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Vice President Al Gore, Question & Answer Period Question: [inaudible] Dr. Untersteiner: Let me answer that in two ways. Theres two problems. The Vice President mentioned this puzzle that we have understanding how the climate system works. We immediately get more than twice as much data than we already have in the Arctic, which starts to tell us how the models work so that we can put that together. So theres an immediate improvement in our understanding of climate models. But we have another practical application and that is we get some information on what the currents are, the ocean currents are in the Arctic Ocean and we can use that to understand whats going to happen with some of the disposal of radioactive waste up there. So weve got two immediate applications that well be using. Gore: Either of the others wish to comment on that? Dr. Baker: Only perhaps along the same line that anything we can do to put the right initial conditions in our models are going to improve the forecasts, including the forecasts of the ice cover, which is something of great practical importance for commercial shipping and fisheries, for instance. Admiral Paul Gaffney: I would agree with both Dr. Untersteiner and Dr. Baker, the Navy as well does weather forecasting globally and using this information to update and improve our models so that we can have better weather predictions not only in the Arctic, but as they affect other parts of the world, will be critically important to us. Gore: I think its safe to say, isnt it admiral, that where your team is concerned, youve gotten as well as youve given, havent you, from the scientists that youve worked with? Admiral Paul Gaffney: Absolutely, weve, its really been a terrific benefit for us. Weve received so much information that was not available before. And likewise, weve given some data and expertise to put this all together. But its been a terrific two-way street Ive never seen before. Gore: Yes. Question: Mr. Vice President, can you tell the average American why they should care about this? Gore: Were going through changes in our world that are different from any that have come during previous periods of history. The relationship between human civilization and the Earth on which we live is going through a profound change. There are three reasons for it that have all come together at the same time. The population explosion thats adding a billion more people net, every ten years, the scientific and technological revolution which is still accelerating and which, along with the many benefits it brings us, also brings some poorly understood negative consequences by magnifying the impact of age-old behaviors of exploiting the Earth that were used to now have different implications because were so much more powerful than we were, and so much more numerous than we were. And then, third, a change in attitudes about the consequences of what we do. This last is really a philosophical struggle in our country and around the world. Between those who say unfettered exploitation is no problem whatsoever and those who, on the other hand, say, look, were seeing the depletion of major fisheries all around the world. Were seeing the loss of living species at a rate unprecedented since the age when the dinosaurs disappeared, and so many other life forms. Were seeing the destruction of critical habitat important to the preservation of food crops. And as a result, we need to understand much better what is at stake, and what can be done about it. The most vulnerable part of the global environment is the atmosphere, which is a thin sheet surrounding the Earth and is part of the global climate system. Up until now, perhaps the most poorly understood part of the global environment has been the role of the Arctic. It is still poorly understood. But with the doubling of the scientific data available and the ongoing process which will continue to produce large new increments of data, we will have a much better chance of improving this process of change and a much better chance of mitigating harmful consequences for those of us who live in towns and cities where weather patterns matter and where climate change can have great consequences. One final note. Just Sunday, the Washington Post business section had a front page story about how major corporations around the world are now beginning, some of them for the first time, to focus intently on the implications for business of the dramatic changes that are being forecast by scientists. If the insurance industry and other industries are now looking at their profit and loss statements and projecting into the future in an effort to try to understand this process of change, naturally they come to the scientific community. And the scientific community will now have a great deal more data about one of the most important components of that system which is undergoing change. Question: Is today the first day any part of the scientific community has access to this data, of have NOAA and other agencies had access before? And secondly, where is it most likely to have to overturn previous ideas [inaudible]? Gore: Let me answer the first part of the question and then invite my colleagues to answer the second part of the question. The Medilla group of scientists had prior access to this information. One of the mechanisms that we settled upon to accomplish this transfer of knowledge was to provide clearances to some within the scientific community who agreed to abide by the constraints of non-disclosure of anything sensitive for national security, and then get access to all of this knowledge, to characterize it, to identify the portions of the database that would be most useful for scientific analysis, and then to participate in the moving of that knowledge into the open. And so that group of scientists has had prior access. And Ill ask Jim Baker and the others to deal with the second part of it. Jim Baker: The question was, where are we most likely to see a change of knowledge about our understanding of the ocean? And if you look at that figure over on my left here, that point A that the vice president mentioned where you see the blue color going from the top to the bottom, it shows that there is sinking of water. The sinking of water occurs because it gets real cold in the Arctic. The water is cold. It gets more dense and it sinks. One of the big questions about climate change is how do you link the surface of the ocean with the deeper part of the ocean? Its that overturning that helps provide a balance of heat in the world system. If in fact it gets warmer, you dont get that kind of sinking, we dont get an overturning, well have a quantum change in the way the oceans circulation works and we could have major changes in climate. This is the first time that weve seen a forty year average of that kind of process, its already given us some very new things to think about in terms of how the oceans circulation works. . Gore: Let me add one point to this, you know aboutand this is also partly in response to the prior questionyou know of course the consequences of El Niño, the oscillation in the Pacific that has now become associated with recognizable changes in weather patterns in the United States and around the world. Well, that is a regional change in the Pacific Ocean that is now used for predictions of tremendous value to agriculture. For example, in the Summit of the Americas that President Clinton hosted in Miami, we began a process that resulted in the sharing of information with our neighbors in Latin America about the projections of El Niño years. And that has already resulted in what kind of savings, Jim? Jim Baker: Well, youre talking a couple of billion dollars in terms of agricultural savings. Gore: Because farmers and agribusiness companies now follow the El Niño predictions very closely because it means billions of dollars each year. In the Arctic region there has long been known and Dr. Untersteiner knows about this in ways that I obviously do not but there has long been known to be an oscillation from one side of the Arctic to the other. And although the analogy is imperfect, it may be that careful study of this data will eventually yield an understanding of that Arctic basin weather cycle that similarly can lead to much more accurate year-to-year predictions of weather patterns in the northern hemisphere. Dr. Untersteiner would you want to... . Dr. Untersteiner: We know that from the El Niño southern oscillation there emanate anomalies that travel northward along the Pacific Ocean. And that can be with some modest but measurable statistical significance can be observed, for instance in the coastal regions of Alaska. Thats where we get into the Arctic. And the Arctic, because it is, especially around the fringes, teetering between being ice-covered and not being ice-covered, and it takes very little to go from one state to the other, that climate system and the ocean atmosphere system in that region is very, very, sensitive to small perturbations. . So this is all extremely interesting because it gives us more clues to understand why the ice-cover is doing what it is doing and how the ice-cover affects the circulation that you see here and then how that affects the stratification of the world ocean because that water that is imprinted, as the vice president said, that is shaped, that is given its properties at that region, this can be tracked all the way down, down the North Atlantic, down the South Atlantic, and over in the Pacific and even in the Indian Ocean, as part of this large conveyer belt. If you just bear in mind that three quarters of the water masses of the world get their properties in a place that is only five percent of the surface of the world ocean and all of those five percent are located in the high latitudes. In the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Sea and Labrador Sea and then way down in the Weddell Sea along the coast of Antarctica. Gore: Yes. Question: Is that point A a major surprise? And are there any other surprises [inaudible]? Dr. Untersteiner: This wide column behind A is a representation of many individual events. These chimneys, as they were called, are in fact quite small. They are only maybe a few miles wide, maybe only ten miles wide. That thing is about four hundred miles wide or so, because it is the average. The summation of many chimney events. These chimneys are very small and they dont last very long. They last only a few days, maybe a week or two at a maximum. So they are extremely hard to observe. How many ships are creeping around in the Greenland Sea in the springtime? This is a very hostile environment. I think so far no research vessel has ever been in a chimney exactly when it happened. But we see the cumulative effect, and thats it. So that large column is the result of hundreds of chimney events. And thats why the water goes all the way down. Gore: Were you surprised at how stable that picture showed the chimney to be? Dr. Untersteiner: Yes, I was surprised, because we all thought that this would be not as strikingly located in that particular region. We should note that that kind of water was has been seen by oceanographers for decades, but only on the oceanographic sill between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. The end result of all this has been observed, because there was this water with these particular properties that spilled over that submarine sill. But this is the first comprehensive look that we have at where this water comes from. Gore: This is a 40-year picture. And so its fair to say, in response to his question would it be fair to say that this was a major surprise for scientists to see this stable feature? Dr. Untersteiner: Yes, it was a surprise. Question: Do you expect this data to strengthen [inaudible]? Gore: Jim Baker is nodding his head yes. Let me defer to you, Jim. The question was do you expect this data to strengthen the accuracy of global warming forecasts? Dr. Baker: Absolutely, because, as you know, were starting to see the indications of global warming with surface temperatures rising and stratospheric temperatures declining. But one of the big pieces of the puzzle is what is happening in the Arctic region. And this data gives us the first step towards trying to put that last piece together. Once we put it all together well have a much better way to start to do real forecasts of long-term change. Gore: Yes. Question: [inaudible] nuclear and chemical waste in the Arctic Ocean and just how serious those problems are [inaudible]? Gore: You want to take that? Dr. Baker: Yeah, I can start that process and then Paul Gaffney can also discuss it. You know, over a period of a number of years there have been a disposal of both nuclear reactors and radioactive waste. Over 2.5 million Curies of radioactive waste have been disposed of by the former Soviet Union in various spots across the Arctic Ocean. Admiral Paul Gaffney: There have been a number of studies done by a number of different organizations international organizations, by the United States Navy in cooperation with other agencies here in the United States looking at circulation, of insults to the environment in the Arctic. And those are about to be finished. Theyll be finished sometime in the next three or four months, I suspect, give or take a month there. And they should tell you how this is going. The initial thought is theres not any substantial leakage, and if there is any leakage, that the insult would be confined to a very local area. But as Dr. Baker said, understanding these currents better will allow us to refine the models that we have for circulation of the water and, eventually, as we look at the ice, when we do an ice climatology here next year, look at the drift of the ice around and see how any particulate matter in the water column or in the ice might move around the arctic. Question: Does the United States dispose of nuclear waste in the Arctic at all? Admiral Paul Gaffney: No, sir. Gore: Yes? Question: [inaudible] Gore: Well the answer to the second question, did you all hear the question? The first part of the question was: did Canada play a role in producing the atlas? The second question was: would it have any impact on the ongoing disputes over sovereignty? The answer to the second question is no. I cant see any way that it would have any impact on that at all. Dr. Untersteiner: Thats fair. Gore: Were only going to be able to take a couple more. Yes? Question: [inaudible] Gore: Well, Im looking forward to the next round of the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, and we will have a number of new initiatives in each of the committees that work under the commission. Ill be having a press conference in a different setting a couple of weeks from now in the run-up to that session. Our staffs are going to be meeting in Moscow soon and its premature to get into a curtain raising on the next commission meeting.
One more. Yes? Question: Mr. Vice President, you mentioned that this is a 40-year record. The other record that is almost 40 years old [inaudible] and that will be continuing. Will this activity be continuing? Will you continue to gather data like this and make it available to the public? How valuable will this be to actually [inaudible]? Gore: I think the Mauna Loa record has its 40th anniversary this year. And it is continuing. And this one will also be continuing. In fact, one of the most productive exercises by this group of scientists and national security officials has been to demonstrate how new instruments, primarily designed for national security purposes in many cases, can, with a tiny incremental change, be optimized for the collection of even more valuable scientific data. So the collection is continuing. The collaboration is continuing. And more atlases like this one will be published on a regular basis in the years ahead. Admiral Paul Gaffney: There are three more atlases coming: one for the summer which will come out later this year, and then for meteorology early in the next year, and one for the ice, the actual cap on the Arctic Ocean, at the end of `98 or the fall of 1998. Gore: Thank you all very much, and thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate it very much. Thank you very much. Bill Allen: Just one more thing before you go, Mr. Vice President. Frankly we have been amazed over the last six months at how much the Vice President of the United States knows about the pure underpinnings of the science of these serious environmental issues. I know the Medilla scientists feel exactly the same way. And apparently so do the oceanographers of the U.S. Navy. Now, not many people know this, you may now know this... Gore: I do not... Bill Allen: But for the past half decade the Navy has been referring to their primary research sector around the North Pole as the Gore Box. Gore: Im not sure I approve of that (blushing). Bill Allen: I will hasten to add that they do this out of respect for a man who is so concerned about these global issues that he will get on a nuclear submarine and go see the Arctic first hand. That he will pose questions to scientists until midnight and that he will hammer out solutions to some of the most serious environmental and global issues that we face. So we thought we should put that on a map. And its here on page 43 in the February issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine. Its outlined in black and it is also serving as a momento of this visit. Mr. Vice President, for you. Gore: Thank you very much. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Bill Allen: And to make sure that it is an official Geographic feature on maps, what would be complete without a resolution? This is considerably shorter than most of the resolutions that you are concerned with, Mr. Vice President. And it is also bereft of any whereases. It says simply, By virtue of the fact that cartographers of National Geographic Society have included a specially designated quadrant of the Arctic Ocean on a Society map, we hereby declare that an elegantly shaped region of the Arctic Ocean shall henceforth be known as the Gore Box. Gore: Thank you very much. Thank you. Bill Allen: Its a pleasure to have you. Gore: Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Jim. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much. Hey, Bruce. Bill Allen: Are you folks going to be available for questions after this in case anyone would like to extend this? Well, on behalf of the National Geographic Society I would like to thank all of you for your attendance at this historic occasion. Thank you very much. |