Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science

•

1 like•1,615 views

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most challenging problems humanity faces, but public opinion surveys show that many people are skeptical about global warming. In this seminar, Dan Crawford, Scott St. George and Todd Reubold will share their experiences with using music to help climate science reach out to new audiences. Their first collaboration — a music video that reconfigures global temperature data as a cello composition — has been described as “amazing, and eerie” and “an effective tool to show people that our planet is changing.” Join us to learn what global warming sounds like!

Education Technology

HTTP://WWW.NRMSC.USGS.GOV/REPEATPHOTO/OVERVIEW.HTM

USGS REPEAT PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT

In September 2012, Arctic sea ice reached the smallest extent ever recorded
in more than three decades of satellite measurements.

How have average annual temperatures changed across the planet?

1

°F

0.5

0

-0.5

1880

1900

Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

“

This is simply outstanding! I'm really excited
about this.
Jon Foley, Institute on the Environment
March 12, 2013

”

“

I don’t quite know what to feel about [this video];
pleased that a passion for artistic creation lurks
in the soul of a dendrochronologist, or
astonished that a research intern would spend
time on something so frivolous.
Ivan Hewi , Music critic
August 30, 2013

”

“

However, sometimes converting a simple graph
into some diﬀerent form of information can
deliver the message far be er, and more
eﬀectively, than dots on a page.
Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy
July 18, 2013

”

Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science

What's hot

3 haiku's henry.t

Ms Wilson

Reasons for the seasons notes

mrcoyleteach

Solstices & Equinoxes

kmacdevitt

The Universe and the Earth

lmminarro

Solstice and equinox

Merlyn Denesia

Reasons for seasons

Deborah Devine

Season wd animation

Makati Science High School

Reasons for Seasons

Makati Science High School

What's hot (8)

3 haiku's henry.t

Reasons for the seasons notes

Solstices & Equinoxes

The Universe and the Earth

Solstice and equinox

Reasons for seasons

Season wd animation

Reasons for Seasons

Viewers also liked

The decadal character of northern California's winter precipitation

Scott St. George

Background/Question/Methods Under environmental stress, boreal and temperate trees will occasionally form a discontinuous layer of wood about their stem, a condition described as a locally-absent (or “missing”) growth ring. Absent rings can potentially cause errors in tree-ring dates and dendroclimatic reconstructions but the frequency, distribution and controls of these features are not well understood at large spatial scales. Furthermore, the recent claim that the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring network contains multiple chronological errors caused by widespread but unrecognized locally-absent rings has been difficult to evaluate because it is not known where or when absent rings have occurred across boreal and temperate forests or what environmental factors cause the development of spatially-extensive absent rings. Here we present a synthesis of locally-absent rings across the Northern Hemisphere during the last millennium based on 2,359 publicly-available tree ring-width records. Results/Conclusions Over the entire dataset, one locally-absent ring was observed for every 240 visible rings. More than half of all records (1,296 of 2,359) did not contain a single absent ring. Absent rings were extremely uncommon at high latitudes; poleward of 50°N, the absent:visible ratio increased from 1:240 to 1:2,500. Absent rings were not widespread during the growing seasons that followed the four largest stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection events of the last millennium, including A.D. 1259 and the “Year Without a Summer” in A.D. 1816 or during the coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 1,500 years. Because these features have occurred so rarely in high-latitude and high-elevation tree ring-width records, the argument that paleotemperature estimates based on these data contain chronological errors due to unrecognized absent rings is not consistent with field observations. If however the rate of absent-ring formation were to increase in forests outside of the American Southwest, that behavior would represent a response to environmental stress that is without precedent over the last millennium.

Absent rings are rare in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Sou...

Scott St. George

GEOG5839.21, The Colorado River

Scott St. George

GEOG5839.17, Dendroecology

Scott St. George

Every year, trees in temperate and boreal forests go through a cycle of dormancy and activity that produces a new layer of tracheids, fibers and other woody cells around their stem. The end result of this process - a tree ring - is one of the most obvious signs in nature documenting the passage of time and the character of that year’s weather. Measurements of tree-ring widths are the most widely-distributed and best replicated source of surrogate environmental information on the planet and are one of the main archives used to estimate changes in regional and global climate during the past several centuries or millennia. In this lecture, I describe the structure and characteristics of the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring width network, and outline how these data are linked with key aspects of local climate and the global climate system. More generally, by describing the characteristics of the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring width network and the diversity of its relations with varying aspects of the global climate system, this presentation highlights the breadth and quality of environmental information that may be recovered from the width of annual growth layers in temperate and boreal trees.

Seeing the Forest for the Tree(Ring)s

Scott St. George

5 Things You Can Do Right Now To Make Your Presentations A Little Bit Better

Scott St. George

GEOG5839.19, Dendroclimatology

Scott St. George

In 1968, Benoit Mandelbrot and James Wallis published an article titled ‘Noah, Joseph, and operational Hydrology’ in the journal Water Resources Research. In it, they argued that hydrological models of the day were not able to estimate the true risk of extreme floods or prolonged drought, and that rare hydrological events were much more common than usually assumed. In this lecture, I’ll review how high-resolution paleoenvironmental archives can help us judge more accurately the risks posed by the ‘Noah’- and ‘Joseph’-style events described by Mandelbrot and Wallis. I’ll give particular emphasis to the environmental information recovered from the rings of ancient trees, and explain how dendrochronology (tree-ring research) has been used to redefine the ‘flood of record’, test potential avenues for long-lead climate predictions, and gage the performance of state-of-the-art climate models.

Noah, Joseph, And High-Resolution Paleoclimatology

Scott St. George

Nearly all decisions about water in Minnesota relate either directly or indirectly to data collected by the state’s hydrological observing network. Because most gauges were installed in early 20th century, as a whole the network provides us with roughly a 100-year ‘window’ to estimate flood risks, develop worst-case scenarios for drought, and set maximum allowable withdrawals for aquifers. But when we rely exclusively on observations made during this relatively brief interval, we may inadvertently increase our exposure to hydrological ‘surprises’. In order to make sound decisions about water in Minnesota, we need to expand this window: into the past, drawing upon historical accounts and natural archives; and into the future, via projections from climate and hydrological models. By cultivating a broader perspective on hydrological variability and extremes across the state, we will be better prepared to ensure adequate water supplies and mitigate the impacts of future floods and droughts.

Expanding the window - the past, present, and future of Minnesota's water

Scott St. George

In many settings, trees growing on floodplains provide an important source of indirect evidence that may be used to infer the occurrence, extent, and magnitude of floods prior to direct observations. That evidence may take several forms, including external scars caused by abrasion or impact from floating debris, anatomical changes within the annual growth increment following prolonged stem or root inundation, or tilting or uprooting due to the hydraulic pressure of floodwaters. Likely the most useful characteristic of paleoflood studies based on floodplain trees is their relatively high temporal resolution and dating accuracy compared to most other methods. Dendrochronological methods can routinely date past floods to the year of their occurrence and, in rare cases, can estimate the timing of floods that occur during the growing season to within two weeks. This high degree of chronological control, which is surpassed only by that provided by direct observation or instrumentation, can be used to determine whether floods in separate watersheds were synchronous or offset by several years and test hypotheses that suppose linkages between extreme floods and specific forcing mechanisms. Furthermore, the wide geographic distribution of tree species with dateable rings combined with the broad suite of methods available to examine interconnections between floods and tree growth allow this style of paleoflood hydrology to be applied to many settings that are not suitable for techniques that depend on geological evidence. Future paleoflood research involving tree rings will need to strike a balance between improving our understanding of the biological and fluvial processes that link tree growth to past events, and providing answers to questions about flood dynamics and hazards that are needed to safeguard people and property from future floods.

Trees as flood sensors

Scott St. George

The "Year Without A Summer" was not a year without a ring

Scott St. George

Measurements of tree-ring widths are the most widely-distributed and best replicated source of surrogate environmental information on the planet, and are one of the main archives used to estimate changes in regional and global climate during the past several centuries or millennia. Because the Northern Hemisphere ring-width network is now so large, it is more crucial than ever to ensure our understanding of tree-environment relations is not influenced by decisions to include or exclude certain records. It may be the case that a particular set of ring-width records are, for whatever reason, more tightly coupled to a particular climate factor than other records from the same region or species and, as a result, may be superior estimators of that factor’s past behavior. At the same time, it is known that selecting a small number of predictors from a large pool of potential candidates increases the likelihood of a Type I error. That effect may be particularly relevant to dendroclimatology because the total number of available ring-width records is often much larger than the number of records used to produce reconstructions of large-scale climate features. As an initial step, it would be helpful if paleoclimate reconstructions derived from tree rings described more explicitly the criteria used to select ring-width records as potential predictors and specified those records excluded by that screening. By comparing ring-width chronologies and their relations with climate against the standard set by thousands of records across the hemisphere, we should be better able to distinguish climate signals from proxy noise and produce more accurate reconstructions of climate during the late Holocene.

Guarding against false discovery in large-scale dendroclimatology

Scott St. George

Large-scale low-frequency variability has emerged as a priority for climate research, but instrumental observations are not long enough to characterize this behavior or gage its impacts on dependent geophysical or ecological systems. As the leading source of high-resolution paleoclimate information in the middle- and high-latitudes, tree rings are essential to understand low-frequency variability prior to the instrumental period. But even though tree rings possess several advantages as climate proxies, like other natural archives they also have their own particular impediments. In this lecture, Dr. St. George will describe the structure and characteristics of the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring width network, and outline how the fingerprint of decadal and multidecadal climate variability encoded within ancient trees varies across the hemisphere.

Large-scale dendrochronology and low-frequency climate variability

Scott St. George

These visuals were prepared to support a string quartet performance and panel on climate change at Northwestern University in February 2106. A well-designed graphic can help audiences to quickly understand the main message embedded within a complex set of climate data and to retain those ideas longer than they would have if they were conveyed by words alone. But the visual aids used regularly by climate scientists also have their limitations: they are most easily understood by people who are already fluent in technical illustrations; they're usually static and sometimes do not tell an obvious story; and for many, they don't elicit a strong emotional response. Music, by contrast, is inherently narrative and is known to exert a powerful influence on human emotions. Because of this, sonification — the transformation of data into acoustic signals — may have considerable promise as a tool to enhance the communication of climate science. Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George report on a collaboration between scientists and artists that uses music to transmit the evidence of climate change in an engaging and visceral way.

Making Climate Data Sing

Scott St. George

Strong variance at decadal and multidecadal timescales is a common feature of most tree-ring width records. But does this aspect of tree growth exhibit such long-memory behavior due to biology, climate, or some combination of the two factors? Understanding the origins of this behavior is crucial for efforts to evaluate the causes of decadal variability in the climate system. Presentation at Johann Gutenburg University (Mainz) on February 16, 2017.

Decadal variability in tree rings

Scott St. George

Viewers also liked (15)

The decadal character of northern California's winter precipitation

Absent rings are rare in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Sou...

GEOG5839.21, The Colorado River

GEOG5839.17, Dendroecology

Seeing the Forest for the Tree(Ring)s

5 Things You Can Do Right Now To Make Your Presentations A Little Bit Better

GEOG5839.19, Dendroclimatology

Noah, Joseph, And High-Resolution Paleoclimatology

Expanding the window - the past, present, and future of Minnesota's water

Trees as flood sensors

The "Year Without A Summer" was not a year without a ring

Guarding against false discovery in large-scale dendroclimatology

Large-scale dendrochronology and low-frequency climate variability

Making Climate Data Sing

Decadal variability in tree rings

Similar to Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science

Omissions of-emissions-presentation

Paul Mahony

Teachers' Notes to accompany Werner Herzog film

GeoBlogs

Meier clean presentation_ppt

waltmeier

Climate Change in the Arctic

Zachary Labe

15 February 2023… Rider University, Global Biogeochemistry Class Visit (Presentation): Arctic climate change through the lens of data visualization, NOAA GFDL, Princeton, USA. References... Delworth, T. L., Cooke, W. F., Adcroft, A., Bushuk, M., Chen, J. H., Dunne, K. A., ... & Zhao, M. (2020). SPEAR: The next generation GFDL modeling system for seasonal to multidecadal prediction and projection. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 12(3), e2019MS001895, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019MS001895 Labe, Z.M., Y. Peings, and G. Magnusdottir (2019). The effect of QBO phase on the atmospheric response to projected Arctic sea ice loss in early winter, Geophysical Research Letters, DOI:10.1029/2019GL083095, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL083095

Arctic climate through the lens of data visualization

Zachary Labe

Contrasting polar climate change in the past, present, and future

Zachary Labe

RCEC Email 5.3.03 (a)

Obama White House

“3. NEW CLIMATE LAND” “THE JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER on the west coast of Greenland is the fastest-moving glacier on Earth. It’s also one of the most photographed, drawing climate paparazzi from around the world. If you’ve seen images of enormous chunks of ice falling off the sapphire-blue face of a glacier in news reports or documentaries, you’ve probably seen the Jakobshavn. It’s the Kim Kardashian of glaciers—fast and unpredictable but symbolic of changes in our world in a way that makes it difficult to ignore. On my flight from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, a town in southern Greenland that is the main launching point for visits to the ice sheets, I was, I admit, excited about the prospect of seeing the famous glacier up close.” “My guide for the trip was Jason Box, an American climatologist who was working for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, a quasigovernmental agency that has a keen interest in understanding what is going on with the Greenland ice (Greenland, a former province of Denmark, is still a territory of the Danish kingdom). Box is a young maverick scientist and Greenland ice junkie who got a lot of attention in 2012 when he publicly predicted just weeks before the summer melt season began that Greenland would experience a record-breaking year for ice melt. And he was right. During the summer of 2012, a heat wave warmed the Arctic much more than climate models had predicted, and the Greenland ice started melting like ice cream on a summer sidewalk. Usually, only the lower elevations of Greenland melt during the summer; in 2012, melting was recorded on the entire surface of the ice sheet, including the highest elevations. Aerial photos showed rivers of luminous blue water flowing across the surface of the ice sheet, disappearing into what scientists call moulins, which are basically big holes in the ice where the rivers waterfall down to the interior of the glacier. “The melt of 2012 attracted international media attention, and a YouTube video of a tractor being washed down a river swollen with meltwater in Kangerlussuaq attracted millions of viewers.” “When I met Box at the Kangerlussuaq airport, he had that scientist-in-the-wild look—scruffy, windblown hair, a big black duffel bag over his shoulder. With his goatee and gently rebellious manner, Box has the air of a skate punk made good. After chatting for a few minutes, he and I headed out into Kangerlussuaq. The town, such as it is, sprang up around the runway, which was built by the US military during World War II—and it still feels like a military base, with Quonset huts transformed into shops and hotels. I was surprised by the number of middle-aged people in town wearing new North Face jackets. “Disaster tourism,” Box explained. “They’re here to say goodbye to the ice sheets.” “We checked into what Box called the “science hotel” on the edge of town. It was basically a Quonset hut outfitted with beds and cable TV. We went for a quick evening walk, and Box showed ...

3. NEW CLIMATE LAND”THE JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER on the west c.docx

tamicawaysmith

Meier clean presentation_pdf

waltmeier

Stealing the Oceans by Rick Doble is a hard science fiction novella based on our current understanding of science and technology. An unusual SF story, it covers 1000 years when the people of the Earth are forced to make drastic changes. This occurs because ocean levels begin to gradually fall for hundreds of years -- with no end in sight. Using the latest technology, world governments work to determine the reason. But the discovery of the cause leads to panic and desperate attempts to rebuild civilizations. This epic story is as much about the forces involved as the individual people -- and comes complete with a city directory for one of the new cities that is established, along with a full description of how a new culture evolved.

Stealing the Oceans: Humanity Struggles for Survival in This 1000 Year Epic W...

Rick Doble

Similar to Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science (10)

Omissions of-emissions-presentation

Teachers' Notes to accompany Werner Herzog film

Meier clean presentation_ppt

Climate Change in the Arctic

Arctic climate through the lens of data visualization

Contrasting polar climate change in the past, present, and future

RCEC Email 5.3.03 (a)

3. NEW CLIMATE LAND”THE JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER on the west c.docx

Meier clean presentation_pdf

Stealing the Oceans: Humanity Struggles for Survival in This 1000 Year Epic W...

More from Scott St. George

A good talk can open the doors to new collaborations, increase your chances of funding success, and make it more likely other people will respond to your ideas. But scientific presentations are too often confusing, boring, and overstuffed. Here are some suggestions, based on our experience as speakers, audience members, and presentation trainers, that we hope will make your next conference talk or seminar more enjoyable, engaging and effective.

Boosting the Signal: Simple Strategies to Deliver Better Scientific Talks

Scott St. George

Ringing true: The scientific and societal relevance of dendrochronology at th...

Scott St. George

Much of what we know regarding variations in Earth's climate during the past millennium comes from tree rings. But tree rings, like other proxies, attenuate some climate signals but amplify others, and their fidelity at longer timescales is difficult to gage. Even though dendroclimatology is well-established, questions remain about the climate clues encoded in tree rings — particularly at decadal-to-centennial timescales.

How long do trees remember?

Scott St. George

How long do we need to watch a river before its behavior holds no more surprises? In this country, instrumental measurements of river stage and discharge stretch back a century or more, but this observed history still provides only a rough guide to the risks of future extreme floods. In this lecture, I’ll outline how paleoflood hydrology expands our perspective on river history by combining historical, botanical, and geological evidence of earlier (and ofttimes unknown) floods. And I’ll explain how we can interpret those physical clues left behind by ancient floods to improve hazard assessments for at-risk communities, support decisions about flood infrastructure, and investigate the long-term effects of climate or land-use changes on flooding. Because what has happened before can happen again, most everyone near a river would profit by keeping a longer memory of old floods.

Don’t call it a comeback: Studying ancient floods to prepare for future hazards

Scott St. George

Flood rings: Paleoflood evidence in tree-ring anatomy

Scott St. George

Historic accounts of extreme floods on the Red River of the North

Scott St. George

Even after more than a century of coordinated monitoring, instrumental weather observations are still too short to adequately constrain decadal or multidecadal behavior in the Earth’s climate system. Leading climatologists and climate modelers have called for the wider application of high-resolution proxy records to decadal variability and prediction studies, and our community has responded by producing new paleoclimate products that specifically target this type of ‘intermediate-term’ behavior. But we now also know our medium changes that message: the biological and geological systems that encode climate information into natural archives often also alter the original ‘input’, usually due to either seasonal filtering or non-climatic persistence. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the challenges inherent to the use of high-resolution proxies to study decadal or multi-decadal climate variability, and suggest strategies that might clarify how climate acts on those timescales. And we’ll also present a new theoretical framework that could help paleo-scientists evaluate competing ideas about the causes of decadal- or multi-decadal events known to have occurred during the past one or two millennia.

Disentangling the decadal ‘knot’ in high-resolution paleoclimatology

Scott St. George

We know from tree rings and other natural drought records that the western United States has been affected by several 'megadroughts' during the past millennium. But are these exceptionally long-lasting droughts due to unusual external forcings, or are they inevitable given a sufficiently long period of time? Here we present a statistical model that combines sea surface temperature records and drought severity statistics from the western USA, and use that tool to set out an expectation for megadrought, given no other changes in the climate system. Even though this model was trained using only modern climate data (and incorporates no information from tree rings or other proxies), it still produced megadroughts. Moreover, those simulated megadroughts were just as long-lasting, covered as large an area, and were just as severe as real megadroughts estimated from tree rings. That result means that megadroughts can occur in the western United States even if nothing else changes in the climate -- they really are just a matter of time. On the other hand, the only aspect of real-world megadroughts that the model cannot duplicate was the high number of these events during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly (800 to 1300 CE). So that cluster of megadroughts may have been caused by some sort of unusual climate circumstances that have not been observed by us during the past few decades. The proxy record tells us that many different kinds of exceptional or unusual climate events happened in the past. But it is often difficult to determine what caused those exceptional events because even, within a period of a thousand years, we still have very few cases. So besides being an aid to understand the causes of past megadroughts, we hope this approach can be applied to other paleoclimate records to distinguish between real interrelations between separate components of the climate system and simple coincidences.

A new framework to test the origins of western American megadrought

Scott St. George

So much of what we know about the Earth’s climate during the past two millennia comes from tree rings. Information gleaned from the physical or chemical properties of growth rings in trees have allowed us to extend hemispheric-scale temperature records back by several centuries, construct annual maps of drought severity that span several continents, and generate proxy estimates for many of the leading modes within the climate system. The theoretical foundation that underpins these products — and most others in dendroclimatology — was fully mature by the early 1990s and set out in detail by Cook and Kairiukstis in their seminal book, ‘Methods in Dendrochronology’. Most of the core analytical methods used to infer past climate from tree rings that appear in this reference (as well as prior works) depend on two concepts in particular: first, the idea that patterns common to many trees at many sites are more likely to be related to synoptic-scale climate variability (the principle of replication), and second, the notion that the most useful tree-ring records are found in forests where growth is particularly sensitive to a specific aspect of local climate (the principle of site selection). But because of (i) the gradual expansion, extension, and in-filling of the global tree-ring network and (ii) the emphasis given to atypical or even unique site-specific signals by some novel reconstruction methods, it is a point of debate within our community, at least implicitly, whether these principles remain valid. This presentation will review several recent studies that illustrate the possible advantages offered by a disregard for the usual ‘rules’ of dendroclimatology but will also discuss the potential pitfalls of placing too much emphasis on apparently optimal records. We hope this talk will encourage the sharing of ideas on how best to extract climate information from the ever-expanding network of tree-ring records across our planet and help open a discussion on the relevance of our standard theoretical framework to contemporary global dendroclimatology.

The need for new theory in global dendroclimatology

Scott St. George

Southern Manitoba is one of the most flood-prone regions in Canada, with the Red River of the North being the cause of most significant floods. The realization that the then-recent 1950 flood disaster was dwarfed by the historical 1826 flood led Canadian government officials to set an unusually high design standard for the Red River floodway, a 48-km long diversion built in the 1960s to protect the provincial capital of Winnipeg. And after paleoflood research confirmed new evidence of the 1826 flood, that event was cited as the main justification for expanding the Red River floodway, a $668 billion CAN infrastructure project that began in 2010. Without these insights from historical and paleoflood research, it’s almost certain flood risk estimates would have been unrealistically low and Winnipeg would have adopted a lesser level of flood protection. Because widespread Euro-American settlement in the Pembina Territory (the present-day Red River basin within the United States) did not occur until the 1870s, there are no historical accounts that indicate whether the 1826 flood was also so severe in North Dakota or Minnesota. As a result, the 1997 flood, which was nearly 1.5 times larger than any other previous flood in the US gage record, overwhelmed the dikes protecting Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. By having a deeper understanding of the history of flooding, communities are better able to anticipate future floods, make sound decisions about flood protection and migration, and protect people and their property more effectively.

The societal value of historical and paleoflood research in Manitoba, Canada

Scott St. George

In their study of tree rings from the Chemnitz Fossil Forest (Germany), Luthardt and Rößler (2017) claim to identify a regular near-11-yr cyclicity in growth, and present that pattern as evidence of the influence of the Schwabe solar cycle (Usokin and Mursula, 2003) on climate and forest productivity during the early Permian. If correctly interpreted, these fossil tree rings would indicate the sunspot cycle was the dominant influence on interannual variability in Earth’s climate during this period and that it has been a consistent aspect of our Sun’s behavior for at least the past 300 m.y. We argue the fossil tree-ring record from Chemnitz does not constitute reliable evidence of solar activity during the Permian because the individual tree-ring sequences are not correctly aligned (dendrochronologically dated) and, as a result, the mean ring-width composite is not a meaningful estimate of year-to-year variations in tree growth in this ancient forest.

Solar ghosts: Weighing the evidence for sunspot cycles in fossil trees

Scott St. George

In the Biblical story of Joseph, following seven years of abundance, the Kingdom of Egypt was confronted by seven years of drought and famine. In the parlance of modern climate science, intervals with several consecutive extremely dry years are described as ‘“megadroughts”. In this short talk, I’ll describe how climate scientists combine clues from natural weather archives (including corals, tree rings, lake sediments, and many other sources) to reveal the history of ancient megadroughts across our planet. And I’ll highlight new research that combines these surrogate drought records with simulations from state-of-the-art climate models to help us better anticipate the risks of unusually persistent droughts during the coming century.

Long droughts: Using natural climate archives to gage the risks of future “me...

Scott St. George

As one of the most destructive hazards on our planet, floods kill thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in property damage every year. We usually try to gage the risk of future floods by fitting mathematic functions to hydrological data and then extrapolating the upper tail of those distributions. But because large floods are rare and river gage records are short, the conventional approach can sometimes drastically underestimate the threat posed to communities and infrastructure by extreme floods. In this lecture, I’ll argue that paleoflood hydrology — the study of ancient floods as recorded by river and lake sediments, trees, caves, and historical documents — is absolutely essential to judge the real risk of large, rare floods. And I’ll use examples from North America to illustrate how a ‘deeper river memory’ can help people evaluate their own vulnerability to floods, weigh the potential benefits of proposed infrastructure projects, and become more aware of what nature is truly capable of producing.

Expecting the unexpected: The relevance of old floods to modern hydrology

Scott St. George

Prolonged episodes of persistently dry or wet conditions are common features of most proxy-based reconstructions of past hydroclimatic variability. These so-called “Joseph” events might be due to external forcings that push sea-surface temperatures into warm or cold states, and thereby increase the likelihood of widespread megadroughts or megapluvials. Alternatively, internal ocean-atmosphere variability alone might be able to produce long-lasting and spatially extensive wet or dry intervals, even in the absence of any exotic external influences. In this study, we use a simple statistical emulator to establish benchmarks for decadal or multidecadal patterns in the western United States. We constructed a linear inverse model that included three key aspects of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (monthly sea-surface temperatures, zonal surface wind stress, and sea-surface height), and restricted the spatial domain of each field to include only the tropical Pacific. By also including western United States hydroclimate information in the LIM, we are able to test whether ENSO variability and stochastic weather ‘noise’ could be sufficient to create low-frequency coherence within proxy networks. More broadly, if simulated drought patterns generated by the LIM are able to match the frequency, intensity, or spatial extent of droughts reconstructed by proxies, that implies that neither exotic forcings nor climate variability outside the tropical Pacific are required to produce widespread megadroughts in this region. If prolonged departures from the mean are indeed emergent but unremarkable features of western North America’s hydroclimate, we might be able to estimate their future occurrence as a linear combination of changes in the mean state and the linear dynamics that have governed their behavior in the past. S. St. George, T. Ault, C. Carrillo, S. Coats, J. Mankin, J. Smerdon, What to expect when you’re expecting decadal variability in hydroclimatic proxies, PAGES 5th Open Science Meeting, Zaragoza, Spain, May 9-13, 2017.

What to expect when you’re expecting decadal variability in hydroclimatic pro...

Scott St. George

The ability to deliver effective and engaging oral presentations is a critical skill for all researchers. Unfortunately, despite the importance of clear communication, too many scientific presentations at conferences and workshops are confusing, abstract, and boring. In this short workshop, participants learn several key strategies and tips that will make their professional presentations just a little bit better than the rest. We discuss strategies for presentation planning, show how basic design principles can create more memorable slides, and point towards an outstanding set online tools and resources. Become a presentation superstar! Scott St. George is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota and a Resident Fellow at UMN's Institute on the Environment. Prior to joining the faculty at Minnesota, he was a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. Scott shares some of his experiences ‘doing presentations differently’ at conferences, outreach opportunities, and the classroom.

Five Things You Can Do Right Now To Make Your Research Presentations Just A L...

Scott St. George

GEOG5839.22, Paleofloods

Scott St. George

More from Scott St. George (16)

Boosting the Signal: Simple Strategies to Deliver Better Scientific Talks

Ringing true: The scientific and societal relevance of dendrochronology at th...

How long do trees remember?

Don’t call it a comeback: Studying ancient floods to prepare for future hazards

Flood rings: Paleoflood evidence in tree-ring anatomy

Historic accounts of extreme floods on the Red River of the North

Disentangling the decadal ‘knot’ in high-resolution paleoclimatology

A new framework to test the origins of western American megadrought

The need for new theory in global dendroclimatology

The societal value of historical and paleoflood research in Manitoba, Canada

Solar ghosts: Weighing the evidence for sunspot cycles in fossil trees

Long droughts: Using natural climate archives to gage the risks of future “me...

Expecting the unexpected: The relevance of old floods to modern hydrology

What to expect when you’re expecting decadal variability in hydroclimatic pro...

Five Things You Can Do Right Now To Make Your Research Presentations Just A L...

GEOG5839.22, Paleofloods

Recently uploaded

Activity 01 - Artificial Culture (1).pdf

ciinovamais

Unit-V; Pricing (Pharma Marketing Management).pptx

VishalSingh1417

General Principles of Intellectual Property: Concepts of Intellectual Proper...

Poonam Aher Patil

𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐎𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬: -Discern accommodations and modifications within inclusive classroom environments, distinguishing between their respective roles and applications. -Through critical analysis of hypothetical scenarios, learners will adeptly select appropriate accommodations and modifications, honing their ability to foster an inclusive learning environment for students with disabilities or unique challenges.

Understanding Accommodations and Modifications

MJDuyan

ICT role in 21st century education and it's challenges.

MaryamAhmad92

Mehran University Newsletter Vol-X, Issue-I, 2024

Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro

Unit-IV- Pharma. Marketing Channels.pptx

VishalSingh1417

Key note speaker Neum_Admir Softic_ENG.pdf

Admir Softic

Salient Features of India constitution especially power and functions

KarakKing

Dyslexia AI Workshop for Slideshare.pptx

callscotland1987

Vishram Singh - Textbook of Anatomy Upper Limb and Thorax.. Volume 1 (1).pdf

ssuserdda66b

Application orientated numerical on hev.ppt

RamjanShidvankar

Explore the world of IT certification with CompTIA. Discover how the CompTIA Security+ Book SY0-701 can elevate your cybersecurity expertise and open doors to new career opportunities. This PDF provides essential insights into the CompTIA Security+ certification, guiding you through exam preparation and showcasing the benefits of becoming CompTIA-certified. Download now to embark on your journey to IT excellence with CompTIA.

ComPTIA Overview | Comptia Security+ Book SY0-701

bronxfugly43

TỔNG ÔN TẬP THI VÀO LỚP 10 MÔN TIẾNG ANH NĂM HỌC 2023 - 2024 CÓ ĐÁP ÁN (NGỮ Â...

Nguyen Thanh Tu Collection

SKILL OF INTRODUCING THE LESSON MICRO SKILLS.pptx

Amanpreet Kaur

1029 - Danh muc Sach Giao Khoa 10 . pdf

QucHHunhnh

Introduction to Nonprofit Accounting: The Basics

TechSoup

Graduate Outcomes Presentation Slides - English

neillewis46

Accessible Digital Futures project (20/03/2024)

Jisc

Food safety_Challenges food safety laboratories_.pdf

Sherif Taha

Recently uploaded (20)

Activity 01 - Artificial Culture (1).pdf

Unit-V; Pricing (Pharma Marketing Management).pptx

General Principles of Intellectual Property: Concepts of Intellectual Proper...

Understanding Accommodations and Modifications

ICT role in 21st century education and it's challenges.

Mehran University Newsletter Vol-X, Issue-I, 2024

Unit-IV- Pharma. Marketing Channels.pptx

Key note speaker Neum_Admir Softic_ENG.pdf

Salient Features of India constitution especially power and functions

Dyslexia AI Workshop for Slideshare.pptx

Vishram Singh - Textbook of Anatomy Upper Limb and Thorax.. Volume 1 (1).pdf

Application orientated numerical on hev.ppt

ComPTIA Overview | Comptia Security+ Book SY0-701

TỔNG ÔN TẬP THI VÀO LỚP 10 MÔN TIẾNG ANH NĂM HỌC 2023 - 2024 CÓ ĐÁP ÁN (NGỮ Â...

SKILL OF INTRODUCING THE LESSON MICRO SKILLS.pptx

1029 - Danh muc Sach Giao Khoa 10 . pdf

Introduction to Nonprofit Accounting: The Basics

Graduate Outcomes Presentation Slides - English

Accessible Digital Futures project (20/03/2024)

Food safety_Challenges food safety laboratories_.pdf

Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science

1. LARGE CLASS

3. HTTP://WWW.NRMSC.USGS.GOV/REPEATPHOTO/OVERVIEW.HTM USGS REPEAT PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT

4. In September 2012, Arctic sea ice reached the smallest extent ever recorded in more than three decades of satellite measurements.

5. How have average annual temperatures changed across the planet? 1 °F 0.5 0 -0.5 1880 1900 Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000

10. “ This is simply outstanding! I'm really excited about this. Jon Foley, Institute on the Environment March 12, 2013 ”

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. NOT ALL OUR REVIEWS WERE POSITIVE.

25.

26. “ I don’t quite know what to feel about [this video]; pleased that a passion for artistic creation lurks in the soul of a dendrochronologist, or astonished that a research intern would spend time on something so frivolous. Ivan Hewi , Music critic August 30, 2013 ”

27. 133K VIEWS

28.

29.

30. “ However, sometimes converting a simple graph into some diﬀerent form of information can deliver the message far be er, and more eﬀectively, than dots on a page. Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy July 18, 2013 ”

Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (8)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (15)

Similar to Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science

Similar to Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science (10)

More from Scott St. George

More from Scott St. George (16)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climate Science