cc  >> I'd like to thank you all for  joining us tonight, my name is  Michael Notaro and I'm a  scientist at the Center for  Climatic Research and today  we're kicking off the new  seminar series, "Bracing for  Impact, Climate Change  Adaptation in Wisconsin."  I thank you all for joining us  and so far two speakers for  coming.  I want to point out a couple  things, we're going to start off  a nine-part series, today is the  first day of the series.  We have handouts which are off  to the right in the back which  will show the schedule.  And also we'll have a slide--  later which is the schedule of  upcoming talks.  I want to thank Wisconsin Public  Television for joining us today  and filming these events, and in  addition to the handouts at the  back there's also a sign-up  sheet if you want to be included  on the list of upcoming events.  So now I'd like to introduce our  first speaker, Richard Lathrop,  Richard Lathrop has worked for  31 years as a research  limnologist for the Wisconsin  Department of Natural Resources.  Dick received his PhD in  oceanography and limnology from  UW Madison in 1998 and he holds  a dual honorary appointment with  the UW Center for Limnology and  the Nelson Institute for  Environmental Studies.  Dick currently is the Madison  lakes field site manager for the  UW Madison north temperate lakes  long-term ecological research  project, and he's a lead DNR  scientist on other collaborative  lake research restoration  projects.  In addition he's the science  council co-chair for the  newly-formed Wisconsin  Initiative on Climate Change  Impact, called WICCI, which is  the sponsor of these events.  So thank you very much, Dick,  for joining us. 

 Thank you.  >> Okay.  Just one clarification.  (APPLAUSE)  My name is pronounced  "LAY-thrup," so just for the  television.  Well, it's quite a night to be  here, talking about climate  change when we're at the cusp of  switching from a rain to an ice  storm and actually this is quite  an opportunity, this seminar  series, because John and I are  expecting to have to start going  out on the road now and giving  more presentations about the  WICCI project.  Just have a couple of slides  because I know that Dan and  Michael at the next seminar will  be giving more information on  this, but we want to just make  the point that climate change is  happening.  The earth is warming, recent  trends, plotted here, in the  last decade or two, are showing  a major increase in air  temperatures, so the science is  really unequivocal that the  earth is warming, climate is  changing, so we're not here to  argue that tonight.  Some of the impacts, if we look  at the global scale, here are  the Arctic Ocean, North  American, Asia, you can see  where the red, the median ice  cap, minimum each summer, for a  '79 to 2000 period.  And then, 1982 was the white.  And this last year, you can see  how much less ice there is up in  the Arctic Ocean, in a  significant area along the  northern part of Alaska and  parts of Canada and all of Asia  here that is now open. 

 With this kind of large global  change, there's ecosystem  impacts and polar bears are kind  of the poster child of climate  change impact.  However, what we really want to  do is try to look at what's  happening in Wisconsin.  What does climate change mean  for Wisconsin?  And this, just a quick graph  produced by the Union of  Concerned Scientists some years  ago, and in general they were  saying that Wisconsin would have  its winter look more like Iowa  by the end of the century, and  then its summers would progress  down about where the state of  Illinois is by 2030.  And then by the end of the  century, we would look more like  Arkansas.  I don't want to be talking on  these points very much because I  know that Dan will be  highlighting them, but we are  expecting higher temperatures in  different seasons, increased  humidity, and more intense  storms as just some of the  things that we expect.  What we're really wanting to do  with this WICCI project is look  at the impacts of climate change  and how we might adapt to them.  I'm going to go through a series  of slides just to give you a  sense of all the impacts that we  are expecting in Wisconsin, some  of which are already happening.  With warmer air temperatures,  particularly at nighttime,  coupled with higher humidity  levels, this will lead to  increased risk of heat stroke.  And Chicago in the summer of  '95, and Milwaukee, we had hot  summers and springs, some water  here as a way of trying to cool  themselves down.  And water in our trout streams,  the warmer summer water  temperatures are going to  threaten our coldwater fish. 

 And our native brook trout, and  then brown trout, which were  originally stocked but are now  much a part of our ecosystem.  These fish, if the stream waters  were warm, are gonna be  threatened.  And we're going to have a whole  segment in our series about fish  species coming up later.  Air pollution and climate change  and interactions of these  things, are all kind of  complicated, but the point is  that climate change is going to  have an impact.  And when you mix air pollution,  increasing temperatures,  changing circulation patterns  where you have more air  inversion and maybe some air  from the Chicago, Gary, Indiana  region coming up here.  That combines to produce more  ground-level ozone, which will  affect human health.  We're expecting an increase in  vector-born infectious diseases.  More mosquitos if we have  wetter, hotter summers for  longer periods, ticks, and these  will be carrying various  diseases that are definitely of  concern for Wisconsin and for  humans as well as our wildlife.  Staying with the human health  theme, waterborne infectious  disease problems could increase  if more intense storms overwhelm  the infrastructure of our sewage  treatment plants and our storm  water systems.  Here's a shot early, years ago,  where the combined sewer  overflow out of Milwaukee poured  out into the Milwaukee harbor  and out into Lake Michigan and  there was a lot of disease  issues and health issues  associated with that water  contamination. 

 This just happened last summer,  we had a number of water  treatment plants throughout the  state that were completely  flooded.  And here's the Reedsburg sewage  treatment plant.  See here, the clarifier tanks,  and so this whole system was  flooded when the Baraboo River  over-topped.  Winter in Wisconsin is  important, and I know John  Magnusen is probably passionate  about this story and he's going  to present much of it in his own  seminar series coming up in a  few weeks.  The point is, it's part of our  culture, our sense of place.  We live in Wisconsin, we've  learned to adapt to the winters  here.  Recreation is important, the  Birke was here this last  weekend.  Kites on ice.  We like to do things in the  winter.  Well, the loss of winter is a  real potential for our future. 

 The muddy snowmobile, there's a  lot of tourism that depends on  snowmobiling and skiing in  northern Wisconsin.  Ice fishing, you start having  floes of ice like this already  on the lakes, it's gonna be  really hard to be safely doing  that.  Another point that a lot of  people don't know, and I've been  learning from our forestry  folks, is that it's nice to have  really cold winters and frozen  ground for the logging, so they  don't go in and chew up the  ground.  So another issue related to  warming of our winters.  Well, the wildlife issue has a  whole host of potential impacts,  but I'll just show you a few  here.  The pine marten, one of our  endangered mammals in the state  is only found in the very  northern part of Wisconsin, and  there's a -- in the snow, and  with warmer winters and less  snow, animals that were  displaced from the south will  mean the pine marten will leave  the state.  If you're a snowshoe hare in the  winter and you're turning white  and the ground's brown, you  haven't got much of a chance.  I mean, that's not a good thing  for the snowshoe hare.  And the spruce grouse is really  adapted to cooler climates and  colder winters.  That is an endangered or  threatened species in the state,  too. 

 Well, some wildlife are gonna be  winners.  And deer is a big problem for my  agency, the Department of  Natural Resources, and deer  will, without the cold winters  to help maintain or suppress  their copulation, their  population numbers are gonna  explode.  And one of the impacts is that  they're gonna be browsing more  and more of our coniferous tree  species like hemlock, white  pine, and white cedar.  So it really restricts the  regeneration of these species.  So it's a big problem to manage  our northern forests when you  have a deer population that's  exploding.  I think we can really relate to  the problem of geese in the  Madison area.  And there's a lot of problems  associated with them.  With all their defecation and  the bacteria there that gets in  our water courses and things, so  an exploding geese population  with warmer winters is gonna be  another problem.  We got problems from insect  pests and invasive species may  increase because of warmer  winters and a warmer climate.  A lot of these pests are  controlled or suppressed when  the winters are cold, so as the  winters warm, there'll be more  survival the next year and more  pests which means more  insecticide use on our crops. 

 The --, we don't want this  coming up from the south but as  our weather is more like a  southern climate, we're gonna  see more of these problems.  We have a number of tree species  in this state that represent our  northern forests.  And David -- and others have  shown with some modeling that  where our southern range of  these trees are right now, so  the balsam fir is by this solid  line, white birch by this solid  line, and red pine by this solid  line.  By the end of the century, if  climate continues to warm like  we're expecting, we may no  longer have balsam fir growing  in the state of Wisconsin.  It will only be up in this tip  of Minnesota.  Same with white birch, which no  longer is projected to be  growing naturally within the  state.  Red pine, which is much in the  central part of the state and  the northwest will be only in  the northeastern part of the  state.  So these are projections based  on how we think our climate  might change and how these  species would have to move along  with the warming temperatures.  They'll be moving north.  Well this is an apropos slide  for tonight. 

 We don't know tomorrow morning  if we should maybe get a photo  to put on here that's more  relevant.  But when you start having  winters that are warmer, and  more freezing rain and ice  storms, a tremendous amount of  damage with these.  I gotta find a shot showing a  lot of these car pileups on the  interstate when they hit these  patches of freezing rain.  But you can see the damage here  caused by a lot of freezing  rain, and these southern states  have a lot more of this than we  have in Wisconsin.  I just saw on the news the other  day that we've got the pothole  patrol out, where you can start  reporting to the city where your  local pothole is.  If we start having more  freeze-thaw events, the pavement  breaks up, and driving on  University Ave.  all winter has been a rough road  and potholes all over the place.  So we're expecting more of them  if we have more freeze-thaw  situations.  One of the things that we've  really seen in this past decade  and this trend that we're  expecting to continue is the  increase in the extreme  precipitation events.  And that causes of course  runoff. 

 And if you look at data from the  Madison airport from the 1940s  by decade through the 2000s and  the number of rainstorms that  are greater than three inches  per day.  So, this would be two storms for  the 1950s that were greater than  three inches a day, and this  decade, we have had a fourfold  increase in, about the average  of these two per decade, now  we're up to eight and we've got  two to go yet.  Well, last year was a banner  year for flooding.  And here's some shots from, this  is the dam blowout at Lake  Delton, here's a shot from  previous years up in the city of  Antigo.  But Baraboo was completely  flooded.  I mean, the damage to our  communities is tremendous with  these kinds of major, big  storms.  Our transportation  infrastructure is also really  damaged.  This shot happens to be just  over, across the Mississippi  River from this August 2007  storm.  AS you can see, almost an entire  highway is just completely  eroded out now.  Rebuilding this road is going to  be a major problem. 

 Here in Wisconsin, the same kind  of thing.  And the railroad systems; a  trainwreck here, the tracks got  in the soggy ground, washed out  and tipped over.  This last summer, the flooding  caused all our, a couple of our  interstates, this is up near the  interstate on the Baraboo River.  I'm not sure if this is highway  39 or 90, but the point is that  the interstate was flooded and  closed.  Down near Milwaukee, you heard  from our Milwaukee folks, that  the closure of that road really  affected their economy.  When interstate I-90/94 to  Milwaukee was shut down, truck  traffic and car traffic going in  and out of Milwaukee was a huge  problem.  In the field that I am, I'm a  limnologist, so runoff.  From agricultural sources in  this case.  -- produces dirty water and the  amount of pollution in these  large events is exponentially  bigger than our more moderate  events.  This pollution goes into the  lake and they end up with water  quality problems like this algae  bloom here, and lake  eutrophication. 

 This is a big problem if we're  going to see more of these  extreme events in the future,  we're going to have to do even  more land management practices  to try to control this  pollution.  Now see this is a slide that I  have to work on, but variable  rainfall causes problems for  Wisconsin agriculture.  You have too much or too little.  If it's raining in the spring,  they can't get into their fields  to plow them.  They have these washouts in the  summer, that completely kill  these crops, or you go into  periods of severe drought for  long periods and then have a big  washout.  So these variable rainfall  patterns really cause problems  for our agriculture which is an  important economic driver of the  state.  Droughts and increased  evaporation can lead to lower  lake levels.  And lower lake levels certainly  affects recreation, property  values, and ecosystems.  Here in the central sands region  of Wisconsin this is exacerbated  by increased groundwater  pumping, while they're pumping  more groundwater because they  need to irrigate.  So these lakes here are drying  up. 

 This is a northern part of  Wisconsin and maybe Dan will be  talking about this, but we  actually had a drought in the  northern part of the state and  you could see all this coarse,  woody debris here along the  shoreline, the shoreline is now  exposed.  This is important habitat for  fish and organisms they depend  on.  That's all diluted now or  exposed and no longer part of  the lake ecosystem until the  lake refills.  We have some tremendously  valuable and pristine  environments in the state, and  our natural areas.  And here's just a couple of  examples of our open bog peat  lands, they harbor many rare  species dependent on cool, humid  environments.  The northern part of the state  we have these northern white  cedar swamp forests.  And they're adapted to cold  winters and cooler summers.  So the biodiversity that is  special to this state is  dependent on maintaining  a climate  that does not become much  warmer.  Well, how are we acting on  climate change in Wisconsin?  There are two approaches, and  one is focusing on mitigation  and this really is showcased by  the governor's task force on  global warming, which addressed  ways to reduce greenhouse gas  emissions.  This was a major effort about  two years and many agency folks,  many experts in the state,  university participated in this  effort and recommendations were  made on how to reduce our  greenhouse gas emissions and  make economically sustainable  choices. 

 However, what WICCI is about is  adaptation.  Climate change is happening  already, and it's going to  continue to happen.  What we want to do is to  complement this but focus on  addressing ways to adapt to the  consequences of climate change.  Back in the summer of 2007 a  group of us met from both the  DNR as well as the university  and we came up this model of  what we though WICCI might do.  And it's comprised of a science  council, of which John and I are  co-chair and a number of working  groups that are associated with  our science council.  But it's independent.  And then also an operations and  outreach unit and an advisory  committee.  And you can see they're all  interacting there, and I want to  talk about each of those groups  in a second.  The science council.  Our members are represented by  the university system, the DNR,  and other state and federal  agencies or institutions around  the state. 

 This is not a DNR-centric or  UW-Madison-centric effort.  We're trying to bring the best  minds of the state together to  address these problems  collaboratively.  And you see some of these --  give you a sense of the kind of  collaboration we have on the  science council.  Our key mission is, our goals  are to identify critical or  emerging scientific questions  related to the mission of WICCI,  and organize and coordinate  working groups, and this is -  the working groups really is  where the work is being done and  I'll talk about them in a  second.  And provide leadership on  climate change impact issues in  the state.  The working groups.  These are where the experts are  found in our various  institutions and universities  and agencies and they are  brought together to address  these objectives: to identify  potential risks and  vulnerabilities pertinent to the  working group topic area or  geographic region.  There's a lot of information out  there already in the Midwest  region, and it's a job really to  synthesize it and come up with  recommendations based on that  current body of information.  There's also -- needs and  research needs that we're gonna  need to pursue with new funding  and whatever to assess these  impacts of climate change and  then finally, to recommend  adaptation strategies.  How are we going to adapt to the  future of climate change?  Well this is an organizational  chart that's a little outdated  even now, but it gives you an  idea of the two different types  of working groups that we  conceived originally. 

 We have the statewide topic area  working groups, and then we have  the geographic region working  groups which are focused more on  a set of focus areas as  exemplified by the list here.  But you'll see right underneath  the statewide topic areas the  Wisconsin climate working group.  This is central and key, it's  one of the first ones we got  formed.  Dan is one of the co-chairs, I'm  sure he'll be talking about  that.  They are to help us figure out,  well, what is our future climate  going to be?  We could be sitting here trying  to make assessments and  projections for the future, but  if we don't know what the  climate's gonna be, it really  won't be based on science.  So they are interacting closely  with all of these topic working  groups that we've got formed as  well as those geographic  regions.  After a couple of years of our  working groups doing their  impact assessments, we'll pull  that information together and do  a synthesis of Wisconsin's  climate change impacts, kind of  a model of the first adaptive  assessment like the IPCC, every  five years they do another one  of these adaptive assessments.  This is dynamic and this is,  WICCI is dynamic, it's not like  the governor's global warming  task force where they came up  with a series of recommendations  and now the agencies or  institutions will be trying to  implement them.  We're gonna be assessing climate  down the road for years to come.  After we get new information,  new research, and we have new  ideas about where the climate  was going, we'll bring that  information together and we'll  do a second adaptive assessment  and so on, so this is a dynamic  thing. 

 Climate is not going away and we  don't want WICCI to be just  something to report on itself.  We're trying to make this  something that will be here for  the future.  Here's a slide representing the  working groups that we already  have going in the dark blue, and  then four of them that are  developing and soon to be  launched.  We also have a water-- group  that we're trying to get  together, but you'll notice a  number of these are related to  geographic regions, the  Milwaukee working group has been  going on for about a year,  making great progress.  Green Bay, the Green Bay  ecosystem already produced their  fifth report about how they feel  climate change is going to be  affecting the Green Bay system.  A number of these topic areas  will also be discussed in detail  at the upcoming seminar series.  But you'll see again central to  all this is the Wisconsin  Climate working group.  We had our first annual working  group workshop back in the  middle of January 2009 and you  can see John here, my co-chair,  I think he's in a mode of  playing there to get us started  but actually we had a good  kickoff, the whole working group  set of folks that came from  various working group and then  each working group broke out  into a couple-hour session to  work on some of the details  pertinent to their own topic  area or geographic region.  And you'll see Dan here,  furiously taking notes, because  he was interacting with a  particular working group trying  to get this good dialogue going  between the climate working  group and the other working  groups.  We have an advisory committee,  we just had our first meeting on  the second of February, and  you'll notice -- and Mark Miller  here, we have a lot of  high-powered people,  representing all kinds of  sectors of the state. 

 Transportation, organizations,  businesses, and their job first  of all, well, we're representing  all the stakeholders in the  state and trying to be this  advisory committee, and some of  the main priorities, we're  asking them to identify  information needs for planning  and decision making.  Interact with the science  council and give direction to  the working groups.  We can't have the working groups  producing things not relevant to  the people of the state.  And bringing information  back to their colleagues.  We have a big operations and  outreach team, as you can see in  -- here, support is being  coordinated by the Nelson  Institute for Environmental  Studies.  A number of folks there working  very hard to make this WICCI  process work.  I'll mention a few names, Pete  Molak, --, Louis Gilbert have  been on the ground floor helping  us get this project going.  Allison Colson who helped me in  putting this presentation  together has a major role in  making sure that our WICCI thing  went smoothly.  And then we have others who are  doing the website work.  Here's our website, the website  address. 

 You'll be able to go their and  find out information about all  the different WICCI groups, to  kind of keep it as fresh and up  to date as possible.  To mention -- who's been with us  from the start.  He helps run our meetings,  taking notes, and he keeps our  website up to date.  Just to give you some ideas and  examples of ideas, adaptation  strategies.  Sometimes that's a little hard  to understand.  The Birkebeiner folks, who just  had their race.  The southern part of their race  track, they're having last of  snow sometimes, the entire race  was in danger of being  cancelled.  What did they do?  They adapted.  They built a second loop back to  cable here, because this is down  in the Lake Superior snowbelt,  so they get more snow on that  part of the trail as opposed to  down here.  Our trout streams. 

 Well, we could plant trees maybe  on the southern shorelines of  these streams to provide more  shading.  So if we identify streams that  are going to be threatened by  warming of waters where the  trout would be subjected to  those temperatures, we need to  do more planting.  In our nurseries,  if certain tree  species are not going to be  growing in the state 50 or 60  years from now, we don't want to  be growing those trees in our  nurseries and planting them and  seeing them die before they  reach maturity, so some of the  things that the forestry working  group will be working on, just  how exactly are they going to  run our nurseries and adapt to  those kind of things.  And I think one of the biggest  things that we're gonna see is  our storm water working group,  Ken Potter had a really major  role in bringing this to the  forefront early on.  Now -- is a co-chair with him on  that.  It's designing our  infrastructure so that it  handles bigger storms.  Currently, as I understand it, a  lot of our designs are based on  outdated hydrologic statistics  from the 1930s to the 1960s.  Well, back in that period, they  weren't having some of these  bigger storms.  A hundred-year storm today might  be every five years.  We had probably a  five-hundred-year storm, of  older statistics last summer in  Baraboo. 

 So we've got to be designing our  bridges and our storm sewer  systems to handle these kinds of  events.  I'd like to point out, recognize  all the contributors, we also on  all of the slides tried to give  credit to the source of the  slide material and again I want  to mention Allison Coulson for  all her hard work and help, it  was a real team effort putting  this presentation together.  I want to end with this.  I'll just read it off.  "Are these the shadows of the  things that will be, or are they  shadows of things that may be,  only?  Men's courses will foreshadow  certain ends, but if the courses  be departed from, the ends will  change.  Say it is thus with what you  show me!"  I was thinking about this last  night as I was going through and  fine-tuning this presentation.  This is kind of a depressing  talk.  We've got a lot of problems in  the future, how are we going to  deal with them?  But we can change.  We can adapt.  And I think Dan will show you  that if we do some mitigation,  as opposed to business as usual,  the future won't be as bad, if  we do make an effort to change. 

 So that's the ending message I'd  like to leave, we need to make  changes now, but we can and we  will make a difference.  Thank you.  (Applause)