that there really is scholarship that shows that the
Federal investment in meteorology pays handsome dividends for
the well-being of farmers, for the well-being of fisherpersons
and others and at a level that is a huge payoff on investment.
And I can give you chapter and verse if you need it.
There is great optimism now in the community that does
weather forecasting that we will be able to move into that area
which would give more warning to the farmers of Oklahoma, the
fisherpersons of Oregon and Maine as to what's coming. We can't
guarantee that, but the optimism is real, it's palpable, and
it's exciting.
Dr. Bell. And I'm going to just add one thing--I just want
to follow up with one thought following on Richard's is that we
have invested a lot in weather forecasting. That's why we now--
I'm not a farmer, I'm a sailor, so I think about hurricanes
more than droughts. Sorry. But----
Mr. Lucas. You have waterspouts, we have tornadoes.
Dr. Bell. Yes. Yes, yes, I do, and I worry about them, too.
They give me goosebumps. But we've been able to narrow our
understanding of where those hurricanes are. I can plan much
better when I hear there's a hurricane coming than I used to,
and that's because we've invested in weather research,
everything from the process-based work to the numeric, and
that's what we don't have for the ice sheets yet.
Mr. Lucas. Indulge me, Chairwoman. Dr. Wolken, what are you
telling the State of Alaska about how to handle the
circumstances in the next decade or so?
Dr. Wolken. Well, that's a good question. I mean, we have
some of the best climate modelers in the world at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks, and they are doing a tremendous
job in producing downscale climate models for Alaska. Their
products are only as good as the data that they can use to
train those, and they've done a tremendous job in predicting
out to, say, 2100 what the climate is going to be like. From
that, we can make some estimates of how glaciers are going to
respond, how the cryosphere in general is going to respond.
And, you know, the best tools that we can produce are
available, but we need to improve those tools tremendously in
order to make better predictions so people can plan.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Doctor. Thank you, Chairwoman.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Bonamici.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking
Member Lucas. But really thank you to our witness experts who
are here today. We do appreciate your expertise.
I'm fortunate because I'm from the Pacific Northwest where
we still have glaciers and the Cascade Range and the beautiful
Wallowa mountains in eastern Oregon. And over the years the
snow and ice masses have really helped delicately balance our
water temperature and our ecosystems. The nutrient content,
glacial melt water has provided drinking water, and the runoff
helps power our communities. Tourism and outdoor recreation are
really important in our State. People travel to see our
streams, rivers, and lakes, which the glacial sediment makes
this iconic teal color. It's a beautiful place. You should all
come and visit.
But today, the glaciers that have once filled a lot of the
hanging valleys and the moraines and the mountaintops across
some of the most pristine regions are rapidly melting and in
large part because of anthropogenic emissions.
On Mount Hood, which we can see from Portland in my home
State, the Sandy Glacier Caves were once the largest glacier
cave system in the lower 48 States, but now, the glacier is
melting at an alarming rate. And further north of Oregon at the
Columbia River basin at Glacier National Park, they're losing
the geologic features that provided its namesake. In fact, when
it was founded in 1910 the park had about 150 glaciers. And
according to a study from Portland State University and the
USGS the park is on track to lose its remaining 26 glaciers in
the next few decades.
Dr. Moon, thank you for your testimony. You mentioned the
role of glaciers in sustaining ecosystems, and in northwest
Oregon the expedited rate of melting of glaciers could have
significant consequences for our salmon and steelhead
populations and threaten recreational and commercial fishing,
tribe species that benefit from healthy salmon runs. And as the
glaciers melt and the water flows change and the water
temperatures warm in the Columbia basin, the tributaries, the
fisheries are threatened. So how quickly are these larger
ecosystem changes taking place? And are there potential
adaptation and mitigation strategies that we in Congress can
support to help at this point in time?
Dr. Moon. I would say--and you might find, too, some--that
you have many problems also related to those that are being
seen in Alaska and receive comments there. Certainly, we are
losing those glaciers very rapidly. Just as you cited, we are
seeing retreat and ice loss at rates that have never been seen
in these areas. And so those fundamental changes that are
happening rapidly and quickly are changing the ecosystem just
as quickly. One----
Ms. Bonamici. Right.
Dr. Moon [continuing]. Thing to consider is that in many of
these places we initially see a bump in the amount of water
because we're getting warmer air temperatures. We still have
the glaciers there at the moment, so you actually get a bump in
water availability, and we see communities also in other places
in the world where they depend even more strongly on glaciers
for drinking or irrigation water adjusting to an added level of
water input, which then of course is eventually going to
decline substantially to levels below what it was----
Ms. Bonamici. Right.
Dr. Moon [continuing]. Previously. So they are rapid
changes, and I think that there are many places where the
research is not keeping up with the speed of these changes.
That's true for us understanding the glaciers and ice sheets
themselves and also certainly true for understanding the
ecosystems that depend on it. So I think it may be a case where
we are changing things that we are not even able to keep up
with or see the true level of those changes.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that very
much. And a good place for the Science Committee to get some
more research funded.
Dr. Pfeffer, some of your colleagues at the University of
Colorado Boulder published a study in 2017 about the effects of
dissolved black carbon on glacial melting, that sooty black
material that's emitted from gas and diesel engines, coal-fired
power plants, and wildfires is a significant portion of
particulate matter and contributes to climate change, as we
know. The study found that the black carbon from the combustion
of biomass and fossil fuels can enhance glacial melting as
black carbon deposits on snow and ice surfaces, then the
particles decrease the Earth's ability to reflect rays from the
sun, so then that results in the absorption of heat and faster
melting. But it's also worth noting from the testimony here
today that even if anthropogenic emissions were halted
immediately, we'd still see the reciprocal effects on glaciers.
So, Dr. Pfeffer, what are the most apparent gaps in the
current modeling of glacial recession for various emission
scenarios? And assuming that the U.S. achieved a net-zero
carbon emission policy by midcentury, where should we invest
more Federal resources in responding to the consequences of
glacier melting?
Dr. Pfeffer. So the process that you bring up, black
carbon, it's hard to see when you're actually out there. It's
quite a subtle effect but very small particulate matter, which
is carried into the air, and this was particularly a problem
prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union because there was a
lot of coal burning industry in Siberia. It's far enough north
for their emissions to get trapped in this atmospheric gyre in
the Arctic. That's reduced a little bit but not by a large
degree. And emissions from further south still get into the
Arctic basin and also elsewhere. Not all of Greenland is in the
Arctic basin, for example. Southern Greenland is exposed to air
masses that come off of Europe and North America, so there's a
lot of mixing. And this material continues to be deposited.
I think that understanding the surface energy balance,
things like if you make the surface of an ice sheet just a tiny
bit darker, how much effect will that have, that understanding
is pretty well in hand but we need observations. Simply knowing
that it happens isn't enough. I really do think, though, that
the basic needs go beyond that to simply making the
observations. There are so many parts of the world that were,
until recently, really in the dark. A lot of high mountain
Asia, Himalayas and other ranges, that's been partially
addressed by remote sensing, but again, not all of it. Some of
this work just has to be done on the ground.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And I see I'm out of time, but,
Chairwoman Johnson, I request unanimous consent to enter into
the record this study from the University of Colorado.
Chairwoman Johnson. Without objection.
Ms. Bonamici. I yield back. Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Mr. Brooks.
Mr. Brooks. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Is anyone on the panel not familiar with the Earth's last
glacial maximum, roughly 20,000 years ago? OK. Everybody is?
Good. For those in the audience who are not, by way of
background, during the last glacial maximum, northern Europe
was under ice, roughly 90 percent of Canada and almost all of
the Continental United States of America north of Missouri and
the Ohio Rivers and east of New York City under ice. According
to the United States Geologic Survey, during the last glacial
maximum, again, 20,000 years ago, sea levels were roughly 410
feet lower than today. Stated differently, for 20,000 years,
sea levels have risen on average 2 feet per century versus the
much less roughly 1 foot per century rising rate since 1993
that is reflected in Dr. Alley's written testimony.
Finally, per Zurich University of Applied Science, Earth's
average temperature 20,000 years ago was 48+ F versus 59+ F
today. That's an 11-degree increase in global temperature
average over the last 20,000 year period.
So my question to each of you is, and we'll start over here
with Dr. Pfeffer and move from my right to left, did human
beings cause the global warming that started 20,000 years ago
and continues through today or, if not, what did?
Dr. Pfeffer. So the examples from 20,000 years ago that Mr.
Brooks gave us, they are excellent examples of the kind of
natural variability that the Earth experiences. And there's no
question that in the past, there have been changes in
temperature and sea-level rise and weather patterns and climate
generally as dramatic or more dramatic than what we may be
experiencing in the future. And of course they weren't human-
caused 20,000 years ago or in the last million years. All of
these variable events have been occurring throughout the
Earth's modern history.
Mr. Brooks. Well, my first question, in your judgment, did
human beings cause the global warming that began 20,000 years
ago during the last glacial maximum?
Dr. Pfeffer. No. No, absolutely not. It's an example of
spontaneous natural variability, one of the many ways that this
whole system, whether you look at it in terms of sea-level rise
or temperature, storms, can be varied.
Mr. Brooks. Are you familiar----
Dr. Pfeffer. Natural----
Mr. Brooks [continuing]. With the phrase snowball Earth or
slush ball Earth----
Dr. Pfeffer. Oh, yes. Yes.
Mr. Brooks [continuing]. Roughly 600 million years ago----
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes.
Mr. Brooks [continuing]. When we were almost entirely ice
or slush?
Dr. Pfeffer. Entirely natural variation.
Mr. Brooks. Versus the Paleocene and Eocene thermal maximum
of about 55 to 56 million years ago when the average
temperature was roughly 73+ F, which is 14 degrees warmer than
what we are experiencing now.
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes.
Mr. Brooks. If you don't mind, Dr. Wolken, let's go to you.
Did human beings cause the global warming that began 20,000
years ago?
Dr. Wolken. No, absolutely not. That was just a product of
natural variability in the climate system. Yes.
Mr. Brooks. Dr. Moon?
Dr. Moon. Humans weren't around in nearly the numbers we
are today, so we certainly weren't available to be combusting
fossil fuels at the rate we are today or putting emissions into
the atmosphere. You can consider we've built America in the
last 243 years, and we're changing things at a much more rapid
rate.
Mr. Brooks. So you also agree then that the global warming
that has occurred over the last 20,000 years, that 11+ F
increase in temperature was not human caused at least when it
began 20,000 years ago?
Dr. Moon. So I would agree that when it began 20,000 years
ago when we were coming out of the last glacial, that was not
caused by humans.
Mr. Brooks. All right.
Dr. Moon. The warming of the last hundred years most
certainly was.
Mr. Brooks. Out of curiosity, how do you explain that the
sea-level rise average over the last 20,000 years has been 2
feet per century, yet we're down to 1 foot per century?
Dr. Moon. So much of our rise in sea levels that you're
talking about came earlier in that 20,000 years.
Mr. Brooks. For 6,000 or 7,000 years.
Dr. Moon. Over this last 10,000 years, we've been sitting
with very stable sea levels. And those stable sea levels have
allowed us to develop the coasts of the world.
Mr. Brooks. All right. Thank you, Dr. Moon. And I only have
about 30 seconds left for Dr. Bell. Dr. Bell, in your judgment,
20,000 years ago, global warming when it began, was that caused
by humans?
Dr. Bell. In my judgment, the variation that we were seeing
20,000 years ago was part of the pulse of the planet. It pulses
at 100,000 year glacial, interglacial. When I started graduate
school, we were expecting to go into the next glacial period--
--
Mr. Brooks. Yes.
Dr. Bell [continuing]. Except that we as human beings in
the last hundred years--and you can see the kick up--since we
invented the steam engine, you can see the temperature moving
up.
Mr. Brooks. All right. I'm out of time. Madam Chairwoman, I
appreciate your indulgence. I just wish I had sufficient time
to actually get into what the cause of the global warming that
began 20,000 years ago was if not humans. Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Excuse me. Go ahead, Doctor.
Dr. Pfeffer. I just wanted to respond a bit further to your
question. The changes in the past have--there are two
significant differences between those events and the events
today. One of them is that they were triggered by natural
variations, not by human agency.
And let me just give you an analogy of your house. Your
house might burn down, and it might burn down for entirely
natural reasons. It might be struck by lightning. But it could
also burn down if you're careless and you, you know, drop a
cigarette in the crack in the sofa. Both of those are triggers
that result in your house burning down. The presence of one of
them doesn't really say much about the other except that they
both lead to the same endpoint.
The other thing is that while there were these very
dramatic temperature changes and sea-level rises in the past,
which were entirely natural, we weren't there to deal with
them. The problem here is with people. How do we respond to
environmental change? The Earth will take care of itself. It
doesn't really care what happens. It's what people do. And if
this had happened, you know, a long time ago when the
population of the Earth was a few hundred million, it probably
wouldn't have mattered either because we could have just gotten
out of the way. But as it is today with the numbers of people
that we have and the infrastructure, we're very sensitive to
changes of this kind. We don't handle change very well.
For example, suppose that the conditions for growing crops
that exist today in California picked up and moved to North
Dakota for a couple of hundred years. There are variations like
that in the fairly recent geologic past that occurred. How
would we deal with that? It's an entirely different world than
what we were not here to experience but we know about 20,000
years ago. We're much more sensitive. We don't deal well with
change, and to deal with it, we need to know a lot about it.
Mr. Brooks. Dr. Pfeffer, thank you for your additional
insight.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. McNerney.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chair for calling this
hearing, and I thank the witnesses. I appreciate all your
testimony this morning.
While the planet is continuing to warm up and I believe we
are going to blow past the 2+ centigrade marker that people say
is the limit of tolerability, we need to be looking at all the
potential tools in the climate solutions toolbox, especially if
we're to take action to prevent the collapse of the West
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. That's why I introduced the
Geoengineering Research Evaluation Act last Congress. It didn't
pass, but just introducing that caused the National Academies
of Science to explore the state of research in climate
intervention strategies, as well as the need to implement a
governance structure of those technologies.
Dr. Bell, given the complexity of the climate system and
the risks associated with further human interference, how do
you think the U.S. should approach the field of research on
climate intervention?
Dr. Bell. Both the National Academy and AGU, the American
Geophysical Union, have statements that say this is an issue
that we must research. If done wrong, it could be terrifying.
But, again, it is the same problem that we have been saying
before. We don't have the sufficient workforce looking at the
issue, evaluating it, and building the body of knowledge to
evaluate whether or not it is a good idea.
To me, I come back to the very, very few examples of
geoengineering of the ice sheets that are out there. And to
give you the idea of how many groups have done it, I think two
groups have put it on the table. You know, one is basically for
one approach--you get a bunch of snow blowers and put more snow
back on the ice sheet. The problem is it turns out if you put
snow blowers on the ice sheet, it gets steeper and it flows
back into the ocean. It didn't work. The other idea is to build
bigger than the Panama Canal many times walls to keep the ice
sheets from being attacked by the warming ocean.
These are ideas being put on the table by a small cadre of
glaciologists. What this illustrates is that we need, as a
species, to research this, and we need not just glaciologists,
not just atmosphere scientists, but we need to bring the full
suite of talent to the table to think about this because, as we
address climate change, we're going to probably need to look at
every tool that we have available. That's what we found when we
did the building down the street.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you.
Dr. Bell. We couldn't reach our goal by doing just one
thing.
Mr. McNerney. Dr. Alley, do the risks of abrupt change in
the Arctic and Antarctica indicate that we should be serious
about technological interventions such as sunlight reflection
to maintain stability?
Dr. Alley. So I would echo what the National Academy and
what the American Geophysical Union have said, which is that we
need the knowledge base that will allow you, all of you in this
learned body, to actually make wise decisions. We don't yet
have that knowledge base. There are real issues with
international governance, as you raised, and thank you. There
are real issues with reception by people. I can tell you
stories of--geoengineering cloud seeding that led ultimately to
a professor from Penn State having a hole shot in his car door
because the local farmers were very unhappy with the idea of
cloud seeding. Sort of how this plays out into the broader
populace is sometimes not as obvious and as simple as you might
imagine. So I think gaining this knowledge base so that you
would then have the capability of making wise decisions is
wise.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you. Again, Dr. Alley, the West
Antarctic ice sheet has been noted to have the greatest amount
of uncertainty in the melting and breaking rates. How much of
the uncertainty related to West Antarctic ice sheet can be
addressed by additional research, and how much is dependent on
the future rates of warming?
Dr. Alley. Right. Certainly, the uncertainty can be reduced
by the research, but it is already very clear that the faster
and the more we warm, the more likely a failure will be. So in
our world mitigation, trying to slow down the warming, buys you
time. It buys you time to learn. There is always some danger
with a tipping point that you pass it before you see it, and
it's too late to slam on the brakes. It's too late to turn and
avoid the iceberg. And very rapid warming, that becomes more
likely for West Antarctica as we run at the future.
Mr. McNerney. Well, what are some of the--Dr. Bell
perhaps--what are some of the major concerns about the collapse
of the West Antarctic ice sheet?
Dr. Bell. The major concerns are that it could go fast, and
we don't actually know how fast. It's back to the ice sheet we
know there used to be an ice sheet in New York and many of the
States here. We didn't see that one collapse or the residents
of New York then who didn't record what was happening. So we as
a species don't have the record of how an ice sheet collapses,
so we worry about how it collapsed--what happens to the ocean,
how the ocean chews at the bottom of it as the ocean warms. We
worry about what happens when the surface melt, where does that
water go? Does it fall into cracks and act like a jackhammer to
open it up, or does it run off like a river? There are some
major fundamental understandings about how warming air, warming
ocean impacts ice. And in that sentence alone you see how we
have to have different disciplines talking to each other.
Dr. Alley. So Dr. Moon is working on this problem in
Greenland, and Dr. Pfeffer is working on this problem in
Alaska, as is Dr. Wolken, so the truth is the--what we learn
spreads broadly.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I hope the other three panelists don't
feel neglected, but I only have 5 minutes, so I'll yield back.
Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Babin.
Mr. Babin. Yes, ma'am.
Chairwoman Johnson. Changing of the guard.
Mr. Babin. All right, musical chairs. Sorry about that.
Dr. Wolken, in addition to serving here on the Science
Committee, I also serve on Transportation and Infrastructure.
And I represent southeast Texas and have four ports in my
district. I recognize the importance of our navigational ship
channels.
With that being said, one of the things I find very
interesting on this topic that's relevant to my Committees and
my district is the possibility of two trans-Arctic commercial
shipping routes that are opening up. This isn't to say that I
want to see all the glaciers melt and the sea levels rise
uncontrollably, but if there are inevitable changes, I want to
make sure that the United States is positioned to be
economically fortified. And I know that the Russians are
certainly exploiting newly opened up shipping lanes, ice-free
zones, and even claiming certain areas that were considered in
international waters are no longer that but belongs to Russia.
So how do you see the Department of Transportation or even
the U.S. Coast Guard interacting with coordinated multi-agency
collaboration that you say is needed?
Dr. Wolken. Yes, thanks for the question. I'll answer in
two ways. The first is that what you speak of is really an
incredibly important issue and, you know, economics and
national security really do come to mind. And that's a sea-ice
issue in the north, principally. And reduced sea ice of course
is offering opportunities to enter into the Arctic and explore
and ship, and that comes with fantastic opportunities of course
and a lot of perilous conditions that could cause lots of
environmental damage if not done right.
Having a multi-agency approach is incredibly important a
little bit farther south. And you mentioned the Coast Guard. We
have changes in Alaska that are impacting many of the fjords
and the transportation routes in the South, and some of the
changes in the cryosphere or changes in the snow, the ice, and
the permafrost in the mountains are unpredictable to us right
now. We don't have enough information. And so the Coast Guard
communicating with various universities and agencies about how
stable the slopes are, about how fast conditions are changing
in certain areas could really be an asset to the Coast Guard as
they respond to emergencies or possible disasters from cruise
ships or fishing boats in different areas.
I will point out an example in 2015, there was one of the
world's largest snow/rock avalanches into the Tyndall fjord,
and in the process of that collapse, the tsunami that resulted
from the rock falling into the fjord was enormous. It caused a
trimline like the bathtub ring that was around 600 feet high.
And any fishing boat caught in that or Coast Guard vessel or
tourist ship would have been destroyed.
Mr. Babin. Right.
Dr. Wolken. So communication about the data that we have to
the individuals who will be working in these different areas,
Federal agencies such as the Coast Guard, it's critical that we
have this conversation.
Mr. Babin. Absolutely. Thank you very much. And one other
question. Some experts have predicted that our currently
available mapping and navigation and ship capabilities are
going to limit just how frequently and successfully we use
these potential routes. And, Dr. Wolken, and to all of our
witnesses, when conducting research on ice depth and volume, is
there also efforts to improve commercial shipping potential
such as data needed for mapping? Dr. Wolken, I'll ask you
first, and then I'll go to Dr. Pfeffer.
Dr. Wolken. Yes, so a lot of the work that's being done in
the fjords in Alaska are specifically focusing on the nearshore
environment, and so the exchange of dynamics of interactions
between the glaciers and the water in that environment. And so
in the process of doing that, wonderful maps of the fjord are
being generated; lots of different surveys of the coastlines
are being generated in the process. And so the really great
part about this is that we can have overlapping interests being
served with good research in the right areas. And I think
that's where this idea of having these interagency
collaborations, these multiple perspectives, this team approach
is really important.
Mr. Babin. Great. And, Dr. Pfeffer, I think you wanted to
say----
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes, I wanted to respond because your
description of the situation in Texas reminds me a little bit
of an experience that I had about 5 or 6 years ago where I was
employed as a consultant for the Prince William Sound Citizens
Advisory Committee, which is an environmental group that was
set up in the State of Alaska following the Valdez oil spill to
provide environmental oversight in Prince William Sound, which
includes the town of Valdez and southern terminus of the Alaska
Pipeline. And their specific concern was icebergs.
The Columbia glacier in Alaska, which is one of the
glaciers that I've worked on for many years, was a major
iceberg producer. And those icebergs came out into the shipping
lanes. And the Alyeska, which is the operating company for the
Pipeline, and the Coast Guard were both concerned about what
future iceberg hazards were going to look like. Specifically,
they had an ice detection radar system that had come to the end
of its useful lifetime, and they had to replace it. And what
their specific question was, you know, do we have to be
worrying about icebergs for the next hundred years or the next
5 years?
And so I worked with them for about a 2-year period
developing some simple models based on how much of the glacier
was left and our best prediction of what the retreat would look
like to give them some sense of what the iceberg discharge
would look like. It was a good opportunity to collaborate with
a State-level agency and also with the Coast Guard. We have a
limited amount of bathymetry for that region. It would be good
to have more, and NOAA has done some surveying in there. But
that kind of interagency cooperation could be a lot more
frequent than it is, and when it does happen, it's extremely
beneficial. It certainly was a great help to us in Alaska.
Mr. Babin. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. I
appreciate it.
Dr. Bell. I have a quick addition to that in that just last
summer we saw one of the first groundings--I actually saw the
vessel before it grounded of a Russian icebreaker that ended up
grounding in the Northwest Passage, you know, exactly the
places we're hoping or were thinking may be opportunities for
more connections across the high Arctic. So it is a critical
issue because it ran aground on an uncharted rock----
Mr. Babin. Right.
Dr. Bell [continuing]. In essence. And the other piece is
that the Coast Guard provides critical infrastructure to
support the work we do in Antarctica. Without the U.S. Coast
Guard and the heavy icebreakers, we could not, the U.S. could
not run the flagship programs they do. And we are seeing the
Asian countries invest deeply in icebreakers. The Chinese
Government has invested in two. The Koreans have a beautiful
new icebreaker. We need strong ice-breaking capability both for
ability to engage in the Arctic and continue to be leaders in
Antarctica.
Mr. Babin. And we have a shortage of icebreakers, do we
not?
Dr. Bell. Yes.
Mr. Babin. Yes.
Dr. Bell. That's why I thought this was a moment to remind
you that----
Mr. Babin. Yes. Thank you.
Dr. Bell [continuing]. With science, it's really clear--
boats run aground, and we need icebreakers.
Mr. Babin. All right. Thank you very much. My time has long
expired. Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Casten.
Mr. Casten. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all so much
for being here.
Earlier this Congress at the Environment Subcommittee
hearing on the impacts of climate change on our oceans and
coasts, our experts were talking about what we need to do to
stay below 1.5 degrees of warming. And I asked them if we got
rid of all CO2 emissions tomorrow, how much sea-
level rise is already baked in? And the answer was an
unequivocal 2 feet. I think that's consistent with your
testimony, Dr. Alley. That is frightening, but in some ways, I
have a bigger fear that's the deficiencies of our little Homo
sapien brand.
And I want to demonstrate this and I want all of you out in
the audience, you get to participate now. We're going to do a
little experiment. So what we're going to do--this is real
easy. I'm going to say two things. You give me the next in
order. A, B? A little louder, come on. You got this. This isn't
hard. Thank you. All right. Second one, 2, 4? You're all wrong.
I was looking for 8.
This is the problem, right? We have all of these nonlinear
trends, and our little brain says 2, 4, 6 and we see all these
things that are going on. And, Dr. Alley, I think you alluded
to this in your testimony. And so if 2 feet is baked in and if
the likely skew of that data is not a bell curve but on the
more frightening end of the spectrum, what sea-level rise
should we be planning for within the zone of possibility?
Dr. Alley. I surely wish I knew. This is a frustration for
us at a level that is deep and I wake up at 2 in the morning
and I look at the ceiling and I say what do I tell somebody? I
can remember coming back from Old Ironsides on the water taxi
while doing the Freedom Trail in Boston and sitting in the
water taxi and putting West Antarctica into Boston Harbor and
not knowing what to do, which is--I mean, I'm sorry, it is very
self-serving for me to sit here and tell you that funding
research is good because it might go to me or my students, but
we want to know.
Mr. Casten. So I'm not asking you for certainty, and I
appreciate--look, I started my career doing--I got a master's
of science in chemical engineering. I get the caution. But
we've got to sit on this side of the dais and make decisions,
so I'm just asking if you were in our seats with uncertainty of
information, what is the range that we should be thinking about
in our zone of possibility?
Dr. Alley. Yes. Don't go below the IPCC and start thinking
about flexibility. Think about adaptive capability, the----
Mr. Casten. I'm just asking for like a number of feet.
Dr. Alley. Yes, I can't give you a number.
Mr. Casten. How about a----
Dr. Alley. I wish I could.
Mr. Casten. How about a timing? How long do we have before
2 feet is locked in?
Dr. Alley. Yes, very soon if not and, so for the 2 feet,
you're getting close. But the big numbers, it really is, you
know, I mean, a good businessperson looks for the black swan,
but they don't know when a whole flock of black swans is
coming, and so they really do look to their best people to be
ready, which is here. You know, that's you.
Mr. Casten. I want to get to a couple other things in my
time, but the reason I ask this question is in part because the
same day that we had that hearing--I sit on Financial Services.
We had Federal Reserve Chairman Powell in, and I said to him we
just had this hearing. You are responsible for helping us write
30-year mortgages. Do you factor in whether or not those
mortgages are going to be paid off in low-lying coastal areas?
And the answer was that he thought we probably should start
thinking about that but we haven't yet.
We have a whole host of issues here that go just beyond
whether the sea level's a little higher, right? We got housing.
I live in Illinois where we've got, you know, polar vortex
because--and polar bombs or whatever the term is of this year
because, as that ice melts, we're destabilizing global weather
flows and shifting that cold air down temporarily until we all
get a lot hotter.
Dr. Wolken, I had a little fun doing a little Googling on
the weather report on Moose Mountain where you live. I
understand you got a huge unseasonable amount of rain a few
hours ago. I understand that is pretty positive because you've
got some concerns up there. Can you just help explain to me
what's happening on Moose Mountain that makes that rain good
and how that is related to the falloff in sea ice?
Dr. Wolken. Wow, that's a really good question. I will
preface this with some history about the winter. It was a very
low snow year. We didn't have near the snow that we would
normally have. And this is a trend especially across the
Arctic. And this year it's been unseasonably hot. In fact, this
week in Alaska many records have been broken. And this is
common as well in recent years.
I left Alaska the other day to evacuation notices, so
before I came here, we were planning to evacuate our house
because fires were raging just near our house. And so the rain
coming is a great idea. The whole State is suffering from smoke
right now because there are so many fires really resulting from
a chronic low-snow issue and having warmer temperatures that
are really fueling the fires. And so this is a major issue for
us, and it's become quite personal for me.
Mr. Casten. So just last question for the whole panel, has
anybody estimated how many people's homes are at risk because
of this combination of sea-level rise, spreading wildfires,
flooding in the Northwest? How many people do we need to be
thinking about dealing with right now? Do we have any estimates
of that answer, Dr. Moon?
Dr. Moon. So I'm going to give you an estimate that's just
a fraction of those things that you just asked about. This is
just an estimate on homes. It doesn't include power plants,
airports, military bases, anything else, just homes. If we're
looking at 1 foot by 2035, that would be about 140,000 homes.
If we're looking at 4 feet of sea-level rise, that's about 1.2
million homes. If we're looking at 2 feet, that's about 300,000
homes. So it's in the hundreds of thousands, and if we look at
levels where we're reaching 6.5 feet of sea-level rise by 2100,
we're looking into the trillion-dollar kind of mark just for
homes. That's not other roads, other infrastructure, et cetera.
Mr. Casten. And I would presume that's just coastal. That
doesn't include Dr. Wolken's house that may be at risk----
Dr. Moon. And it doesn't include wildfires or any of those
other things that you mentioned that will be also addressed by
addressing climate change.
Mr. Casten. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Baird.
Mr. Baird. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member. I
guess my question deals across the board. We got all doctors
here as witnesses, so the question I have simply, what Federal
programs are most critical to gaining a greater certainty on
the future change in ice sheets and those effects on sea level?
So you can go in any order you want. Dr. Alley, you want to
start?
Dr. Alley. Right. It is interagency. The National Science
Foundation provides so many of the people support, and they do
the lead agency in Antarctica and in some other things. NOAA,
we have to have what they are doing. NASA has been keynote not
only on Operation IceBridge, which we have been talking about,
but the satellite monitoring. The DOE has a role in modeling,
and so I've hit a lot of the high ones, but it really is the
interagency, the U.S. Geological Survey. When I gave the number
on how rapidly the icebergs were breaking off when John Muir
was watching, that number came from the United States
Geological Survey. So it is having these wonderful centers of
excellence that you have built that live in the U.S. Government
and give us leadership, they are not localized in one place.
They are in several agencies, and they work together, they know
each other, and they can do this with support.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. I'll remind you that Madam Chairwoman
gave me 5 minutes, so we can spread that out.
Dr. Bell. Well, I will echo the NSF for understanding why,
NASA for monitoring how it's changing, the USGS for incredibly
important measurements of the glaciers, DOE for modeling, and
NOAA for lots of information about how the ocean is changing
and what the fundamental tide gauges are doing.
Mr. Baird. Thank you.
Dr. Moon. You asked about narrowing our range of what's
going to happen into the future. On the science side,
integrating better observations and understanding of the
physical system into our models, our models can't make up that
information on their own. But I also want to reiterate that it
is our mission's pathway that is going to make a tremendous
difference in what that future number of sea-level rise and our
future number for ice loss is. That's not the science part.
Dr. Wolken. Yes, I just want to echo the comments of my
colleagues here and really just add that we're doing this in
Alaska already. We're getting as many people together as often
as possible to try to solve some of these issues. The only way
to really do this is through an interagency perspective. And
there's really no other way to address such a large issue. And
all of the Federal Government programs are critical to what we
do.
Dr. Pfeffer. OK. Well, again, I'm echoing what all of my
colleagues have said, but I want to add to this. The problem of
collaboration and communication between these agencies is not
an easy task. One example, NSF operates on a principle that
could be summarized as turn the brightest people loose on the
most interesting questions. The fundamental function of NSF is
to support these investigator-based science where each one is
evaluated on its own scientific merits. It's not a mission-
driven agency in the way that, say, NASA is. That has
produced--it's been extraordinarily successful by letting
scientists decide on what's the best thing for them to study.
But in a situation like sea-level rise, I think that more--
well, it's for climate change generally, not just sea-level
rise, I think that a more coordinated approach is necessary.
Back in the early 1970s the National Science Foundation had a
brief program called RANN, Research Applied to National Needs,
where basically a management structure was experimentally
imposed on research programs. And it was a notable failure.
Almost everybody that you talk to that knows about RANN say,
oh, boy, yes, that was a bad time at NSF but not everybody.
It's a little bit like the Manhattan Project. If the
Manhattan Project had started out with the, you know, advisor
saying, OK, we need to understand about atomic energy, all of
you pick an interesting problem and go work on it and come back
in 5 years, you know, that's not the way the Manhattan Project
worked. And I don't think we're going to solve this problem
that way either. I'm not talking about the magnitude of the
project or how much money should go into it, but I am talking
about coordination and the need for some really innovative
thinking about how those agencies should interact because it's
hard to steer scientists and, you know, it really is a herding-
cats problem.
But particularly with all these agencies, there needs to be
some really imaginative way of figuring out what gets done
first and how long do we have to solve it. And I don't have any
answers to that, but I think that's a really strong need.
Mr. Baird. Thank you, and I'm out of time and I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Wexton.
Ms. Wexton. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, for yielding. And
I thank the witnesses for appearing today.
It has been quite alarming to say the least to read your
testimonies and also listen to the responses to some of my
colleagues' questions here today. It is absolutely clear to me
and it should be clear to everyone that we are at a tipping
point of our Earth changing dramatically and irreversibly due
to human-caused climate change. It's even more alarming that
we're locked into 2-feet of sea-level rise--everybody seems to
agree about that--and that, given the melting of the Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets, we could be looking at 11-feet of
sea-level rise.
And how you prepare for that is something that is really
important to all of us and certainly to me in my home State of
Virginia. We have a lot to contend with over that. We are home
to Naval Station Norfolk, which is the largest naval base in
the world, and Langley Air Force Base. They are already having
to deal with the effects of sea-level rise and the effects it
has on our national security. And I'm also the mom of two kids,
and I worry about what kind of a planet we're leaving for them
and their kids.
I know that we had some questions about climate ice cover
and sea levels and how they routinely change from season to
season and over time. Some claim that this natural variability
means we shouldn't be concerned with humans changing the
climate.
Dr. Alley, I know that Mr. Brooks asked a little bit about
this and Dr. Pfeffer did give some explanation of what is
actually happening. But, Dr. Alley, can you explain what the
science tells us and why we should be concerned with the
changes in ice and sea level and climate that we're seeing
right now? What makes it different from what happened, you
know, over the past 20,000 years?
Dr. Alley. Yes. So thank you very much. It's wonderful that
people take interest in what we do, you know? So, as you know,
on a dry, hot summer day, you know, the hills of Virginia have
always burned when there was a lightning storm. And because you
know that, if you see kids headed out on a dry day with illegal
fireworks, you were very worried about it. We know that people
have always died, so we have metal detectors at the front of
your building here. We know that climate has always changed,
and that proves that climate is changeable. And you've never
met the person who said the hills have always burned, so we
won't worry about arson. But you have met the person who said
the climate has always changed, so we won't worry about humans
changing the climate.
The climate has always changed proves that the climate is
changeable. The climate change has always affected living
things, which proves it's important. Climate has changed for a
lot of reasons, but CO2 has been especially
important. And that points a finger at us. Now, if you were an
arson investigator, you better know natural fires. You do CSI
(crime scene investigation) fire. If you're a homicide
investigator, you do CSI homicide. We do CSI ice. We do CSI
climate. And we actually have very high confidence that what is
going on now is human, not natural. If anything, over the last
small number of decades nature has tried to cool it off a
little, so how much of the warming has been us is a little bit
more than all of it is the central estimate.
But the fact that nature has done these huge things in the
past, that when nature warmed a little bit, sea-level rose a
lot. And then you say, well, we could cause a whole Ice Age of
warming with our CO2 in the future. And the last end
of an Ice Age gave us 400-feet of sea level. There's 200 more
left.
So I believe that climate has always changed is a very,
very strong argument to be concerned about what we're doing for
climate in the same way that burnable hills make you nervous
about arson. And when----
Ms. Wexton. And related to that, Dr. Alley, in your
testimony you discussed several studies that suggest that the
IPCC report is overly conservative and underestimates the rate
at which ice sheets are and will continue to melt.
Dr. Alley. I have great difficulty finding any evidence
that they are overly alarmist, and there certainly are things
that point to the possibility that they have been low in the
past. And, yes, that's fairly clear. When you look at the
history of----
Ms. Wexton. Can you discuss this current scientific
research on estimates for tipping points for the Greenland ice
sheet, Arctic ice, and Antarctica ice? What are the tipping
points or what does the science tell us?
Dr. Alley. So Greenland, as it gets thinner, it gets
warmer. As it gets warmer, it melts faster and gets thinner,
and at some point it will be committed to loss. It probably
will melt fairly slowly. West Antarctica, if it starts doing
what the glaciers in Alaska have done, the coastal glaciers
have done, it could go very, very rapidly. We're cautiously
optimistic that the sea ice in the Arctic will act like a dial
rather than a switch, but we're not entirely sure of that. We
are worried a little bit about circulation in the Atlantic and
other places that act more like a switch or a tipping point.
The National Academy of Sciences looked at tipping points in
2013. They especially pointed to tipping points in ecosystems
and in human systems. So at what point when people are stressed
and they're having to move their houses or change what they do,
at what point do the people become very mad and then tip into
some other level of behavior. And so when you look, there are
some physical tipping points, there are more ecological tipping
points, and there may be a whole lot of people tipping points.
Ms. Wexton. Thank you very much. I see my time----
Dr. Alley. Thank you.
Ms. Wexton [continuing]. Is expired. I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher [presiding]. Thank you. I'll now recognize
Mr. Gonzalez for 5 minutes.
Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you,
everybody, for being here for this important hearing.
I want to focus at least the beginning of my time on
adaptation and resiliency. I think it unfortunately seems like
there's a lot that's sort of locked in that we're going to be
dealing with over the next however many years. And I'll start
with Dr. Pfeffer. What are you seeing or what guidance can you
give us with respect to making sure that we can adapt as sea
levels rise and that we're building more resilient
infrastructure?
Dr. Pfeffer. So I mentioned in my early comments I really
am concerned with--in the work that I've done in the near term,
the next 30, 40, 50 years where this constellation of factors
has to be considered. One of the very interesting and extended
conversations that I had was with a man named David Behar, who
works for the San Francisco--the city of San Francisco as a
coastal engineer. And one of the problems that they have to
deal with are--it's a very large dike system that basically
surrounds San Francisco Bay. And they need to know how far do
they have to raise this dike system, which is extremely
expensive? It's in the billions of dollars for a very small
rise. And so it was not adequate to simply say, well, let's
just be safe and figure on 10-feet of sea-level rise and then,
you know--and you only get 1 foot and you've spent an awful lot
of money.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes.
Dr. Pfeffer. In the same sense, one of the questions--and
this goes back to an earlier question about how many people may
be displaced by sea-level rise. If you take an overly
conservative number meaning let's take worse-case scenario and
you draw a line on the coast saying, OK, this is going to be
inundated by such-and-such a date, what happens to the value of
those homes on the basis of that line that you've drawn? And
the nearer in time you get, the more important that becomes. So
you really have to have a tight bound on sea-level rise and a
tighter bound to the nearer to the present that you get. We
don't really have that yet. In some places we do, and it's--
very often is a group of scientists that live in a particular
region like Hudson River, for example.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes.
Dr. Pfeffer. San Francisco Bay is another example where you
can look at all of the causes of sea-level rise, including
things like isostatic depression or rebound in an area as--
partly as a result of large-scale things like ice sheets
disappearing 20,000 years ago and partly local things like
putting buildings on that land.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes.
Dr. Pfeffer. There are a lot of different factors that have
to be considered and different time scales you deal with
different factors. And I think it's another thing that points
to this interagency collaboration.
Mr. Gonzalez. Got it.
Dr. Pfeffer. But one of the things that I've tried to
emphasize in the past is there's certainly a cost to neglecting
sea-level rise, but there's also a cost to overestimating.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes. And I think that's actually a really
important point is, you know, when we talk about resiliency and
adaptation, there is a cost to all of this, right?
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes.
Mr. Gonzalez. And we can't completely ignore that. We can't
be too conservative or too aggressive or----
Dr. Pfeffer. That's right.
Mr. Gonzalez [continuing]. You know, we're going to be
wasting a lot of money.
Dr. Wolken, if I could shift to you quickly, in your
testimony you mentioned that in Alaska there are only three
long-term continuous records of glacier mass for the entire
State. Considering remote sensing and computer modeling are
used to predict future scenarios due to the lack of ground-
based observational data, how reliable and accurate are remote
sensors and computer modeling in measuring glacial melt and
predicting future changes?
Dr. Wolken. Yes, we're doing really well with these
different tools, and I think, you know, one of the things that
you can envision is if you go to the hardware store and you get
a laser rangefinder, for instance, from the shelf and, you
know, you do some home renovations at your house, well, that
laser is actually quite accurate. It's a laser, and it's very
precise and accurate. And we use tools like that to really
gauge how the ice is responding. We use other remote-sensing
tools to do similar things, to see how much it's changing in
this direction. And those are incredibly useful, and that's how
we do things. We do those with both airborne and satellite-
based assets.
There is a need in places like Alaska where the topography
is so extreme and where the changes are so great to actually
have ground observations. And so when you're using these
different remote-sensing tools, the resolution isn't quite
there some of the times, and so having ground observations to
validate in some way or to correct in other ways is really the
way to go. And so more ground observations truly do help us.
With a lack of that, we have no option but to use the tools
that are in front of us, and really, remote-sensing-based
opportunities are where it's at for us.
Mr. Gonzalez. Great. Thank you, and I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Dr. Foster for
5 minutes.
Mr. Foster. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I'd like to thank
really the Ranking Member and all Members of this Committee and
the witnesses about the tremendous increase in the level of
serious discussion that we're having on issues like this over
the last 2 years.
I think if you Google my name along with Greenland, you're
led to a video of a previous witness who was a lawyer trying to
convince this Committee that it was a matter of scientific
debate whether or not it was a good thing that the Greenland
ice sheet melted, OK? And so we're having a long-overdue and
very high-quality discussion here.
Now, my next question, how many of you knew Charlie
Bentley? Wow.
Dr. Alley. He was my Ph.D. advisor.
Mr. Foster. Well, oh, wow. I grew up next door to Charlie
Bentley on Lake Mendota in Madison, and, you know, and I
remember sitting on his porch discussing what he did. You know,
he would disappear every couple of years and study the ice
sheet in Antarctica, which did seem goofy. And I think it's a
lesson on curiosity-driven research, that this thing, over the
course of his career, went from something that was done by, you
know, sort of an eccentric professor to something that is now
going to be an absolutely crucial thing in deciding how we
deploy trillions of dollars of capital to try to mitigate the
damage of this.
Charlie passed away I think a couple years ago, and I
understand there is a mountain named for him in Antarctica.
Anyway, I was pleased to see the recognition among the
Committee here.
Now my next question I had is, what is known about the
speed of response of the ice sheet system to changes in
temperature? You know, there are natural experiments when you
get volcanoes going off with a couple degrees swing for a few
years, is that long enough to actually be seen in the response
of the ice sheet?
And the reason I'm asking this question is I think it's
likely that we'll be able to decarbonize the U.S. economy. I
think it is much less likely, you know, since we're 5 percent
of the world population that we're going to be able to convince
the rest of the world to decarbonize as quickly as necessary.
And if that happens, then I think it's likely we'll be looking
at things like albedo modification which has the potential of
very rapidly changing the temperature. There's an article in
Nature earlier this year that used state-of-the-art climate
models to say, OK, you know, will it work or are we going to
get cyclones and so on? And the first look was that it might be
feasible.
But they didn't, to my remembrance, model anything having
to do with the ice sheet. And so I was worried that maybe there
was sea-level rise locked in just due to the thermal time
constants, that even if you rapidly bring down the temperature
of the atmosphere, that it will take a while. And so what is
known in modeling or in data about that issue?
Dr. Bell. The ice sheets respond slowly--they're slow. I
mean, when Richard and I started studying ice, we couldn't
imagine they'd change as fast as they are today. I mean,
Charlie actually--one of my first papers I wrote told me I
couldn't write that they were going to change fast because even
in the 1980s we couldn't imagine the speed at which we're
seeing now. And now you can actually occasionally hear fear in
scientists' voice because they are changing faster than Charlie
thought they could when you grew up next to him, that we just
couldn't imagine these thick pieces of ice changing, and he
couldn't either.
But now we know they're changing due to the ocean warming
and the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a faster driver than the
ocean. So it will--there's--we don't have a good handle on how
fast it's going to respond----
Mr. Foster. Do you have models that even make a decent
approximation? Can you see, for example, in response to
volcanic eruptions and the swing there, can you see changes in
the rate of ice accumulation or de-accumulation?
Dr. Alley. We can do a lot of it right and a lot of it not
yet, and so I could brag on the progress that we've made and
some of it with Charlie's help. And I could bore you or scare
you with where we're missing, especially the couplings into the
ocean. So if you start blocking the sun, what it does to the
atmosphere is fairly straightforward. What that does to the
ocean, which is interacting with the ice, is not at all
straightforward, and that really needs work. And there is----
Mr. Foster. Are these computing-limited problems or
knowledge-limited problems?
Dr. Alley. Yes, especially knowledge-limited. The computing
is coming. We could use a little more, but it's primarily
knowledge-limited.
Mr. Foster. Yes.
Dr. Bell. It also has to do with those measurements, our
lack of knowledge of even what the ocean temperature is around
Antarctica. We can look from space--we can measure the top of
the ocean, but we're still so limited in understanding what's
going on at depth, and that's what matters because the critical
parts of the ice sheet that are really--the sensitive switches,
those are down low, and we don't have the good measurements.
Mr. Foster. Let's see. No, I'll abuse another 20 seconds.
Yes, for the last----
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes, I wanted to add, and it's already been
mentioned that the IPCC's fifth assessment, their discussion of
sea-level rise is very conservative. I was one of the lead
authors on chapter 13, which is the sea-level chapter, and that
discussion that we had about what number are we going to put in
for our upper limit, and I remember that very vividly. And
essentially what we did is we said we just do not know yet
enough about the rapid tipping point mechanics to be able to
attach a number to this rapid response.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. And to the extent these are compute-
limited modeling problems, you're very welcome to use the
supercomputers at Argonne National Lab in my district--I can't
think of a better use for them.
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. Yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Ms. Stevens
for 5 minutes.
Ms. Stevens. Thank you, Madam Chair.
We got to talk about the psychology here. I just went from
another hearing on heat effects in the workplace and the
overheating in the workplace from warehouses to fields and how
that's impacting human health. We're willing the have the
dialog on climate change.
So, Dr. Bell, you had a chart that kind of showed the sea
levels and made that point about your father's life. How long
have we been able to actually talk about rising sea levels and
their impacts on us? How has modern science been able to
influence this discussion and the question of what we can
actually do to combat this?
Dr. Bell. The answer is, you know, people have been living
with changing ice for a while, but the real understanding of
the linkage between the changing ice--because people who live
up near the mountains like the people who live in Alaska are
very aware of the changing ice and the people who live at the
beach. It's really I'd say in the last two decades that it's
gotten very strong, that connection. In fact, back to your
psychology point, it's really in the last decade that we're
starting to see the conversation about the psychology of how we
handle it.
And it was only this year that--actually last month that
the Earth Institute handled the--convened the first-ever
conference on could we ever talk about managed retreat? What
would that mean? How do we have that conversation? So in fact
we are just opening this door of connecting the work that we
all do on frozen stuff and beautiful places far away with what
happens to our assets at the coast, to our beaches, to the
naval ports, to the airports. We happen to like to build
airports. You know, of the 10 impacted airports on the planet,
five of them are ours because that's a good place. So we're
just starting----
Ms. Stevens. Well, and we're coming up with new terms, I
mean, with these extreme weather events and what it means. And,
you know, we can study the free-rider principle. We can study,
you know, you start to think of like nuclear warfare or weapons
of mass destruction and when faced with that threat and what do
you as an individual do. What do you as a society do? What do
we as a body of Congress do? What is it going to take for us to
take this seriously?
I'm in Michigan, and I don't have a lot of sea around me
but I got a lot of lake. And this is going to impact us. You
know, I stumbled across a video. What is a world without ice?
Is it going to take a modern society to see a full city go
underwater for us to take climate change seriously, for us to
take rising sea levels seriously and the grand challenge that
we actually can do something about it, that it's a uniquely
positioned challenge for us as the great America to take on?
So I don't know who else, with all your great expertise and
your phenomenal science and all your great background can
provide some guidance here, some common sense for us to not
just talk about it but to do. And I don't know who can chime in
here because we do this on recycling, with the plastics crisis,
and what the individual can do, what the body can do, the body
that we're currently in, and then on. Thank you.
Dr. Alley. Right. So you raised very important questions. I
wish we had good answers. But you know the Nobel Prize in
economics, corecipient last year, William Nordhaus from Yale
developed tools which allow decisionmaking or inform
decisionmaking. And he showed that efficient response on
climate change helps the economy, right? If you want a bigger
economy with more jobs, you take actions that honor the science
on this. Many of our medical professionals, through their
organizations, have said this is a serious health issue, that
actions that would reduce the warming will have health
benefits. Our military leaders have been very clear on the
national security issues of not dealing with this. So
environment and ethics are actually in the direction of economy
and employment, as well as national security and health. And we
can see futures in which very expensive sea-level rise happens
and large other changes happen, and we can see very bright
futures where we use our knowledge.
The Yale climate communications people have surveyed what
America thinks about climate and climate science. Most
Americans tend to accept climate science but not all. But many,
many, many Americans are very excited by the solution space.
And if you ask them should we solve it, even if maybe they're
not sure there's a problem, they're happy to go look for
solutions.
Ms. Stevens. Yes.
Dr. Bell. Representative Crist, I used to always show
pictures of drowning Florida in my presentations. You know, I'd
show how much I'd drown Florida. I drown Florida a lot. I
decided I couldn't do that because it was depressing people,
turning them off, and they were not listening. I see change--we
have to move--before we drown Florida or New York where I'm
from, we have to actually start thinking about how we as
individuals--I very much worry about what I as an individual--I
worry about my community I live in. I worry about my
professional society, what we can do. And I'm very happy that
you are asking--I worry about our local government, and I'm
very happy that you are engaged--and it's essential that you
take leadership on this, too, because we can lead if we step
forward before we drown a city or a State.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Crist for
5 minutes.
Mr. Crist. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the
opportunity. I have some very well-prepared questions that my
staff has put together for me, but you've inspired me to kind
of go off script. I am from Florida, and my colleague asked I
thought an excellent question about, you know, what is it going
to take before, you know, Congress takes concrete action, each
of us as individuals do so.
I live in St. Petersburg, Florida--it's on the west coast--
and have lived there since 1960. And I live downtown. My
parents live in the northeastern part of the city. We both live
on the coast. So when I drive to visit my parents, who, thank
God, are still alive, I go along the coast and I can see the
difference in the sea level in the bayou that they live on. And
I have noticed it significantly greater in the past 5 years.
And I don't think that's just an anecdotal thing. I think it's
a real thing.
You know, I previously served as Governor of my State, so I
would travel the whole State quite a bit. And whenever I would
go down to Miami, on Miami Beach in particular, there's a road
called Alton Road. And Alton Road will flood when it's not
raining. And I remember President Obama visiting south Florida
and would talk about that example of, you know, the climate
changing, the rising sea level. And so we Floridians get it
because we've seen people drown a lot. And we're witnessing
that occurring, you know, so it kind of freaks us out.
And, you know, it seems to me that we need to figure out a
way to sort of get off the dime. And I'm sure, given your
illustrious professions and dedication to what you study that
it's got to be frustrating for you as academics to not see a
whole lot of action in this area.
And I'm going to ask almost the same question but maybe in
a different way. What kind of advice can you give us--as
hopefully decent communicators to Americans--to motivate
action?
Dr. Moon. So I want to reiterate Dr. Alley's point in
emphasizing solutions. I had an opportunity to give a TEDx talk
to my community in January, and I emphasized the solution space
of it. And I had a friend then a month or two later sent me an
article about the U.N. report, which told you about all the
horrible things that are coming down the Pipeline for us. And
she said is this true? This seems really radical. And I said,
yes, all the information in there is true. And she said, you
know, this hasn't motivated me at all, but your talk did.
So I want to emphasize that we need to be talking about
solutions. That's motivation to people who don't even
necessarily think about climate change because they wanted to
be getting renewable energy, becoming energy independent, which
is something that we can do with that sort of thing. The
solution space is very inspiring. As Americans, we have led, we
have innovated, we have created new paths for the world, and I
think that we can convince people that we can do that in this
space as well because, in fact, we can do that in this space.
And then the one other thing that I want to say in this
area, too, is that it's about encouraging people to talk about
this and come together with each other, too. We simply don't
talk about this enough. And if we talk about solutions, we can
also think about how we're directly helping people. I mean, in
the last couple weeks we've heard about hundreds of people
being laid off from coal mining jobs because of bankruptcies or
other problems the--in decline in coal. But if we're thinking
aggressively about moving forward, we can think about how are
we going to give these people other jobs? How are we going to
support them as we're losing this industry instead of just
putting our head in the sand as we lose this industry, which is
hurting people on both sides.
Mr. Crist. Well, if I could follow up, I have a little time
left. In speaking about the solutions, what are the most
obvious ones to you that you would be willing to share with us?
Dr. Moon. Well, I'll tell you, I'm a scientist, so in my
personal----
Mr. Crist. Thank God.
Dr. Moon. In my personal solution space, a lot of it is in
communication. I don't envy you as policymakers and having the
much more difficult job in discussing all of the elements, not
just science, that go into your policy decisions. And
unfortunately, many of the questions on those solutions lie on
your desks. And I really would love to see us depoliticizing
climate change so that all of you can spend your time
discussing which of these solutions we're going to implement
and how.
Mr. Crist. Thank you very much. I yield back. Thank you,
Madam Chair.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Crist. I'm going to recognize
myself for 5 minutes, and then we'll continue with the hearing.
This has been a really great panel, so I want to thank all of
you for the time that you've taken with us this morning. And I
want to thank Ranking Member Lucas for holding the hearing.
We've heard great questions and great answers.
And there's a lot that I'd love to cover, but, Dr. Moon, I
want to go back to something that you talked about in your
opening. You were talking about sea-level rise and sort of
potential possible rise levels. And you mentioned that it was
going to be 2.5- to 3-feet potentially in the next 80 years,
and that number would be higher on the Gulf Coast. As a
Representative of Texas' 7th congressional District in Houston
right off the Gulf Coast, that of course perked up my ears. And
I would love to learn more about why this is, what is the best
estimate for the Gulf Coast region? Certainly, all of our eyes
are on New Orleans right now. All of us are focused on the
impacts of hurricanes and overall sea-level rise on our
coastline and the Gulf Coast. And so part of the question is
why is it and also what can we do about it?
Dr. Moon. There are a variety of things that determine sea-
level rise in your local spot. So where we're losing ice on the
Earth makes a difference. You are going to be influenced
differently by losing ice in Antarctica than Greenland. There's
also the ways that ocean currents and atmosphere currents move,
pushes oceans one way or another, and also what's happening in
your local region as far as your land naturally rising or
falling already. And that's a--land subsidence is something
that we see broadly across the Gulf Coast.
So there are these multiple different elements that all
stack up to make what you in your individual city are going to
see as far as sea-level rise. And it's quite consistent that in
the Gulf Coast region we will be seeing substantially more than
the global average over the--since roughly 1960, many areas
along the Gulf Coast have already seen 8 inches or more, which
is much more than the global average during those periods.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. That's helpful, helpful
information. And something that we do talk about a lot and we
talk about resilience and rebuilding a resilient
infrastructure, there are a lot of issues, and I think it is
top of mind in a way that it might not be for some other folks
in terms of sea-level rise. But I think one consistent theme
I've heard from every witness today is that we need more people
doing the research, helping us get the information that we want
to know so that we can make smart policy decisions and that we
can know what we're dealing with.
So I really want to put this out to the entire panel to
talk about how we are recruiting and training the next
generation of glaciologists and where there's room for us to
help. What kind of policy can we implement here, what kinds of
things can we do in addition to funding that would be helpful
for you, and for anyone who wants to take that on and talk
about what we can do to increase that number from 1,400 to--and
maybe what number you think would be good overall.
Dr. Bell. Well, there are 13,000 people who are members AMS
just to give you an idea of what--who--and that's the American
Meteorological Society, so who's working and worrying about the
weather in the U.S. We have 13,000 people doing that, and we
have 1,400 around the globe doing ice. So numbers should be
higher than 1,400. Let me give you an order of magnitude.
What can we do? I think it's partially making it so
everybody can talk about the science and back to Twila's point
about it not being politicized and also making it so--I think
we're driving some of the young talent from the field because
it seems like it's a hard place to be, not because it's hard to
go to the field and see beautiful places but because it's hard
because you're under attack.
I think embracing science so we have within our communities
science-based, evidence-based planning for the future I think
will attract more people because young people want to make a
difference in the world. And if they see there's science, even
if you're studying how ice deforms and flows, is going to
matter to what happens in your district, that's one way we can
help attract it, by working on--even by holding this hearing is
huge, but by working to ensure we have scientists intimately
involved with developing the policy on how we're going to lead
in the future.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. Would anyone else like to weigh
in on that?
Dr. Pfeffer. Yes, if I could add----
Mrs. Fletcher. Dr. Pfeffer.
Dr. Pfeffer [continuing]. A couple of comments to this. I
mean, I think we're suffering to a certain extent from sort of,
you know, the boiling frog syndrome of things changing around
us at the moment at a rate which is, you know, gradual enough
that we can say, oh, you know, this is just sort of natural
variability or I remember something like this happening 20
years ago. I think making climate change generally a reality
for people involved, somehow bringing it out of sphere of
scientists. You know, a news report will say, OK, here's a
scientist in Antarctica who has done such-and-such and thinks
this, and then they show the picture of an icebreak or
something, which to the ordinary, you know, person on the
street, it looks like these scientists are on a different
planet. It's all kind of removed from them and--in the
hypothetical.
And somehow this link--and I think things like this hearing
are creating this link that's not just scientists in this
hypothetical space discovering this thing which can only be
detected through sophisticated measurements but that it's
actually happening in a way that everybody is feeling, and it's
happening now. We're no longer waiting for the evidence that
climate is changing. We've got it. We've got buckets of it. And
that boils down to communication.
And I've done a lot of public presentations. As was
mentioned earlier, I was involved in the movie ``Chasing Ice''
and have done a lot of that kind of public communication both
before and after, and very often I get questions from people
about, you know, what can we do? And it can be very hard to
answer that question, especially if they're asking what can I
do personally about climate change because it just seems like
such a big problem? And one of the things that I do say to them
is, you know, things like installing fluorescent light bulbs
and, you know, buying a more fuel-efficient car doesn't seem
like much, but we did create the problem one airplane seat at a
time, one car at a time, one truck at a time. And the
individual action does matter if everybody does it. And so
recruiting people to understand and accept that this is a
reality is sort of the first step.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I yield back my time, and I'm
going to recognize Mr. Tonko for 5 minutes, who will then close
the hearing. Thank you all very much for your time today.
Mr. Tonko [presiding]. Thank you, Chair Fletcher, for what
I think is a very important hearing. Thank you to the panelists
for setting such a respectful tone for science, refreshing.
I represent New York's 20th congressional District, upstate
New York, and it's home to much innovative pioneering work, the
topic before us. At Union College in Schenectady, for example,
Professor Rodbell has been working for more than 30 years to
document glacier fluctuations in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian
Andes. Professor Rodbell and his students are conducting
ongoing research on glaciation in the Andes with a specific
focus on determining rates of current ice retreat compared to
natural rates of ice retreat in the geologic past.
At the University of Albany, Dr. Mathias Vuille, a
professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental
Sciences, is researching climate impacts and glacier retreat in
the tropical Andes. In February of this year, Dr. Vuille
testified in a public hearing held by the New York State's
Senate Standing Committee on Environmental Conservation. He
noted that sea-level rise is resulting from warming of the
ocean and added water mass due to ice melting glaciers and ice
sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. He noted in particular
that sea-level rise is not equal everywhere and sea-level rise
in the mid-Atlantic and New England coasts are much larger than
the global average. He also emphasized that since we have no
glaciers in New York State, impacts can seem far away and
irrelevant, but glacial melt affects us nonetheless.
So, Dr. Bell, can you describe the indirect impacts of
glacial and ice sheet melt in States like New York that I
represent that do not have glaciers?
Dr. Bell. Well, thank you very much for that question. I'm
also from New York, so--and the ones I'm going to speak of
are--actually the nice examples are in New York because--
because of sea-level rise, the number of people impacted by
Sandy was significantly larger because--because of that in New
York it's about 9 inches in the last hundred years the sea-
level has--you can see the record right from the Battery. And
you can see how many more homes were flooded, how many more
people were impacted, and today, we're seeing that those are
the homes that are actually being built up along the edge of
the Hudson. It now looks like you're in New Orleans. The homes
are being elevated right there in Haverstraw. You have homes
that you could see in New Orleans.
So that's the kind of impacts we're seeing. You're seeing
that we've had Sandy. We impacted far more people, tens of
thousands more people than we would have, and now we're
responding to it.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you for that. And what more can you tell
us about the uneven distribution of sea-level rise across our
country? What will sea-level rise look like, for example, on
the East Coast versus the West Coast or in New York City versus
Washington, D.C.? What are the wide-ranging impacts of sea-
level rise?
Dr. Bell. The National Climate Assessment did a beautiful
job of laying out those variations and going through the
different parts of the U.S. and really explaining the
difference. But briefly, each community has to worry about
which ice sheet you're close to. If you're close to an ice
sheet, it turns out it doesn't matter as much, so for New
England, Greenland--Antarctica matters way more than Greenland,
whereas the Representative from Florida is going to see both
Greenland and Antarctica full on. So there's the proximity.
Then there's how close you are to ocean currents. That's
some of the change we've seen in New England is the warming
ocean has impacted New England. And then the Representative
from Virginia is seeing the tremendous impacts of local
subsidence around Norfolk because you've withdrawn water, so
the land is going down at 4 millimeters a year. You add that
onto the sea level going up, suddenly, you have a problem.
Mr. Tonko. And to anyone on the panel, what mountainous
regions around the world are most at risk, and what adaptation
measures can be taken to avoid large flows of environmental
refugees?
Dr. Pfeffer. If I could----
Mr. Tonko. Yes, Dr. Pfeffer.
Dr. Pfeffer [continuing]. Address that, there are potential
for environmental refugees at sort of both ends of the
hydrologic cycle. Let's discuss the Himalayas, for example.
Earlier, I mentioned the various geologic hazards that people
in the immediate vicinity of glaciers, these high valleys, high
density of people in those valleys. As we go downstream, there
are people who are very dependent upon runoff from those
mountains for crop irrigation, so this goes out of Nepal and
into India. And then the people on the coast--and Bangladesh is
very often used as the example--that are at risk from sea-level
rise.
So everything from geologic hazards to changes in water
supply to sea-level rise, each one of those has a population
which is put at risk. And as far as mountainous regions where
this really matters, certainly the Himalayas, also portions of
South America, Alaska is subject to certain risks, but the
primary influences there I think are going to be environmental
on the changes in water and immediately coastal effects.
But the people I think really in the Indian subcontinent,
they're at very high risk, and that is a global problem. It's
not just a problem for them, and I think that's probably very
clear.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Look, that concludes, I believe, all who have chosen to ask
the witnesses any questions. Before I bring the hearing to a
close, I do want to thank this panel. Thank you so much as
witnesses for testifying here before the Committee. And I want
to thank both our Chair and our Ranking Member for hosting this
hearing.
The record will remain open for 2 weeks for additional
statements from the Members and for any additional questions
the Committee may ask of the witnesses. And we ask that you
respond as efficiently as possible.
And then finally, I will say the witnesses are excused, and
the hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:24 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Dr. Richard B. Alley
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Responses by Dr. Robin E. Bell
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Responses by Dr. Twila A. Moon
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Responses by Dr. Gabriel J. Wolken
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Responses by Dr. W. Tad Pfeffer
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Appendix II
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Additional Material for the Record
Letter submitted by Representative Suzanne Bonamici
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]