- Howdy.

I'm Chelsea Reber.

Today, I'm visiting with Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon.

He's a Regents Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M and also serves as the Texas State Climatologist.

Thank you for joining us.

- My pleasure.

- So first tell me, what is a state climatologist and why is it important to have one?

Well, a state climatologist is essentially someone designated by the state to provide what we call climate services.

Mainly consists of things like tracking historical records, being able to connect people who need information with the data sources, doing outreach, helping to explain extreme events such as some of the weather we've had in Texas the past few years, and also doing research on the climate of Texas.

And also, we can do a better job of dealing with it and adapting to it.

- What is the difference between climatology and meteorology?

- Well, in a sense, climatology is a branch of meteorology.

Climate is essentially the statistics of the weather.

So you've got this sequence of weather events and climatology looks at the average conditions as well as how extreme things get.

It's sort of, it's broadened recently because climatology now includes interactions with other parts of the climate system.

It's not just the atmosphere.

We've got the ocean, we've got the land surface and plants, and we've got ice sheets and ice caps.

So climatology is really a more interdisciplinary science now than it ever has been.

- As the state climatologist, what are your goals when it comes to sharing what you learn and know and observe with the public?

- Well, my one sentence mission statement is to help the state of Texas and its people make the best possible use of weather and climate information.

With climate and climate change having become somewhat politicized recently because of all the issues related to it, I think it's important that somebody be a reliable source of information for anybody who needs the information and not put a slant on the data or the information or the implications.

So it's my role as state climatologist to do that for the state of Texas.

- What kind of work were you doing before you became the state climatologist?

- Well, it wasn't climate work.

My background is in, think of as weather and weather forecasting.

So studying things like heavy rainfall, sea breezes.

I actually did some work on air pollution and how weather affects pollution levels in Houston.

But around 1997, 1998, was now the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, came to us and wanted to partner with us in developing a statewide network of weather stations.

The state of Oklahoma had a mesonet in place that was sort of the gold standard of mesonets, useful for water supply, monitoring, for agriculture, for public safety.

And that was operated out of the Oklahoma Climate Office.

So when John Griffiths retired, he'd been the state climatologist from 1973 to 1999, he retired and I was thinking, "Well, if I'm gonna help operate the mesonet, I ought to be the state climatologist."

And so, I volunteered for the position.

The department head forwarded my name to the president, and the president forwarded my name to the governor.

And the governor's office tried to figure out what a state climatologist was.

Nobody, they had to deal with it for 25 years.

So finally, I got appointed and then I had to be a climatologist.

So started doing research on climate in the state of Texas, started getting funding for doing research, started writing articles, research articles, and finally, they let me teach climatology classes.

So I went through the process of becoming a climatologist by, first off, being called one.

- A & M has a highly respected atmospheric sciences program.

What excites you about the department's research and public outreach?

- Yeah, it's one of the largest programs in the country.

And back in the 1990s when I was looking for a job, what struck me about it was how collegial the atmosphere was, and that's still the case.

A lot of departments are competitive, and they carve out different fiefdoms.

We're much more collaborative, plus we have lots of other departments at the university to work with, not just in the former College of Geosciences where we had geography and oceanography.

And we've also got a full Department of Statistics at A & M, which is kind of unusual.

And you know, climate is the statistics of the weather.

We've got the whole agriculture program, AgriLife Extension and so forth.

I do a lot of talks at agriculture programs because obviously, the climate's important for farmers and ranchers.

And then we also have the full engineering program where we're designing infrastructure to be more resilient to the climate.

So it's a really great environment to be a climatologist.

- You teach several classes as well.

Why is it important to train the next generation of climate experts and what will they be dealing with in the future?

- Well, I can tell you from recent experience of trying to staff up the Southern Regional Climate Center, which we were awarded a couple years ago from NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the job market for climate service providers is extremely tight.

People are recognizing that you can't just assume the climate in the future is gonna be like the climate in the past.

And that requires a certain, you know, amount of background knowledge to be able to help people understand what's likely, what we know about the future, and what we don't know.

So we are training students both in the classroom and through internships and employment opportunities within our department to understand climate and climate services, be able to make the connection between what they learn in the classroom and what people actually need, and be able to provide the information on terms that people can understand and find useful.

- Do students who come into your program kind of know, this is what I wanna do, or some of them, you mentioned like you weren't really doing climatology work before you became the state climatologist.

Do students find their way into your program once they're already at A & M sometimes?

- A lot of them come in wanting, their a dream to work for the National Weather Service.

- [Chelsea] Okay.

- That's sort of the model.

But that's true of a lot of meteorology students across the country.

And they'll think it's gonna be about two or three out of our 30 some of our graduates each year that are actually gonna be able to get a job with the weather service.

And usually, that actually requires a graduate degree because it's so competitive.

Along the way though, they find lots of other opportunities such as broadcast meteorology, consulting, air pollution meteorology, research, like going to graduate school, and so forth, and climate and climate services.

So in our curriculum, we cover lots of territory and allow them to broaden their horizons, to see what makes sense for them with their skill sets and their goals.

- Well, let's get into climate and talk about perhaps two of the most contentious words going on right now, and that is climate change.

At a very basic level, what does that term mean?

- Well, and in our present climate and present understanding, it's essentially referring to how the entire climate system is changing due to changes in the composition of the atmosphere primarily.

So we're changing some of the minor constituents, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, but also is a greenhouse gas.

We also are putting particulate matter pollutants, what we call tiny aerosols into the atmosphere.

And those have competing effects.

They block sunlight, whereas, and cool, whereas greenhouse gases have the effect of warming.

So climate change in general is the large changes happening in the global climate as a result of those sorts of processes.

Now, the climate has, what we have?

We've had four some odd billion years of climate, and it's changed in a massive amount that people probably aren't aware of.

We went through periods of time when the entire earth was almost completely covered with ice, for example, and other times when only the highest mountains had any ice.

So, having climate change is not unusual historically, or at least geologic historically.

The rapid climate changes only took place when there were massive volcanic eruptions or maybe a sudden massive meteor impact.

So what's happening now is fairly unusual in that, well, it's never happened before in just this way.

And it makes it kind of hard to predict what the outcomes are going to be, but it's really had a big impact, and not just my field, but all sorts of other fields, ecology, oceanography, places where, you studied the system as it was, and all of a sudden, it's changing.

So you have to study those changes as well.

And it brings in a whole other set of complications.

Climate change has made science simultaneously much more interesting and much more difficult.

- So what exactly is causing the climate to change?

Is it humans or is there, are there natural causes as well?

- Well, if we look at, say, the difference between a hundred years ago and today, that's primarily manmade.

Perhaps, it's possible that natural factors would've produced some cooling over that period.

Because we'd gotten past our peak between glacial cycles and we were in a slow cooling period, but sun, which can change its intensity, has not really changed intensity very much over the past hundred years.

Volcanic activity has been kind of erratic, but hasn't caused any dramatic changes over that period.

And the changes we've seen due to greenhouse gases, both at the surface and aloft, are consistent with what we would expect to see happening.

So that part of climate change is quite certain that we are at least responsible for that part of it.

- So how much of a role does urbanization play?

- Well, when we talk about climate change, we're talking about global-scale change.

You can also have changing conditions locally, and there are a lot of reasons for that.

Urbanization is one of them.

As people collect in cities, that increases population density and it produces lots of infrastructure, some of the impact of that is the landscape gets paved over.

So water runs off rather than soaking in, asphalt can absorb more sunlight.

People are running air conditioners and so forth, so they're generating heat.

And so, we can see in a, say, in a calm summer day, temperatures in the middle of Houston or Dallas be several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside.

So that's one factor.

Another factor is irrigation.

Back in the early 1900s, there wasn't a lot of irrigation going on in Texas, and we saw some pretty hot summers back then.

But then after the drought of the 1950s, we realized we need a more stable water supply.

So lots of reservoirs went in, lots of irrigation now for agriculture, and that sort of has a cooling effect, like a swamp cooler.

The more water you put out, the more the energy goes into evaporating the water, rather than heating things up.

So in Texas, we've seen cooling due to irrigation, and we've seen warming due to urbanization.

That doesn't really have much of an effect globally because most of the earth's surface is covered with water already, it's the ocean.

And that's increased by almost as much as the land surface has.

- How do people's personal experiences with weather affect their view on climate change?

- I think it has a major effect.

You know, as a climatologist back before climate change became such a thing, a lot of my job would be to say, "No, actually something like that did happen before."

You know, sure, 2021, we had very cold temperatures, but in 1899 in the middle of February, the average temperature in Texas got down below zero Fahrenheit.

These things do happen.

So I sort of provide a longer-term perspective than people can rely on with their short term memory.

The downside of that is it's hard in people's short experiences and short lifetimes to detect something that's slow and gradual as climate change, especially when they're only feeling the weather in a particular location.

I think there've been two major climate events in Texas that have gotten people's attention regarding climate.

First was the drought of 2011 when we had our driest 12 months on record and also our hottest summer on record.

And that was concerning because that fell in line with climate change projections for temperatures becoming that common in the future.

And then secondly, the hurricane Harvey in 2017 really woke people up to the dangers of extreme weather.

So whether or not they're talking about it in terms of climate change specifically, people are aware that we have risks from extreme weather and they're aware that these risks could be changing.

And so, I think having had those experiences has got us move forward along the way to being it better able to deal with those risks.

- We've been through multiple, record-breaking summers recently.

Can we expect that heat to keep getting higher?

- Well, let's see, so far, let's see, as of the middle of August, 2023 has been, I guess, hottest summer on record for parts of South Texas and West Texas.

Statewide, it's not setting a record.

It's gonna be probably top five in that regard.

And it is doing that by being somewhere around three or four degrees above the 20th century average.

Now, back in the 20th century, temperatures typically were only on the hot years.

Were only one or two degrees above the 20th century average.

So having something this hot was much more unusual back then.

But average temperatures have increased by a degree or two already, and they're projected to keep increasing.

So, if you think forward to the middle of the 21st century, we'll be three degrees above our 20th century average normally.

And then the high temperatures, the hot summers will be four or five, maybe six degrees above the 20th century average.

So this is, the summers we've seen in 2022 and 2023 are not the new normal yet.

They are the new abnormal and they're on their way to becoming the new normal.

- Oh, not good news.

(laughing) You mentioned hurricane Harvey earlier and then also, winter storm Uri which happened in 2021.

You even mentioned the drought in 2011.

Will similar severe events become more common?

- It really depends on the event.

So for example, we talked about temperatures going up, and that means that the unusually hot summers either become less unusual or become more hot depending on how you look at it.

But the same sort of thing is happening at the other end of the spectrum.

As temperatures get warmer, the hot becomes more common, and the cold becomes less common.

So even though this wasn't really part of the narrative at the time, extreme cold like Uri is less likely than before climate change.

I have a graduate student by the name of Judy Dickey who's looking specifically at the different factors involved in 2021.

And basically, what we're concluding is that without climate change, an event like that would be expected to happen maybe about four times a century.

Whereas now, we're at the point where it happened mainly, maybe only twice a century.

- [Chelsea] Mm.

- So at least as far as temperatures go more hot, but fewer cold, so that's sort of a trade off.

You don't really get that trade off with rainfall because the climate change is making rainfall more intense.

The amount of water in the atmosphere is increasing when you've got clouds and rain, and so, the amount that's falling increases.

So storms like Harvey will become more common, although that's probably a bad way of saying it, because storms like Harvey will never become common.

(Dr. Gammon laughing) - [Chelsea] Right.

- The best research I've seen on it says that it's a sort of, even with the present climate, this should only happen about once every 10,000 years or something like that.

So good news is we won't be seeing a Harvey every day.

Bad news is intense rainfall's increasing by about seven to 10% for every degree of global warming we get.

So those run-of-the-mill floods are gonna become more common, and devastating floods are expected to become more frequent.

- All of those severe storms, and when you talk about the lack of rain and the high heat, and the freezing cold and ice, those have all impacted utilities in Texas in the past several years.

How should electric grids and water suppliers be adapting?

- Well, the problem with electricity and with water is not primarily a climate problem, it's a people problem because the population of Texas is growing fairly rapidly.

I sort of put the climate change in there as the second biggest problem or the second biggest concern for water supply or electric supply beyond use.

When in summer of 2023, we've been setting records for energy demand, but we haven't, you know, it is still not the hottest summer on record.

So population growth has driven that increase of demand, so that when we have a hot year, it's that much hotter.

Same thing applies for water supply.

We're seeing, we saw a lot of water use restrictions in many places during the summer of 2023 because water demand was so high during the heat and there were more people using water and needing to use water.

Now, we have, for long-range planning purposes, projections of population growth, and that's fairly easy to plug in.

It's, unfortunately, it's a lot harder to just take a projection of climate change and plug that in because it's complicated how that's gonna affect water supplies, for example.

We should be dealing with it with electricity fairly easily because we can see as temperatures go up, the demand goes up proportionally.

So that part's relatively simple to deal with.

The water supply, it's hard to work out how you go from, let's say, we'll project a two-degree increase in temperature and say, okay, well, what's that mean for extreme rainfall?

Maybe that increases by a bit, that ranges of variability.

What's that mean for stream flow going into reservoirs?

Probably the average stream flow decreases because temperatures are causing more evaporation, but with heavier rain, the intense runoff becomes more intense, so you get more flooding and that will fill up a reservoir.

Maybe that makes things more erratic.

That's a lot harder than just saying, we're gonna have 10% more people, so we need 10% more supply.

And so, we're gradually getting to the point as a society, both in Texas and elsewhere, where we're basically figuring out how to deal with climate change and how to factor that into the long-range plans and long-range infrastructure building.

- In Texas, reliable climate data has been collected for about 130 years, but that's a short time when considering the age of the planet.

So how can we know what we're experiencing now is different than what happened hundreds to thousands of years ago?

- Well, it's probably about 3 million years since we've had sustained temperatures this warm.

So in that sense, it's happened before, but the way we know about it is basically a lot of really smart people are looking at indirect ways of telling what happened.

For example, water is oxygen and hydrogen, but each oxygen molecule, each oxygen atom has some number of neutrons in it.

And some of them have eight neutrons, some of 'em have 10 neutrons.

And that changes the weight of the water molecules.

When it's hotter, they can both evaporate readily.

When it's colder, some evaporate, and the heavy one's don't evaporate so much.

So you can actually tell from the water that's been basically built into shells that can get deposited on the sea floor, how hot the ocean was when that sea creature was living.

And so, we can easily see the fluctuations in the ice sheets from the amount of heavy water, so to speak, that's left in the ocean and then deposited in calcium carbonate deposits on the ocean floor.

That's one way of doing it.

We've got other chemical tricks like that that work.

You can also look at tree rings, which is mainly useful for variations in rainfall, but even the, as pollen zones shift from one place to another, you know, Texas going from forested to grassland, that denotes a change in climate.

You can track that sort of thing also.

So lots of really ingenious indirect means that give us a good sense of what was going on.

It'd be nice if we had satellites 3 million years ago, but we still have a lot of sources of information.

- Trees and shells, we're gonna have to rely on those then, I guess.

(laughing) - Trees, shells, rocks, whatever gets left behind.

- Gotcha.

Climate change is constantly in the news.

And you mentioned earlier it has become pretty politicized these days, and it's easy to become numb to the numerous headlines and articles written about it every day.

So what should people be taking away from that widespread coverage?

- It's tough because every news source has its own perspective on what's important, what information needs to be conveyed to the public.

And very little of it is based upon the public wanting to have an in-depth scientific explanation of what's going on.

It's not what people wanna hear, and so that's not what they get generally.

So people tend to get this misinformation, shall we say?

Whether we're talking about left-wing news sources, right-wing news sources, mainstream sources, what have you.

Just because it's all sort of made into something that can be interesting and immediate.

You know, it's unfortunate climate doesn't work that way.

Climate changes slowly.

You can tell it happened over 30 years.

So we have stories about something that happened and say, ah, that's an indicator of climate change.

Let me have a story that says, ah, but this happened.

And so, how could that be the case?

And really, the best advice I could give is to take the long view, look at what's happened over a long period of time and see what's gone on with that.

And also, I mean, there are lots of good resources for people who wanna learn about the climate.

The IPCC Reports, which sometimes you hear about, there's several thousand pages long.

Forget that noise.

(Chelsea laughing) But the summary for policy makers is written for non-scientists.

It's about 30, 40 pages that covers everything we know about climate science in general terms as well as how well we know it.

Can we be confident or we're not confident about it?

And you generally don't get those sorts of nuances from a brief newscast or a brief article.

So there are ways for people to find out what scientists are really thinking.

It's usually not what they seem to be arguing over in television.

- Regulatory actions meant to mitigate or adapt to climate change are underway around the world.

How long will it take to see those effects?

- Well, we've seen effects already where there were economic incentives put in place for things like wind and solar power.

And now, that makes up a sizable fraction of energy sources in Texas and elsewhere in the United States.

We've seen people essentially modifying their behavior to emit less carbon dioxide.

We've seen attempts at countering greenhouse gas emissions by lots of things.

I mean the most obvious one is planting trees, but that's not gonna, that's gonna get us a little bit of the way there.

Trees die in the drought, so well, but what we've done so far has made it sort of a bit of a dent.

It's sort of probably made the higher-end projections unlikely to be realized.

So we're probably not gonna have five degrees of Celsius of warming.

Maybe it's gonna be four degrees or three degrees, or two degrees, depending upon what happens here on out.

And policies by themselves, only work to the extent that they're popular and widespread.

I think the best progress which we're following to a large extent in the United States, is providing economic incentives for improving the technology.

Giving us better batteries that can actually even out fluctuations in solar power generation and make those sorts of things cheaper and more widely available.

Because once you have a green energy source that's cheaper than gasoline, you don't have to make a moral judgment is which one's better.

You just do what's less expensive.

And ultimately, I think that's where we're gonna have to go with it.

- Some people suggest that climate change is something that we can just deal with in the future.

The next generation, they can figure it out.

Why is it important to address these issues now and to keep addressing them?

- Well, for one thing, they will have to deal with it in the future.

We've already had some amount of warming, so we're dealing with it now to some extent.

Future generations gonna have to deal with more of it.

Even under the most optimistic projections, we'll probably have at least twice as much warming as we've had already.

But it's sort of like steering a super tanker.

If you start putting in changes now, it's gonna have an effect a few decades in the future, which makes us hard to get positive reinforcement for that sort of change.

But that's really what we're talking about.

What we do now, will improve things for the next generation.

What the next generation does when the problem is worse, isn't gonna improve things for them, really, it's gonna help the generation after that.

So the sooner we start, the better off we are, and the more we can sort of take those worst cases off the table for future generations.

- Are we too late with anything?

Is there something that's unchangeable in your mind?

- There's at least one line of rhetoric that tries to make climate action seem very urgent by saying like, we're approaching a tipping point.

We have to do something now or else.

I think, from my point of view, reality is it's sort of the opposite of that.

We don't know where those tipping points are.

We don't know how hot things have to get before we lose the rest of Antarctic ice sheet, for example, or things like that.

We just know the probability of that happening increases the warmer temperatures get.

So that means that everything we do do now is reducing those odds in the future.

And the stuff we do now, even for that matter, has a bigger benefit than anything that is done in the future because it's affecting climate over a longer period of time.

So while there's not a deadline for action on climate change, the sooner the better.

- We've talked a lot about climate change, but that's not all you handle as state climatologist.

What other things does your role entail?

- Well, yeah, climate change is sort of a small part of climate services.

People want to know why was the summer of 2023 so hot?

So I explain the different weather and climate things that contributed to that and help people understand the weather and climate.

We do a lot of research on weather and climate also.

Some of it's related to climate change, some of it not so directly.

Like we looked at hurricane Harvey and how much rain it could have produced.

Not so much if the climate was warmer, but if the forecast had been correct.

And the forecast for Harvey was it was gonna move slower than it actually did.

And if that happened, we found that the peak rain fall would've been closer to 80 inches rather than 55 inches.

We're looking at how rainfall intensity is changing.

So that's related to climate change, but we're also looking at how we can better measure things like drought, especially at a small scale because the federal government provides drought relief on a county by county basis based upon how severe the drought is in bigger locations.

And we developed a tool to use radar data to actually fill in the gaps between stations and understand the intensity of drought at places within the county, so that can be properly reflected and relief money can be properly allocated.

So that's something we did for the benefit of Texas, but it was for with national funding, so it could benefit the whole United States.

- That's great.

You're also currently the President of the American Association of State Climatologists.

What do climatologists talk about when they get together besides the climate?

(laughing) - Yeah, weather and climate is a common topic of conversation.

Another common topic of conversation is funding because there's lots of federal dollars available for doing research, but the federal government doesn't really provide money for state level climate services.

And different states have a variety of levels of support, that sort of activity.

My own office, I get support from the Texas A & M University.

It doesn't have a direct line of funding from the state, although we get funded for research projects for benefit different state agencies.

A lot of state climate offices operate in mesonets.

We try to.

Right now, fortunately, the Texas Water Development Board is putting in a Texas mesonet, so I don't have to worry about that.

But it's a big challenge for them as to how to get funding to maintain those stations because ideally, you want weather and climate data to be freely available to everybody for make maximum benefit.

But if you do that, how do you get the money to pay for maintaining those stations?

Do you charge for it?

And so that's a tough conflict that a lot of offices have to negotiate.

- Does the size of Texas and the multitude of climates that we have in the state make your job challenging, fun, both?

- Well, I certainly don't mind the variety of climate within the state, although I grew up in California which actually will surpass Texas for differences in climate.

Main difference between Texas climate, where I grew, California climate where I grew up, and Texas climate is, in Texas, the climate changes fairly, fairly rapidly.

Whereas in California, you get the same climate year after year at a particular location, you have to go, but you drive 15 minutes and you get completely different climate.

So that's a little bit weird on that regard.

But the biggest downside for Texas is if I'm doing a speaking engagement, usually that's gonna be at least an hour and a half away from college station.

So, it takes at least a half a day to go out and actually talk to people face to face and so forth.

I sometimes envy states like Rhode Island and Delaware where you can.

- [Chelsea] Quick trip.

(laughing) - Yeah, I know, but I do get to see the state that way.

I've still got about 20, 25 counties I've yet to set foot or rubber in, but we'll see.

Maybe I can get 'em all ticked off before we retire.

- What worries you about the future of our planet?

- Eh, our planet's gonna do fine.

It's the people on it that gonna have to deal with it.

And, even though I'm a climatologist, I should say climate's our biggest threat, I don't think climate is necessarily our biggest threat.

I wish people would recognize it for the danger it is.

But we've also got war, we've got disease, we've got famine.

All of these are pressing problems.

At least, climate change is unlike say, war or disease, or famine, something you can actually work out solutions to and implement.

You know, people are complicated.

Climate is relatively simple.

- What excites you about the future of our planet?

- Well, science in general.

Our knowledge of how things work keeps expanding.

Our ability to deal with things keeps growing and exciting to see that progress and be a part of it.

- Well, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon, thank you so much for joining us today on "Texas A & M Today."

- Thanks a lot.

Appreciate being here.