humans can adapt to climate change with authors of a new article on changes in the weather, the economy, and disaster preparedness. this is hosted by arizona state university. it is an hour. [inaudible conversations] >> ok. good morning, everyone. [indiscernible] welcome for those of you who have not been to our very cool new space on this very typically hot, typically hot august washington, d.c., day. so this is -- for those of you who are repeat offenders, you may have figured out we have two different type of morning seminars. one is our policy tools seminar

which features especially faculty and colleagues from asu and aligned institutions, very much focused on presenting ideas for improved design and policymaking. the other series that we engage in also around breakfast is to roll out our quarterly edition issue of science and technology magazine, which we co-publish with the national academy of sciences. so, that's what this event is and we feature authors of one of our articles, both to present issues that are important and valuable, but also to shamelessly promote what we think is a really important magazine. in the service of the bigger mission here, and that mission, as you've all heard me say if you've been to any of these events before, is to build a community, a much bigger community in washington, d.c.,

in the beltway, that can have vibrant, civilized, yet diverse conversations around issues of science, technology, public policy, innovation and so on. , so, this is our latest issue of issues. if you take a look, you'll see all sorts of cool articles, especially the one featured with our speakers today. you will also -- it's a beautiful magazine, beautiful art, striking photography on the front, should give you some sense of that. we also have subscription cards, very affordable, can't get something for nothing, and -- but obviously we do this because we believe that it's a very important service to the community of those interested in policy, science, and technology in the city. so, i will quickly turn it over to our speakers, but i want to go over the standard rules here. again, we're about building community, enhancing conversation, which means we ask

our speakers to stick to a half hour or less in presentation and then we invite you to engage them in conversation. that will go for another half hour and then we will take -- and then we'll break for those of you who have to go to your day jobs, but we also invite anyone who has some flexibility to stick around, continue the conversation, trade business cards, and make lunch appointments, because that's what we do here in d.c., and build the community of people having these conversations and discussions. so today we have author of one of our prospective pieces, focus on climate, and this is an issue near and dear to my heart, i've been writing about and obsessed about for maybe 30 years, and it's only now finally i think coming to the surface as a central part of the discussion,

not just around climate change, but around resilience, sustainability and welcome being in societies across the globe. so, i'm going to quickly turn it over to our two speakers, bruce and roger, and let me say a little bit. we don't go much on biographies here because we think that content speaks for itself. bruce is one of the principals -- if you're a policy wonk, you know, as the mythical wag group. who knows about the wags here? oh, there's not -- oh, all right. so, those of you who don't, need to google it. sometime in the mid-1990's, a huge percentage of the -- i would say principal science policy individuals in the country formed a group. and i assume driven by the insight, the same one that brings us here together today, which is that we need better discussions and better input into science and technology policy decisions. rog works at the american geo physical union one of the largest societies in the united

states, where he runs a thriving earth exchange which is very much in the spirit that we cspo embrace, focused on making the -- bringing scientists and citizens together to make the world a more resilient place. i will turn it over to them. they can talk about what they wrote in their article, raise other issues, and then they will open it up to conversation with you guys. so, thanks for coming. [applause] [inaudible] >> thank you. if i put this here, does that work better? i'm not much of a microphone holder. thank you. i assume everybody can hear me. i'm not shy and withdrawing at all. first, the drill is, i'm going to make a couple of quick opening remarks and then rog will take the floor and i'll come back for opening remarks.

first of all, dan, thank you for the introduction and i want to thank issues in science and technologies, the academies, asu and a lot of -- agu and techs for supporting a project that sort of got us started down this path, even if the project wasn't specifically focused on this. there are also two individuals who are not here that worked on that project who i wanted to mention, shahan and marina, both deeply involved in the stuff rog is going to talk about. let me say that rog and i met for lunch yesterday, first to remember what was in the paper. because you never remember what was in the paper and the other thing was to talk about the presentation today and i think we were both stunned and pleased that the paper has gotten such a positive response, especially since it basically states the obvious. and in discussing why this has took us so long to get to the point where the paper was ready

for publication, there were two things that we had to overcome before we could do the paper. both of them were what you would call objections from the community. first time, i'm sure, dan, you've run into this, every time you talk about uncertainty in the future of climate change, you're accused quickly of giving ammunition to the climate deniers. if you don't know what's going to happen, you know, we shouldn't respond to it. well, at the end of the day, also, if you don't talk about the uncertainty of the predictions, you also can't address the uncertainty. we had to set that concern aside that we were not giving in to the climate deniers and giving in to that adaptation. the second issue that came up was very similar, which was any focus on adaptation is often regarded by the community as taking pressure off of mitigation, and so the answer is no, we're not taking pressure off mitigation, but to state the obvious, if you're not dealing with adaptation you're not , dealing with a problem that we are confronting almost immediately.

and, too, once we got over two objections, it was a statement of the obvious. what the paper says and i'll summarize this quickly because it only takes a point. the first point, we have poor information about what's going to happen at the local level and we need to attend to that. the second point is, like any major problem in this technological society, we need to increase the focus of research development and demonstration in those areas of concern about adaptation. the third point is, it's best not to hide your head in the sand about the cost of this because it's real and therefore, once you know what's going to happen and you start spending resources to come up with some solutions, you better start thinking about how you're going to pay for it because it could be an expensive proposition over the next several decades. the last one is you need to adjust your policies to reflect

a warmer world and worry about risks, hazards and protecting vulnerable populations. that's the summary of the paper in a short thing. once again, i state stating the obvious. with that, let's turn it over for a little more detail to talk , about the first of those points, which is better information. >> thanks, bruce. i also want to say thank you to asu and to cspo. and to issues. it's a little bit fanboy of me, but i'm super excited to be in this building with these people and thank you also for being here this morning. the other thing i want to say is, bruce has mentioned marina and shahan and i think it's fair to say that everything i'm about to say that's good is reflecting their input and that i contributed the rest. [laughter] thank you. [laughter] so, i do want to dig a little bit into this idea of improving the usability of of science and

climate information and developing rd&d agenda. the punch line is we can approach both goals for better connections with decision-makers and scientists. i want to unpack that a bit. in doing this i'm drawing heavily on the experiences we've had working with community leaders at lots of different levels, lots of different municipalities. in the other thing i will say, building on your uncertainty point, arguing about uncertainty is sometimes said you're playing into the hands of climate deniers. but also used sometimes to say that decision makers can't handle uncertainty about climate . in my experience, working with people who are making decisions at the local level, that's all they do is deal with uncertainty, right? they're incredibly sophisticated about dealing with uncertainty so that myth that uncertainty is going to get in people's way, i think that that's a discredit to the people who are making decisions. i'm going to walk over here and grab the advance thing.

so one way i think about this is to sort of think about a mythical kind of linear pathway between science and applications, right? and you can sort of imagine that you start with first with earth science research and trying to understand the climate system and thinking about what those models do, how they enable you to make projections and how you can determine local risks based on those projections. and finally the best way to present the local risks or having conversations about the local risks, towards the end of evaluationing adaptation options that let you make local decisions. what i want to say is that the first part of that is fairly robust and fairly well attended to and the later part of that pathway need more attention. that speaks to the need of doing a better job of using what's already available and integrating that into discussions and decision making. and this idea of evaluating local options, i think, is an

especially important part of this chain and i think a great place to anchor the discussion. one reason for that, options are aspirational. it's easy in conversations about climate change to start talking about gloom and doom scenarios and that doesn't entice action, that gets in the way of action. by framing in and around options by helping people make choices, you shift the conversation towards an aspirational one. even aspirational about something like adapting to climate change. the second thing, and i think this is especially important in sort of our present climate is that options, evaluating options ensures that scientists don't overstep and insert the rights and roles and responsibilities of citizens to make decisions with their elected representatives. and i think that's particularly important now when we see what looks in some ways like a little bit of a rejection of the overstep of so-called experts in providing prescriptive

approaches. i hope that's clear. trying to be diplomatic. all right. so, the other important part of that though is who we're providing options for or who we're providing information about options for. and i think it's particularly important to attend to the options that are available for all communities and the information that's available for all communities, as you think about that. and this is a picture from the astrodome after hurricane katrina which i think vividly illustrates the challenges and the dangers of not paying attention to options for some of the most vulnerable and historically disenfranchised and i think that's a key responsibility in developing this research and development. the research demonstration and development agenda that we pay attention to all of those communities. so as we dug into this idea of options and evaluating options, one of the things we very quickly realized is that there is a fairly large disconnect

between the way the scientific research is organized and presented and the way people at the local level and regional levels are making decisions. so, we found that a lot of people in local decision making contexts were thinking in terms of sectors. public sectors like emergency services, goods movement, people movement, public health and health care, and infrastructure, and as a scientific community, helping people try to understand climate change, we were thinking in terms of flood risk, extreme solar radiation, precipitation extremes and it took a lot of work to map those two things together and connect that information to usable sectors. and the whole point of this diagram is that it looks complicated. [laughter] it does, right? ok. the other thing that we found was that options were defining on a spatial scale. the kinds of decisions people were making told us about the spatial scale in which they needed and wanted information.

so this is a picture from new orleans. this is part of the response to katrina. this is a good thing. one the things that happened is the city's reevaluated its relationship with water. traditionally, historically it tried to pump every drop of water that fell out of the city and it turns out that exacerbates the large scale city sinking and contributed to future flooding, so they are reimagining what it is like to be a city that holds water and celebrates water. that decision making process is happening on a block by block scale. climate information isn't up to a block by block scale by itself. but climate information combined with local data and local knowledge can be relevant at a block by block scale. so options point us towards the kind of scales that we must be investigating. options also seem to pull us into thinking about the time scales at which people make decisions. bruce mentioned this. that the time scales which provide climate information are

sometimes not useful in decision making. decision making varies from front line decisions made on the order of hours through sort of an intermediate strategy level kinds of things where you're thinking about how you're going to deploy resources, how you're going to deploy people, that specifically takes from weeks to years. you think about a five-year strategic plan. finally, there's infrastructure kinds of decisions that take place on the scale of 50 and 40 years. and the climate information for adaptations is focused primarily on this level, but it hasn't reached to the other places where people are making decisions and often decisions begin somewhere else than the infrastructure level. and finally, this is kind of a cute story, shared by some students at mit. they entered a contest to offer adaptation options to the city and to the university. and so, these were really earnest students, incredibly sharp. they took a gcm.

they did some regional down scaling, they coupled it with a hydrological model and a bay model and a cost benefit analysis, so this is a chain of six different models for options. and at the end of the day, the recommendation to the university was move all of your critical infrastructures to the second floor. [laughter] in reflecting on it, they thought maybe they overengineered a little bit. [laughter] and i think the lesson for that. if you understand the options and choices people are making, you can design a research and development agenda that's appropriate for that. one more cool story, sorry. i get excited about this stuff. i talked about the need to think about options and sectors which people make these decisions. but sometimes the options, the the decisions people are making actually cross the sectors in really creative ways, and thinking about climate adaptation can push people

across the sectoral boundaries. this is one example from los angeles, called parks after dark, designed to get people in neighborhoods out of their apartments and into parks. it does three things. it revitalizes the parks, which long-term helps mitigate against the heat island effect. it builds social cohesion and neighborhood identity, which is one of the best short-term actions you can do to protect people from extreme heat. and the third thing it does, it has a really strong public safety benefit. and it represents a collaboration between the parks department and public health department and the public safety department. so it's a good example of how climate adaptation, understanding options can position adaptation in terms of larger, broader societal priorities, which i think is cool. bottom line, understanding options can frame future research.

they lead all the way back into the beginning of the path, which is why i said at the beginning, a mythical straight-line path, it is more of an iterative process of collaboration. that can give us the knowledge and expertise and collaboration we need to really define what is an adaptation focused research, development demonstration agenda that would be a worthwhile investment for the united states to make at this time in collaboration with global partners. last thing i will say, if you don't want to remember anything i just said, this is the title i wish i had, right? adapting a user center philosophy, or how i learned to stop worrying about climate change model and helped make people make adaptation decisions with apologies to , stanley kubrick. [laughter] thanks. [applause]

bruce: you said a half hour. i think you are still under half an hour. i will not be very long. raj really addressed what was the core of the first section of the paper, the better information and to queue up a set of agenda items. i have a different brief, the focus on the second section of &d agenda fore rd adaptation. dan, you opened up to talk about the washington advisory group. i'll spent a minute on that. washington advisory group was founded in 1996, basically bob white, president of the economy of engineering was the driving force behind that and he gathered together a bunch of very senior guys and they invited me to join them primarily because they needed somebody to go get coffee. that's not true, but it was an adventure where i was junior to them by 30 years in most cases and we had a great run. it was a lot of fun. the one thing that i learned,

both at the academy and then at the washington advisory group is that if you identify a problem , there's no economic argument that stands in the way of applying the research and development approach to it. so in the same way that there are in the community of climate scientists as you heard earlier, the objections, don't talk about this because it reduces the pressure on mitigation, there's a logic in the r&d world which says, the government can't pick winners and losers. we shouldn't invest in research and development because there are different lodgics which says the government should stay away from that sort of thing and leave it to the private sector. well, in my bones, both from the academy and from decades at the washington advisory group, i just don't care. it's just wrong. the answer is, there are a set of problems and there are very few barriers to intelligent application of research and

development to those problems. and that really is the spirit of the second section of the paper. as we point out in the paper, in backing off from what i would call aggressive recommendations, the whole paper is about we &d is know how much rd focused on adaptation questions. there hasn't been either a national or global, it is not a collaboration effort, but at least a cataloging of what's going on in adaptation in an effective way. i don't want to belabor that. the primary recommendation in the paper is paying attention to adaption as a goal for research and development demonstration. i like to contrast what's going on in mitigation to what should be going on in adaption by giving a couple of quick examples. in energy, there is an international, multinational state level collaboration in research on alternative energy called mission innovation, which

is a substantial commitment of public resources to energy, advancing the alternative energy futures, and it includes, i don't know, 23 different countries that are actually investing resources and focusing on it. similarly, there's a private sector initiative called breakthrough energy coalition, which includes the famous and rich from jeff bezos to jack ma and bill gates that are investing in exactly the same thing, which is alternative energy with a goal of mitigation as the motivating force behind it. it's hard to find that level of attention and focus in adaptation, so i have three ideas. i'm not sure they're the best ideas, but three areas where it's obvious to me that the application of of research and development resources and efforts make a lot of sense. and they can be adaption focused, but some of these have

other aspects. the first one is the built environment, especially infrastructure. for those of you who have studied or thought about the instruction industry, it is an r&d-light industry. it's very decentralized. most of the innovation is by material suppliers rather than construction industry themselves. and what i would call, there's a huge opportunity for -- of a wide variety of research and development focused, whether it is from materials or applications of control technologies through, you know, construction project management, but particularly in what i would call retrofitting infrastructure. it's very different if you're going to build an airport than if you're going to raise it by two feet. it's different if you're going to lay rail tracks than if you're going to refit them in such a way to handle the new heat environment they're operating in. and that alone i think is an excellent opportunity for the national and perhaps

international collaboration across rd&d. second one is obvious and it's an area i know relatively little about, but it's public health. the public health research, whether it's by the c.d.c., which already has a set of international contacts, or whether it's focused on the disease vectors or clean water. there's a huge public health research agenda that already exists, but is altered by rapid global warming and it's one of those areas where an international collaboration, whether it's private or public, probably public in this case, focused on public health would be hugely valuable. now, the third area where i think we could use a focused large scale rd&d agenda is in climate-related disaster ' preparedness and recovery, and risk management, what you call for disasters. once again, there are lots of efforts worldwide and the

history of the decade of natural hazard reduction. but this whole issue of the change in the natural hazards as a function of global warming is not something that has risen to the level of focusing private and public resources on rd&d to address that. and i'll close with a personal comment, this is from somebody who is primarily an r&d guy, a scientist and technologist, rather than necessarily a climate person. for those of you who don't live in california, the wildfire season is now 12 months a year. in the last decade my wife and i built a dream home in northern california that backs up on a park. and i used to walk out in the morning with my cup of coffee and i'd look at that park and think, oh, this is spectacular, how fortunate i am to be here america where i managed to secure this little piece of private property next to public lands. cup ofalk out with my coffee and imagine a wall of

fire coming down to the park to where we live, and it bothers me that there are massive research programs for putting robots on dangerous environments and we can create internet enabled refrigerators and amazon, when i buy a barbecue can recommend that i buy barbecue fuel and that we can control an acres-wide refinery from a small control room, and yet our response to wildfires is basically drop a bunch of guys with shovels and axes into the face of the fire. so i ask myself, is there an rd&d agenda in natural disasters of increasing prefrequency because of climate change? the answer is absolutely yes. and if you want to buy a house in northern california, i'd be willing to talk about it. [laughter] thank you very much. i think that's the end of our presentation. [applause]

what i'd really like to do is tell everybody to go so i can sit and have a long conversation, because everything you said resonated with me in ways that i feel are very fertile. instead, i will turn that over to you. i want to start with one question that responds to your point about options, and how framing the climate change issue and the adaption issue in terms of options is kind of a liberating perspective. this seems to me to be a really big and important point because i think a lot of the politics around climate change, the ugly politics around climate change has been an unspoken narrative around winners and losers and around who gets to decide what the problem is and how horrible things are going to be. but you know, not to be pollyanna-ish about it, one could also see climate change as an opportunity for a species

that is incredibly able to adapt to adversity to be creative and deal with a challenge in a way that empowers and advances society. in fact, i'll just plug another report called adaption for high energy planet, part of our climate pragmatism that kind of tries to make this case, but could you just talk a little about whether there's a politics behind that that could be emerging and how we could drive that? because it seems to me that that could really do a lot more than the literally hundreds of millions that foundations are putting in to try to do things like change public opinion. so -- i meant that as a softball, not a hardball. [laughter] mic, or isanother this the only one? please share the mic. to the extent that i have any role in this life in advising people who are politicians or policy makers, it

seems to me as though adaption is a softball that everybody is missing. mitigation is a hard sell for all of the reasons you would expect. it's long-term. the consequences are hard to measure. it's critically important. we should charge ahead as fast as possible. but politically all of the wins, the easy wins comes from doing things on adaption because they're immediate, they're local. it's all politics is local. you can fill potholes and stop the impact of flooding in miami and become a hero, politically, and build consensus around the importance to deal with climate change by leading with adaptation rather than with mitigation. and it seems to me as though that's a huge opportunity that the policy community and politicians have missed, and i think the worse the summers get, the more people are realizing that responding to that presents

a political opportunity and that may change opinion more quickly than the foundations investing. raj: i think i am just adding to that. it seems like two things. a lot of innovation around adaptation is happening at local scales and regional scales, and one of the things we can do is elevate that and surface that and that is a useful thing to be doing. the other thing, adaptation is a really wonderful way to position science as something helpful for people, things one -- people want to do anyway. instead of the mitigation conversation that you should be doing this, and i know you have 20 other things you are worried about, adaptation allows you to say, i know you are worried, i can help you do those things in a different way and maybe even a better way. that for me is a really positive opportunity.

daniel: ok. i think it is now time for me to shut up and you all to start asking questions. >> from the advanced institute on sustainability from germany and a.s.u. two points about the local aspect. i think it is very important. i very much appreciate, by the way, what you presented. i think there are a lot of important points around the local and the options, both of those. the comments, the two comments are one, and happy to get some response to this. one is the question of meaning making in local communities. when you're dealing with very different people at different levels of power, resources, time, expertise, etc. in the local context.

obviously local context matters a lot, but also how people make sense of what it is that is on the agenda. i think that takes some real effort, to facilitate at the local level, because otherwise, very easily the experts dominate the story and the kind of engagement and the kind of ownership that that requires, really, if we're going to deal with these options, it gets lost. second point to follow that, just as a specific example. i've been working and will be back in a few weeks in indigenous communities in taiwan and small communities in rural japan dealing with disaster risk. and there, too, the process of really engaging the local community in that and their engagement in thinking on their own terms about the process

becomes really important, but then the other part is how do you merge that, how do you integrate that with global, scientific knowledge. so, i'd be interested in your thoughts on that. raj: yes. [laughter] i'll tell you about a project that i think is very cool that takes this in a really interesting direction. in the mountains of afghanistan there is -- people have a tradition called calendars of the body, and essentially it maps ecological symbols onto understanding human physiology. a is an empirical tradition, cultural tradition, that has been refined and developed over generations, and it is incredibly well suited to local conditions. it is an incredibly mountainous place, so you can go 10 kilometers away and experience a very different climate, meaning

you have very different agricultural, cultural practices. and i'm told that if you marry someone from a village ten kilometers away you have to learn a new calendar. the tragedy is sort of because of political events, because of conflict, people haven't been able to use these calendars for 50 or 60 years and in the process of recovering those calendars, starting to reuse them as a cultural preservation effort led by individuals, they found a no longer match the signals around them, the climate signals around them. so they reached out to the climate community to ask essentially we have this historic tradition of revising our understanding based on our experience and we would like to incorporate climate science in that historic tradition. and that is a great, i think, example of what you just talked about. bruce: i have sort of a nonresponse-response, which is

the local knowledge is often confused by what i would call the national knowledge. and this is as a consumer of information about climate change from national publications. if you just watch the drum beat of fear mongering that comes along it is often, it often creates more confusion than anything else. not putting time scales on predictions, you know, three meters of sea level rise, or the other thing i think that often happens is that the local level is brought to the table, not by local events, but by global predictions, and i think that stands in the way of what is an intelligent approach to what actually is going on at the local level. and that's a nonresponse. [laughter]

>> i have in my research come across reference to climate change discussions from as early as 1908. i name is alice, and represent the association of greater washington. we look at environmental and nutritional influences on mental and physical well-being. and in the research where references went back to 1908 and some from the 1800's and in the mid-1800s, acon and doyle have an all battery-operated house. what theus as to source of the electricity was at that time, and for the world's fair in the 1800s celebrating

electricity, what was the source of the energy at the time? weren't there battery-operated cars before the combustion engine gained control and popularity? can you enchance some -- enhance some of that earlier knowledge, maybe? where did we get lost? bruce: i don't know if i have a constructive answer. i would refer to wikipedia. when you talk about the early history of different vehicle approaches, it is really a historical context, very important and interesting, but really not something i have anything to -- to ask, asi'm trying a knowledge base question, what did we know then that might have put us in a different direction? bruce: it's a very good question. i don't have a constructive answer.

raj: there was a big literature on the way the energy system has evolved, and why, the political and technological influences, which i would be happy to talk to about. >> thank you very much. my name is debbie. i am a volunteer with citizens climate lobby. i really appreciate this talk about solutions. ccl trained us to skip the solutions sometimes, and deal with climate anxiety for our listeners. at this year's conference, one of the people i met was from charleston. he said, lots of people used to live on the coast line, but now they are starting to move away from the coastline. he said, your income level directly affects how far above sea level you live. so i am not exact the shore -- question,re of my but can you talk about climate justice, why local vulnerable

communities, what decision-makers can do about that? raj: it is a great question. you know, we're in this interesting position where in some cities, the only available sort of land that was made available for people with less economic resources for all kind of reasons, structural, racism, all of those things, were lowlying areas of the city, and now those are most prone to flooding. solutionsthoughtless like, let's just move everybody out of that area. shouldn't have been there in the first place without realizing the historic legacy. it's not a great answer in the sense that it's complete, but i guess two thoughts are -- one is that as a community of people with privilege -- well, knowledge is power, right?

science is a kind of knowledge, and we, as we develop these research agendas, right, we have a responsibility to be thinking about the relationship between those agendas and the people in power. we're in a system of of science where who decides what science to pursue is often driven by who has access to science and who participates in science, so you can end up with a vicious cycle where you have a community of scientists that doesn't mirror the demographics of a region or a country, and that determines, in part, the scientific agenda, so we have a responsibility to fix that. and i guess, i think i'm losing my train of thought because it's a big question and it's an important question. the other thing i'll say is that -- unusual allies. there was a program, i think in minneapolis, where the chief resill against officer wanted to

-- chief resilience officer wanted to make sure that the resilience plans were reflecting members of communities that didn't typically show up at city meetings, right? and so they ended up partnering with, i think, the naacp to do advocacy training for communities as a way of enabling them to participate or helping them -- i shouldn't say enabling, helping them participate in climate discussions, and it's sort of six steps away from the climate conversation. it's helping people do things they want to do so that they can then consider adaptation and be active and vocal in setting an equitiable agenda. ok. it's a great question. it's a hard one. >> so, i very much like your slide, raj, but it seems at odds with what you were saying in your linear chain, which is you want to stop worrying about climate change models, but you

also made a strong argument for much more local climate information, so that seems to be opposed. so, can you talk a little bit more about that? >> thank you for calling me out on that. no problem. [laughter] rajul: it's a little bit tongue in cheek. what i was trying to say is that for me it's been an important evolution to sort of not only think about climate change models, but also think about this other thing. and my historic sort of background as a climate scientist was to imagine that climate models were god's gift to humanity, and they are. [laughter] rajul: but, and this is my way of reminding myself it's important what context they're used and how they are formed.

it's a reminder to myself to think about the whole chain, not just the climate model. i don't mean to diminish the importance of that as part of it. >> i would push back and say you're absolutely right. that i would argue that having -- waiting for or expecting that kind of localized knowledge to arrive and save the day, as a barrier to actually making adaption decisions, is absolutely what we shouldn't be doing, and so that is spot on. i just didn't map to your process. so i'm agreeing with you here, but not there, exactly. i have a partial response to this. go back to the one which has the different direct impacts, the -- >> that one?

>> yes. these predictions, hazards and risks associated with them, some of them will come out of climate models, maybe. maybe you can localize to the point. a lot of them won't. but you'll end up doing flood risk because you've put sensors around the city and developed a trend of the understanding of the relationship between precipitation and storm surge and the actual flooding that happens. i think that raj did a nice job of presenting that the climate change modeling community needs to adjust, but there are things that are outside of the scope of climate change models that we'll need to have done to be able to address these. >> and they're far more fundamental to get done, and your mit example about that has been the trend, both by the climate modeling community, but also by the communities who are

interested in adaption, waiting for that to happen before they deal with uncertainty which, as you pointed out, they're deeply used to thinking about anyway. for some reason, everyone has gotten wrapped around the idea that we, the climate community, can do a better job and do better than, say, tomography, where are people going to live in your city, or where is the economy going to be in 2050? that doesn't seem to bother people, but the climate science we have oversold what we can tell about the people about the future of what other communities have said, i've got a bridge for you to buy or the stock market will be this at this time. so, yeah. you didn't talk about the

role of the insurance industry. shouldn't -- i mean, i'm looking for people who are -- who have a financial incentive to do something, and they're an obvious one. >> dorothy, thank you for the question. during the focus project in thinking about the paper, i dug a little bit into the insurance industry. what i discovered was a certain amount of cynicism about the economic incentive that comes from insurance coverage. basically, most policies are rerated and repriced annually, so that commercial real estate insurance or business continuity insurance basically, they have predictive models to establish a baseline insurance rate, but

because they're not, the premiums aren't fixed. it's not like buying a life insurance policy where a flat -- like where tia craft gets you 20 years at the same rate. commercial insurance is rerated annually or every two years. while some of the insurance companies do great jobs of prediction, they are really predicting what is going to happen in the next five years, and that's all they care about. so i don't think that insurance provides enough economic incentive to do any kind of adaption except in the very, very short-term. >> well, i'm thinking of things like to get home owners insurance you have to, you know, have smoke alarms or earthquake insurance in california, i presume you have to deal with things that could easily fall off. i mean, all of those kinds of-- bruce: but once again, the issue

is the insurance companies are very good at rating the current situation, but the unprecedented uncertainty of what's going to happen as a function of global warming moves the horizon for individuals and for owners of infrastructure or homes beyond the scope of the insurance companies sort of approach. so you may get an initial rate as a function of having smoke detectors and a fire suppression system, but when they rerate you three years from now, based on the number of wildfires that are occurring in your region, it doesn't matter whether you have the suppression system. it's established a baseline, but they rerate and increase the policy. so, the rerating process, insurance companies live by rerating based on the changed risk assessment, and in many cases the risk has little to do with the property or the thing, and has more to do with the external environment.

as that changes, you'll pay more and provide an economic incentive to get out of the house, maybe, or sell the commercial real estate, to move, but it's not an economic incentive to -- it's not a particular economic incentive to do a better job of preparing now. that's what i would say. >> an adequate answer? >> hi. i'm with the u.n. environmental program, and i just wanted to see -- you mentioned how adaption is pretty much a political softball, but you didn't really get to talk about the cost associated with adaption, so can you elaborate a little bit on that? and from what i understand, it seems to be very difficult to sell intense projects with

significant cause associated with adaption. so, that's where i'm thinking about this when you classified adaption as a political softball. >> you're absolutely correct. the projects that require money are politically unpopular, among all parties, generally, is the way i would describe it. mitigation requires money. adaptation requires money. i would say it is not a question termsbeing a softball in of actually making something happen, but as a political presentation you can say, i am focused on adaptation, this is important, and you will get a positive political response from your constituency. we want to be protected from these things.

it does not mean it is easy to do it. it means it is something you can focus on -- it is a truly political softball, not necessarily an execution softball. does that make sense? a mayor in georgia who wanted to-- here. there's a mayor in georgia who wanted to sort of design a city hall that would be resistent to flooding, and she sort of told me everybody can get behind a .ity hall resistant to flooding i am not talking about why it is going to flood more. i think that is essentially political softball. >> thank you both for presenting. i just have a question about ways that you can present options for all that you mentioned, the recovering after

hurricanes and having those popularly unrepresented communities. i had an opportunity to go to germany last fall. we got to tour in town in germany that was really sustainable. it was great, but also insanely expensive and accessible. -- and not accessible. i am curious how to make those funds accessible to those communities for everyone, because often those are the least accessible to those who need it. rajul: i'll give you an example from new orleans that i thought was pretty successful. so this is a project that involved city residents in collecting stories on flooding in their city.

they brought into to the national weather service, and the weather service updated their models to predict how flooding is going to occur. i think that is cool because i am a weather geek. the second thing is they want to city council and were able to demonstrate that their region is prone to flooding and amend an rfp that the city was releasing for plans to redevelop areas to include their neighborhood, and it had not been included before. i think it begins with making sure that those communities are at the beginning of the political process, not at the end. one way to do that is to help them develop the tools and language that connects with what they know and amplifies what they already know through science. >> ok. we want to remain on time here in deference to people's

schedules. one last fairly efficient question. sir? joe rousher at spacefaring-services.com. i have been testify colleagues in the space community to develop a private partnership consortium to use space technology to address energy needs, to mitigate possible climate change, and i'm a little nervous about where to begin. i need advice because i don't want to reinvent the wheel and i want to have some partners with some clout, and i just don't know where to begin. if you have any suggestions,

i'll be around after the session, but if you want to talk a little bit about those briefly, i'd appreciate it now. thank you. bruce: we should talk after the session. the answer is, as i've said earlier, there is a wealth of environments where people are bringing new technology to bear on alternative energy, improving the environment, or reducing the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuel. you name it, there's a huge r&d enterprise, so i don't know what you mean by space technology, but my guess is, unless it's really, really, really unique, it's redundant, isn't it? unless it's unique, someone is already working in a close space, and you want to see those folks and make sure you're aligned with them.

>> great, thank you, raj and bruce. thank you all for participating. this is not over, but the formal aspect. we urge you to hang around and enjoy the coffee and food and chat. and come back next time. i think next time actually is september 5. we're going to have a book event, an interesting book about termites. if you are here on wednesday the fifth, that will be interesting for everyone. a round of applause, please, for our speakers. [applause] by voicing my appreciation. i think it will make a difference in our ability to make progress on the climate change front, so thanks a lot. [applause]

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