Turning climate ideas into action. Will Kochtitzky, Asst. Professor, University of New England

 In the interest of Global Exchange, I have focused on having podcast guests from all over the planet. But today's guest comes from just a few miles away. Will Kochtitzky is an assistant professor at the University of New England in my hometown in Maine. Will's specialty is observing and quantifying the impacts of climate change on planet Earth. Having worked in equatorial and polar regions, as well as on some of the tallest mountains and along our changing coastlines, will, has a very broad perspective on the subject.

Today he focuses on engaging and training University of New England's undergraduates to understand the consequences of climate change. He is also preparing them for work in this sector by providing them with hands-on opportunities to enhance climate resilience in their local college community. 

A note to listeners who are further a note to listeners who are further flung the New England: in this podcast, we speak about a series of memorable winter storms that walloped Maine's coastline a couple of years ago, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and serving as a stark reminder of the precariousness of life as we know it along our treasured coastlines.

Transcript

Abigail 0:05

Welcome to the podcast where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. In the interest of Global Exchange, I have focused on having podcast guests from all over the planet. But today's guest comes from just a few miles away. Will. Kaki is an assistant professor at the University of New England in my hometown of Bedford, Maine. His specialty is observing and quantifying the impacts of climate change on planet Earth. Having worked in equatorial and polar regions, as well as on some of the tallest mountains and along our changing coastlines, will, has a very broad perspective on the subject. Today he focuses on engaging and training University of New England's undergraduates to understand the consequences of climate change and to help prepare them for work in this sector by providing them with hands-on opportunities to help enhance climate resilience in their local college community. A note to listeners who are further a note to listeners who are further flung the New England. In this podcast, we speak about a series of memorable winter storms that walloped Maine's coastline a couple of years ago, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and serving as a stark reminder of the precariousness of life as we know it along our treasured coastlines. Welcome to the podcast, will.

Will 5:10

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Abigail 5:12

I am excited to have you on the podcast. We've had interviewees from all over the planet, and you're about two miles down the street. And so it's really fun to have you here today. You've been doing global research from the, equator to the polar caps to, on climate change and its impact on the earth. Where are we? What have you learned?

Will 5:35

I mean it's, I guess it's the ultimate question right now is where are we? And I think. We're in a lot of trouble in many ways, and our planet's changing more rapidly than at any other time that we can see in the geologic record, across hundreds of millions of years for sure. And this is really unprecedented in so many ways. What we've done to change the composition of our atmosphere has had ripple effects across the planet from the equator to the poles without exception. And so we're seeing. Dramatic change across our planet. Just in the last couple of years it's, there are a number of measures, so it's a bit hard to measure, but we've crossed the 1.5 degrees Celsius swarming threshold that many countries have agreed is this important threshold to maintain the planet that we used to know and we're rocketing past that. We'll likely flip into an El Nino pattern in the next year, which we'll see warming intensify around the planet. Our average annual temperature for the next year will probably be much greater than it has been in this slightly cooler phase we've been in for the last year. So we're seeing changes happen incredibly dramatically and incredibly rapidly, which is then having ripple effects across the planet. And so we can see that not only in the changing ice sheets and ice caps and glaciers in the Arctic and in Antarctic and across mountains around the world. But also in sea level across the planet here where we are in coastal Maine. Two years ago we experienced the highest water level on record. That's not a mistake. That's what we expect with sea level rise and more intense storms and a changing planet. We are seeing rapid changes everywhere you look and it's terrifying to watch. But from a. Scientist perspective is also an amazing opportunity in human history to be able to observe these rapid changes and understand them. And so that's really what my kind of mission here at the University of New England has been, is to better understand these changes and prepare our students for that future because it's going to get worse. We know warming's going to continue. We're not stopping our use of fossil fuels. And so we need to be prepared for that future and we need to help communities. Understand how to adapt. So I think that's really one of our key questions going forward is how do we help communities adapt to this rapid change and help them prepare for a world that we haven't seen before?

Abigail 8:01

So it sounds like what you are saying, I think there's this whole discussion about adaptation, which is pretty much accepting this progression, this rapid progression of climate change and its impact on our planet. Is that. We used to talk about prevention.

Will 8:23

I should be clear. We, and we should stop. We should continue doing everything we possibly can to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and drive down our emissions and reduce the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere. We absolutely have to do that because every little bit of CO2 extra that we put in our atmosphere now makes things worse. But we are definitely at the point where adaptation is critical. Just to give you one example my background, my academic background really has been in Arctic glaciology. So that's an area I'm most comfortable with. And when we look out towards the end of the century, it basically doesn't matter what our emissions, our future emissions are, we're going to see at least a couple feet of sea level rise. We could see even more if we continue putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the planet warms past two degrees, for example, then we're going to see even more than that. But we're, so the climate system is far out of equilibrium that the glaciers are taking time to catch up. So what, and we don't even know everything that we've set in motion because of this. For example, uhwas and Pine Island glaciers are some of the biggest, an Antarctica. They're like a cork in a bottle holding back a huge portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet. If those let go, which is entirely in the realm of possibilities, then yeah, you're looking at several feet of sea level rise over the next century. So we're going to continue to see dramatic changes across our planet, even if. We stop fossil fuel emissions tomorrow,

Abigail 9:53

Wow,

Will 9:53

even if we started sequestering carbon tomorrow. We're still so far out of balance. We're going to see these changes for decades to come.

Abigail 10:03

you've left me a little bit speechless. I wanna better understand this two feet. I have the great fortune of being right along the main coast right now, and I know what two feet represents in terms of our little landscape on this peninsula. Can you put that in perspective, like the a hundred years preceding us? What did that change look like?

Will 10:25

So over geologic timescales, the last, several thousand years have actually provided a remarkable stability in sea level. For the past four or 5,000 years, something like that, sea level basically hasn't changed. We've had this a global average sea level has not really changed. Before that, it was changing rapidly. Because ice sheets were melting across the planet, and so coming outta Alaska glacial maximum, so we had these huge increases in sea level. We've had, in recent past we've had very stable sea level, which has had allowed civilizations to flourish across the coast, right? It's very, it's really nice when you can build a port and that port doesn't change and you can continue to do commerce on the ocean without having to change your infrastructure. But we're starting to see this dramatic change now where sea level is going to continue to rise, which poses significant challenges for all coastal communities on the planet, which is the majority of the population. Most humans live near coasts. And Bedford Pool and your peninsula, or sometimes I like to consider it an island, really is is a great example of a place that's quite vulnerable, right? It doesn't take, we saw it in the January 20, 24 storms. That peninsula was overtopped and the marsh was connected to the beach, right? And you saw you couldn't drive on the road without driving through seawater. So this what we're effectively doing with sea level rise is loading the dice, right? As we add sea level rise, we're making it more and more likely that we're going to have these large storm events that cause this damage to coastal communities. As we sit here today, if we had two feet of sea level rise. It's not a problem today. We're not on a super big tide. It's fairly nice day out. It's not a problem. It's a problem when we get those storm surges that are near astronomically big tides, and that's what's gonna hurt us. And the more sea level rises we get, the more loaded the dice will be. The, in the increasing probability. Will be that we're going to have these damaging events for our coastal communities, and that's going to lead. We saw, well over 70 or $80 million in damage just to public infrastructure during the January 20, 24 storms. That wasn't even the private infrastructure damage. This is easily hundreds of millions of dollars in damage from that storm. And that's, it's not a matter of if that water level will be broken, it's when.

Abigail 12:40

So there is some news that's been circulating about a recovering ozone layer. Can you speak to that and why that doesn't seem to matter?

Will 12:52

The o the Ozone really is one of the best environmental stories of the last half century. We, people, countries got together and. Chlorofluorocarbons, were destroying the ozone. This was a fairly easy problem to solve. We had good replacements. Everyone agreed in Montreal that we would ban these CFCs and on we went. And the ozone has been recovering since. So really that is a great example of humans coming together saying, we can't em admit this gas right, which was largely associated with refrigeration. And. Because of our actions, because we stopped using and letting that gas be emitted the atmosphere. You've seen these huge recoveries in the ozone hole. So ozone is only a problem really in the southern hemisphere in very specific times of the year when you have light and really cold air temperatures. So Spring Southern Hemisphere, spring.

Abigail 13:43

Yep.

Will 13:43

So we, yeah, that it's not much of a problem. Most of the human population lives in the Northern Hemisphere, so it's not, the ozone hole is not much of a problem for us now. And parts of Australia for example, its still is on some days. But the recovery of ozone hole really is one of the best environmental stories where we got together and we said, we know how to fix this problem and we did it right. And unfortunately, we don't seem to have the same. Willpower to do that with carbon dioxide and methane that if we've been trying there are well over 30 conference of the parties now to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where they've gotten together and they've never been able to figure out how to get rid of fossil fuels. And so they're just so deeply embedded in our life. We know we have the solutions. We know how to move away from them. We know how to deploy wind and solar power. We're seeing that happen on huge scales across the world but it's just not fast enough and we don't have the willpower to get ourselves off of oil. It's really hard. And so that's proven much more challenging than it was to get off of chlorofluorocarbons in large part because there was such an easy replacement for the CFCs. And there's not this easy replacement for fossil fuels.

Abigail 14:53

It seems like the CFCs were very specific too. And the whole world runs on gas and oil and, if our current president would have his way we'd add coal to the mix and just keep increasing all of that for the joy of all.

Will 15:07

Which is a totally crazy thing to do just based on economics. The cheapest power we can add to the grid is wind and solar. And so even the coal industry, they large parts of the coal industry don't want to restart because it's the most expensive energy to bring back to the grid. It really doesn't make any sense. So forget any of our, the externalities associated with climate change just based on economics. The only thing we really should be doing is wind and solar.

Abigail 15:33

So just to play devil's advocate a little bit, if we're gonna have a problem in a hundred years, one way or another, is that just like moving the needle a little bit to make all these changes or not?

Will 15:45

I guess I, we're going to see a lot of damage. Yes. And we can still prevent the worst of it and help so many communities and we know that so many of these projects are damaging. These fossil fuel projects, fossil fuel extraction and consumption is so damaging to communities across the country, particularly those that have been historically marginalized the most. And so I think we have just this responsibility to do what we can to help

Abigail 16:16

Yeah.

Will 16:16

if we actually had a free market around energy in this country, I think that would also be a different story that we've been subsidizing oil since we started using it. And if all subsidies were removed, this would actually be a much a different ball game because now wind and solar would really be the cheapest. But that's politically not going to happen, I don't think in this country.

Abigail 16:38

And

Will 16:38

sit here days after the latest war over oil has

Abigail 16:42

It's so interesting too, 'cause I've always thought that renewables just seemed like. This unnecessary political lightning rod. It would seem that the sort of buy your bootstrap old like Republican, guard would love. This idea that you could be completely free of the government and free of the big corporation by having solar panels on your house. And getting off the grid seems to me like a very traditionally right idea, and yet it's the left supporting it. So I don't understand why it's such a lightning rod. I feel like we should all be on board about this, but but. So we've had this huge pushback on environmental policy in the United States. What are some of the things, I know you're really you're not just a researcher, you're an advocate. You are a man of action, you're getting your hands dirty and projects. But what do you think can be done on the state institutional, individual level? Like, how can we make a dent so it's not the worst case scenario in a hundred years.

Will 17:40

Yeah, and sometimes I think we just have to keep having hope too. And sometimes it is demoralizing. You feel like there's nothing we can do and we should just, I don't know go sit on the beach on the tides that we can and enjoy it and. Move on. But I can't give up hope that easily that we can move the needle here and we can do better things. And so I think, recently the Inflation reduction Act was, one of the biggest historic investments in climate. And I think we will see that again at the federal level. We see businesses, for example, they understand where the markets are going eventually, they understand that we have to reduce our carbon emissions, and they're not losing, they're keeping those investments from what I see in sustainability in the long run. That doesn't mean that we don't have this huge deviation right now at the local level in particular, I think we can make a lot of action here in Maine. The politics are such that I think we have been making a lot of action, but also not nearly enough. And here in Maine, one of the best examples is heat pumps. Heat pumps have been deployed much more rapidly than was initially projected in the state of Maine which is great news, not only in terms of getting the state off of heating oil, which Maine is one of the states with the most heating, oil consumption in the country. But also providing this really critical adaptation for people to have air conditioning when our summers keep getting hotter and many people don't have air conditioning otherwise. So the heat pump story in Maine has been a really big success, and I think there's a lot locally in the state that we can continue to do That doesn't mean Maine hasn't had their setbacks. One good example of that is the EV adoption has been much, much slower in Maine. Than the state would like to see. And I think there are a number of compounding factors with that. I don't pretend to understand all of them. But I think a huge part of that is education and making sure people understand how EVs work, how they really can improve your life. My wife and I bought a EV five years ago now, and we'll never buy anything else. It just has made our life so much better to never have to go to the gas station to be able to. Run the car and leave our dog in it, for example, on a hot day or a cold day. So it's provided so many benefits to our life besides fossil fuels. I, it's clear to me that's a trend that's going to continue and something that we need to encourage at all levels of government. Here in the city of Bedford, we're trying to do a number of different things at this extreme local level to work towards our climate goals that we've set. So two examples of that. Is right now the city is working on a solar ordinance that would allow for large scale solar development in the city. Right now, that's not a current permitted use. And then we're also working on ordinance that would help increase ev charging when new infrastructure's built in the city. You would be required to put in some ev charging alongside that. We have to build out the infrastructure that would support this sustainable future, this low carbon future. I think we do have an opportunity now to move that at the local levels. Of course funding is always hard and the Inflation Reduction Act was this huge infusion of cash to help move a lot of these climate projects forward. And I think everyone's struggling with how to fund those right now. We have to figure out ways to continue to support these projects, find ways to share cross across government and business and private investment. And the pendulum will swing back. I'm confident, we will head in the right direction eventually. We don't really have a choice. At our own peril, we continue to use fossil fuels and I think. We will see this swing back and I hope we can continue to be, to lay the groundwork to be ready to make a lot more progress during the next time we have that opportunity.

Abigail 21:09

You were just a recipient of a very important grant to study lo very local coastlines and our resilience tour in, in, faced with these big coastal storms. So can you talk a little bit about that and how this sort of research project in academia ends up having a real world impact?

Will 21:30

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I'll back up a little bit and say that, my background in I received my PhD studying in Arctic Glaciology and was working on arctic glaciers and really enjoyed that and found it very fulfilling to get to travel to the Arctic, particularly during the hot summers, I'd go to the Arctic for these cool environ. And it was just amazing. The Arctic landscapes are fascinating and critically important for what's happening here locally. When I came to the University of New England and started doing research here with my students, I quickly realized that I would have such a bigger impact if I could bring my students to these local environments and help communities already adapt to these incoming impacts of sea level rise. Instead of bringing just a couple of students to the Arctic every year and trying to predict, better, predict what sea level rise we know is already coming. And so it's been super rewarding to get to work with students here on Mains coast from the University of New England. And so this award that we got really is going to bolster our capabilities to better understand how sea level horizon and coastal erosion is impacting all of Maine's beaches. And so we're going to be doing drone flights across these beaches to understand how they've changed during the recent storm events, during the January 20, 24 storms, for example, and how they're recovering since then. But then we need to know what to do next. And so just because we know how these beaches have been impacted it's really difficult to know what we can do to support their longevity. We know what the coast looks like today is not what's what it's going to look like in a century. The coastal homes that are on the coast today likely are not gonna be there in a hundred years, or they're gonna have to look very different. But we can buy ourselves time. And so we have a number of different projects we're going to employ to try to understand the best adaptation strategies to support coastal dune systems out into the future. And so we're going to build, for example, a wave tank here at the University of New England where we're going to be able to model. What a beach setup would look like. Do some kind of adaptation measure come up with the best ideas to stabilize dune systems and then simulate that by create generating waves and sending it towards our artificial beach. And then we're at, we've partnered with the bit of fruit pool conservation trust here, where we're going to then get to implement some of these strategies in the dune system to see how they perform in real life. And so I think we have this really unique opportunity here to. To better understand how our coastlines are changing, what their future could look like by combining these model simulations and real world data collection. And I guess I should put a bow on all of this, really, to me, this is the most about preparing our students for their careers and for the next generation. We, I feel like the best thing I can do is train our students to go out and then have a big impact on the world, and we see them getting jobs at amazing places, and that's definitely the most rewarding part of my job is that students go out and they get employed to help do these projects commercially and help. Help clients build these more resilient coastal systems. And so that's really what we're all about here at the University of New England, is training our students to go out and make a difference in the world. So I hope this research project can not only help benefit our local community, benefit academic community, and advance our knowledge, but also train these students for their future careers.

Abigail 24:45

How are the students feeling about the world today? A lot of the students at UNE have a real environmental mandate personally. And they come and they get involved in the Marine Science Center and they they care about ocean health, sea level rising. What are they, what are you hearing from the student?

Will 25:07

Yeah, I think they're scared. They're scared about what the future is. They're worried about the planet they're going to inherit, right? The planet they're living on. Most of them. Our, they come to UNE because the environment is, their number one issue and their life's work. And so I think they, it's really rewarding to get to work with those students. And sometimes I have to remind myself that not every young person thinks that way, but our students definitely do. Our students are. Incredibly mindful of the environment and are incredibly passionate so that's what makes working here so much fun and getting to work with them. So yeah, there I have a lot of hope that they will help us as we move forward. And it's just really a joy to get to engage them in helping our community here too, in coastal main.

Abigail 25:52

There's been an ongoing sea grass planting project here in Bedford Pool that I know you've been involved in. And I planted sea grass for a day a couple years ago, and it looks like it's taken and it's working. Can you speak to that? 'cause I think it's a project that other communities might be able to mimic if if they hear about our success story.

Will 26:15

May I'll rewind a little bit and say that for a long time in Maine people were building sea walls, right? And so sea walls we now know are very detrimental, particularly to your neighbors in creating more energy deflecting energy to these environments and increasing coastal erosion. And so in the 1970s or so, main band, sea walls and now there's really been a lot of work. To establish living shorelines that can better tolerate coastal erosion. These large storms and the sea level rise we have coming for us. And exactly this project was really in initiated by the Bedford Pool Conservation Trust to do what we can to buy time on these beaches and provide better habitat for shore birds and other animals that inhabit these ecosystems. And so the dune grass planting really is a. Very cheap way to try to help these ecosystems. And so just by planting dune grass the hope is that we're helping build up the beach. We're helping build up sand and the elevation so that the beaches are more resilient to the next storm. And next week actually we'll be planting more dune grass in Bedford Pool. So really excited to be out there again and pounding holes and putting in the grass. And so I think this is it's a great project not only to support the beach and that ecosystem, but also to engage our students. And those kinds of experiences are often what they remember the most and has the most impact on them, that they were able to go out and they were able to plant and help the community. And they'll probably remember that for. Years to come and they're gonna forget the lecture I gave yesterday for sure. So it's really rewarding to get to work with students on the beach and it's yeah, it's just a great project to get to work with the community.

Abigail 27:49

You said something that was really in interesting to me. You talked about sort of natural remedies and I think this is something that you're really focused on instead of building, concrete walls and let's figure out natural solutions to these problems in nature. When I was an oyster farmer, my motto was, nature works well when you let it, so I, I learned very. Soon that I had to work with nature. If I was gonna try to fight against it, I was gonna lose that battle. But you could learn how to harness nature to actually help you achieve your goal. Are there other sort of examples of that you've discovered in your work that that are lessons that you could share with people?

Will 28:28

I fully agree. I think we're often nature. We love to put nature in a box and nature does not want to be in a box. And so yeah, I think the more we can work with it, the more we can understand how these systems naturally operate we're going to be so much better off if we can work with those systems that rather than against them. The first thing comes to my mind and what resonates with me in the last couple years, my wife and I have started beekeeping and we've learned so many times to just let the bees do their thing. If we start intervening and we start trying to monkey things around and move things within the hive, it just makes things worse and they know what they're doing. We just need to provide the environment in which they can thrive. And so I think that's really what we see in so many other areas of life too, the June grass is a great example of we're not providing a big intervention. This is a species that's already there. We're just trying to give it that help, help it spread faster, get it into this environment in a favorable condition. And hopefully then it can thrive and better do what it has evolved over millions of years to do yeah I agree. And perhaps what's most interesting about Maine's coastline is that we have so many different types of coastline in southern Maine. We've seen even within individual beaches, we see huge variations of the coastal types from. Rip wrap big rocks that are protecting the coast to sea walls, to dune systems. And so that's what makes Southern Maine particularly unique and interesting to study from a research perspective that we get these pieces that are have been hardened. The shoreline has been hardened to protect it by and for various reasons. But also areas where huge portions of main's coastline are untouched and undeveloped. And so they provide this great natural control for us to get to see what happens to the coastline when we don't do anything, when we don't intervene. And so that's scientifically provides us a great natural control to better understand how communities can prepare in the future. And so that's one of the ways that we have targeted our work. Is by trying to include some of these areas that are preserved and have been left to be natural and to retreat, have coastline retreat naturally. And then we can also study places that have been more developed where there's more economic activity and perhaps where humans have a better, a greater interest in protecting them going forward. And so we hope that by studying these two different systems, we can really better understand both of them and help everyone.

Abigail 30:51

I think I know the answer to this, but I ask everybody who comes in interviews, are you optimistic about the future of the planet?

Will 30:59

It's a hard one for me, and I think it really depends on the day. Some days I see our students and some of the good work that's happening and. You hear about the latest renewable energy project being plugged into the grid or we're areas where we're really making progress and I think we can do it right, and we have the tools and we're in so many ways we're we're making progress and we're making lives better. We're improving things. And I also feel super privileged to be in academia. I feel super privileged to live in Maine to be who I am. And so I feel like I'm very lucky and, my future personally is great. But I also worry a lot about our world. And yeah, this is a, I think there's a lot of reason to be pessimistic in the world right now. With New Wars breaking out with fossil fuel use continuing to increase with our annual, our average annual temperatures continuing to increase. We have a sea level rise going up. All these climate metrics are all going in the wrong direction. And so these are very difficult trains to stop once. Now that we've been emitting carbon dioxide. We talked earlier about how much the sea level rise is really inevitable. And so I think our future looks very bleak in many ways, and our climate is going to change dramatically. And so the question becomes how quickly and how adept will we be at adapting to this changing climate? And so I think my glimmers of optimism in that are just the way that our students and young people respond and they're ready to take action. They want to help create this world that's better. But we're up against a very tough challenge here. So I think we're in many places the world are in for a lot of pain in the coming decades. But I think we, we have the tools. We know what we need to do. We just need to find the willpower to do it.

Abigail 32:45

If listeners could do one thing in their lives to have an impact on all of this, what would you recommend they do?

Will 32:54

I would say I, this is a no small task, but eliminate fossil fuels from your life in every way you can. I think so much of some of it's totally unavoidable. Flying on planes right now if you want, if you need to go somewhere, you adjust. There's, there are not good options. You can electrify your home, you can electrify your transportation, you can think of lower energy ways to get around. And that's really the number one thing I think we can all do, is trying to eliminate fossil fuels from our lives. Will, I think in my case I'm I've totally drank the Kool-Aid, but it's made, being on electricity and being electrified being on solar has totally made my life better in many different ways. And compared to using fossil fuels. But it also has huge benefits for our planet and our communities. And so just thinking about ways that yeah, you can eliminate fossil fuels from your life in every way. I think it's a fun challenge and it can be really rewarding.

Abigail 33:43

Thank you Will so much for coming on and sharing your stories today. And thank you so much for all you're doing for our local community and for the next generation of students at Unity e and e.

Will 33:53

Thank you, Avi. I look forward to seeing you planting dune grass next

Abigail 33:55

I will be out there.