I am going to be talking about climate
and ecological forecasting,
predicting and preventing public health risks.
I'm going to start out as the abstract said
– if you had a chance to read it – with a few questions
just to remind you what we're all doing here.
Some of the things we'll be discussing
are about whether the beaches are safe to swim in,
is the seafood safe to eat,
why did that whale die and how does that affect me?
Some of you might think about the unusual deaths on beaches
and that sort of thing. Why is my drinking water green?
If any of you were in Toledo last summer, you may know that.
And does it feel hotter, wetter, drier to you?
Are you in the middle of a heat wave and you think,
"Jeez, isn't that sooner than it used to be?"
To answer some of those questions,
we're gonna talk a little bit about climate.
We're gonna talk a little bit about ecological forecasting,
the two titles of the talk. We're gonna talk a little bit
about some of the operational products
we're developing to address those things
and some of the future trends that we are looking at
in terms of climate impacts on health down the road.
And again, a lot of interaction with you
about how to communicate this information.
This is what you all do for a living is communicate this
to many different levels of students
and how to stimulate their interest
in both science and action.
To me, it's a great honor to have you all as an audience
and I hope to learn a lot from you
by the time this is over, as well.
I will say that there are a couple people on the phone
who have a very large role.
Allison Allen is the portfolio manager
for this ecological forecasting program we have at NOAA
and I'll turn to her at some point during the slides.
And there are a few other scientists on the phone
who've contributed to the modeling efforts
that we'll talk about in a bit.
Starting with the climate context,
how do we know the world is warming?
For some of you, this may not be news.
For others, I'm sort of trying to give us a common ground.
There are about 10 essential things
that the science community over the last
many decades has been looking at and basically what they are,
are the variables shown here.
And now, each one of these or this one slide
could be an entire talk. And I'm not gonna do that.
This is just sort of setting the context.
But we know that arctic sea ice is decreasing.
We know that air temperatures over the ocean are increasing.
We know that the sea surface temperature is increasing.
We know that humidity is increasing.
We know that snow is decreasing.
We have less snow pact than ever.
Temperatures in the lower atmosphere –
but that's a pretty technical thing –
they're going up, the glaciers are going down
and we've got air temperature on land that's going up as well.
These are some of the basic indicators
of how we know the world is warming.
Some of you may have heard that in May, we – about a year ago –
released the National Climate Assessment.
This was a huge effort, much like what's known
as the International Panel on Climate Change.
They do a similar process globally
and this is a lot of scientists working together.
Many different chapters, sector-specific regions
in the United States and responses strategies,
coming together to put this document together.
Big, big effort and even if you just Google National
Climate Assessment, you will find it.
There's a specific chapter on human health outcomes there are.
Some of which I am going to speak next
is drawn from that assessment report.
Some key findings.
We know that temperature's increased about 1.5 degrees.
We know that more than 80% of that has occurred since 1980.
We also know in the second bullet
there extreme weather events including heat waves,
floods and drops have become more frequent and more intense.
We know sea level rise has risen about eight inches
and is projected to rise another one to four feet.
That's huge, one to four feet by 2100
but it's not going to be one to four feet everywhere.
It's going to be more in some places and less in others.
It's not a uniform thing.
Frost-free seasons have been increasing.
And this next one, we're going to talk a fair bit about –
heavy downpours have increased as well.
And the last one, number of category four
and five hurricanes in the North Atlantic has also increased.
Those are the very severe hurricanes.
This is sort of the increasing strength in evidence
about what we understand the changing world
and the changing climate to be.
If you look here – I just picked a few examples –
these little slides that you see on top of the map here
basically, if you look at the increases in red,
what that's showing you is increases in air temperature
in all of these regions.
This is what has happened. This is the fact.
This is the data that had been collected over time
and that centerpiece right here
is what it looks like on the map.
Air temperature is definitely going up.
In the future, the climate community
has what they call scenario predictions
and there are three or four main predication scenarios.
Some are more conservative meaning not a lot of change
in how much greenhouse gas we're admitting as world
and those are the more far-end and the more extreme,
the far ones on the right,
if we continue on our current path with emissions scenarios,
the ones that are highly restrictive –
we stopped all emissions now, basically –
that's the white map on the left.
And basically, we're looking at a temperature change
in the worst-case scenario
on the right of up to 15-degree days,
15 days of hotter temperature more than we have now.
Over here on the left, not quite as bad.
Not likely we will have the emission scenario on the left.
It's also not likely we will be quite this severe.
It's somewhere in between.
But the map you see in the middle
is actually from an estimate of the year 2030
and the temperature, the dark red –
is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is an estimate of what the maximum temperatures
are going to be in the year 2030
and what we do know is that extreme-heat events
are going to be more frequent and more intense in the future.
What normally seems like a hot day
will become more commonplace.
You might say, "What does that have to do with me?
I'm not in an urban environment. I have an air conditioner.
But heat not only effects regular folks,
it effects all kinds of things
and we're not gonna talk too much just about heat impacts
although I will say that we do predict heat events.
At NOAA, we predict heat events
and we're trying to build systems
to manage those risks from heat on climate-time scales
so that we're addressing not only
the elderly in the inner city
and the children who are exercising.
And games after school where it's really, really hot.
Not the greatest time to outdoor workers and migrant workers.
And that sort of thing.
But heat has an impact in and of itself
but it also effects the water cycle
and some of the other things in the ecosystem.
We're gonna take the slice of heat impacts
as it affects water and some of the ecological conditions here.
Climate change affects the hydrological cycle.
Warmer air can hold a lot more water vapor.
With each additional one-degree increase in temperature,
the atmosphere can hold another 7% of water vapor.
That's a lot of water vapor.
Water vapor's one of the biggest gasses in the atmosphere
that retains heat.
There's already 4% more water vapor over the oceans
than there was only 30 years ago.
That's a very rapid increase.
What does this mean? We have more heat.
We have more water-holding capacity in the atmosphere.
What does that mean for health?
There are volumes have been written on that but in summary,
it means increased extreme events.
It means more impacts related to wildfire
and you know there's a really nice tie-in
between drought and wildfire. And extreme heat, in particular.
We are seeing drought in California.
Everybody is probably acutely aware of that.
Increased wildfires there and even with the rainfall
that we expect to get,
that doesn't mean the drought's going to go away in California
or in the west because the water wouldn't be absorbed
into the ground very well. It's sort of a cycle there.
We also have air quality impacts,
threats to mental health and illnesses from food,
water and insect-related diseases, vector-borne diseases.
Ticks, mosquitoes and those sorts of things.
And some of these are already underway.
We're going to focus most of the rest of the conversation
on the range of health impacts,
specifically on water, foodborne and impacts on our health.
What you see here is a slide that was developed
actually by CDC
despite the fact that you see the little logo there.
The center logo that's turning is basically the climate
variables that are change and this is what we've just been
talking about in a short version.
This middle circle here,
the pathways of exposure to which people
are exposed to health risks and around the edge,
are sweetest health risks from right down here,
some of the water-related ones, the malnutrition and disease.
We've got some of the civil conflict
which is not heavily quite so relevant in the US
and some over here, the vector-borne disease issues.
We're going to focus most of the rest of this talk
kind of right around here.
But I wanted to make one point.
And I'm sure you've probably heard this before but if not,
let me be the first. Climate is actually a continuum.
If people talk about climate change
and they talk about climate variability
and they talk about El Nino and they talk about weather.
And it's actually a continuum from weather,
which is everything from minutes
when you talk about a tornado prediction to a rain forecast
to it's gonna rain next hour, what am I gonna do?
Am I going to take my umbrella to work today or not?
Hours to days. Those are weather-time scales
and if you talk to climate scientists and meteorologists,
there's huge debates on how you define this
and where you actually draw the line.
But generally speaking, we're talking minutes to hours
to days as a weather-time scale. Sub-seasonal is weeks to months.
Seasonal is seasonal. Things like El Nino and La Nina,
those sorts of things you've heard about
are more seasonally indicated.
Inter-annual and decadal out to the century
to the long-term that you often hear
about typically associated with climate change.
But that's what I'm trying to express
is that it is happening across a continuum
and you see a backdrop of increased heat days.
But it translates to a weather event.
It translates to a n earlier onset for your rainfall
and your seasons.
There is a connectivity between weather and climate.
And I just wanna bear that in mind
as we're going through the rest of this.
You'll see some of the impacts of this again
and on the left side here,
climate change across time scales,
temperature extremes, hydrologic extremes,
sea level rise, changes in the ocean current
both in the coastal environment and in the deep ocean.
And then, over here, is a series of, again,
pathways through which climate affects health
and on the right-hand side are some of the examples
that we understand a little bit better
than others of the actual health impacts.
Over here, again, we're looking at cholera
and other things that are related to cholera.
We're gonna spend a little time on that.
We have harmful algal blooms down here,
we're gonna spend a little time on those
and a couple of other things at the end, there.
How do we know all this about climate
and how do we know what's going on in the ocean?
This is one slide from an entire community of people
who spend their lives observing the Earth.
I'm sure that this, in and of itself,
would be the topic for some other discussion
about all the buoys. What you see on here
is a reflection of buoys in the water,
buoys that are stationary, buoys that are floating.
Vessels, ships of convenience, satellites fly over this,
sometimes we even use planes to take observations
and so there's a huge network of a science community
that collects these observations.
And it's how we understand what's happening in the climate
and how we build our climate models.
And some of our prediction tools.
How do you take all of that?
You've got these observational systems that look at things
like sea surface temperature and salinity and turbidity.
That's what the vessels and the buoys look at.
And they help predict the tsunamis.
And they're looking at sea-level rise and sea-water height
because it has to grow tsunamis.
But you also have a component that observes
in a very different way.
And if you go up, this is an example
specifically for embryo Vibrio
which I haven't explained quite yet
but they're a bacteria that are ubiquitous
in the marine environment
and often in fresh water as well.
And we'll get into a little bit more detail on them.
But they can make you ill through consumption of seafood
in a couple of different ways
and it's also the same thing that causes cholera.
They're not the same species but they're the same Vibrio.
But they're not the same subspecies of Vibrio.
But they all live in the marine environment.
And what you see up here are small little bacteria.
They are collected, sampled in the shellfish.
There are some lab work that's done.
There's our ocean-going observation systems
and this, down here, is a robotic sample device
that we're testing literally this week
to see if we can collect these from the water directly.
How do you put all of this together from the fieldwork
that people are actually collecting fish
and testing to the big ocean0giing vessels
and buoys that are collecting data on that information?
We're trying to make targeted information on this little robot
here will go on the buoy over there.
How do you put it all together?
The point of this is – for this conversations –
is we understand the climate is changing.
We know it affects ecological systems
and we're trying to figure out
how that can help us for event health risks.
This is an example of a generalized epidemic curve
and what you see on the left are the number of cases.
And across the bottom are the number of days.
Generally, how public health would work is you have a case.
Let's just say flu, for instance.
You'd have flu but you wouldn't necessarily know
that it's coming. You might have an idea
but you wouldn't do anything differently.
Then, you get your first cases reported through the hospitals
or through the emergency rooms.
It takes a little bit to do a lab confirmation.
In the US, we do that.
Other countries don't necessarily.
But by the time you actually get to a response,
whether it's a vaccine or whatever,
if folks haven't been alerted ahead of time,
your opportunity for control – this area right here,
under the curve – is not very much.
And it's often a question mark about how much your intervention
– whether it's a vaccine or whether it's an outreach
to make sure people used their insecticide
and weren't bitten by mosquitoes.
Or got the ticks off of them. The opportunity for control
is often not as much as it could be
if we did things a little differently.
What we're trying to do here is use the information
that we have rom our ocean and coastal observing systems,
from our modeling and prediction tools
and those census little robotic things
that we're trying to put on the buoys
to actually change how this curve looks
so that you have a lead time.
120 is just exemplar but you could have a two-week lead time,
a two-month lead time, a year even and say,
"We know that we have a greater risk of influenza season
starting earlier
or in the case we're gonna be talking about later,
a harmful algal blooms coming a little bit earlier
or a Vibrio coming a little bit earlier.
You know what to be looking for,
whether you're doing your sampling in the water
or whether you're a doctor in a hospital.
Or whether you're a school nurse.
What would you be on the lookout for,
maybe at a different time of year,
a little earlier than you're used to seeing it?
You do a better job of detecting,
lab confirmation happens earlier
and you can map your response earlier
and protect a lot more people that way.
In general, that's what we're aiming for.
How do we get there? There's a lot of research
that goes into the climate side of this
and into the public health side of this,
how people use information if you have a forecast.
Even if you had a perfect forecast, could you use it?
What would you do with it? We have an effort across NOAA
called our ecological forecasting roadmap
and if I had the ability to do a drumroll,
I would have the "So Now What?"
enter with a drumroll. Ecological forecasting.
We're gonna talk just a little bit about what that means.
And basically – that was a drumroll.
Did somebody just do a drumroll for me?
Yeah, that was me.
Thank you, Bruce. I like it.
You're welcome.
What are ecological forecasts?
These are things that predict likely changes in ecosystems
in response to environmental drivers
that effect people, communities, societies and economies.
Obviously, the pocketbook if we can get to that.
Ecological forecasts also provide early warning
of the changes in the ecosystem.
This is where the intersection of how do we use climate
in some of these ecological forecasts
to get a little bit further B time in what we're doing.
And the whole point is, again, to allow a decision maker –
and your decision maker could be a doctor in a hospital,
the person planning the mosquito control or abatement district
or it could be some of you trying to figure out
if you're going to let the kids go out for recess
or maybe even the kinds of actions exposure of people
to the risk basically.
And the decision framing is multiple time scales
and multiple levels
of governance down to the individual.
You, yourself, decide the forecast, it says,
"Likely have a greater risk at this beach.
I might just sit on this beach and not get in the water."
Those are lots of different levels of decisions.
Through this roadmap that we started at NOAA
a couple years ago,
we're going to enable the delivery of forecasts
for these things
and we're going to use a few examples here, in a minute.
But the whole point is,
is there's a lot of research that's been going on.
A lot of people in academia and in federal agencies
and state agencies have products that are almost operational.
And there's a bit of a gulf
in making some of those products transition to a regular 24/7
or whatever the right timeframe is for a product
for somebody to rely on and use,
much like you're used to using a weather forecast.
And this ecological roadmap is striving to do that.
Striving to bridge that gap and take the research
into an operational forecast mode for things
that are beyond the weather-time scale.
We talked earlier about climate is a continuum.
This is the ecological forecasting version
of what is often communicated in a weather forecasting mode
but we're taking it on ecological time scales.
And you see here, there are different levels of warnings,
forecasts, prediction, outlook going along the axis here.
And you'll notice also that the uncertainty increases
as you go up. The models aren't as good.
The drivers are a little different, complicated.
But none the less, this is where we need to go to be able
to address some of the problems society is facing in the future.
And so, Allison Allen is on the phone here I know.
And she is running that program for NOAA.
And that's a very across-NOAA effort
and very tightly tied to the weather service,
really looking to get out,
beyond the time scales with products
that are ecologically based.
The forecast that ecological roadmap has under development
are three primary areas and you'll see four things here.
I'm aware of that. The first one's harmful algal blooms.
The second is hypoxia.
Third, is pathogens and the last one is sentinel habitats.
The last one was recently added and is relatively new.
And is taking a much longer time horizon on the climate question.
The two we're going to talk about in more detail
are harmful algal blooms and pathogens.
And some other water-related illnesses, as well,
as those two have the most direct
and definable human health outcomes.
Let me pause now and just see if anybody has any questions
because I'm going to get into some of the examples
of the forecast products.
Any questions for Julie?
Please type them into your submission box.
I will keep on going.
You'll see we're narrowing in on water here and [Audio Cuts]
Bruce, are you there?
Yes, I'm here. I'm here, Julie.
Let's see. We lost audio for a moment.
Julie, we seem to have lost your audio.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, you're back.
I'm just not going to move. It might be positional.
Did you hear that basically the runoff
comes into the coastal environments?
That was the short version.
We did not.
The primary sources of contamination
of our coastal environment from increased precipitation
are agricultural livestock runoff,
urban runoff from purposes, things like roads and streets,
buildings and that sort of thing.
And residential runoff. And the thing in the back
there is actually a water-treatment plant.
There's also a piece about combined sewage overflow,
wastewater treatment, wastewater management
that we'll be hearing a little bit more about.
But all of that ends up running into our coastal environment,
especially in coastal areas.
Or into our freshwater environments.
But we're gonna focus mostly on coastal.
And for NOAA, coastal also includes the Great Lakes,
which is a freshwater body.
For us, we do freshwater because we do the Great Lakes.
The runoff has both natural contaminants
and toxins in it that –
things like increased turbidity, increased salinity,
toxins that might come off, on the street.
All of these actually end up in our marine environment
and affect the production of algal blooms.
And affect some of these other species
that can make us sick through eating our shellfish
or through even being exposed to the water.
That's the basic cycle.
Drinking water, recreational water and contaminated food
are the primary roots of exposure
of how people become ill
from exposure to the things that are in our water
that affect both marine and freshwater.
And we're not talking just as easily.
We're talking chemical contaminants
and zoonotic, as well.
Think I'll just skip that one. What does this mean?
We know that we have a pathway for contaminants
to get into our coastal environments.
We know from the science that we are going to have
a more extreme precipitation events.
And in fact, 67% of the waterborne disease outbreaks
are preceded by a significant precipitation event.
It's defined as the 80th percentile
across the 50-year climate record,
in case you want to know the details.
But again, this slide here,
if you just look into that general trend,
the increases in green basically are increases
in very heavy precipitation events
and these are projected to occur
more frequently as our climate changes.
What does that mean?
We're gonna use the Great lakes as an example for starters
but it could apply to many regions.
Our wastewater is often managed through either wastewater
treatment plants or combined sewage overflow.
All of the water from our sewage systems
as well as just regular runoff is combined and flows out.
And those systems are older in many parts of the United States.
Julie, hi. We've lost your audio again.
You can hear me now? Yes.
I'm not moving so I'll just keep going.
Increases of combined sewage overflow of 20%.
Right now, our systems are already stress
and that's expected to continue even more.
That means more contaminated runoff
getting into the Great Lakes. Wind fields are gonna change.
The storm model will also change, as well.
And getting to that increased precipitation event
and expected impacts on our coastal environment
and our coastal health, many of you may recall
one of the biggest illness-related outbreaks
in the United States
was the cryptosporidium outbreak in 1993
and it was preceded by the heaviest rainfall
event in 50 years.
A lot of work has been done on that
and it wasn't only climate related.
It's a combination of an increased amount of rainfall
beyond the capacity of both the institution
and the physical capacity to handle that.
The point is, it was an extreme event at the time
and we're expecting more of them.
Julie, we're getting a lot of interference
on your line. That's better now.
Is that better?
Yes, much. Thank you.
I could hear it, too, actually.
The climate change at the Great Lakes.
You'll see up at the top here this climate model
is basically tailored and developed
out of the University of Wisconsin
climate research center for sustainability
in the global environment.
They've done some specifically - targeted downscaling
of basically what climate is gonna do in your region
and this is particularly about the frequency
of one inter-precipitation events.
They took all these big, global climate models
and made it relevant to the region,
which is what happened 'cause most of the time
it makes things more useful for those of us
trying to make decisions at a much more local scale.
And basically, because we know there's going to be
more increases of these intense rainfall events,
we could expect more stress
on our urban and wastewater systems.
And, in fact for anybody who was around last year,
you might remember that there was a bit of a problem in Toledo
with some drinking water facilities.
This picture right here on the right
is actually what the water looked like.
The one below it was a satellite image
of the same place outside of Toledo.
You can see Detroit up there.
Over half-a-million people were affected by this,
for a few days had to drink just bottled water and see?
This is the – why is my glass green?
Remember that question I asked? I would not drink that.
These kinds of things, we are trying to address
through understanding the basic system
through our ecological forecasting efforts
and then understanding what we might expect
as the climate changes.
This is the whole point of trying to merge the two,
why we're talking to you all.
That Toledo picture I mentioned was actually caused
by a harmful level – and not this particular kind –
but harmful algae are natural phenomenon that result in damp –
they're in the marine environment.
They're actually in freshwater environments, too.
They're small bacterial algae that grow
under increases of nutrient loading –
phosphorous and nitrogen specifically –
and they like warmer waters. Many of them produce toxins
that can accumulate in fish and shellfish.
And so, there is an aerosolized toxin that people can inhale
if they're walking on the beach.
This one on the right here is in Florida red tide
but all harmful algal blooms are not red tides.
That's just generally what people began to call them.
But the Florida red tide is actually one that is caused
by a Karenia brevis, it's an aerosolized toxin.
The mechanism by which that affects you and your kids
is walking on the beach,
if there's a bloom, it's in the air.
That's the high risk factor there,
especially for children and the elderly
and other immunocompromised folks
is for a respiratory infection.
Others actually affect you in other ways
I'll get to in a second.
This is just a map talking about the different kinds of illness
that can be caused by these algal blooms
that exist in the environment.
As I said, they are naturally occurring but their frequency
and their toxicity and their range you'll see
is shifting as the climate changes.
Some of them cause a paralytic shellfish poisoning.
This is a toxin up, in the Pacific Northwest.
Neurotoxic shellfish poisoning
is what's caused by the one down in Florida
and then a cyanobacteria is the freshwater one
it's affecting up, in the Great Lakes.
And we also do know that these blooms are increasing
in frequency and duration globally.
Over here, talks about changes in harmful algal blooms
in the west-central Atlantic
and this is something that you can see an increase
in harmful algal blooms, even in Chinese water.
This is not just US phenomenon. It is a global phenomenon.
Climate is not singling us out.
Here's kind of how it works for the fish poisoning part.
Not the aerosolized, not the part that you breathe in
but if you're worried about the paralytic,
amnesic or neurologic shellfish poisoning,
some of the ways you become exposed
are through the consumption of contaminated shellfish
that basically live among the algae, eat the algae.
People eat the fish or shellfish actually º
and if you have a contaminated shellfish,
like some fish with ciguatera poisoning.
It's just a regular fish, not a shellfish –
then you can become ill from eating the fish.
That's why we have these advisories and warnings
that go out.
We work closely with the fisheries,
management entities at the state or local level to do that.
We have a few examples of where we are working on that.
For starters, the Gulf of Maine.
This is a HAB of harmful algal bloom for the Gulf of Maine
and it's based on cyst counts of this right here
is actually those vessels that it was showing you earlier.
Not all the big ocean-going ones
but they count the number of cysts
that will lead you to be able to predict the likely abundance
of harmful algae in the Gulf of Maine the next season.
You'll see up here the forecast is for New England
spring and summer,
red tides will be similar in extent
to those of the past three years.
That's the first time we've been able to say anything
with that kind of certainty.
And it may not seem all that certain to you.
But it's a huge step for us
to be able to have this kind of science.
And to be able to make the models
to be able to allow us that kind of confidence
to be able to say something like that.
We're doing this for harmful algal blooms around the country
and this is part of the program,
the ecological forecasting roadmap,
one of the ecological forecasting areas
I mentioned earlier is harmful algal blooms.
And so, while they're different species,
some of the observations that you make are similar
and we're striving to get within five years
the ecological forecasting products
for the harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine,
the Gulf of Mexico. Specifically, Florida and Texas.
And there's actually already been
a harmful algal bloom bulletin in that area for a while
so we're beginning to try to operationalize that.
And Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie,
the Pacific Northwest and California.
And what you have over here are a couple of examples.
This is a bulletin a Lake Erie harmful algae bulletin.
We've been putting this out for six or seven years, at least.
This one down here, the one right below it is something that
we are putting together in the Pacific Northwest
that was going to the public health departments
and the Washington shellfish managers
and the shellfish growers that we did with CDC.
It's actually not funded anymore
so I don't have a current one to show you
but it basically puts the parameters –
the sea surface temperature,
the salinity, the wind direction –
the environmental drivers that people
who manage shellfish and public health
need to know about into a commonplace.
And we're turning that now,
hopefully, into a prediction system
for the Pacific Northwest as we move forward.
That's kind of how we're predicting in seasonal
and near-real time
but I want to highlight a little bit
of where we're heading in the future.
And this is work done down
at the Northwest Fishery Science Center
by Stephanie Moore and her group out there.
And they're looking at –
Alexandrium is the harmful species of algal bloom
that is important
for a paralytic shellfish poisoning in Puget Sound.
And what she's done is look at the difference
in the current bloom season.
If you see, right now, this is how the blooms currently occur
and the bottom line is the month.
We're looking at June, July, August, September,
October, November.
Those are what those are down the bottom.
And they'll present day, 2020, 2040
and this is what you've got right here
in the dark gray area.
But if you look at the longer timeframe,
when you start to go out you start
to see an earlier bloom season and a longer bloom season.
Managers both for public health folks
and for recreation fishers as well as cultural folks,
particularly out on the Pacific Northwest there,
a lot of tribal heritage
associated with harvesting the razor clams
and shellfish in the Pacific Northwest.
And so, this will affect how and when they can do that.
Ciguatera is another harmful algal bloom,
a toxin that actually makes people sick.
This one is particularly –
this one is a little bit of a good news, bad news story.
This one is down in the Gulf of Mexico
and the Caribbean right now
but it likes particular warmer waters.
You'll see this sign here.
If you've gotten sick, people are trying to understand
what this means and how to understand ciguatera.
And what the climate drivers are.
The map here is sort of where ciguatera is
and the good news for the folks in the Caribbean
is that as the waters warm,
ciguatera is less likely to occur as frequently there.
But the bad news is it's moving a little bit further north.
That's what we think. That's what we're monitoring for.
And this is some work that is just released.
It's not even published yet and we'll be talking
at the end of this about this assessment climate
and this assessment process. But this work right here,
modeling Gambierdiscus in ciguatera
basically it shows you that in the Gulf of Mexico,
you're gonna see an increasing in the shift
and the seasonality of these species,
which means the risk shifts a little bit –
you have a longer window of opportunity
to be exposed to this fish,
either through consumption of a shellfish.
This is not a shellfish. This is a regular fish.
This is only through consumption of a fish
but you have a longer window of opportunity further north
and the important piece, too, is that right now,
we're not used to seeing this along the eastern seaboard.
But the science is saying it's moving northward.
This is an area where we ought to be looking
and ought to be on the lookout so we're not caught off guard.
It can make you quite ill.
Sorry for the pictures
but it is hopefully late in the day for most of you.
We're gonna talk about another bacteria
that causes illness in humans.
These are the Vibrio that I mentioned before.
There are many different kinds of Vibrio.
It is a bacteria
that is ubiquitous in the marine environment.
Many different species,
the three we're gonna talk about here are –
the first two are the most important in the United States
because that's the two we have here.
And then cholera because it's of global importance.
But Vibrio parahaemolyticus is one of the main causes
of seafood poisoning and it is often unreported
because people don't always go to the hospital
and it's also misdiagnosed.
But its' estimated to be about 8,000 cases a year.
Vibrio vulnificus, these things –
you might assume that this child up front here
might have parahaemolyticus and an upset stomach
and is maybe not feeling well.
The vulnificus can actually cause wound infections
and it is very fatal. And it is rapidly moving.
We don't have a lot of cases but if you have one
and it's not diagnosed properly,
you can lose your limb or your life in very short order.
A couple of days.
That's of great concern because the range of these is shifting
and I'll show you a slide on that in just a second.
Vibrio infection rates from these diseases
and from these illnesses in the United States
have increased 115% over the last decade.
Vibrio cholera –
also transmitted from a species of this thing –
is one of the top 10 killers globally rated
by the World Health Organization.
Three to five million cases a year,
a hundred to two-hundred-thousand deaths
and there are big efforts internationally to try
and use the environmental prediction,
the sea surface temperature in some of these other parameters
to predict it so that people can mobilize vaccines,
can mobilize responses,
can actually even improve development
to improve the overall risk of cholera.
We don't have outbreaks of cholera in the United States
because we have relatively robust water sanitation systems
but we do have Vibrio cholera in our waters.
It's just not prevalent.
I'm watching my time here.
This is how Vibrio are actually –
or the ecology of cholera.
You'll see up here, these are the Vibrio species.
They actually reside on these coco pods, which eat the algae.
We think there's actually a connection
among those and algae.
And what happens is that that is transmitted to humans
through waterways,
either directly because they are in the water
or through handwashing or not handwashing.
Or poor sanitation. Or poor hygiene.
Or consumption of shellfish that are contaminated.
Multiple pathways for this to make us ill.
Fortunately, we do know enough about the environmental drivers
for some of these species.
This is particularly about cholera
being a big, global killer.
It has had a lot of research done on it
which is how we know about sea surface temperature,
salinity, chlorophyll, some of these other –
soil moisture and precipitation also do affect it,
particularly when it comes to runoff.
But we know – we've got some of the drivers here –
we know we've had increases
in Vibrio infections in the United States –
this is data from the CDC – from the Vibrio Group.
This is just from the Chesapeake Bay.
What we're doing is taking these parameters –
we, being the ecological forecasting folks –
taking these parameters
and putting them into a prediction map for Vibrio.
And this is what we're striving to operationalize.
This is a little bit older but you'll see this kind of
real-time change in the Vibrio risk.
This is for vulnificus in the Chesapeake Bay.
What you're seeing here along the side is the risk,
the level of risk, by the color.
Zero being blue and red being 100
and going up, into the Chesapeake.
This is how we use the environmental observations,
how we use the modeling to end up with a product
that eventually comes out, on a regular basis to you.
We've got a couple of experimental products
at a couple of timeframes, too,
but I won't spend much longer on that.
Now, in the context of talking about shifting sea surface
temperatures and water temperatures,
what you have here is a slide of an outbreak in Alaska.
This caught the Alaskans by surprise.
In 2004, there were 62 cases in Alaska.
They've not had a Vibrio outbreak there before.
It was, prior to that, only found in Puget Sound,
about 160 miles south. What you see across here,
the bar across the top here
is the actual time and the color change you see
is the sea surface temperature down here.
As the temperature evolves,
you can see the outbreak evolving, too.
That's basically the premise of this slide
and this is a partnership between NOAA and the Food
and Drug Administration, who has responsibility
for managing the regulatory side of the shellfish.
Again, this is a direct observation of changes
in sea surface temperature.
That year in Alaska, they were warmer than they'd seen before
and they had a Vibrio outbreak they had not seen before.
In terms of being able to understand and predict our risk,
we heard earlier that we know sea surface temperatures
are warming. We were expecting to see,
we should at least be prepared to see more Vibrio
in places where we didn't see them before
because we know the waters are going to be warmer.
In order to manage this, we are trying to build the system
for predicting Vibrio risk around the United States,
integrating the observations that we have at a local level.
In fact, there are some river systems and some communities
actually do sort of citizen science operations.
And you might even think about getting your students out to do
some of this monitoring if you're interested
and need some of this sort of engagement at the class level.
We can talk about that a little bit more at the end
and it might be an interesting way to go,
just to make things a little bit more relevant to that level.
But you have to be in a place where we think
we're going to have Vibrio so we know what to look for.
This slide right here is actually work that's been done
for this assessment report and this is, again, Alaska.
And I put it 'cause I just showed you
what happened in 2004 in Alaska.
And this basically demonstrates –
I'm not going to go into the models here.
These are a bunch of different climate models that they applied
to looking at the changes in sea surface temperature in 2030.
This is Alaska 2050 and 2090. And basically where you see red
is where we will have an evaluation of temperatures
above 15-degrees C and 15-degrees C
is the temperature above which Vibrio thrive.
If it's about 15-degrees C, you won't really have a problem
because they won't really survive there.
Similarly, we've taken some of the climate models
and done projections for Alexandrium,
which is one of the harmful algal bloom species,
Vibrio parahaemolyticus which is a Vibrio species and vulnificus.
And these species here are a little hard to follow.
But in summary, basically what you're looking at
is the gray is the present day and the black is 2099.
And you're looking at basically a shift
in the seasonality of each of these.
There's an earlier and a longer growing season,
a change in their seasonality of
when you would expect to see these in your area.
A progressive expansion of the window
of opportunity right here.
And so, knowing that, we're getting to work with managers
both with shellfish, public health state
and local folks, tribal communities
and maybe actually schools after we're done here to try
and figure out how to engage in both the study
and the response so that we're not ill from it.
And maybe it's as simple as working with you
to make sure that your students know what to look for
when they go to the beach or when they're out,
eating shellfish so they can educate their parents.
Maybe it's involving them in the actual science.
I'm not sure but think about that
while we're finishing up here.
I already mentioned that we're using this to try
and build a system with the World Health Organization
and other countries at high risk for cholera like Bangladesh
to do something to reduce the risk,
either by making sure
they have the proper oral rehydration units available,
they have enough staff or now there is a vaccine.
And efficacy is questionable.
But we can even use some of the prediction tools to target
when and where to deliver the limited vaccine
that's available.
While we're talking about things that affect the US,
there are applications globally
and things we can learn from people globally as well.
I wanna put down here, too.
We're talking mostly about marine and coastal issues
but in terms of health impacts, climate, the weather
and the water – water directly because of the habitat issues –
affects vector borne diseases.
Vectors are, again, the mosquito and tick-borne diseases.
And Lyme disease in the US
is something we are a bit worried about.
We can see that the – right now,
this is the current state of affairs
and there are many things
that affect the spread of Lyme disease.
Climate is one of them.
Climate affects their ecological habitat
but there are also social factors about who is outside
and what kind of precautionary measures you take.
And whether you've actually gotten the public
service announcement that says,
"Gee, this weekend's going to be really bad.
Make sure your kids are checked for ticks."
But when you're thinking about this in the future,
here's the 2012.
Here's what the risk areas look like in constant suitability,
meaning this is an anomaly. It's not an anomaly anymore.
2050, 2080. I mean, that's a huge difference
for our risk area for Lyme disease
so we need to be thinking about those things.
I have one slide in here that we're not quite predicting yet
because we just don't know enough.
And this is raising an issue to those of you
who are trying to stimulate interest
in the next generation of scientists here.
We don't really know a lot about how climate affects diseases
that affect marine animals but what we do know
is that marine animals die
for reasons we don't often understand.
Sometimes, we know that there is a connection with a temperature,
a sea surface temperature like an El Nino event.
But we don't often understand what that means
bout the environment in which they're living.
They're exposed to whatever it is
that's made them sick all the time and we are,
we share that environment with them sometimes
and we also share their food.
There's a real question about what we can learn
from these what we call sentinel species
and their habitats that can inform us about our own life
and also help us do a better job of protecting them.
There's sort of a nice back and forth there.
I mean, you don't want to see them dying
but we don't understand about what's going on.
We don't know the risk to ourselves
and if we figure that out,
we might be able to help both protect our own health
and the health of our children
as well as do something to protect the animals
and protect their environment.
To me, that is – there's a group of folks at NOAA
that manage the marine mammal health
and deal with the marine mammal die offs.
And they are looked to for their expertise around the world.
This is a big area that we need to understand a bit better.
And we don't know as much about it as we should,
either for their own sake or how it affects our own health.
I wanted to just leave you with that.
We have one example of where the dolphins –
this is a case of Brunswick, it's a super funcite –
and we are monitoring the dolphins there.
And actually, they were telling us
that the super funcite was not cleaned up
because the circle that you see here,
it's highest levels of PCBs
they've seen in the environment ever.
It does tell us for better
or worse it's not great for the dolphins
but it does tell us also sort of the state of the environment.
Begin to help us educate our children
to help us think about tackling that problem
so that we can understand
it better both for our sakes and for theirs.
I'm about wrapping up here. I'm going to move onto
just a couple of slides on the national assessment
but let me pause for a second because
I'm going to then open up for discussion just after this.
Are there any questions on harmful algal bloom predictions
for the neurologic, paralytic or the amnesia shellfish poisoning
or the aerosolized toxin? Those are all the hap things
or the Vibrio that cause gastrointestinal illness
or the wound infections? Just pause there.
I was trying to get some examples
that are sort of regionally relevant
and that also highlight
what we're doing for a regional forecast.
And how that can apply to help us manage
our climate risk in the future.
In the abstract, I wanted to take a moment
and mention some of the work that is happening in the context
of the president's climate action plan.
One of the things that was called for
in the president's climate action
plan about a year and a few months ago
was to do an assessment of the impacts of climate change
on human health.
And that assessment is being conducted as we speak, actually.
For the moment, I will tell you what the state of play
was but the purpose was to basically look
at what kind of changes we should expect to be happening
that affect our health in the United States.
We hadn't done a very comprehensive job of that
for well over 10 years – actually, more like 13 –
and part of the other goal was to really begin
to quantify the impacts because it's very hard.
You can see that you have a climate driver
of whether it's a sea surface temperature or salinity,
rainfall, heat – it affects an ecosystem.
And through multiple pathways, it affects human health.
It's a complicated system for the ecologically mediated
and even for the direct ones like heat and air quality,
those are still complicated. This assessment was to say,
"Where are we? What do we expect?"
And actually to try and quantify the models so we do a better job
of expecting and managing our risks in the future.
The four areas highlighted here –
thermal extremes, air quality, vector-borne
and zoonotic and water-related illness –
all have modeling associated with them.
And the models that I mentioned here
related to seasonal windows of opportunity
and the Vibrio model for Alaska
were all done as part of this assessment process.
And now, it's available for – actually,
the public comment period of this
has just closed for the assessment process.
We are now in the review phase, the national – right here,
with the national review committee is coming in.
Our public comments are back with the authors.
The National Academy of Science is reviewing it
and we're expecting their comments back in, in two weeks.
And then, we'll do agency clearance and the like.
That will be coming out in the next –
we're aiming for March of 2016,
which sounds like a long way away
but when you look at all the review and clearance,
it's actually not. Just less than a month ago,
you would have had a chance for public comment
but that period has closed.
But I do want you to know that that's happening.
And there are about 120 scientists across the US
that are focused just on that,
looking at different health outcomes
and trying to do some modeling to help our communities
figure out what risks we should be planning for in the future.
With that said, we're trying to figure out –
we know the climate's changing.
We know it's affecting our ecological systems.
We know we can do some prediction
but it's a bit of a challenge.
The complicated system and this is the kind of challenge –
Hi. We've lost you on audio again.
Can you hear me now? Audio is restored, it says.
Yes.
What I wanted to do here is talk about how important it is
to train the next generation of scientists
to be able to tackle these kinds of problems.
You can still do science sitting at a bench by yourself
if you want to
but most of the societal challenges for which people,
regular folks like you and me who want to go to the beach
and want to make sure their fish is safe.
And want to make sure their kids are safe
when they're sitting in the sand at the beach –
maybe tools and information
to be able to make those decisions
or somebody needs to be able to open
and close the beach with better information.
And that kind of science is a different kind of science
than basic, fundamental, traditional science discipline.
It takes that kind of discipline, sure.
But it takes the person who can work with other disciplines.
It's inquisitive that it's inherently collaborative,
that it's innovative and thinks, "That model didn't work,
I'm not gonna give up. I'm gonna try something else."
It takes a bit of somebody who's a little social
because you've got to work with other people, other disciplines.
It takes a lot of patience.
Probably those of you on the phone,
though I was instructed to and I tried very hard
not to use lingo, I'm sure that I did.
And I'm hoping that some of you are patient enough with me
to ask me what I meant by X, Y and Z
if you didn't understand. But it takes some time to learn
what these other communities are talking about.
As you're thinking about teaching your students,
think about things that will incorporate that skill
into how they work and how they do that science.
And how they conduct themselves.
And bilingual, I did not mean Spanish, English,
French, German. I meant bilingual in sciences.
We need to be talking with folks
that do some of the climate modeling
and some of the climate assessments
and the ecological predictions with public health
and with communications folks.
Communicators who help us figure out
how to communicate the level of risk and what to do about it.
And we need our scientists to be engaged in society, to –
not everybody's going to be an advocate
but how do we actually protect our environment
and protect our health. They are not mutually exclusive
when actually they're mutually beneficial.
They're helping our emerging scientists
see their role as a part of a larger community,
both improving the science and improving our environment,
is a really important task and I think you,
on the phone as educators,
are the ones who are charged with doing that.
I would like to just stop now and see if you have questions.
And I'd like to figure out if there are some things you are
already thinking about engaging your students in this area
or questions we could follow up with if you're interested.
But I do think that I would just like to thank you for the time
that you've spent listening to this and for – in advance –
helping think through how we can make this relevant for you
so that you can take it to your students.
And help them both become the scientists
we need in the future. Or just take the message home
and be safer when they go to the beach,
help their parents learn, help your communities evolve.
That's where I want to leave it
and that's what I meant by balanced.
It's not just a scientist in the lab.
It's a scientist as a part of the community.
And I actually had a question about art.
I'm going to stop for just a second because
I think there's an intersection with science and art
that we haven't explored too well either.
And I know many of you are beginning to think about that.
How do we get this message into schools in a way
that scientists are emerging burgeoning science community
can be prepared to tackle this
in the next 20, 30, 50 years on our behalf.
And I will leave it at that and just say thank you.
And turn it back to you, Bruce,
for moderating and letting me know
if anybody has any questions.
I will. Thanks so much, Julie.
Ad if we're gonna take a few questions now
that folks have put in.
If you do have questions for Julie,
feel free to type them into the question box
as well as you may join us for our informal discussion
with Julie directly following this on our telecomm number,
(866) 662-7513 with the passcode dial-in number of 1170791♪.
And please stay tuned after this question and answer period.
We do have some announcements
and we have some educational resources
that you may use with students.
One question that we got, Julie,
early on is how is it getting the general public
to trust something like the ecological forecast
with their being to some degree – and it's decreasing now but –
a lack of trust when it comes to the discussion
and belief in terms of climate change overall?
If I understand correctly,
it's actually sort of two questions there.
One is about a climate change question
and the other one is how do you get people
to trust a prediction of any sort, right?
Well, yeah but the question is really focused on getting people
to trust the ecological forecasting
that your group is focused on making.
It's a very good question and the, I will dispense
with the climate piece of that by saying in the US,
I actually don't know the number of people,
of scientists that wrote the National Climate Assessment.
Globally, there's 3,000 scientists
that come to a consensus.
And if you know anything about science,
a science consensus is a big challenge.
We have enough evidence to know that the climate is changing
so that's not a belief.
Those are just facts and how you actually translate
that into a prediction that people trust
is actually a very good question.
And we do that – not that we do it perfectly –
but we do that by having conversations with the people
who are going to be using the information
from the beginning and involving them.
And asking them either what they need.
And what decisions they're trying to make.
And coproducing the tools with them.
When I mentioned – let's just take the Vibrio prediction –
we're working with Food and Drug Administration
and with the state shellfish managers in Puget Sound.
And with the shellfish growers in Puget Sound
to understand what they need,
how they need the information delivered
, how they're going to use it
so that they understand the certainty
and what we mean by high likelihood of risk
or a certain percentile.
We work very closely with the people who need
or are asking for the information
from the beginning to help build the trust.
We have experience with this on managing drought in the west,
working with water managers out there
and if you even look at the weather service,
150 years ago the weather service
didn't put out a forecast like we do now.
And sometimes, you might laugh but sometimes we get it wrong.
But we're still here and we're still working to communicate
that level of risk better.
And how to be wrong and still survive.
But it does start with building trust
and, on ecological timescales,
we have chosen to start by building partnerships
with the people who will be using the information
either because we've asked them or most often they've come to us
asking us for additional guidance.
We work very closely with them
but I'm open to other suggestions.
Thanks. One question that we had was –
and you've shown how with the increasing temperatures,
having an earlier generation time for certain pathogens
and a longer retention time –
one question that we had was do warmer temperatures cause
a faster maturation and shorter generation times for pathogens?
And if so, can you provide some examples?
Yes, actually.
Yes for Vibrio, for Vibrio vulnificus especially.
I'm actually not sure of that for cholera
but it does also increase the –
for mosquitoes and some of the vector-borne diseases
the pathogen development in the vector.
In the tick, the nymphalid stage of the tick progresses
at a more rapid rate with hotter temperatures
and the parasite itself
grows more rapidly at higher temperatures.
But if you take that to a mosquito,
depending on the mosquito,
if the temperatures are too high,
the mosquito itself defecates, dries up, dies.
Yes, it increases the reproductively of the pathogen
but it also can affect the host itself.
There's a dynamic there but yes,
generally speaking when asked the question,
increased temperature does increase pathogen replication.
Just that alone doesn't mean
that you'll have an outbreak of disease.
I hope I got all of that question.
I think you did. I think you covered that very well.
One of our viewers has asked, that she had heard
about some children that died in Northern Minnesota
because of inhaled bacteria in lakes.
And she thought it was some kind of an amoeba.
Do you have any formation on this
or have you heard of this?
A little, I guess.
And she's probably talking about Naegleria fowleri.
Yes, I am not an expert on that
so I don't want to speak too much about it.
I am aware. I'm sure it was Naegleria fowleri.
It is a brain-eating bacteria and we don't know much about it.
It is on our climate and health assessment
that I mentioned right at the end of this talk,
it is an emerging area of research
that we really don't know much about how it's transmitted.
Well, we know how it is transmitted.
We don't know much about the environmental drivers for it
but it is quite a concern for the Centers for Disease Control,
as you can imagine.
And I'm sorry, I don't know that anybody knows a whole lot more
but I am not an expert on that at all.
But I do work with the folks at CDC and in our water chapter.
That was a huge issue.
I think they would have had a whole section on it
if we'd let them but there just wasn't enough science
to be able to report on it.
But certainly,
if someone was interested in dropping you a line,
you could refer them to those individuals at CDC?
Absolutely.
Great.
Absolutely, I'd be glad to do that.
One question that we had was actually referring
to the situation in California's water shortage.
If you just had – very briefly,
you might be able to discuss the relationship
in terms of the studies that NOAA has been doing
in terms of the lack of rainfall going over,
in California and its relationship to climate change
as folks who are sort of studying this phenomenon.
There are people in NOAA whose entire lives
are spent on drought information systems.
And I'm fortunate enough to work for some of them.
I can speak to that a bit.
But you do know that we have – first of all, there's a place.
If you just came here for drought monitor
or Drought. gov is a place where much information –
the latest drought prediction,
historical information on drought –
exists in this portal and it is a multi-agency effort.
There is a connection to changing climate.
I am not going to get into whether the attribution
of whether the drought
is specifically climate change related
but you do know that with changes in climate,
you have changes in ocean circulation patterns
and atmospheric patterns.
And that effects how much rain falls.
There is a climate connection to it.
Is the drought climate change related?
No, I'm not going to say that
but there certainly are climate drivers
and we do understand them.
And unfortunately,
I know the drought's not going to subside any time soon.
I know the latest forecast was also for continued
severe drought in the west
and so that means you have severe drought
and you have increased heatwaves.
You've got some wildfire situations
and so you would expect some increased wildfires too.
It's not a, it's quite a severe situation
and there's a ton of people working on that.
And tons of them in California and the desert Nevada Institute,
USGS, lots of agencies.
Please check out that website and again,
if you would like additional information,
I'd be happy to connect you directly to the experts on that,
as well.
And one recommendation we actually had a webinar earlier
in the year from Kevin Warner,
who is actually a point person for issues regarding water,
particularly with the Colorado River
and out in California, as well.
He would be one of the people to whom I would refer you.
And if anybody wants to see an archive of that webinar,
please drop me a line as well that we did back in March.
Just a final question 'cause I know the hour is getting late
and we would like you
to participate in an informal discussion
if folks would like to chime in
and just have a few more questions at the end.
But regarding Long Island Sound and the Connecticut shoreline,
what's kind of sort of currently now –
any Vibrio problems along in that area?
Yes. There was a Vibrio outbreak in Massachusetts last year,
I believe and the forecasting roadmap
is tackling New York and Long Island Sound
for both Vibrio mishaps.
We haven't been working there as long
and so our observational capabilities
are, we're just putting it all together
so we don't have a forecast product for it yet
but it is on the near-term list.
The ones that we will operationalize,
are striving to operationalize over five years for both Vibrio
and halves are things that we've already had some modeling
and some observational capability in place.
And we did not for Long Island Sound.
We are building it. We are aware that we need to
but there is no product right now in testing it.
Great. Thanks so much.
We're working on it, though. We hear you. I'm sorry.
No, that's okay. I understand completely.
I wanna thank you so much – [End of Audio]