we need to go beyond housing. and you see there is more similarities than differences. we really do focus how you go beyond that in the mixed-race to be sustainable and equitable okay hello everybody. >> hello everybody. welcome to the seachange

session of the texas book festival. it is great to have you here. i am the geneticist and anthropologist and author. for many years at the national geographicec society that is the effort to use genetics how our species has populated the world i have lived here in austin. and co-author off the nightclub. [laughter] [applause] i will introduce our authors who is the austin-based science science writer contributing to publications such as the new york times national geographic and slate

from the university of southern california lives here in austin. [applause] the head of the head of the u.k. with visiting professorships and currently the scripts of oceanography. [applause] just a couple of quick reminders authors are signing books and remember when you buy a book at the festival you support the author and local

independent bookstores. to have low income students in texas so that really does make a difference. so we will kick it off. so spineless is about jellyfish which is an interesting topic. >> i was just as surprised left left. [laughter] everybody has experienced us staying in the ocean. but i was turned on how fascinating they were when

they had the jellyfish exhibit you could see what the creatures were like. >> actually most of them said that wasas the beauty a textbook writer here in austin and i was doing some more mainstream writing for national geographic and they have that classic w graphic of the winners and losers and on the winner side like micro lg and jellyfish do we really knoww that? have we done these experiments

that they can do this in the future? so i dove into the scientific literature and i found that we had not done the experiments to know that. with that scientific argument what is happening in today's oceans to the jellyfish? what we are doing or making life better like coastal development, the runoff of fertilizers, overfishing, all of these thing things, the jellyfish seemed to tolerate them very well so are they overhanging theas ecosystem? so then there was pushback to say we don't know.

and not study jellyfish because our view of the ocean becomes biased that is hard to handle that treatment so to me it was the incredible scientific question that leads me into the world of jellyfish. >> they are really interesting they are animals with complex behaviors including sleeping oddly enough. a new study just came out but yet no centralized nervous system and no brain. so tell us about the life history and the biology which is fascinating. >> there is a secret that some

people are not picking up on but the book is based on the lifecycle of the jellyfish. it, starts off as medusa with males and females then the larva is like a tictac with her. so the first section is the idea of the book then it becomes a polyp like a cnn amine with tentacles. they live upside down it could live like that for many years so in i the second section but at some point to giving those environmental cues it will go into a stack of plate then i

realized i needed to get out of texas then each of those pops off that becomes a baby jellyfish then later become medusa which are the mature jellyfish and it starts over h again. so the medusa is definitely not the only part although that is what most people think of. so back to how do they get around if you look carefully at a medusa in the aquarium right around the edge of the bell those are the sensory organs and in each one a couple of eyes, a touch plate

it can reach out into the water to smell chemicals and a balance sensor and a pacemaker that controls how fast it pulses. the nerves run and they integrate all the information from all directions it is experiencing. although not centralized and don't have a brain at the top but they have this interconnected intelligence or the ability to get around in the world that has given them enough so they are quite adept

at what they do. >> so your book is about i.c.e. among other things but then you talk about first going to the t arctic on the research ship hudson in 1970. how did that happen and why did you become interested in i.c.e. in the first place? >> and then to take part and then to go around north and south america. and then that meant going down the atlantic and on the way back we came to the northwest passage so had plenty of time to study i.c.e.n

and so few people were working on the i.c.e. in those days. a now it is a more important link because it is disappearing so large fraction of the world now they are interested in i.c.e. we hear about this in the news but the habit of observing i.c.e. pattern even goes back to the wailers. so why was that so important? >> and then then it was

important in the arctic why they produced the oil that they would light the towns in new england so think of those most of those must be using while oil to light a street they were all caught at the time and they made very valuable observations about the i.c.e. or porsche fusion and that we simply disappeared which has a climactic effect. so to tell us where those were in the 19th century helps w us.

>> one of the coolest stories that i found i would start to plan the family vacation to go talk to jellyfish scientist we were w on cape cod i started to talk to these jellyfish scientist talking about the biomechanics. and then to build a robotic jelly. and with surveillance using very little energy. so making the robotic

jellyfish and then they are called actuators but it moves forward but then it has to go back to where it started. it is like a yo-yo. that there is supposed to be a little flap the edge. i didn't havee time maybe we should put that on soo they glue this silicone piece on on the edge of the jellyfish. theyf put it on and it swims out of sight. so the discovery that path of

margin they just move as a consequence is everything to push something forward through the water. it creates turbulent eddies that jellyfish can push against to move forward but actually that wasn't even the whole story. tee4 tee4 us we create like a high pressure zone behind us and we push off that to go forward. we're terrestrial creatures we don't have thick things around us but in the water bending of the jellyfish doesn't only push back against the water. it actually creates a suction in front of the jellyfish's bell a low pressure system like -- when we suck in air from our chest so that low pressure is is

actually a great contributes had more to the movement of the jellyfish than the high pressure in the back. so then they started looking around the world or the ocean at lots of things that swim and you know you notice that everything bends. it's all flip and flops in the ocean. and the whole reason is because it creates this low pressure in front of the animal that suck it is through the water as we've been building ship and submarines all things to explore oceans we've always used our tres cial point of view like let's push back against the water but, in fact, we should probably be bending creating bendy vehicles to be underwater because they're much, much more efficient, in fact, jellyfish most efficient swimmer they looked at compared to a salmon which we think of as a powerful swimmer the jellyfish use way -- a fifth as much energy to move the same distance as a salmon does. so yeah. really cool very cool story.

>> yeah. mimicry we shob paying attention to nature. tell us a little bit if dagalo jellies. >> so this is another great story from the jellly fish maybe not so well known that is that -- both many jellyfish and they live all over. they just don't just live in surface or coastlines but throughout the the ocean and in the deep waters it is one of the major probably the major way of communication. it is -- animals make screams and holler to come meet me. check me out and go away. so p i'm getting eaten help me all of those they make these calls that have these different meanings and jellsly fish are good at that, and

in the 70s they were trying to understand how that makes that happen and one scientist -- was working on that question in jellyfish in sound, and yeah interestingly he was about a few miles away from nagasaki and it was on the bomb so he had an interesting life story. anyway he was had able to purify chemicals out of jellyfish are from the sound and then -- what he noticed was that purify the gloi glow was blue but jellyfish in the ocean glow green. and so how is is what was going on there, and he went on to discover that there was a small protein callinged green floor res that takes blue light and it shifts to green and

self-contained unit. it doesn't need an enzyme to work but it needs light and some biochemist and genetic pick up on this this to take the dna for that green protein insert it in front of the the gene that were interested in studying in animal hads to light up it is almost like adding sentence to e-mail before you forward it. so every time gene is expressed the green protein will be as well and so you probably seen pictures of cells that are glowing and that's all started with the green fluorescent protein from jellyfish and then other people a guy named martin chelsea figured with the green protein now it comes in all of these every color of the rainbow really, and so this -- and this scientist won the nuclear -- nobel prize for their work dagolo jellies. >> funding per basic research

which is -- debated. >> which is for science. speaking of basic science peter, we're going to get into the discussion, obviously, about present day climate change, human pin deuced climate change but give us some context tell us about the cycles in these longer periods of climatic shift that happen naturally over hundreds or thousands of years. >> to say something about that's happening to the ice now in the last few -- decades, because when ice first started working in the arctic it was very heavy ice mostly that you can see the picture multiice which is really thick like mountains of ice. occupying the whole of the arctic ocean between north america had and the asia, and so the feeling psychological

feeling was that -- the world from the hemisphere joins join together at the top because it extends to join kind of to the russia and we all won. but recent years the ice is being retreating faster in the summer but also in the winter as well. so that instead of her continuous cover across the arctic you now have -- you have seas in some of events which has changed everything. they've changed nature of the ocean itself. and has produced a lot of feedback effect, and one with, first part of my book is actually concerned with this because when you sew this sea ice retreating and thinner ice and less of the the temptation to say this is a curiosity. it's obl global warming has caused this. but it's just that a curiosity

like disappearance of last few years from kilimanjaro but what we're finding is that the loss of ice from the arctic is having much bigger efnghts elsewhere in the climate systems. so we can't just think of arctic sea ice retreat by itself. it's affecting whole climate system. to greater extent than the loss of isoopen quarter is giving us that warming of the world. and it's causing warmer air to spreads over the green lapd ice sheets and that's making greenland melt faster which is giving us an increase in the rate of sea level rise globally. so that's no typical here in the gulf of -- gulf of mexico everywhere, in fact, in the world. so you have at least rising at the accelerated rate and that's very extra contribution is mainly from -- the melting of the greenland ice sheet due to sea ice retreating

in arctic and another effect is that we're getting -- released from arctic surface because les sediments from the continental shelve was of the arctic and actually the three bed sediments -- in the last ice age allows below to get out, and we're now seeing big ones coming up into the atmosphere and again causing an acceleration of global warm withing. and the final -- not final but -- two more that affect people here is fact that -- the as sea ice retreats we're getting warmer the arctic is warming faster than rest of the world so the temperature difference between the arctic

and the lower latitude is going down. and that's reducing strength of the jet stream that's the rapid air , wind, mass that separates arctic air from the tropical air and you experience it when you fly from u.s. to europe. it helps you on your way, and that jet stream is slowed down because these winds have decreased in strength because the temperature doesn't slow down, and jet stream now is producing a low instead of being straight. it's in -- vertical low and each low brings polar air down into some low latitude region like the midwest. and warmer air it takes up towards higher latitude where it shouldn't be like -- the northeast. so you are finding alternating fleejts world in mid-latitudes where it is either exceptionally

hot or exceptionally cold and these extremes of weather are being seen for the past eight years coinciding with the retreat of sea ice, and they span the latitudes where we get most crop production and so they're having very drupghtive effect on crops and causing global food crisis to rise which is really serious for third world countries so we're finding another effect on the -- global food production that's -- the life of people. and the final set which is is really important for around here with the hurricanes -- is up north greenland a place first spotted by whale hadders is a location where ice used to grow in the winter and cause the the surface quarter to sink the ice has salt into the ocean and that producer helped to produce

to slow circulation of quarter in the atlantic. not the same as the gulf stream but in the same direction. and that circulation in the line -- has slowed down because that is not being produced anymore. and the result is for less warm water from the gulf and the caribbean being carried to northwest europe that means because it is just as much heat going into the world that means hot water stays down here, and the the surface water temperature down in the gulf and in the caribbean is warming u up faster because the water is not being transported efficiently up to europe. so europe is calling down or not cooling down but warming slowly. but the gulf is warming faster and this hot water is what intensifies hurricanes this is warmer the water at the surface the more intense the hurricane. so we are getting hurricane intensification because of this

slowing down of the water that takes water away from northwest europe so i guess the point for all of those is that sea ice retreat in arctic doesn't just affect of the arctic but the whole planet and some parts of the planet are affected much worse than the arctic itself, and one of the places affected badly is around here because of the hurricanes getting more intense and sea level rise affecting low -- low at altitude regions which is northeast and louisiana -- >> great. so peter in your book, you talk about this if notion of tipping point. do you tell that we've reached a tipping point respect to climate change? >> yes. i think we we have. well we -- tipping point if you stop poking

something with a stick it goes back to sleep. it's if you don't have a tipping point a and you poke a lion with a stick and then you stop it goes being to sleep and everything it okay if you reach a tipping point you poke and it comes to eat you so a irreversible process in science. and question is -- have we stressed the climate and the planet so much if we managed to take a away to take it away then we'll go back to where before and i think we still can. i think we haven't reached that tipping point that say -- mars or venus reach where had they lost all of their water and became completely lifeless. but we -- we can go back. but we have to first of all stop producing carbon dioxide so what

we put in already is enough to give us acceptable global warming. it's not a question of reducing emissions. we've got to not only reduce emissions but we have to get rid of the stuff there's out there already and research methods to take it out of the atmosphere directly and it is just technology. but it needs a lot of money to develop it. but once we develop it we have solved global warming so i think we can see what we need and feel totally gloomy about global warming because we can find a way to get that up. and that's in the atmosphere if we spend enough on research to do it. >> you've done some effort about research on the coast in some of these geoengineer projects. >> i work up at u.t. piment with a group that does sequestration,

and yeah it's a -- really, you know, they -- the idea is that you take carbon dioxide from a power plant and inject back into the reservoir where original fossil fuels were extracted done in west texas as part of a process called enhanced oil recovery for 50 years i think. so there's a lot of technology right here in texas. and there's a lot of expertise about carbon sequestration, and, in fact, there's a project down on near houston called net carbon, which is -- one of the big problems with carbon sequestration is added cost to the electricity. but there's a innovative project happening there's innovation everywhere it is like peter's point you know we -- i do think we have are the capacity to solve these problems and this is one toilet mention because it is interesting there's a problem called net carbon down near houston where they're using this pex tract they're burning fossil fuels taking the carbon dioxide and

directly using that to turn a turbine opposed to what regular power plants do which is extract, you know, burn a fossil fuel get carbon dioxide in the other things and those go off the pollution. and then use the heat to boil quarter to make steam so dynamically you have lost every level so a much more efficient way and idea is that you can scale this so i think there's really creative ways for pus to attack in some of these problems that event the ocean that the jellyfish are telling us about and what ice is telling us as well. >> julie do you see evidence of the affect of climate change in jellyfish population? >> so this is one thing that scientists are fighting about but i think in certain places certainly -- there's jellyfish that invaded eastern mediterranean originally from indian ocean which is quite

warm in the past it probably would not have been able to survive this the eastern mediterranean which was significantly cooler but that part of the ocean has warmed as proportionately so much, much warmer now and these jellyfish came through are thought to have come through the canal or else in the water ship that cascade through the canal, and they've been dispoflted in the eastern mediterranean u now formed looms that are tens of miles big every summer. and these jellyfish are really, really bad sting percent. they're called nomadic jellyfish so you can't go to the beach when they're bloom and then they wash probably they wash into power plants which use sea quarter to cool their machinery, and they are like millions sink stoppers coming into the machinery so they have to shut down operations and then you can google it like there's these container ships physical of

jellyfish that they have to scoop out of their machinery and wait until the bloom dissipates. this similar thing happened in australia -- swooped into the ronald reagan a big aircraft carrier, and it incapacitated it so yeah the jellyfish are responding to changes in the ocean. they're living probably -- able to take advantage of the new habitats that are forming as we warm the ocean. >> so peter, there's all of this evidence you know scientifically for climate change caused by human activity. but a lot of people are, obviously, reluctant to accept this is an issue and researchers at texas tech university pointed out when they've done surveys people believe that in general climate change may affect a region or a country but it won't affect them personally. do you feel they have to be kind

of an advocate rather than a scientist when it comes to climate change? >> well it's -- to be a scientist is to be an advocatening because the evidence is so powerful scientific evidence, and so which -- it is evidence which can't really be -- there's fed that can be refuted or if you see some peskts right the ice is clearing you can think about the ways that either things might be causing that besides warming of a -- of the atmosphere. and so there's always room for doubt in science and someone can dream it up but some things in science that refutable like gravity and fact that -- dan has says that quarter flows quarter flows down here and two plus two equals four so this should be respectful for tax when we think about political

discussions. and one fact is that carbon dioxide warms atmosphere because it is sort of high school physics you have a bowl floated in space the earth -- it's the temperature of the earth is balance between the radiation that it gets from the sun. which is pretty much constant and the radiation that the earth itself emits because of the temperature which is long wave with raid ration if you have atmosphere covering the earth the radiation from the sun gets in and warms erst but radiation from the earth can't get out because carbon dioxide absorbing it and gets it back like in the a green house and more carbon dioxide it is and warmer earth gets so produce fat balance so you can't add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and get anything other than warming of the planet so to say that carbon dioxide

doesn't affect the climate is -- is absolutely wrong. it's not just an opinion, it's like saying that water flows up hill so you have to accept basic things about climate change that really -- all scientists accept and then beyond that the magnitude of the afterefnght is something where the scope ore the disagreement and disagreement about how it will show itself what will happen first, will we start starving because of lack of food or will we start drowning? or o will neither of those things happen? all right on that note like to open up to the audience if you have any questions there's a microphone set up over here. i'm sure you have lots of questions for our panelists julie and peter. >> hey, spencer --

>> hey, how are you? >> you know we read about the preserve, reserves, natural gas reserves and so on and that there are folks who own these reserves and are working diligently to get the fuel out of these reserves so that we can bring them and put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, and i'm wound peering you know i don't know how to interpret the numbers that are involved here. so with these reserves that people are actively either pumping out or -- have purchased and have plans to pump out, in terms of the carbon dioxide that will will end up in the atmosphere i know it depends hows pennsylvania and but if we know what rate we're burning fuel is there a ballpark that figure that we can have is as to what the effect of all of this stuff out there will likely have so that when we talk to our representatives we can say this is not good.

>> recommendation from the government power and and it's about two-thirds of the remaining known reserve of carbon oil should stay in the ground we can't -- ration of what we can burn and still keep warming below 2 degrees which is the what's regard at this acceptable means that two-thirds of the reserves can't be shouldn't be got at. but it's psychologically highly unlikely that the world will allow two-thirds of the remaining oil in coal to stay in the ground so that's where it shall i see all of the engineering methods have to be use od or co2 removal used because there's an irresistible urge to dig for coal and to build for oil, and we've got --

we've all the world has that despite what they say about reducing carbon emissions so we won't get that amount of restraint i think we'll see two-thirds of our reserves left in the ground. and if we're going to drill -- and burn them we have to get rids of co2. technically -- >> next question. >> hi, this is for peter. i left four years ago i lived there my whole life and one of the reasons i left was because of sea level rise and sense i left city put millions into a pump system on miami beach to try to keep high tides out of the streets. and it doesn't look like it's done much good i think this weekend is the bad king tide as well. and my question is -- i have heard so much about how much more quickly the ice is melting and now the winds

blowing on the antarctic from the west cause warm waters to melt under the ice as well as the warm air melting above that. it seems like it's happening so much quicker than we thought we can see it whatting in our lifetime which is amazing to me. should everyone be moving away from the coast now? well perhaps think we should be careful living right on the quarter, and because the sea level ice rate was previously thought to maybe be -- half a meetser or so by the end of this century that's, you know, two and a half one and a half feet in the u.s.. but now keeps going up because with the accelerated amount it have greenland now antarctica and some of the predictions are

four, five sb six feet essentially which means we'll see changes for places like miami fast within our lifetimes and -- close to real estate will stop being high priced because it will be underwater. [laughter] >> i just had sort of a question that you could both deal with. i just read an article like yesterday and this morning that the meltings of the ice in the northwest passage is also changed gulf stream going up around the island and changed the pods and other animals that live in the -- [inaudible conversations] is this reversible type of thing or is the pods that are imroag there now are less u nutritious which affects the birds. the birds and fish are not going to live as well et cetera, et cetera.

and wonsdzering how reversible do you both feel these things are? well, i think in materials of biology it is a difficult question to answer one thing we've seen with some of the coral reefs are that have been affected by climate change already is that -- they can be resilient. there's a coral reef that was not destroyed by climate change but by pollution. and oil spills in the red sea, and once they put in place made a marine protected area, put in place restrictions about the kinds of fishing and pollution that could go on around there, it came back within, you know, a decade. so they're -- in materials of the biology it is an incredible -- there's a lot to be hopeful for whether it will come to back to

what it was is -- who knows. but it could become a very rich ecosystem given enough time the thing is that -- the amount the speed at which we're changing our planet is outpaces evolution and the resilience of many ecosystem so i don't know. i don't know if anyone can really answer that question. we need to start paying attention to it. how about that? >> definitely -- message first went to it in 1970 we have to factor the way and we still got statistic and this here a cruise ship went through and only ice that was seen it was in the atlantics -- [inaudible conversations] a big change happening there. [laughter] wing we have time for one more quick question. thank you for being here. i have a concern about the gee engineering aspect for two

reasons. one i think politicians tend to think oh, we can fix this by sticking the engineers on them on the problem, and that will fix everything. and our history of unintended consequences is not good. so if you can speak to that. thank you. >> well that's a problem with engineering is intended consequences but in that sense there's a form of engineering is massive -- you just plant trees everywhere and that -- the trouble is not enough land. but unintended consequences of putting sea is one method of geoengineering and there the fear is that it will -- spread out over the whole planet and they all effect places where you don't want it to effect

maybe like the indian monsoon and you've got to wait until that all falls out of the atmosphere before the effects start. the method i like because it is like a scallop is called marine lightening here you put seawater in very tiny -- very tiny nozzles in the bottom of gray clouds like you get in britain. and it makes them white, and they reflect more radiation. now that -- that is what works and also it's you're putting something harmless into thes atmosphere ad as soon as you stop pufferring through nozzles effect stops so you can minimize the -- harm possible u unintended harmful consequences as soon as you get in you stop doing it and that you don't have immediate stop what would happen. that's i think is the release harm form of engineering.

>> okay i think we're going to have to wrap it up there. thank you very much. [applause] both of you. so julie and peter will be next door at the book signing thank you very much for coming up.