[SciShow Intro]

Hank Green: Hello, and welcome to the SciShow Talk Show, the day on SciShow where we talk to interesting people about interesting stuff.  Today, our interesting person is Steve Running, regents professor emeritus at the University of Montana, which I feel like means you've been a professor—you were a professor for a long time.  Long enough to become like, legendary status professor.

Steve Running: [laughs]

Hank: And you study the earth, broadly...

Steve: Right.

Hank: How's it doing?

Steve: Ummm...

Hank: I've heard.

Steve: Yeah, we've got an awful lot of evidence that things are kind of cracking up.

Hank: Where is safest?  Where should I be?

Steve: Actually, Montana's not a bad place to be, but don't tell the realtors that.

Hank: [laughs]  The houses have gotten more expensive.  Yeah, and—and so you've been studying climate change for I assume a long time now?

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: And also just ecosystem ecology and et cetera.

Steve: Right.  The job I took when I got here was as a tree biologist, and so I didn't start with NASA and big global science in the beginning, and I think this is actually a useful thing for your audience to recognize.  I see so many students get really concerned and worried about picking the right major to go to college.  And I was a darn tree physiologist and I ended up a rocket scientist for NASA.  And so you really don't have to choose the rest of your life with your major, and I see all too many students just stressing out over getting the right major.

Hank: Yeah.  Biochemistry in undergrad and didn't end up using that much.  [Steve: Yeah.]  But—but glad I had it.  The thing is like you, in whatever profession you end up in, but especially if you're in the sciences, like you're gonna be learning and relearning your whole life. 

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Hank: This stuff is not—like when were you a tree physiologist first?

Steve: 1971.

Hank: So things have changed.

Steve: That's right.

Hank: So yeah, I mean that there's always new stuff and you have to be changing or else you're out.

Steve: Well when I give lectures to—especially students— I liked to pull out one of these [Steve pulls out his cellphone] that every one of you has and to think that when I was an undergraduate, nobody even dreamed of anything like this.  Not even the sci-fi movies.  And now every one of use has one, and think of the industry that's built up over these.  Not only building them but then using them.  [Hank: mhm]  None of that was even dreamed of when I was in college.

Hank: Sure.  Are you still doing active research?

Steve: Yeah, I still have my main NASA grant for Earth observance system.

Hank: What's the Earth observance systems?  Is that the, you just point—point the camera at Earth and you're like, there it is?

Steve: [Laughs]  No we, hopefully do way more than that.  this was the original, started in the late 1980s, called the Mission to Planet Earth.  We launched three really big platforms in 2000, 2002 and 3 and—and these are still producing data 20 years later.  [Hank: Yeah.]  The taxpayers have really gotten their money's worth on this one.  They've lasted and lasted and they're still going.

Hank: And what are you able to, what was the kind of data that you get out of these?

Steve: Well, my particular part is I study the biosphere, so in effect I'm watching plant growth worldwide every day.  [Hank: mhm]  And so I, with some kids, I—I would label it watching the global garden grow, and that isn't a bad kind of mental image of what my data set does: watches worldwide every day.

Hank: What does it do that through, just like, normal visual light photography or is there...

Steve: It's effectively visible near infrared wavelengths, and you're measuring kind of simple reflectance of—of the ground vegetation, so it's not dramatically different than what a digital camera sees as a it looks at a landscape

Hank: When I took terrestrial ecosystem ecology back a long time ago, at the University of Montana, I was sort of shocked to discover that we we do work pretty hard to try and figure out basically all of like the production on earth, like—like basically there are plants, and what is the the output of those plants.  [Steve: Right.]  And traces of like how much—how much light goes into them, how much stuff comes out of them, how much biomass do they build.  Remarkable that we could even think about measuring that on a global scale.  [Steve: Yeah.]  And you do that.  What are what are the things that you are concerned about.  Let's not say global warming first?

Steve: Okay, sure.  [Hank laughs]  Let's start by just simply... we use our data set to literally understand how much plant growth there is in the biosphere, and of course the most obvious utility for that is food production.  What's the capacity of the planet to grow food and how many—how many billion people do we actually think the planet can support?  [Hank: Right.]  So that's a good first one.  {Hank: mhm]  A second one that's very highly related is: can bioenergy actually be a major substitute for fossil fuels?

Hank: And as those two things are related to each other [Steve laughs] cause if...?

Steve: In direct competition with each other, in fact.

Hank (overlapping slightly): If you're putting more—more land toward food and more water toward food that's less water and land toward [Steve: Yep, exactly] fuel.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: You know, I was talking about it in terms of land and water, it's sort of how I think about it, but I think a lot of people might not think about the water.  Like, how far are we from being at max capacity and what are the things that... because—because of course there were times when we thought we were at max capacity and we were wrong.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: You know, we started fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and suddenly like, okay well the carrying capacity of the Earth just went up a lot.

Steve: Yep.

Hank: Thank you, Fritz Haber, for that part, but not all the other stuff.

Steve: Right, right. [Laughs]  Right now, in certain regions, we're really concerned that they're going to literally run out of irrigation water in the not-too-distant future.

Hank: And is that...

Steve (overlapping): Much of India is that way.

Hank: Are they bringing up from aquifers?

Steve: Yeah, this is groundwater depletion.  The Ogallala Aquifer in the southern Great Plains, they're following that as it's depleted and they know when it hits bottom, all that surface ag [agriculture] is going to go back to rain-fed agriculture.  So they're living on, they're literally mining that groundwater.  One of the things that when you hang around NASA, you just fall into things that are amazing.  One of our best ways to measure groundwater is with a satellite.  [Hank: hmm.]  And I tell people that and they go "what?"

Hank: That is how I feel.

Steve: A satellite?

Hank: Yeah.

Steve: I know the principle investigator of that mission and I had to have him explain it over and over again.  Remember: I'm a tree biologist, now tell me again, how does this work?  Real simply, there's—there's two platforms and what they're measuring is really tiny differences in gravitational pull.  And so as groundwater is depleted the gravity goes down by some timy little amount that they can measure in space, and so there's papers in the literature now all over about meaasuring groundwater depletion of whole continents with this satellite.  It's called GRACE [Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment].

Hank: And how long has it been up there, like how—like do we have like—like a graph that goes on over enough time?

Steve: Oh, it's been up, I want to say something like 10 years, and I think the first satellite might have petered out.  [Hank: mhm]  I've lost track, but we have a multi-year measure that's allowed them to look at places where they can clearly see depletion.

Steve: During the California drought, they could see that [Hank: Wow.]  Central Valley depletion easy.  It was huge.

Hank: Fascinating.  And it's really important for those missions to have that continuity, so when a satellite [Steve: Yeah.]  is starting to reach the end of it's life, sometimes there are times when we're not a hundred percent sure.  Losing a year of data in a situation like that where you're trying to have a continuous miss is such a loss. 

Steve: Yeah.  The—the sensor that I work with I started on in 1982.

Hank: mhm

Steve: We then had a design, had a competition, Congress passed it in 1989, and it wasn't launched until almost the year 2000.  So there it was, 16–18 years from concept to launch and now we've had 18 years of data.  But the lead time is really big compared to most things people work on.

Hank: Yeah.  And I—I mean I've heard people sort of pushing back against the idea, like NASA shouldn't be about studying Earth, and I'm just like oh God.  But like, I don't want to say that this is the most important planet, but it is right?

Steve: [laughs] Yeah.

Hank: Like, you know that this the important one that we'd... Like it's good to be able to take a step out and look down at this thing that is the whole reason why you breathe and stuff.  Come on!

Steve: No kidding.  I just endlessly am amazed that people like, and I think they have political motivation not so much scientific as—as they try to say NASA should not be bothering with studying Earth.  It's just so normal and routine they should be out studying the stars, which they do anyway.

Hank: Yeah.

Steve: But this has been part of the NASA Charter forever.  Part of it was also to work on studying Earth, so this is well part of its Mandate.

Hank: Absolutely.  Are we gonna run out of food?

Hank: It's sort of fascinating that we can ask that question on a global level, but like [Steve: Yeah]  in general, like looking toward future instability, food, of course, is that a huge concern?

Steve: Yeah, I don't actually think we will anytime in the immediate future.  And the reason I say that is because an awful lot of agriculture is operating at dramatically less than full efficiency. 

Hank: hmm

Steve: Another thing that just amazes you when you hear these statistics: we waste about a third of the food that's grown.  We being humanity as a whole.  A third!  And I've seen that measured in many many papers, not just one, so that isn't just an idle guess.  And so we have huge opportunity to manage the food we already grow way better than we do now.

Hank: Right.

Steve: And then there's—there's others variables.  More vegetarian diets, having less food go to pets—dogs and cats—and more to people if things got tough.  That's a really unpopular one [Hank laughs] but it's real, and it's part—it's one of the variables.  So I don't see running out of food being anything immediate.  That isn't to say that our entire food system isn't going to have to get smarter in a lot of ways. 

Hank: Right, and—and sometimes what you see is, of course things get more expensive before they become not available.

Steve: Right.

Hank: And that is a problem.  Like we don't want food to get more expensive because we want people to have income to spend on things other than just, you know, on calories.

Steve: Oh Americans spend less on food than about any other country.

Hank: And—and far less than we used to.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: It's—it's extremely inexpensive, a lot of the food that we eat because it's so efficient in this country.  So obviously there's a lot to say about climate change.  Often I ask different people like what's the thing about climate change that concerns you most, and I get different answers.  Like, it's like, ocean acidification and I'm like oh my God I didn't think about.

Steve: Oh jeez.

Hank: There's—and there's... I think the average person is like sea level rise, right?  That's the thing to worry about, but I'm curious about your take.

Steve: Well, the global change scientists, my friends and I that spend our whole life working on this, we're pretty unanimous that probably the biggest damage to humanity worldwide will be sea level rise because so much of the population of the world are on big cities on the coasts.  And that's a pretty strong consensus that that that's going to do more damage and it's going to be less reversible, [Hank: Right.] and we're gonna just have no choice than to deal with it,  And it's already on the way.  Of course, you know how we measure that?  By satellite.  We've got a laser altimeter that measures to about that kind of accuracy...

Hank (overlapping): From space?

Steve: From space, the sea level.  It's really cool hanging around those NASA rocket scientists.  You just, you're regularly amazed, and I have to pretend I'm not amazed because I'm part of the club, [Hank laughs] but I'm actually, quietly thinking how did ever figure that out?

Hank: Right.

Steve: What am I doing here?

Hank: It's just the general, 'how do they get in a room with these people' feeling.

Steve: I think that at NASA headquarters all the time.  I really do.

Hank: That's great.  So what is—how did you end up there?  Like what was the path from tree physiologist to NASA headquarters?  And abbreviated for us.

Steve: Yeah abbreviated, not 40 years worth.  Turned out that when I was an undergraduate, I had a professor who not only was thinking in systems ecology but thought that this computer porgramming might be a good skill, and so what got me into NASA was Fortran programming.  [Hank laughs]  So I was one of the—one of the very first ecologists [Hank: Yeah.]  that could think about how to translate ecology into a computer program with simulation modeling.  So that's what got me in the door.

Hank: And of course simulation modeling becomes all of [Steve: Yeah]  ecology.

Steve: Well, of—of large scale ecology.  At the global scale, what else are you going to do?

Hank: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.  You have a few sets of satellite data streams and the whole rest of this integration and synthesis is computer modeling.  So that was—that was what got me in the door.

Hank: Nice.  Is Fortran... not super useful anymore?

Steve: You know, there is still heritage code [Hank (laughing): Yeah.]  running in Fortran.  

Hank: Oh, man,

Steve: They do things like Mission Operations for satellites.

Hank: I—the other thing I don't want to say back to—to sea level rise is a thing to remember is what can't we move.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: You can move a farm.  Like, you could start a farm in different areas.  You can...

Steve: Canada is gonna mop up.  

Hank: Yeah.  And they have a lot of arable, great cropland there already, but if it gets warmer...

Steve: It's gonna get better.  Growing seasons getting longer up there. 

Hank: But you can't move a city.  

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: Like the infrastructure is there, and that's going to—and it's easy to think of like, New York, but you also have to think of like, everyone in Florida.

Steve: Yeah.  Oh, jeez.

Hank (overlapping): There's a lot of people there.

Steve: Yeah.  Or all of Bangladesh.

Hank:  And I have a friend who's an ecologist who—who sent me a paper that terrified me.  It wasn't how much sea level is going to rise, it was both here's the rise that we expect by 2100 or anything, but here's how much we've signed up for by that point.

Steve: Yeah

Hank: It's of course, he put out an ice cube on the table, it doesn't melt immediately.

Steve: Alright

Hank: So yeah, the sea level is rising, but even if we stay it at that exact same temperature, that ice cube's gonna melt over the next hundred years.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: And that's a really scary number, because you know, if you're having a kid right now, that kid's gonna be around 80 years from now and that's 80 years from now.

Steve: We're probably expecting three feet of sea level rise by the end of this century.  By 2100.  Three feet.  And as you say, that also bakes into probably another five or even ten feet by 2300.

Hank: Yeah.  And that's—and then—and then by 2300, you've got the other baked in.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank:  And this is—I mean, we've seen change in the geological record [Steve: Right.}  we've seen change on that level, and it's not good.  Like, when change on that level occurs...

Steve: It's quite disruptive.

Hank: It's quite disruptive.

Steve: To whoever the local crowd is at the time.

Hank: [laughs]  Whether it's trilobites or people.

Steve: That's right.

Hank:  Alright, well let's—speaking of animals, let's see—let's see an animal that will hopefully skate out [Steve: Alright]  the next few hundred years without too much trouble.

Hank: Hey Jessi

Jessi Knudsen Castañeda: Hey!  This is not a trilobite, but...

Hank: No, it's some kind of reptile, and it looks like—I feel like he could do okay in a world with a lot less water.

Jessi: Well, you might think so, but there are some pretty interesting studies going on.  This is Bindi the bearded dragon, and he's a—he's a fairly old guy, so he's...

Hank: Does Bindi mean that you're from Australia?

Jessi: Yes, from Australia.

Steve: Alright.

Jessi: So reptiles in general are getting pretty—hit pretty hard by climate change, and because they are an ectothermic animal, they rely on temperatures a lot more than endothermic animals.  And so you would think, and scientists were hoping that with the trend of warming up in a lot of places they were excited they're thinking maybe—maybe repitles are gonna do great you know? [Steve: Yeah]   More warmth, more activity, we'd see some cool evolution going on and pretty much the opposite is happening.  So it's heating up too fast [Hank: Alright]  they're not adapting fast enough and so some of the main studies are figuring out you know why...  There's these mass extinctions going on and there are just multiple extinctions every year on reptiles and so it's...  What they're studying is: reptiles will wake up in the morning they'll go out to bask, they'll warm up, then they start hunting it's too hot, they go and hide.  So if it gets fast quickly they're going out and as soon as they're out there basking they're already overheated, and they have to go and find shade and they don't have any time to hunt. 

Steve: Yeah. 

Jessi: And then, you know, they can't sustain themselves, and they can't reproduce, and then [Steve: Yeah]  you know they're either starving or they're just not reproducing and that generation is—is dying off.

Hank: So we're just sending them all to zoos.

[All laugh]

Hank: There you go, it's fine.

Jessi: Yeah, so let's deplete biodiversity completely, right?

Steve: One of the things we measure with our satellites is the surface temperature [Jessi: Yeah]  and it's unbelievable in the middle of the day and full sun you can have a hundred and fifty degree surface temperatures, and so I can imagine exactly what you're saying: that they come out and it's heating up too fast and they just can't—nothing really can live 150 degree temperature,

Jessi: No, and some reptiles, they need to get up to 120, 130 to digest well, but that's just a few.  150?  That's...

Steve: Yeah.

Jessi:  That's too much.

Hank: That's a—that's so hot.  I was just thinking about that time I was on the beach and I couldn't handle it.  But it wasn't anywhere near 150.  That one time I was on a beach.

Jessi: [laughs]

Steve: The AstroTurf at the football stadium [Hank: Yeah?]  we've measured at a hundred and forty.

Hank:  What?  Here?

Steve: Yeah

Jessi: In deserst... you know a reptile can—they can go out and then they can dart into shade and come back out and dart into shade, but that's only if they have a lot of places to find shade, not just these big expanses.  So how that relates to bearded dragons is these guys are easy to study because they breed really well in captivity, and so you can get a lot of them.  And what they wanted to figure out was, you know, how are these warming temperatures affecting these guys?  And they're a fun reptile to study because they have this cool ability to learn by mimicry, so you know, not too long ago, we thought only primates could do that.

Hank (quietly): What?  What do you mean?

Jessi: But these guys, so they—they can watch another bearded dragon do something [Hank: Okay]  and then they can do it.  Where they might not be able to figure that out by trial and error, they would be able to just watch someone else: "Oh, oh that's how you do it."

Jessi:  So that's a really cool thing about these guys.  So they did a study...

Hank: I just—these scales on the side... 

Jessi: They're cool, aren't they?  Want to touch him?

Hank: It's like, pokey pokes.

Jessi: They look like, so he's hard up there, but those look really pokey, but

Hank: They're not

Steve: Pretty soft.

Jessi: They're just attached to like this wobbly skin, so they just move all over the place.  Okay, so the study that they did on these guys was: they took a clutch and they kept—they incubated one half of the clutch at normal, like 82 degrees, that's pretty normal temperature in Australia where these guys are from, and then they took the other half of the clutch and they put it a little higher, at 86 degrees.  And they both hatched and then they did cognition studies on them.  So they all got to watch a video of a bearded dragon doing a task, and it was opening—sliding a door open to get some food.  And they found out that the ones that were incubated at normal temperature learned quicker and were able to get it, while the ones that were heated up, they either couldn't figure it out or it took them way longer.  So of course, it was a small study, so they need to do more, and more, and more, more but...

Hank: The hotter the Earth gets the dumber the...

Jessi: They're dumber

Steve: Well, it's true with people.

Hank:  It is.  Yeah, Florida.

[all laugh]

Hank: I'm from Florida, it's okay for me to say that. 

Steve: You get to say that.

Jessi: So that study, it just tells us that we need to study them more and repeat that study and see if we get the repetition of it.  (To Bindi) You wanna tromp around?  What do you think, do you wanna hold him?

Hank: Sure.  My roommate in college had a bearded dragon.  So I know all about what you eat and what the things that you eat smell like.

[Steve and Jessi laugh]

Jessi: They shouldn't smell bad.

Hank: Crickets smell bad.

Jessi: Oh yeah, you're right.  Cricket poop smells bad.

Hank: Crickets—crickets themselves...

Jessi: Oh like smashed crickets smell bad too.

Hank: Yeah

Jessi: Yeah, you're right.  You wanna eat crickets?  Because that's another food source.

Steve: Yeah.

Hank: I just want to create a world where salmon aren't going to go extinct because I love them.

Steve: Yep.

Jessi: You like to pet them or you like to eat them?

Hank: No, I like to eat them.

Hank: And every time I—every time I eat salmon I think to myself [Jessi (to Steve): Do you wanna hold him?] I should enjoy this while I can.

Jessi (to Steve): Flat hands

Jessi: Gotta enjoy it before you can't anymore.  So Bindi the bearded dragon, a lot of people are gonna want to know a little bit more about bearded dragons.  These guys do come from Australia, and they have these awesome adaptations of looking like a terrible thing to eat.

Hank: Yeah, yeah.  Looking spikey, even if they aren't.

Jessi: Yeah.  Well, I mean, some of these get pretty spikey, and if you were like, trying to bite this thing, it's gonna be a lot different than like, being able to pet this.

Hank: Should I try?

Jessi: I don't

Hank: Okay

Jessi: So to also deter a predator, so it's like 'I look really terrible to eat, I'm gonna hurt you.'  If you were to threaten them, they would stand up on their—on their legs, their beard, or under their chin, would turn dark black, and then they they would open their mouth and hiss at you a little bit.  [Jessi hisses]  And if you come closer, they're gonna do a head bob, which is cool, so they'll be like [Jessi demonstrates] 'Bring it on!  I'll bite you in the face!'  

Hank: Just like the—just like the tiny lizards in Florida.  They're always doing this.

Jessi: Yeah, so then if that doesn't scare you away, they're smart enough to be like, okay, I'm outmatched.  So they're gonna turn tail and run as fast as they can, and they're gonna try and wedge themselves into like a little rock crevice, and then they'll bloat themselves, so they'll puff their body out.  And then, I want you to try something.  I'm gonna go ahead and take him back, so pet down his back like that.  Go ahead.  It's kinda bumpy, right?

Steve: Yeah, okay.

Jessi: Now try and pet him backwards.

Steve: Oh jeez.  Yeah.  That's like a Velcro-sort of thing. 

Jessi: Yes, exactly. 

Steve: If you go against the grain it's suddenly really sharp.

Hank: Something's happening there. 

Jessi: Yes, so if they wedge themselves into a rock crevice, bloat themselves, and something tries to pull them out, it doesn't work

Hank (overlapping): It isn't gonna work very well.

Jessi: It doesn't work.  And then they have to, when the danger's gone, they'll leave.  I know, I know.  He like, did a little [exhales].  A little huff at me.  So that's how they're gonna protect themselves.  

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Jessi: Bindi here was a rescue.  We thought he was a girl at first, that's why I say she every once in a while. 

Jessi: He was so small when we first rescued him that—that we thought he was like, six months old, when really they said they had bought him two years ago in a pet store.  So it had been over two years, he was over two years old.  He had an underbite, some other issues... 

Hank: He does look a little, like, different from other bearded dragons to me. 

Jessi: He looks different.  His eyes are a little poofy, his nostrils are a little poofy.  He walks weird because his legs are actually fused to his bones.  He has metabolic bone disease, so he didn't get UV light, and he didn't get vitamin D and all of the nutrients that he needed.  He was being fed once every two weeks.  These guys should be fed every day, different things every day.  So he was—he survived, these guys are very hearty.  He survived, but he definitely has a lot of challenges and he probably won't live as long as—as other bearded dragons.  But he's—he's still doing pretty good.  

Hank: It's okay, Bindi.  We all die.

Jessi: Yeah, we do.  We do.  So he can't climb, can't like grab things and climb things so we give him little ramps and he walks around.  And he's a—he's a pretty guy.  A lot of them can be a little bit grayer, and just blend a little bit better with the sand there and dirt, but he's like a...

Hank: Pretty bright orange.

Jessi: ...some—some sort of color mutation variation that they—they bred into him.

Hank: Hey, thanks Bindi for coming on my show!  It's been a pleasure to stroke you and wooh, you're getting puffy.  I shouldn't have said that word.  Which honestly. maybe I shouldn't have.  Jessi, thanks for coming on.  If you want to check out what Jessi's up to: Jessi runs a wonderful animal rescue here in Montana.  It's a YouTube channel that we help produce.  youtube.com/animalwondersmontana  

Jessi: Thanks, Hank

Hank: You can learn all kinds of cool stuff and, yes, Steve, than you so much for coming and sharing and freaking us all out.

Steve: [laughs]  It's my job.

Hank: Stuff we need to know.  Thank you guys for watching this episode of SciShow Talk Show.  It's always a great time, and I really appreciate people who stick around for these longer, interesting things.

Hank: Thank you!

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