- First question.
Can climate change cause earthquakes?
I cannot answer that one.
(Laughing)
I don't even know if that's possible.
I can't think of a mechanism.
It almost sounds like a movie with, like, the Rock in it,
like, a mega earthquake because climate change
and there's a frantic scientist or something.
Does climate change make winter colder?
In certain places, yes.
So, it's always important to be clear,
climate change is this global phenomenon,
but it doesn't mean it's gonna affect every part
of the world in the exact same way.
So, some places will get much hotter,
some places will get drier,
some places will get wetter, some places will get colder.
So, the Midwest of the US has seen more polar vortexes
in the past several decades than they have historically
and these polar vortexes are literally just arctic air
that's plunging further south. And so,
I was in undergrad in Iowa at the time
where I experienced my first polar vortex,
and it was a -20 degree day, not including wind chill,
and we still had classes.
Climate change can make winter colder,
but not everywhere and not all the time.
Is climate change getting better?
I would say things are gonna get worse
before they're gonna get better,
if that's what the question is seeking to ask.
An example, the Mississippi River, parts of it
are drying up, which is, for me,
unfathomable given that I grew up three blocks
from the Mississippi River.
So, to think about the idea
that climate change is getting better is, like,
so far from my mind right now that, in some ways,
it's hard to really address that question.
But I think it's gonna get worse for a little bit.
It will eventually get better.
So, we gotta get through
the thickets before we get to the nice, green fields.
Can climate change make you sick?
Not directly, but indirectly.
As many places start to get warmer and more humid,
these diseases that used to only be found
in the tropics are now finding themselves
in places where, hey, we can hang out here, and guess what!
We have a population that we can now infect.
So, that's a real growing concern about the future
of epidemics in the world of climate change
and it's really critical
for us to better understand kind of the medical side
of that and how these things relate to environmental change
so that we can better prepare ourselves.
Can climate change cause extinctions?
Yes.
A lot of the extinctions that happened
during the dinosaur die-out didn't come directly
from the KT event and the explosion of an asteroid,
but a lot of dying happened in the centuries and millennia
after the event because all this ejecta was thrown
into the atmosphere, changed atmospheric dynamics,
and that led to a lot of plants dying,
it led to a lot of herbivores dying,
and then carnivores died.
And so that is obviously a much more cataclysmic event
and if an asteroid was to hit us now,
we'd have bigger fears to worry about,
but that just goes to show
that we can have massive die-off events that are related
to changes in climate.
Does climate change affect natural disasters?
I'm just gettin' all the good ones.
Yes, so, hurricanes are a good example
of an area where climate change changes their strength,
their severity, and their frequency.
Global ocean temperatures are rising
and warm water is the fuel that hurricanes like to eat
and makes them bigger and stronger.
In particular, when you look at the Gulf of Mexico,
storms that were maybe
a tropical storm category one, which are fairly weak,
those storms are now entering
the Gulf where sea surface temperatures are elevated
beyond historical levels and then these storms
are quickly ramping up to category two,
three, four, and even five,
and those storms cause much more devastation.
Will climate change end the world?
That's a bit sensational.
(Laughing)
I think I can take this question two ways.
So, in the world,
if the world we're talking about, like,
physically the planet, then no.
Earth will be fine
whether humans or any life is here,
but in the world in the way that we know it
and understand it as this biosphere that humans enjoy,
climate change won't end it necessarily
unless you look at the most extreme examples,
but it will significantly change it
and make the way that humans have lived on this planet,
and not just humans,
but plants and animals, dramatically different.
So, it will take conservative effort at the global level,
a lot of agreements,
to really get the climate
and the planet back on track
in a way that we have liked to live
on it though for the past millennia, several millennia.
Nothing.