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Oct. 31, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
49:38
Edition 95 - Hurricane Sandy Special

This time – in a Special Edition, we reflect on the devastating events around HurricaneSandy, as it ripped through the Tri-State Area surrounding New York. We get a report from New Yorksfamous Gabby Cabbie - Peter Franklin in flood and wind-hit Lower Manhattan; then we talk with leadingClimate Researcher Katharine Hayhoe at Texas Tech University.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
A special rush edition of this show.
I felt I had to do something when I listened intensively to the coverage of Hurricane Sandy coming out of New York City and the tri-state area and watching television pictures coming out of there too.
This story as a journalist, and you know that I'm not working on radio in London right now, so as a journalist, you never stop being that.
It piqued my interest.
And of course, I have many connections in America, and America has been a big part of my life.
So vicariously, this side of the Atlantic, I felt this whole thing.
And I couldn't sleep that first night for listening to coverage on radio stations like 1010 Winds, the big powerhouse rolling news station in New York, to see the impact of Hurricane Sandy.
And one interesting thing happened, and you will know this by now, especially if you're in America, and particularly if you're in the tri-state area around New York.
The forecasts of what would happen were absolutely correct.
Now, quite a number of people made the assumption that it wasn't going to be as bad.
It would be like Irene, and we all stayed put.
And look what happened to some of those people.
So we're entering a new phase here, and that's why on this special edition of The Unexplained, I'm going to talk to Catherine Hayhoe.
She is a leading climate research person at Texas Tech University, recently featured in a big edition of the documentary series here in the UK called Horizon.
Now, I loved her views on climate and wanted to get her on this show.
And I called her people yesterday and was able to organize this for today as I record this.
So we're, what, nearly 48 hours from the impact of Hurricane Sandy.
That's when we're doing this recording.
I'm going to talk to Catherine Hayhoe in just a moment.
Thank you as ever to Adam Cornwell for his fantastic work on the website, Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very, very much for your fabulous emails that still come in and for the support that you're giving me through what has not been a great year for me, 2012, with my hearing problem and all the rest of it, but I want to get back on track.
And you've had some really nice things to say.
There was a very nice email, and I will do some of your emails in a future edition.
I'll go through some of them, but there was a very nice email I had from one person who made a suggestion a few of you have suggested.
And that suggestion was, why aren't you on American Radio?
And if you tell us where you'd like to go, we will bombard that organization with requests to get you on.
What a lovely thing to say.
Thank you so much.
That would be a dream for me one way or another.
I love American Radio, and my inspirations have always been the great American broadcasters of our time.
When my colleagues were copying people from the BBC, my heroes were Dan Rather and Art Bell and Cronkite in the past.
So that's where I stand.
Hence my interest in Hurricane Sandy and what it did.
And clearly, it left in its wake a huge toll of devastation and was a climate event and a weather event that we won't be able to forget in a hurry.
So we'll talk to Catherine Hayhoe in just a moment.
What I'm going to do first, though, is just say this.
If you want to send me some feedback about the show, if you want to send me some guest suggestions, I always work on those and I'm glad to see them.
Go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
Now, before we cross to Catherine Hayhoe, climate researcher, we're going to go to New York City now to Manhattan and to a man who is known to broadcasters all over the world, but I don't think so much in the US as the Gabby Cabby.
Peter Franklin is a New York yellow taxi driver, and he is a good guy.
He does feature pieces on radio stations around the world.
Radio stations call him up.
You'll know him in South Africa, Australia, wherever.
And he'll go on air with you and talk about America.
When I covered the first anniversary of Ground Zero, I walked around the site with Peter Franklin.
He was my guide for that.
So we're going to connect with Peter first, and we'll talk to Catherine Hayhoe in just a moment about the implications of what happened in America this week.
So let's cross now to Lower Manhattan.
I hope he's safe to Peter Franklin, a.k.a.
The Gabby Cabby.
Peter, how are you?
You know, I've been very concerned about you.
You're one of a number of people I know in New York, and you live right in the middle of it all.
So how did you come through it?
I'm bewildered.
I have to tell you this quite seriously.
I think I'm living in a science fiction movie.
And the reason I say that is that we're talking now about New York City.
We're not talking about Key West or Dubuque, Iowa, you know, or Sri Lanka.
We're talking about New York City.
The very reason for coming here is the theater, the sports, the museums, Central Park, and all these other things.
That's why you come here.
That's why you live here.
And what do we have today?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Most of the stores are closed.
The subways aren't running.
The streets, although they have people, of course, on the streets compared to usual, looks like it's a ghost town.
It's unbelievable.
No subway.
Remember, this is a city which is public transportation.
People don't drive cars, so people can't get to work.
Schools have been closed.
I mean, it's just absolutely amazing.
I'll give you a very fast example.
The other night, we went out to dinner because it was the first time we were out of the house, out of the apartment in like three days, because everybody has been instructed to hide out and stay inside.
And while we're sitting in the restaurant, the lights go out.
We have periodic blackouts over different parts of Manhattan.
Can you imagine that?
That sounds like it's Rio or Buenos Aires.
So anyway, the lights go out.
Everybody whoops out a flashlight and continues eating dinner, including me.
And I thought to myself, I thought I was the only neurotic that was working around with a flashlight.
So listen, this is very gratifying to hear, really, because people in New York, I know New York well and I love the city, but they're a little spoiled.
You have everything there.
The whole world comes to New York.
To think that people were prepared enough to take a flashlight out to dinner, that's a bit heartening to hear.
Yeah, and then, of course, we each go, you go and pay your check at the cashier, and she has a flashlight, and you have a flashlight.
Now, we go out of the restaurant to walk home, and everybody's walking on the street with flashlights.
You get the feeling you're at Disney World, you know, where everybody's got a souvenir Walt Disney flashlight.
and the intersections are confusion because there's no traffic lights, and that's it.
And then we all went to bed in our various apartments, and we woke up the next morning and the lights are back on.
So, for instance, right now, I happen to be talking to you.
You know, it's daytime in Manhattan.
But I don't know for a fact.
I mean, we're still in my own apartment and at the garage have emergency lamps and lights all over the place because you just have to be ready.
So, keep in mind that Manhattan has one set of problems.
Brooklyn has another set of problems.
New Jersey has another set of problems.
In other words, there's a lot of different problems that came from the hurricane, which depending on your life, are either very serious or not too serious.
Now, Mayor Bloomberg is talking a lot about the rebuilding.
You know, New York is a city where you want to move on to the next thing quickly, and the next thing is getting back to normality.
From what you see, and you're right in the middle of it, how easy is that going to be?
Because it's one thing for a politician to say, okay, we've got the power back on, going to get the transport running and everything else okay, but you can see what this hurricane has done around you.
I'm going to say to you that I think it's going to be impossible.
It's going to be weeks and months and things like that.
And then, much to my surprise, I'll wake up tomorrow morning and everything is fixed.
That's the nature of New York.
I always, I know the city like the back of my hand, but I always underestimate what it's about to do.
I remember with the World Trade Center, I figured it would take them 10 years to clean up the mess.
They had it cleaned up in six months.
So I'm very optimistic that New York will do what they want.
Now, speaking of Bloomberg, he's become a little bit of a hero.
Obama, President Obama, wanted to come to New York.
And his ulterior motive, trust me, like all politicians, was to have his face on television.
If Romney was the president, he'd do the same thing.
Well, come on, yeah, they all do it exactly.
Bush did it, and they've all done it.
And, of course, Bloomberg said, no, you can't, because I can't spare the cops.
I haven't got enough police for you.
Absolutely.
I mean, if anybody or any of your nice listeners, viewers have ever seen a presidential procession, it ties up the world, you know, with the cars and the motorcycles and the sirens.
So New Yorkers are very, very happy.
Doesn't make any difference whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.
Obama was not welcome, which is very, very good.
And by the way, the election has been knocked right off the front page, where it was the number one topic of conversation that was consuming everybody in the United States.
Now, if you said to me, election, I'd say, election?
What election?
And you know something?
It's taught a few people in New York that I know one thing.
You have so much technology here because it's so cheap and available.
In New York, you've got everything.
It's 24-7.
But a lot of people forgot about old-fashioned analog radio.
And a lot of people don't have a battery radio.
And of course, now was the time that they needed it because you need to get the rolling news stations to find out what the hell's going on, don't you?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's been my principal source of income.
I mean, I'm used to listening to radio.
I love radio because remember, if I drive a cab, I'm listening to it.
At night, when I'm at home, I listen to it and everything.
As a matter of fact, some time ago, I happened to buy, just because it was a gadget, I didn't think I'd ever need it, a wind-up radio.
Radio that you just wind up to create the power.
You better believe it.
I mean, I haven't had any problems this week in listening to the radio.
So, you know, you know what this is?
This is a wake-up call from Mother Nature saying, hey, New York City, big shots.
You think you have the whole world.
You think you know everything.
You think you can handle anything.
Whoa, do I got a little surprise for you kids?
Bit of New York reality there from Peter Franklin, the Gabby Cabby.
And I'm so glad that he came through all of this.
And he is a well-known figure on radio stations all over the world.
Let's get now to Texas Tech University now, to leading climate researcher, Catherine Hayhoe.
And Catherine, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Now tell me whereabouts you are, Catherine.
You work for one of the great educational institutions, don't you, in Texas?
I do.
I work for Texas Tech University, which is up in the northwest corner of Texas.
It is an institution that is very well known, apparently, for its football program, as many universities are in the U.S. But we also have a large climate science center here, too.
And that is very topical right now because of the dreadful events that were not unexpected, but are still shocking that have gripped the northeastern part of the U.S. this week as we speak.
In fact, it's just a couple of days ago now, and New York is in the process of clearing up.
And whatever the politicians may say, this process is not only going to be traumatic, it's going to be expensive.
So it was a major climate event, and I guess one that you would have studied.
Yes, in fact, if I can make the distinction, it was a major weather event, which adding those type of events up over 20 or 30 years add up to our climate.
I think one of the really amazing things about the hurricane that we've recently experienced, though, was how well it was predicted.
It really, I think, was a triumph for weather forecasting.
It showed the value of weather satellites that spotted the hurricane so far out to sea.
It showed the value of our weather models, all of which showed it turning left into land, which is exactly what it did.
They were all supremely accurate, and I was certainly checking that.
And these days online, you're able to watch American television news.
And I was watching the news maps on Fox 5 track the progress of this thing.
And the only deviation from what was expected, it seemed to me, was that at one point in the evening, as it was here in the UK and the early afternoon, as it was in the US, was that suddenly they realized that it was moving far faster than they expected.
And then they said, look, you need to know that this is going to make landfall about three hours ahead of schedule.
I think that was the only point that deviated from what we were told for hours.
Yes.
And in the grand scheme of things, three hours off is not much.
This was a frightening event.
And I don't even think now, and I've been monitoring the U.S. media intensively these last few days, I don't think we entirely understand yet the full scale of this thing, the full immensity of it, do we?
No, it usually takes days and even weeks to assess the damage of an event like this.
If you were, for anybody who was watching television when the storm came in, it was dark out.
So even when there was cameras out, we couldn't even see it.
The next day revealed an enormous amount of devastation.
But even still, like I said, it will be days and weeks and possibly even months to count the full damages.
Now, Mayor Bloomberg has given quite a few news Conferences.
I don't know when this man sleeps, but he gave one about 12 hours ago that I heard.
And the question of climate change was posed to him.
And he said, and I guess as a politician, he couldn't give any other answer: we really don't know at this stage whether this is connected with climate change or whether indeed we can expect more where that came from.
I don't know if you heard that news conference, but what did you make of it, Catherine?
I did not hear that.
I do have to sleep sometimes myself.
But it's really hard to talk about a specific event like the hurricane in the context of climate change because climate change is the average statistics of weather events over 30 years or more.
So we can never say that any specific event occurred because of climate change.
And in fact, very large, strong hurricanes late in the season like this are not at all uncommon.
So the fact that this hurricane existed is completely normal and completely natural.
But on the other hand, any weather event that occurs right now is occurring on top of altered background conditions.
We have changed the background conditions of our atmosphere such that any hurricane or storm or any type of weather event that comes along is occurring over different background conditions.
And what do I mean by that for hurricanes?
Well, for hurricanes, one of the main impacts are the storm surges that cause all the flooding.
And today, those storm surges are occurring on top of an ocean that is seven inches taller or higher, I should say, than it was 100 years ago.
Now, seven inches isn't a lot when you're looking at 14-foot storm surges, but it is that little extra bit that in some places might be enough to cause flooding where there wouldn't have been otherwise.
And we're looking at even greater changes in sea level over the rest of the century.
So we're talking tipping points here, and this extra seven inches in height of the ocean, is that down to presumably the melting of the ice caps?
More than half of it is actually because warmer water expands, and the ocean has been warming quite a bit along with the atmosphere.
But recently, the sea level rise has accelerated.
Now it's rising twice as fast as it was 30 or 40 years ago.
And that acceleration is because of the melting of the ice caps.
And that is one of the reasons then, I guess, why this event in New York was as bad as it was and why there was flooding so extensively.
I'm still hearing the scale of the flooding in tunnels and in the basements of buildings.
And even architects and people who are building specialists are saying now that people need to check the foundations of those big skyscrapers in New York because there is a possibility, and we don't want to alarm people, that they may have been somewhat undermined by what happened.
That's right.
Saltwater is very corrosive.
And so they are very concerned about the impact of that on foundations, on the infrastructure, on the subway system, and all that.
Now, again, when you think about it, New York was flooded by a 14-foot storm surge.
And so far, our global sea levels have only increased by seven inches.
So that's about a 4% enhancement due to climate change, which isn't much yet.
But the point is, is that over the next century, we're talking about feet of sea level rise, not inches.
And that can make events like this one that would have happened anyway, far, far worse.
Exactly.
There's one other important component to consider, and that is the fact that hurricanes get their energy from the warm ocean water.
And if we look at the ocean, and especially if we look over the east coast of the United States in the fall, the oceans have increased by more than one degree Celsius over the last hundred years because of climate change.
So when a hurricane comes along, there is more energy in the ocean to feed that hurricane.
But there will be people listening to this who say, you know, those who have not studied science, those who haven't read the newspapers, one degree.
What's one degree?
You know, one degree, you go out on a day when it's 12 Celsius in London, and then the next day it's 13 Celsius, you feel no difference.
So one degree, they might say, fooy.
Oh, oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think there's probably one degree between the room I'm in, because my computer's in it, and the room next door, which isn't.
So why is this a problem when it relates to our climate?
Well, the way I like to think of it is by looking at our own bodies.
Our own body temperature is very stable.
If it goes up one degree Celsius or two degrees Fahrenheit, it's a red flag.
It's a warning sign that something could be wrong.
It's not enough to make us run to the hospital, but it is enough to make us think maybe we should take a Tylenol, maybe we should take our temperature again in a few hours to see if it's gone up.
It's a warning flag that something is different about our bodies.
So in the same way, the average temperature of the planet and the average temperature of our ocean, our sea surface temperatures, is as stable as our human body temperature.
So when that temperature goes up by one degree or by two degrees, it is as much of a red flag as when our own body temperature goes up by that much.
Is it possible, and maybe this is an unfair question, but journalists ask questions like this, don't they?
Is it possible to estimate how much worse the effects of Hurricane and then Superstorm Sandy were because of what you've just been talking about than it would have been had we not had the changes in temperature of the oceans that we have had?
That's a fair question.
And I think that it would be theoretically possible with some of the really incredibly high-tech hurricane models that they have at places like the Weather Forecasting Centers and at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in the U.S. If you have these models, what you can do is you can actually create a world without climate change.
And then you can create a world with climate change.
And if you could generate a storm like Sandy in the world without climate change, in the world with, you could look at the differences in the strength and the wind speeds and the pathway and things like that.
So theoretically, I think it would be possible, but it would be a lot of work.
So nobody's working on that as far as we know.
They may be working on that right now.
It would take two years before they have any results.
All right.
When you heard that Hurricane Sandy was coming and there was the possibility that it would become the perfect storm that it became because of that melding of a very cold air current from Canada, wasn't it, that meshed in with this thing and gave it so much extra momentum and made it so much more dangerous.
Did it flag up to you that something was happening and this could be the start of a trend?
That's a good question.
We always, as humans we like to look for patterns.
We like to look for significance in every event that occurs.
But as a climate scientist, the problem is we are very rigidly bound to looking at statistics over long periods of time.
So this is one data point.
But what we really need to do is we need to look back 20, 30, 40 years to see if there have been enough accumulation of data points to tell us that something is happening.
And when we do that, we have already seen something.
What we've seen is that we aren't seeing any more hurricanes than we used to at all, but we are seeing stronger hurricanes.
The number of strong hurricanes has increased over the last few decades.
And so this hurricane is one more data point to go into that increasing trend of events and storms that are stronger than we think they would be.
And looked at from our European perspective, okay, there are parts of France and other parts of Europe that get some pretty fierce weather and this country too from time to time.
But when you look, and these days we have better media than we've ever had, so we can all see this stuff happening as it happens, the fronts off buildings being torn away and that crane in lower Manhattan that was pushed backwards, this thing was actually pushed backwards on itself, wasn't it, wasn't it?
So the armature of the crane was hanging down.
I think it's still hanging down there.
This is ferocity of wind that it's very hard for people who haven't experienced it to have any handle on what that must be like.
I know.
These storms really are a testament to the awesome power of nature.
I believe that to some extent, living as we do now, we live very isolated from nature.
We live in air-conditioned and heated homes.
Whenever there's any problems, we have shelters, we have places that we can go.
But back 100 years ago, for example, I live out in West Texas.
So 100 years ago, people living here were settlers.
They were just digging in and the dust bowl was going to come along about 15 or 20 years later.
And so when we used to live in much closer contact with nature, I think we had much more respect and awareness for its power.
But these days, I think we've really lost that until events like this come along and they almost, they surprise us and they almost shock us.
But I don't think they would have surprised and shocked our great-grandparents.
Do you think that from what you've seen and from your research that we need to be to be more prepared?
Look, I did a show with a woman who'd written a book about survival strategies a couple of years ago and how you need to boil the water, which curiously enough they're having to do in parts of New York now, how you can manage for days and days without electric power, which is a terrible thought to those of us who live in big cities like the one I live in, the one that you live in.
Do you think that we need to be giving more thought to how we would cope in the wake of events like the one we saw in New York?
Well, the one thing we know is that these events will come along fairly regularly, whether it is a massive ice storm that can break down trees and power lines for up to two weeks, whether it's a hurricane, whether it's a straight line windstorm like they had in the eastern U.S. this summer.
There is always these types of weather events that show us how vulnerable we really are once our electricity is gone.
So I think it does make sense for people to be smart about it because we can often do some things that are kind of silly.
Like one person I read on Twitter said, why are you buying water when you can just fill it up from your taps?
The water is still running.
And this is before the storm, you know.
So I think it would make sense if we all kind of had some common sense idea of how to ride these out.
But again, I think that recognizing the power that nature does have is really important because we feel so insulated, so protected, so safe.
But we live on the planet.
Everything, the air we breathe, the water we drink, it all comes from the earth.
And every structure we have is at mercy, or at the mercy, I should say, of these events, whether it's a tornado, a hurricane, an ice storm, a windstorm.
We know that they come along and we know that we need to be prepared.
But the events that we're talking about seem to be fiercer.
If you think about the fires that they've had more than once in California, the devastating fires, they had them in Australia as well.
There have been some truly ferocious storms.
And of course, what's just happened in the tri-state area around New York.
All of these things added together make me wonder as a journalist, is it just that we have the capacity to report them that we never had before?
You know, you wanted to get a report out of Australia, then you'd be doing it on a bad phone line, and chances are you may not be able to make a connection.
Well, of course, these days you just click, click, click, and you can Skype to Australia.
You can get television pictures.
It's easy, easy.
How much of this great pattern do you think is down to the fact that we now understand these things and we see them more than we did and they're recorded more than they were?
And how much of it is down to a real and genuine change that we need to be afraid about?
That is exactly the question that climate scientists ask.
And so we have asked that question by looking at data, not just by looking at media reportings, but actually collecting the data on how often these events have happened.
So we have answers.
And here are the answers.
In the United States, especially in the Midwest and the Northeast, we have seen increases in heavy precipitation events.
It's not just in the U.S. around the world, there is a consistent signal of increasing heavy precipitation events that has been linked to climate change.
Now, I carefully say precipitation, because if the temperature is below zero, it's snow.
And that's very counterintuitive.
How could climate change bring more snow?
Well, as the atmosphere warms, there's more water vapor there.
And so when any storm system sweeps through, it picks up much more water vapor than it used to and it dumps it.
And again, if it's below freezing on the ground, it falls as snow.
If it's above freezing, it falls as rain.
So we know that that is increasing and is projected to continue to increase in the future.
And in some areas of the world, especially in the U.S. Northeast, they have had massive flooding as a result of those precipitation increases.
So that's something we need to prepare for.
For example, when designing new storm sewer systems, they have to be able to cope with higher rainfall than they used to.
So we know that that's happening.
We know that sea level is rising.
We know that high temperature extremes and heat waves, like the 2000 heat wave in Europe, those heat waves are becoming more frequent.
With the 2003 heat wave, they actually showed conclusively that the risk of that heat wave had already doubled because of climate change.
Wow.
Well, I can tell you a story.
Right close to the place where I'm recording this, we have a park.
And it was so hot during that heat wave.
And I'm talking about, I mean, in Texas, they do get temperatures like this anyway from time to time, but we ain't used to it here in London, let me tell you.
And it makes life hell.
We had 100 degrees Fahrenheit and we topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
It was so hot that I just had to take a deck chair out of my apartment because I couldn't bear to be in it and sit in the park because I just couldn't bear it anymore.
I have never known anything like that.
And you telling me that that might repeat itself is a little scary.
Yes.
Well, even here in West Texas, we're actually fairly high elevation.
So we normally only get about nine or 10 days a year over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
But two summers ago, we had almost 50 days over 100.
Can you imagine 50 days?
There were people who could not pay their electricity bills because the air conditioning was so high.
The crops withered and died in the field.
Everybody, with that event, just like with the hurricane, with that event, everybody wanted to know, is it climate change?
I think that's the wrong question.
The right question is, will climate change change the risk of these events?
And the answer to that is yes.
That summer we had two years ago could be the average summer in less than 40 years if we continue on our current trajectory of using coal and gas and oil to supply most of our energy needs.
And yet it seems that the climate and on a micro level the weather can throw you a curved ball from time to time.
If I tell you in the UK, the forecasters, because I reported this and talked to some of the forecasters and the government here prepared us for a drought, especially in the south of England where I live, it's always the way that we're a bit short of water.
We have been for years.
And they said, okay, it's going to be very dry.
Make your preparations, but it looks like we're going to have to put drought orders in, which means you can't water your garden and stuff like that.
In the event, we had incredible amounts of rain across this country.
We had a washout of a summer.
We had flooding.
They got it completely wrong.
But we had what I would term, and I've lived a few years, unnatural amounts of rain here.
What does that mean, do you think?
Well, there's a famous quote from Mark Twain that says, climate is what you expect and weather is what you get.
I would not be a weather forecaster for the world because it is the hardest job in the world because weather is essentially chaotic.
It is really difficult to try to predict weather.
We are getting a lot better at it.
I have to say, we have made enormous strides over the last few decades.
But even still, there's some times when we just get the weather plane wrong.
So then that begs the question, how can you be so sure about climate change 50 years from now if you can't even predict the weather next month?
Exactly.
How?
We can be.
And here's why.
Weather is a single event or a single season, but climate is the long-term average over years and even decades.
So think of an individual person.
It's nearly impossible to predict something about an individual person.
Like if you took a single 18-year-old, it would be impossible to predict how many children they would have by the time they were 50.
You just couldn't.
But if you looked at all the population of 18-year-olds around the whole UK, you could predict very accurately that by the time they reach the age of 50, they might have 1.8 children or some other statistic like that.
It wouldn't mean that anybody would have 1.8 children.
That's physically impossible.
But it would mean that on average, the average would be 1.8, and that would be very predictable.
So in the same way, we cannot predict what the summer of 2024 will be like.
We have no idea.
But we can predict what the average summer will be like over 30 years in the future, over 40 years in the future on average.
That's the difference between climate and weather.
Now, the precipitation amounts are a particular worry to us here in Europe, and especially for countries like Holland, the Netherlands, where they're very, very low-lying, and they're having little experiments at the moment.
I only saw on television here a few days ago, little experiments in living on the water, communities on the water.
And they're kind of preparing themselves for rising sea levels and the consequences for Holland.
Of course, here in London, we have the Thames Barrier, and the Thames Barrier is there to close up whenever we're affected by really high tides.
It doesn't happen that often, but they think it might happen more often.
Here in Europe, we're very jumpy about the prospect of more storms and more rain and those sea levels going up.
In our lifetimes, do we need to be that concerned?
It does not hurt to prepare because the one thing we know is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
So anything that we invest in preparing for the future now will save us a large amount of money.
And honestly, we've gotten to the point where I think it will save us money over our lifetimes, not just our children.
It used to be talking about our children, but we are already seeing changes happen right now over the last decade.
And so if we plan to live another 10 years, I think we will see the payoff and many things that we can do.
So for example, in Holland, they've actually, they've got some very innovative ideas.
The Dutch are always innovators, I think, in building.
One of their ideas is, let's just stop trying to hold back the sea, like we've been doing so successfully for hundreds of years.
Let's just even let some of those dikes open and just create floating villages.
That's what I was seeing.
They're experimenting with living on water.
They're actually going with nature.
Yes.
And then you can go with nature in a much more natural way and you don't have to worry about floods or sea level rise.
You can just literally go with the flow.
So do you think that's the lesson that we need to be learning, that this is an inevitability?
I imagine the climate and the changes in it, well, it's like a musical box.
You wind it up and it's going to play.
You can't stop it.
The things that we have done, and I presume that you go with the theory that mankind through the Industrial Revolution and all the rest of it, fossil fuels, we've played our part.
We've contributed to all of this.
But once it's set up and going, there's nothing you can do.
So the best thing you can do, instead of complaining about, oh my God, what am I going to do in my immediate environs?
Best thing to do is to think about, okay, how can I live differently?
How can I adapt to what is inevitable?
I think the answer to that is yes and no.
I think that we are going to see some amount of change that is inevitable because of what we've already put into the atmosphere.
The climate change we are seeing today is because of all the carbon that we produced 30 years ago.
Do you think, Catherine, that we're making a difference then now?
if I tell you, for example, that EDF, the big energy provider, electricity provider for London, they're like sort of Con Ed for New York, EDF announced a huge price rise last week because they've got to update the infrastructure and all the rest of it.
And they said that one of the reasons that prices had to go up like they were is to pay for the cost of administering energy efficiency schemes.
Do you think all that stuff is going to make a difference?
Yes, I know it will because that's exactly what I do with my research.
My research focuses on exploring the impacts of climate change at the local scale where we live.
So for example, what would be the impacts for London versus Bristol versus Edinburgh versus Durham?
What would be the impacts for Boston versus New York City versus Miami, Florida?
That's what I do.
And I look at two different futures.
I look at what we expect to happen if we can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, if we can increase our energy efficiency, if we can, in a sensible, economically healthy way start to explore alternative energies, what would happen under that future versus what would happen on a future where we continue to depend on fossil fuels as our primary energy source and we continue to be very wasteful with the way we use them.
And what we see is this.
We see that over the next 20, 25, 30 years, there's no difference between the two futures because the change that we're going to see over the next 20 to 30 years is because of what we've already put into the atmosphere.
And it's also because we can't change everything tomorrow.
There's no magic wand.
Even if we decide to increase our efficiency and transition to renewables, the next five years might not look that different.
It's kind of already set in stone.
But once we get 30 years out, we do start to see differences between the two pathways.
And by the time we get 50 or 60 years out into the future, we see huge differences between the impacts we'd be expecting.
But here's the kicker.
By the time we get out there, it's too late to pick what pathway you want to be on.
It's like if you are on the operating table about to have bypass surgery, it's too late to promise that you will diet and you will exercise.
It's too late.
You're going to have the surgery because that's the pathway that you chose 20 years ago.
So that's why I do what I do because I want to show that the choices we make today have a huge impact and we can make two types of very important choices.
Number one is we can prepare to adapt to a changing future because we know it will continue to change.
But number two is we can make smart choices to reduce the amount of energy that we're using and to start looking for other ways of energy that do not produce carbon emissions and that will not run out on us.
And that sounds great.
And people have been trying to do that for years, but that's really difficult and expensive, isn't it?
Yes, it is difficult and it is expensive.
And that's why we have to look at the economic viability of many of these things.
But here's where efficiency comes in.
Efficiency saves us money right away.
It does, you know.
If you use a more efficient light bulb, if you replace your car with something that uses less gasoline, if you buy a new appliance that uses less energy, we're saving money right away.
Sometimes we have to pay off that appliance.
It may be a bit more expensive, but we can do the math.
We know how much our energy costs.
We can calculate how many years it would take to pay off and what would be a sensible choice.
And this is the message that it's really hard to get over to ordinary people, especially in these cash-strapped times that we're living in.
You know, nobody's got any spare money.
That things that you do actually could benefit you, even though we're talking about the benefits to the climate being way down the track 30 years out.
Financially, actually, your pocketbook could benefit by doing some of these things.
So it's not a good idea to bury your head in the sand.
Exactly.
I'm actually of the school of thought that I believe that we shouldn't do anything only because of climate change.
There should always be other reasons too, because every decision we make is made up of multiple factors.
So let's just look at it for a minute.
Pretend that there's no climate change.
What would happen if we stopped using coal?
We would have much cleaner air.
All of the children who have asthma, all of the people who lose workdays because of their problems breathing, all of the money the government spends cleaning up the consequences of pollution.
One of my colleagues, a guy called Luis Sifuentes, calculated about 10 years ago that from that point of view alone, the money that we are spending on the public health system, on cleaning our buildings, on taking care of people who suffer from respiratory diseases, from that perspective alone, it makes financial sense to stop using coal.
I remember I grew up in Liverpool and we have this wonderful building there called the Liva Buildings.
It's the sort of symbol of Liverpool and it's right on the waterfront there and the last thing that a lot of people who emigrated to the United States would have seen back in the 30s, 40s, 50s as they looked back from the boat would have been the liver buildings.
Now when I was a little boy, the liver buildings were black and I just thought they're a black building.
But back in the 80s, using I think eggshells or powdered apricot or something like that, they blasted it clean and because the air is now cleaner than it was when I was born, it stayed reasonably white.
The building is actually a beautiful stone, but none of us had any idea of that.
I grew up in a city that had, Liverpool looks a lot like New York, but on a smaller scale, lots of tightly packed, Victorian style, black buildings.
And they were black because of the air pollutants.
Well, a little kid, I didn't know that.
But a lot of these buildings have been cleaned up.
And that just goes to show the benefits of some of these policies, I would imagine.
Exactly.
So there's so much that we can do.
And then again, with oil, too, if you look at where in the world all of the world's oil resources are, the UK has some and the U.S. has some, but the vast majority, even for the U.S., are nations that are not friendly nations.
So there's a reason why the U.S. Department of Defense, why the CIA, is concerned about climate change and energy, because they know that they impact national security by making countries dependent on other countries for oil that they might not want to be.
So from that perspective, from the perspective of security, it also makes sense to transition off of oil.
Now, you said that this process is something that is very, it's like stopping a supertanker.
It's very, very hard to reverse.
And we're not going to see that much in the way of active change in our lifetimes in the next 30 years or so.
But further down the track, we'll see the benefit of improving our ways.
That said, what sorts of weather events do you think we can expect over the next year?
Having seen all the things that we've seen this year culminating in this tremendous storm in the tri-state area.
What do you think we can expect next?
I know that's asking a massive question, and you may not want to answer it, but I'll give it a go.
Well, I'm a climate scientist, not a meteorologist.
So I'm going to give you a slightly different answer.
I deal with timeframes on the order of decades rather than a single year.
So what I can tell you is that the frequency of extreme precipitation events, both snow and rain, is increasing.
So on any given year, you might expect to see more of those than you would ordinarily.
But there can always be years when you see less.
That's the problem with climate is that we as humans, we understand weather.
We see weather with our eyes.
We know weather.
We don't know climate.
We would have to be some type of savant able to track our temperature and rainfall every day of the year for 30 years and then add it all up in our head and then fit a line to it to see if it's going up or down.
That's who we'd have to be to be able to know climate.
So any year can be cooler or warmer.
Any year can be wetter or drier.
But in general, we see more frequent heavy precipitation events.
We see more frequent extreme heat in the summer.
Also, what we also see, something very interesting, one of my colleagues at Rutgers University, a woman called Jennifer Francis, has been exploring the impact of Arctic ice loss on our weather systems.
And what she says is that in the winter, it's making our weather systems last longer.
So when we get a weather system kind of camping out over on top of us, it just lasts longer because our weather patterns are being shifted because of what's happening in the poles.
And in the global psyche and here in the United Kingdom, we know that.
Most of us haven't registered that fact, but we know that when we get a weather system in, you're right.
It doesn't clear in a day or two.
Sometimes it hangs around for a few days.
Sometimes it hangs around for a week or more.
Oh, yes.
The dreadful summer you had.
I was in the UK just before the Olympics and it was raining.
It was 15 degrees and raining the whole time I was there in July.
And everybody was saying, well, where's global warming now?
Tell me about it.
We had a few nice days and the Olympics were blessed with some very good weather, but also there was some pretty grim, gray stuff here.
You're right.
And that's why I think that using the term warming is such a mistake.
It's such a misnomer because it makes us expect it's always going to be hot and dry.
Whereas with climate change, climate is a change in our average conditions.
What is normal is now different.
That's what's changing.
And for my listeners on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and I do have quite a few, and I'm very pleased for all the listeners that I've got in the U.S., do you think that there is a likelihood we will see more events like Sandy, which was a confluence of a few events all coming together to make something that was a superstorm, something that was particularly bad?
Is it likely that as part of this process of climate change, which is an ongoing process, which has ups and downs, on average, we're going to see more confluences of events like this and more bad storms that include a number of factors that come together to make something really difficult?
That's a good question.
I think that the possibility for surprise is definitely higher because, like I said, we have changed the background conditions of our atmosphere.
Our atmosphere is now warmer.
It has more water vapor in it.
Our sea surface temperatures are warmer.
Our Arctic conditions are changing.
Our background conditions are changing.
So the possibility of surprises, I think, are greater because we are moving into unknown territory.
We're moving into a place and a state that we've never been before in the history of the human race on this planet.
So I think the possibility of surprise is definitely higher, but the definition of surprise is you don't know what it's going to be.
And that's part of the fun, I guess, of doing research.
I first came into contact with your work because of a documentary that was on television on the BBC in the UK a few weeks ago on a wonderful science series we have over here, and it's shown around the world called Horizon.
And the title of that program was Global Weirding.
And I think that was your phrase.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
And global weirding being the term used to describe what is happening to our climate overall.
I cannot take credit for coining that phrase, but I use it because I think it's very apt.
It's about what is normal to us all of a sudden changing.
We're getting things that are not normal.
If you talk to people, the number one thing I hear from people is something's different.
This is not what I grew up with.
And what they could be referring to could be a heat.
It could be a storm.
It could be drought.
It could be all kinds of different things.
But in general, what we're seeing all around the world is that things are not the same as they were when we were little.
And those people who are doing the rebuilding, and I know that your time is a little limited, so I'll keep this short, but those people who are involved in the rebuilding of New York right now, putting the fronts back on buildings that had them ripped off, putting roofs back on, replanting trees, would you advise them to stand back for a moment and not actually put everything back in exactly the way that it was to maybe make provision for more of the same in the future?
I think that this is an excellent opportunity to build greater resilience into their systems.
One of the things I think is most important for us to understand is that in 99% of the places in the world, climate change is not creating new problems that we never imagined before.
So just to give you an illustration, if you look around the world, two-thirds of our largest cities, our New Yorks, our Londons even, are located within a few feet of sea level.
So we already have two-thirds of our major cities sitting in a place where they can be easily flooded.
And in the case of the United States, we already know that the East Coast and the Gulf Coast is prone to hurricanes.
So Miami, New Orleans, all the large cities along the East Coast, they were already prone to hurricanes.
They were already vulnerable.
So in these cases, what climate change does is it just comes along and it just adds a little bit extra to the pre-existing risk.
It's kind of like the little extra straw you add to the camel's back.
So whether people think climate change is a real risk or not, I think any rebuilding opportunity is an excellent opportunity to increase resilience and to reduce the vulnerability of a city to something that we already know exists.
That being that the city is right next to the ocean and we know that hurricanes come along.
And as a climate researcher, what is the most pressing thing that we need to do more research on right now, do you think, As you look into 2013, I think that there's two answers to that.
In the terms of solutions, I think where we need to focus our effort right now is in cheap, big batteries.
Because the main obstacle to using more wind energy, using more solar energy, using more tidal energy, is that where do you put the energy you generate it?
Where do you put it?
Yeah.
Exactly.
The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine.
So working on batteries, I think, is the number one thing we need to be doing now.
And then in terms of climate change, the cutting-edge research in our area is understanding not how climate change will affect our temperature or even our precipitation, but how our weather patterns.
Because that could be changes far beyond anything we've imagined so far.
What we need to be looking at more, what we are in fact looking at more, is the interactions between climate and weather.
Because weather is what affects us from day to day.
And we are just beginning to understand how climate change could alter the weather patterns of our planet.
Catherine, listen, I'm very, very grateful to you.
When I saw you on television, I thought I have to talk to that person.
And I tried once through your website to contact you and wasn't able to.
So I thought, okay, I'm going to approach the institution in Texas that you work for, which I did yesterday.
And you very kindly said yes.
And I know how busy you must be at the moment.
And I'm really grateful to you.
If people want to know more about you and your work, what do they do?
Where do they go?
I have a website that is just my name, www.katherinehahoe.com.
And I have a book that I wrote with my husband.
My husband is a pastor of a church here in West Texas.
And we wrote a book together on common questions that we all have about climate change.
You know, it's freezing outside.
Where's global warming now?
Or how do we know this isn't a natural cycle?
Climate has always changed in the past.
How is this any different?
And then him being a pastor, we also added in the, you know, if God is in control, why would we think something like this could happen?
So that book is called A Climate for Change, Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions.
And it should be available on Amazon UK as well as Amazon in the US.
And it's just a really kind of climate change for dummies.
Why do we even think it's real?
Why do we even want to care about it?
And where are some places we could start if we want to figure out what we could do?
And if I was to ask your husband, as some people would have asked if they suffered in that hurricane, why does God allow such things?
What would he say?
I know this isn't a fair question because we're not really talking about that.
But what do you think the answer, since you brought up the subject of the book, what do you think the answer to that might be?
Well, that is a question we answer in our book because that is a question people ask all the time.
And I think the answer to that is free will.
God has set up this planet so that things happen.
If we decide to build enormous cities right beside the ocean in a place that we know are vulnerable to hurricanes, there's consequences to our decisions, good and bad.
And so with every decision we make in life, there is always pluses and there is always minuses.
And we have the ability, we have the freedom, and we have the intelligence to make our own choices.
And that goes for everything, not just the climate, I guess, Catherine.
Catherine, I'd delight to talk to you.
Thank you very, very much.
And please take care.
Thank you.
So great talking to you too.
Well, there you go.
Big show.
And I just felt, the journalist in me felt that I had to get involved in this.
You know, even though I'm not broadcasting right now in London, I'm still trying to find a gig after my hearing problems.
I had to be involved.
As a journalist, it never leaves you that instinct and that zest for it all.
So I hope you understand why I felt we needed to do this show, and I hope you enjoyed Catherine Hayhoe and indeed Peter Franklin, New York's Gabby Cabby before that.
We'll have a regular edition of The Unexplained next, but thank you very much for your support.
Keep the emails coming, www.theunexplained.tv.
And somebody emailed me only today to say, I don't want to use iTunes.
Is that the only way I can get your show?
No.
All the shows are available here at the website, www.theunexplained.tv, as well as iTunes.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his great work on the website.
Keep it up, Adam.
Thank you.
You are a top guy.
Martin, thank you for the theme tune.
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