This story appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
The year 2014 stands out for Dan Vimont for a couple of reasons. It’s the year his daughter turned one, and it was also the year that the Earth’s atmosphere passed a carbon dioxide content of 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. In November of the following year, that threshold became permanent. There is no going back.
“That weighs on me,” admits the professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “My kids are going to grow up in this world.”
Vimont has the cheerful bearing of an outdoors enthusiast—he’s an avid fly fisherman and says he got into his field, twenty years ago, because “I liked math and I liked being outside”—but he turns sober when talking about the implications of climate change.
“I worry about the human health aspects of it, and how it disproportionately affects certain communities,” he says. “I wonder, what will our world look like? Will we use climate change as a way to come together to solve a massive problem that we all share? Or will my kids end up inheriting a world where we are at odds?”
UW-Madison is home to dozens of scientists studying climate change and its impacts on our earth. Experts are working not only in Vimont’s home department, but in geoscience, geography, ecology, and many other fields. Over the decades, their work has helped shape our understanding of what could happen if humans continue to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They work together across disciplines and with partners outside the university. They give TEDx presentations, talk to Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs, visit classrooms, lead international consortia, win awards.
They also worry—a lot.
“One of the great challenges we are facing is, we are moving the earth system to a climate state we’ve never seen in our human lifetimes,” says Jack Williams, a geographer who uses the geological record to study how plants and other species respond to climate change. “We have to go beyond the present and even the last couple of centuries to find analogs to what we’re seeing today.” Williams points to the end of the last ice age as one such period, in which Wisconsin was completely transformed as a result of five degrees Celsius of warming.
Monica Turner, a leading landscape ecologist well-known for her studies of forests’ resilience to fires in Yellowstone National Park, says there is an incredible amount of human suffering ahead if we don’t act now.
“The consequences of not changing society’s behavior at a global scale are really dire,” she says.
You may draw a blank trying to think of another realm where the scholarly findings point so inexorably toward future suffering and upheaval. But geoscientist Andrea Dutton has an answer at the ready.
“Epidemiology,” says Dutton, a recent winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” grant for her work on sea level rise. “Epidemiologists have entered this arena where climate scientists have been sitting for a long time. Welcome to the party, we tell them. Like us, they see trouble coming. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And they encounter denialism, too.”
With President Biden setting an aggressive agenda on climate-related measures, Dutton says she is cautiously optimistic that “denialism,” at least, may take a back seat to activism and change. But will it be enough? Will it come in time?
On one level, climate science is painstaking and precise, and unfolds slowly over time. Scholars look hard at small things in order to understand larger phenomena. Turner’s graduate students, for example, re-create the conditions for lodgepole pine seedlings to germinate and then watch them grow—trying to understand the soil conditions that allow Yellowstone’s iconic trees to establish again after huge fires. Dutton examines the skeletons of coral to track sea level rise through time. Vimont runs models of ocean and atmosphere interactions in the tropical Pacific, inserting one alternate hypothesis after another to test their reliability. For Williams, something as tiny as spruce pollen in a soil sample tells a sweeping story of a Wisconsin landscape long since lost.
Along with hundreds of minute scholarly research inquiries, though, they are asking the same big questions that tease worryingly at many of us: How high will the water rise? How fierce will the fires burn? What will our food systems look like? What new threats will we face?
Vimont, who started out thinking of his work, at a basic level, as “two fluids interacting on a rotating sphere,” now realizes that big-picture societal impacts—and the risk assessments and policy decisions that can mitigate them—are critical to his climate research.
“I evolved from being a pure climate scientist into recognizing how climate science interacts with other fields in order to ask new questions,” he says. “Back in the early 2000s, there was a sense that climate scientists are going to tell you what the climate is going to be, and others will use that information to make good decisions. It doesn’t work that way.”
Vimont, whose primary focus is El Niño (the “biggest thing that regularly happens in our climate system”), first had this epiphany years ago, when he began working with some applied economists from Stanford University to determine how El Niño could impact rainfall and hence food security in Indonesia. El Niño events are associated with reduced rice production in Java.
“But when I ran the analysis, I saw it was plenty wet during the monsoon,” he says. “The economists found that the problem isn’t rainfall amounts, it’s that the rain is delayed. There is a period of time at the end of the harvest where they were expecting to produce rice, but it’s not there yet. They call it the ‘season of hunger.’”
Rather than asking how much rain falls, Vimont says, the question then became: What causes the delay of the monsoon onset, and how do I verify that, rather than changes in rainfall?
“There’s no way I would have known that, without having conversations with economists and farmers who know how rice is grown,” he says.
A few years later, Vimont used that conversational model to help spearhead a group called the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI). WICCI brings people together to better understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change in Wisconsin. That effort took off, with partners in a wide range of fields and sectors of our economy and across the state, including the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The group has put UW-Madison on the map, nationally, as a leader in climate adaptation.
“That kind of collaboration is a signature of Wisconsin,” Vimont says. He tells his graduate students that here at UW, “the bars are high, but the walls are low.”
Elevating the importance of outreach and conversations may have helped put Andrea Dutton on the MacArthur Foundation’s radar. When she gave a TEDx talk in 2017 (“Reframing Sea Level Rise”), she told the audience, “I am a mother, a sister, and a daughter … The reason I came here today is not to save the planet … Planet Earth is going to survive. I came here today to save human lives.”
Dutton feels a moral and ethical obligation to share her knowledge with the greater public.
“I’m a human, too,” she says, her voice cracking a little.
Dutton arrived at UW-Madison last year from the University of Florida, bringing with her a unique expertise in dating the timing of coral growth. Because they need sunlight to survive and live close to the sea surface, corals offer clues to the history of past sea level rise.
“I tell my students it’s like CSI: Planet Earth,” she says. “We are figuring out the puzzles of what happened in Earth’s history from these bits and pieces in the geologic record.”
The past is a yardstick for the future—up to a point. Dutton and her global collaborators are working to understand how high seas have risen in past warming events, and how quickly that has occurred. They are most concerned about the west Antarctic ice sheet, the underside of which is being bathed by warmer water in the Southern Ocean. Ice sheets have melted in the past—but unlike in the past, when one hemisphere or the other might warm because of slight changes in the geometry of our orbit around the sun, our climate is now warming at both poles due to the concentrations of greenhouse gases that warm the entire atmosphere. In a worst-case scenario, Dutton says, eight feet of sea level rise by 2100 will drown many coastal areas.
Even in Florida, where people can see sea level rise happening, the profound impact shocks her listeners.
“After a talk, people will come up and say, wow, I wasn’t aware of just how bad this really is. What I get to do, in these public settings, is wear my scientist cap while showing my human side. We need to understand how this is going to affect us, the people we love, the communities where we live, and global communities, too.”
Dutton’s outreach spans everything from Kiwanis Clubs to real estate investors, documentaries to radio interviews, webinars to city council meetings to the U.S. Congress (she testified in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee on greenhouse emissions in 2019), and it’s in these settings that Dutton feels increasing momentum around what she calls “a social problem, not a science problem.”
“If there was a silver lining to the rollback of environmental policies of the last few years, it’s that people began paying attention,” she says. “The most important thing we can do is talk about it. You don’t have to push an agenda. Listen to people, get their thoughts on what they value. Even if you are at a dinner party, bring it up.”
Whatever the potential scenarios, the concern is how quickly we will get there. Williams, who uses the geological record of the last 20,000 years to study how plants and other species respond to climate change, ponders the meaning of “abrupt change,” a key term in climate science.
“One way to look at it is, a forcing point is reached,” he says. “We see a quick flip in ecosystem state. Will this happen more quickly than we can adapt?”
In a 2018 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Williams caused a stir with analyses of future climate analogs showing that Earth’s climate is expected to resemble that of the mid-Pliocene by the year 2030. That’s going back 3 million years in geologic time. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, climates by 2150 could compare to the Eocene of 50 million years ago.
“That study helped put things into context,” says Williams. “We have to look much further into the past to understand what things will look like.”
Pollen extracted from lake sediments tells Williams that Wisconsin and points south were once covered by spruce woodlands, during the last ice age. They aren’t here anymore, because when the ice retreated, the climate warmed too much for spruce to survive. Oak woodlands and prairie ecosystems took their place. But how quickly? In the case of the last great warming here, “quickly” was centuries. Today, it might be decades.
“I try to focus now on the adaptation part,” Williams says. “I work with conservation managers on looking at this in a new way: there is a strong tradition of preserving and conserving what was here 200 years ago, but that’s just a moment in time. If species like, say, magnolia are starting to move up here, outside their historic range, maybe we should be helping them, not rooting them out.”
Extending the survival of species now native to the region may depend on a strategy to identify “resilient landscapes.”
“The Driftless area, for example, has lots of microclimates where species can survive for a while,” he says. “Maybe a species that is cold-adapted can find a cold zone, like a spring-fed pool, and hang out there. Identifying these pockets of resiliency is going to be the key to climate adaptation strategy.”
As a geographer, Williams has compared today’s environmental analysts to Old World mapmakers, charting unknown territories.
“There will be novel ecosystems unlike any we have seen today,” he says.
Over the decades, even as scientists have learned more about the importance of using the past as a yardstick for the future, and have applied ever more rigorous thinking to analogs and projections for future climate impacts, there have been “well-funded efforts to sow uncertainty around climate change,” according to ecologist Turner.
“It is frustrating and sad that as a society we have such a poor ability to act collectively for the common good,” she says. “We are certain now that this is a statistically significant detectable trend, and it’s going consistently in the direction that we expected.”
Turner herself has had to pivot to keep up with rapidly changing conditions. Her work on the massive fires that consumed Yellowstone in 1988 showed that forests were resilient to fire. But, she says, those conclusions were based on patterns over the last 10,000 years, when big fires like that occurred once every 100 to 300 years.
When large fires in 2016 re-burned some of the same areas that had burned just 28 years earlier, she began to ask different questions: What if the next 100 years look a lot different than the last 10,000? What if it’s hotter and drier every year? Could we undermine the resilience of those forest systems? What she found was disturbing.
“Our ecosystems have withstood many changes in the environment over thousands of years,” she says. “They have resilience built in, otherwise they wouldn’t be here today. But are we creating conditions for multiple events—fires followed by more drought, for example—that push the system so it’s not able to recover? The answer is yes.”
In the worst-case scenario, in which we continue our “business-as-usual” approach, about half of the forested area in Yellowstone will be lost.
The national park is an iconic landscape for many, and Turner found her calling there as a 19-year-old ranger naturalist.
“I was a kid from New York who had never been west. I fell in love with Yellowstone’s remoteness and its expansive forests. I love hearing the wolves howl around the bay of Yellowstone Lake.”
She feels a personal mission to convey what’s at stake, to other park visitors. Working with funds from the Camp Monaco Prize she won in 2020, Turner and her graduate students have been turning observations and data into visualizations for the park.
“I would like for visitors to understand that this is what this landscape could look like if we restore our atmosphere. And this is what it will look like when your grandchildren come here, if we don’t do anything. I feel the urgency of finding a way to help people to understand, because it can be really hard to grasp,” she says.
The enormity of the problem can be overwhelming. Guilt or denial are common responses. And while big, societal changes are what’s needed to solve it, these scientists say, individual actions help them stay motivated and hopeful. Ride a bike. Use renewable energy. Talk to people. Push for systemic change.
As Williams says, “Despair is not a strategy.”
