Philip Mote Oral History Interview, March 23, 2018

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is March 23, 2018. I'm here with Dr. Philip Mote at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Today we're going to be discussing global warming, particularly as it pertains to his research, but I like to start out with your background. Where were you born?

PHILIP MOTE: I was born in Colorado.

ET: Is that where you grew up?

PM: Lived there until I was 5 and then in Provo, Utah, until I was 13 and then moved to California.

ET: What did your parents do?

PM: My dad is a Presbyterian minister, well, he's retired now. My mom is a writer.

ET: Did you have a connection to the outdoors as a child growing up? Did your parents spend time outside?

PM: Our family vacations were usually about camping. We did a couple of backpacking trips and yeah a lot of outdoors.

ET: What was your school experience like growing up? Were you engaged particularly through the high school years?

PM: I didn't get engaged until I was 24 [laughs]. No, I was a pretty studious 00:01:00kid all the way through. I did sports, but not the marquee sports that get a lot of attention. I did cross country and track. Those are great sports because the cross country particularly you're out in trails and in the woods sometimes. That was fun. Then I got more into biking and started doing a lot of bike tours with friends.

ET: Did you plan on going to college directly after high school?

PM: Absolutely.

ET: You ended up at Harvard, is that right?

PM: Mm-hmm, I went to Harvard.

ET: What influenced your decision to go there?

PM: It wasn't terribly well-informed or thoughtful, at least compared with today's kids who just have access to a lot more information. I applied to four colleges and got into all four and I visited Harvard and I was quite smitten 00:02:00with the historicity of it, just the red brick and the sense that this is where George Washington's army trained and things like that. They're just very old and growing up in the West where a building that was 100 years old considered exceptional, seeing buildings that had been around for 300 years or more was a pretty amazing experience. It really had less to do with sort of whether I wanted the academic programs they had to offer or whether I saw it fitting into my career goals, because I didn't have any at that point. It just sort of seemed like a good place to go.

ET: What did you think of living on the East Coast?

PM: It was a good thing to do for four years and I was quite eager to get back to the west.

ET: You studied physics?

PM: Yes.

ET: What made you choose physics?

PM: I knew I wanted to do something sort of sciency and Harvard requires you to 00:03:00declare what they call a concentration, because it's a Liberal Arts degree instead of a major, it's sort of a concentration. You declare a concentration at the end of your first year and they do it that way so that you have some time to think about it. I wanted to do some kind of science and physics had the fewest course requirements so it left me free to take a lot of electives. Of course, what course requirements there were extraordinary difficult and I really struggled with some of them, but I managed to squeak through and go to graduate school.

ET: Did you have experience as an undergraduate participating in research?

PM: Yes. I had a physics professor who allowed me to work in his lab tinkering with electronics. I wasn't very good at it but he was nice about it anyway and 00:04:00it helped me see what it's like to be a graduate student, because I was hanging around graduate students. I got more interested in the application of physics to the real world and so I took an oceanography class in my junior year and really liked that and started just doing a little bit of research for the professor and then won a fellowship to spend my summer after my junior year doing research. It was aimed at physics majors and pretty much anybody who applied for it got it and I said I want to do oceanography. I got to spend a summer doing oceanography. I was mostly doing programming and analyzing data but I got to go to Sefer for 10 days off the coast of California.

That was a really terrific experience being able to be around professional researchers, all oceanographers of course, and spend every waking moment with 00:05:00them and hearing how they talked about their work. It was pretty exciting. That's when I decided I really wanted to be a scientist. That's also when I decided I wanted to study atmospheric sciences and oceanography.

ET: You mentioned you went back west after your degree. Did you wait to go to graduate school?

PM: I did. I took two years off between college and graduate school. It was a very good decision. I just had a sense as I was approaching graduation every time I prayed about my future, don't just go straight into graduate school and so I taught high school for two years and that was a really good way of starting to give back. When you're a student it becomes very self-focused. You're concerned about your grades and your work and that's important. That's part of how you get motivated, but there's a natural gravitational pull toward the self. When you're a teacher, it's quite the opposite. It always has to be about the 00:06:00kids. That was really good for me personally to do that. Originally, I was just going to do it for one year, but it turned into two but I'd already decided that I wanted to go to graduate school and I'd already picked the University of Washington. Once the two years were up that's what I did.

ET: Did you consider, did you want to continue teaching I suppose after that experience in the future, post graduate school or were you pretty focused on-?

PM: As much as I enjoyed teaching high school, I knew that's not what I wanted to do for a career and I was interested in a faculty position but we had geographic constraints and things just didn't work out for getting a faculty position until quite a bit later.

ET: You went to the University of Washington for your Ph.D.?

PM: That's right. I did my Ph.D. in a little over four years, accelerated by the 00:07:00fact that we had our first kid and I was under pressure to get out and get a job and then I did a post-doc in Edenborough, Scotland, and then we moved back to Seattle.

ET: As a Ph.D. student, you studied stratospheric water vapor models?

PM: That's right. A very arcane topic that would pretty much end any conversation.

ET: Can you talk about the importance of understanding phenomena occurring in the stratosphere?

PM: At the time part of the reason I got involved in atmospheric science in the mid-'80s was that the ozone hole had just been discovered in 1985 and it was this big mystery and then by 1987 it had been shown that it was because of human activity producing these chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons that were wonderful for all sorts of purposes but they were accumulating in the stratosphere and then a through complicated a set of processes created the ozone hole over Antarctica 00:08:00every October. I got really interested in this concept that humans could reshape the planet on that scale. It was just completely baffling to me that we could put stuff into the atmosphere in ways that were detectible. I got interested in climate change and ozone depletion and my advisor assigned me to work on this project with stratospheric water vapor, which wasn't really what I wanted to do but it gave me the opportunity to play around with climate models, which turned out to be a good experience.

ET: It sounds like anthropogenic climate change was already an area of interest by that point?

PM: Yeah, definitely. I applied for graduate school in 1987 as I was finishing college and summer of '88 was extraordinarily hot. That was when Jim Hansen testified to the senate global warming is here on cover stories on all sorts of major magazines. I was already interested at that point but that was sort of a 00:09:00turning point in the national conversation about climate change. I wanted to study that for graduate school and I arrived at UW in the fall of '89 and there weren't really projects on climate change per se, so I did a project on stratospheric water vapor and how that might change with the changing climate and it turned out to be very interesting and led to several more years of research along those lines.

ET: How do you think your physics perspective benefited your studies, or in moving into atmospheric sciences?

PM: Physics is excellent preparation for atmospheric sciences or physical oceanography and many of the entering graduate students with me came from physics or applied math backgrounds, so it made it easier to just understand the basics of atmospheric physics both on very large scales and very small scales.

ET: Then you went to University of Edinburgh, as you mentioned, for postdoc?

PM: Yeah, 2 and a half years in Scotland. It was quite a great experience living overseas and we had our second child there and gave her a Scottish name and so we came back with 2 little kids who didn't remember, unfortunately, don't remember living there but they still have an affinity for Scotland.

ET: You worked on your part of research on the atmospheric tape recorder, is that right?

PM: Right. The atmospheric tape recorder was a name given by a professor at Cambridge University to a phenomena of stratospheric water vapor that he postulated would exist and then I found it in satellite data and we wrote a couple of papers together sort of describing this phenomenon and we gave it the 00:11:00name that he had, so we titled the paper "atmospheric tape recorder," to reflect the fact that he had predicted that it would exist.

ET: Can you talk about the importance of this finding?

PM: Well, it hoped to clarify a whole lot of aspects of how the air moves in the stratosphere, how it enters the stratosphere and what kind of restrictions there are in the pathways for air to get into the stratosphere. Basically the mechanism is in the tropics at about 10 miles above the service, about 10 miles above the surface, 16 kilometers, it's above the tops of the highest thunderstorms, almost all of the highest thunderstorms. It turns out that region has an annual cycle in temperature. It's coldest in January because thunderstorms are strongest then. It turns out thunderstorms are cooling that region. So, what my colleague Michael had pustulated was that because it's 00:12:00coldest in January air entering the stratosphere at that time of year would be dryer, because of course temperature controls the amount of water that the air can hold. He postulated that there would be dryer air entering in January and moister air entering in July and that those annually varying amounts would be then be carried up into the tropical stratosphere and that you could actually observe the waves and that the air was essentially marked the way old fashioned tapes would be marked by a tape recorder. Indeed, the satellites, by the mid-90s we had a few years of satellite records that showed that that was in fact happening.

ET: Then, you returned to Seattle as a research scientist with Northwest Research Associates.

PM: Yeah.

ET: Were you associated with the University of Washington at that point?

PM: No, so Northwest Research Associates is a corporation that's owned by the 00:13:00scientists and exists to do science and it's a great place to do research. There are a few scientists who have some kind affiliate appointment at the University of Washington. I was there for about a year and a half and then I got a job at UW and moved back over to UW.

ET: Why did you decide to join the Climate Impacts Group at UW?

PM: From the time I entered graduate school I wanted to do science that was societally relevant and I wanted to find ways to be at the intersection of science and application of science. I'd actually applied for a job at the Climate Impacts Group earlier and somebody else got it. It was somebody in knew. He was a friend and I thought he was better qualified and I was glad that they 00:14:00hired him because he was terrific. They already knew I was interested in doing that kind of work so when another position came open a year or two years later, they contacted me to see if I'd be interested, and I was. It was really exciting to be part of that work for 11 years. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Northwest giving talks about climate variability and change, El Nino, La Nina, Pacific decadal oscillation, global warming and its effects in the Northwest. I talked to rotary clubs and school groups and gardening clubs and talked at scientific conferences about their fields of science, wetland ecology and hydrology and all those kinds of things.

I was doing a lot of kind of explaining climate science to others which in some ways was an extension of being a high school teacher in that these folks had a 00:15:00level of education that anywhere from 6th grade to post graduate but they weren't experts in that field and so I was explaining the basics in language that any educated person could understand.

ET: Did you anticipate taking on that role when you moved to the Climate Impacts Group or is that a role that you enjoyed and cultivated while you were there?

PM: Yeah, the role was originally described solely as outreach and I wanted to maintain a research portfolio, so I said I'll do this half-time but I also need to be doing research and I also maintained the connection to Northwest Research Associates and the funding that we had through NASA. We spent one day every other week over at NWRA and then the other 9 days out of 2 weeks I was at UW mix of doing research on Northwest Climate and going out and doing lots of talks.

ET: Your research was shifting from global circulation models to more regional trends in the Pacific Northwest at this time, is that correct?

PM: Yeah so I started looking at all kinds of observations of things: temperature and precipitation, climate data but also stream flow and snow pack and sea level. We also got interested in forest fires and the connection of forest fires to the climate, which at that time had not been demonstrated, so we were really the first group of people to show that in fact when you get a warm dry summer you tend to get bigger fires and that seems really obvious but the narrative at the time in the late '90s was that the huge increase in fire area burn that had been observed over the last 15-20 years was solely because fires 00:17:00had been suppressed for so long that when they did start, they just got bigger. Although that's partly true, the warming trends generally had also strongly contributed and we were able to show in fact the biggest fires happen with warm, dry summers. It led me into a lot of different fields where I didn't previously have any expertise and I got to work with people who were experts in those fiends and publish a lot of papers about a lot of different topics.

ET: How did you end up coming to Oregon State University?

PM: Well, I had known people down here for a while and when the state legislature created the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and OSU started looking for a director I thought oh that sounds perfect. I applied and got the job and it's been a really great ride now, 11 years as director of OCCRI.

ET: What were you initial impressions of the university and Corvallis?

PM: Really terrific. One of the reasons I was excited about the job was that OSU is a very collaborative place and so I remember my first week on the job sitting down with a bunch of colleagues who were working in a proposal and there were colleagues from biological and ecological engineering, applied economics, liberal arts, and were all looking at how we can-I think that was about decision making under uncertainty. How do we study the decision process in the ways that science is considered or dismissed in the decision process. I remember just thinking this is great. This is what I want in an academic setting where people from many different disciplines can come together. Also I really fell for Corvallis. I realized that having lived in big cities for a long time I'd 00:19:00forgotten how much I like living in a smaller town where I can hop on my bike and in a few minutes I'm just out where I can hear nothing but birds, hiking and just the smell of the fresh air and the quiet, but yet still things to do when we want to do them: theater, arts, music, sports. It's all very accessible and there's a lot going on here.

ET: Who was important to getting you settled into this collage particularly?

PM: OCCRI is a multi-campus institute and although we're housed in what's now the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences we're physically removed from the main part of the college.

Although, now several faculty moved over to Strand since the remodel. The people who helped me settle into the campus were generally not people in CEOAS. I 00:20:00collaborated early and often with Denise Lach who's the director of School of Public Policy now, collaborated a lot with Susan Capalbo and Andrew Plantinga in Applied Economics and Lisa Gaines the director of the Institute for Natural Resources was a mentor in just being director of an institute at OSU. Most of the people that I interacted with, especially in those early years, were outside of CEOAS. Now that I'm an associate dean in the college of course I have a lot more activity and a lot more ties to the college.

ET: Can you talk about the formation of OCCRI and its relationship to Oregon's Global Warming Commission?

PM: I wasn't here for the early history, but my understanding is that both OSU and University of Oregon were interested in creating some institute along these lines and they went to the Oregon University System, I forget what it was called 00:21:00then, the Board of Higher Education or Research-I don't remember the name of the part of the Oregon Univesrity system, but they started talking to legislators and found a couple of sponsors who signed on to write the legislation to create both the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and the Oregon Global Warming Commission which was tasked with helping Oregon find a pathway to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. The two entities were created in the same legislation house bill-HB 3543 in case you want to look it up. It was specified that it would be at OSU and that was part of the deal that they struck with the other universities that it would be here but that it would include faculty at the other universities.

ET: Is it correct in assuming that there's a policy element to this position, 00:22:00then? Or do you feel pretty separate from that component?

PM: There's an expectation that this institute will serve the Oregon Global Warming Commission and state agencies in some kind of science advice capacity. We're not equipped to evaluate policy or recommend policy and we're really about science advice.

ET: Given your interdisciplinary coordinating role, how is your role as a researcher changed with this position?

PM: Well, I've had the opportunity to lead and participate in I think 6 team, large interdisciplinary proposals. By large I mean several million dollars. They weren't all successful but many were and so I've had the opportunity to 00:23:00collaborate with lots of colleagues from other colleges and even other campuses and usually though in more of a leadership role, so it's meant that I've spent a lot more time sort of managing research than doing research and usually when my name is on a paper now it's a graduate student or a bunch of colleagues. That's just been one part of transitioning to more of a leadership position.

ET: What is your relationship to the Climate Impacts Research Consortium?

PM: The Climate Impacts Research Consortium is one of the OCCRI projects. It's funded by NOAA. It's a regional entity one of 10 around the country that are funded by NOAA and we had several universities that participate. We engage with agencies, federal and state, local and also with tribes doing research with them 00:24:00to understand how climate change is reshaping and will reshape their communities and their natural resources. We publish original research but more importantly we apply science to real-world problems. We initially won the competition to host the Northwest Entity for NOAA in 2009, and then were renewed in 2014 for another 5 years.

ET: Given your public engagement component, what have you found to be effective tools in communicating science to non-scientists?

Maybe do you feel like you interact with people differently when they're members 00:25:00of the public versus policy makers?

PM: Yeah, with every interaction communication experts say consider the audience, that's #1. When I'm going out to od a public talk, whoever's invited me I'll ask them what can you tell me about the audience. What are they interested in? What do they already know? so that I can hit their interests and meet them on their territory so to speak. I probably like most scientists err on the side of presenting too much data and not enough story, so that's something that I recognize is part of my evolution as a speaker. When I'm engaging with policy makers, depending on their interest and their level, there's usually a question that's foremost on their minds. They don't usually want to just a general what's the state of science of climate change. Although sometimes they 00:26:00do and that's what I'll give them. Here's what we know now that we didn't know 3 or 5 years ago. But if they're concerned about forest management, then I'll talk to them about fires and invasive species and if they're more interested in agriculture then that's what I'll talk about. Then there's platforms like Twitter. I and many other climate science colleagues spend a little bit of time thinking about how to explain the science that we do and that others do in 280 characters and that's been an interesting journey as well, recognizing that in this world scientists have a role to play in speaking publicly through social media.

ET: Has your use of Twitter made you think about the language that you use differently with communicating climate science since it has to be much more 00:27:00concise but at the same time digestible for a general audience?

PM: When I first started with Twitter I was so extraordinarily concerned about misspeaking that I would spend 5 minutes composing a tweet to summarize a paper. I was thinking I've got one tweet to explain this paper and I would actually run it by a colleague who is more adept at Twitter and she coached me on how to use hashtags and as I got a little more comfortable and then I started looking at how other people do it. This was many years ago now. People were just firing things off and they didn't always care whether it was correct and in my view as a scientist I want to be known as a reliable source that presents the science accurately and I gradually realized that I could do that without spending 5 minutes per tweet and occasionally if I misspoke, well it's a platform that is 00:28:00just such high velocity that those things tend not to stick very long. It's more important to who you're engaging with and how you're generally presenting the science and showing its relevance.

ET: Do you feel like it's expanded the audience that you can access?

PM: Yeah, definitely. I mean, back when my-I did a lot of work with mainstream media throughout my career, both at the Climate Impacts Group and now with OCCRI and those are opportunities that just come along fairly randomly. Maybe there's something else happening and they want to get my take on it or occasionally we've published a paper that's pretty significant and we'll put out a press release and then that generates interest. I'm still doing interviews based on a paper that was published three weeks ago, for example. But you know, over the 00:29:00years now with Twitter I recognize that since I have a direct access to now 1,000 followers, some of whom will promulgate something I say and so I do try to be careful in what I'm saying but also recognize that I have an opportunity to provide interesting little factoids or perspectives on scientific things that are happening.

ET: Can you talk about how technology has changed over your career, especially with your experience with modeling climate change?

PM: I think back to my first job, my summer internship when I was a junior.

I had taken a class in high school on programming in basic language, which nobody uses anymore but in basic you number each line and then you can refer to 00:30:00another line. It's line numbering and so when I switched to Fortran, which is still a fairly commonly used language for really large scientific programming problems, you don't need line numbers in Fortran. You can use them if you need to-go to line 10-but I remember our computer guy just sort of laughing because I was still numbering every line. I knew I didn't need to but it was one of those habits and over the years as I've used scientific programming for other things I'm well aware that my skill as a programmer is spotty and that my practices are atrocious and because we typically just want to get the job done and so we'll throw together some code and make sure it works and it gets the right answer and we don't care about having it follow all sorts of programming conventions. The 00:31:00language now I look at what our graduate students are using. A lot of them are using Python. I don't think I've ever seen a Python script. I have no idea what it looks like. I never even got onto the C, C++ bandwagon that started about 20 years ago, so I program in something that's called IDL-Interactive Data Language, which is still commonly used among earth scientists along with MATLAB, but I find that it takes a chunk of my brain that I almost never use and so when I start working on a program it's almost like heading out to run a 10k when you haven't been jogging. It's like I just can't get there. I have to train. I have to sort of work my way back into programming. Then I'll look at the computers.

I got into scientific programming just a couple of years after the end of the cardstock era where you would have your entire computer program would be on these cards, punch cards. But we still used reel-to-reel tape for storing data and now of course I have more storage on my iPhone than in a whole room full of reel-to-reel tapes back when I was in college. It's really remarkable to see how not just the computing technology that we use for doing science but the ubiquity of doing technology in the ways that a lot of scientists are using networks of people to do observations for them. Bird watchers uploading their observations or people taking measurements along shorelines and uploading their observations 00:33:00for scientists to use. It's really changed the way some people collect data. We've actually used the crowd sourcing to do some more climate modeling now. Oxford University, Myles Allen specifically, had the idea back in the late '90s to write a version of a climate model that could run on a desktop computer and then look for volunteers and now that that family of computing projects, known as climateprediction.net has over a dozen projects going on so we're doing one modeling the climate of the western U.S. and we're doing all sorts of fun things. We have tons of thousands of volunteers around the world who will run our research for us, our research computations and then we can go analyze the data. It's sort of like having a super computer, only it's a bunch of real 00:34:00people with their own machines and their idle time.

ET: What kind of dta are they collecting?

PM: We send a complete set of software and data files and they don't have to actually do anything other than sign up. It just lands on their computer, runs computations for several days, and then returns the data to our server here at OSU. What we're generating is simulations of a year's worth of climate in the real world, so we're using actual observations of sea surface temperature to constrain what the atmosphere does.

Then we can compare that with what actually happened in that year and we're using a very fine mesh across the landscape so we can compare what happens in the valleys and the mountains, can really see how climate change is slower right next to the ocean because the ocean is warming slower. It's information like 00:35:00that that we're using and then trying to understand for instance how extreme precipitation is changing.

ET: Speaking of the ocean, I was wondering if you could talk about your work with the Envision projects in the Tillamook and Grace Harbor communities?

PM: Some of the projects that I've been involved with all of which have been led by the people have used the Envision model, which John Bolte and his group developed many years ago, so one looked at the entire Willamette Valley and incorporated all kinds of important factors, like urban expansion. Our applied economists provided enough information to model where the biggest cities would grow and the conversion of ag land into urban, how prices, land prices, affected 00:36:00those patterns and then the water demand that goes with that. We also incorporated forests and the way forests are changing and will change with climate change and then what effect that has on water, agricultural demand across a whole bunch of different crops. That was a huge, very elaborate project. To my knowledge, it's the biggest application of Envision. Then we also used it in the big wood basin in Idaho to work with ranchers and also with the cities of Hailey, Ketchum, and Sun Valley to look at how water would change in the future. Then two coastal projects in Tillamook and Grace Harbor, Washington, looking at how shoreline change would interact with built infrastructure and community resources like schools and hospitals and how different approaches to 00:37:00shoreline management would achieve some objectives and threaten others, so if you build a massive sea wall, yes that protects everything on the backside but if the sea rises then you essentially no longer have a functional beach. If you take a different approach to shoreline management is there a way to preserve some of the inward infrastructure and also preserve some of the beach functions? It's been a really fascinating tool for putting physical and biophysical considerations into a common platform along with social considerations.

ET: You referenced your recent publication on snowpack in the Western U.S. Can you talk about the importance of snowpack to water availability?

PM: Somewhere around 60-65% of water in the Western U.S. originates as snow. It 00:38:00lands in the mountains and then melts sometime later. That turns out to be hugely important to life in the west. It's just a fact of life that most of the west is dry in the summer very little precipitation and so having water for cities and farms requires a combination of reservoirs behind dams and also snowpack. The texture of the usage of those two types of storage is extremely different across the landscape of the west. On the Colorado River, Lake Powell and Lake Mead can store about 4 years' worth of flow on the Colorado. There are also many basins in the Northwest particularly where there's essentially no storage at all and it's a purely natural river or almost completely natural 00:39:00river. The degree to which built storage can help mitigate one dry year or one year with poor snowpack is quite variable. But agriculture itself is a hundreds of billions dollars of year industry across th west and a lot of that is irrigated. That's including all of the supporting economic benefits-the suppliers and retailers and so on. Then the cities of course, many of the biggest cities in the west rely on surface water and so having one year with bad snowpack can really affect the water supply in that basin in the summer and we saw that in Oregon in 2015. Oregon, Washington, and California all had a drought 00:40:00that originated because there wasn't enough snow.

There wasn't enough snow in Oregon largely because it was too warm to accumulate and it melted early. In Washington that was also the case. In California it was a combination of very low precipitation and warm winter. This illustrates that there's a very real economic connection between the warming climate and the way that we've historically used water and relied on nature to store it in the form of snow in the mountains.

ET: What human or ecological aspects do you think will be most impacted by changes in water availability? You mentioned agriculture is that, do you believe that will be the biggest?

PM: Agriculture is a fairly adaptable sector. A lot of planting decisions are made year-to-year and even perennials, fir trees and other things like that, can 00:41:00adapt to changes over a long period of time. But there are certainly big policy concerns. Water policy and water management that are part of the stress for agriculture. I think that probably the biggest economic impacts have come from things that we haven't even really anticipated yet. I look back over the last 30 years and one of the big surprises happened starting in the late '90s and that was the outbreak of the mountain pine beetle. Other bark beetles have devastated forests in the west and the first time that happened it was a complete surprise. I don't think anybody saw that coming. Biology can be a very surprising part of 00:42:00the climate change question. We understand the physics pretty well. You put more heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, it gets warmer. The physics is simple. The biology is difficult. We have invasive species. We have complicated relationships between predator, prey, habitat, resources and sometimes you'll change one thing and it cascades through the whole system and you'll see a top to bottom change across terrific levels of behavior, range, distribution, abundance of all kinds of species and so we've seen this happen in all kinds of different ecosystems, some stressed by climate change, some stressed by other reasons. We can expect that that kind of thing will happen but it's really hard to predict what the next big change will be.

ET: What do you see as potential issues that Oregon could face based on the 00:43:00Envision project within Willamette Valley? I understand that that being said there are different parts of Oregon that will be affected differently.

PM: One of the interesting results of that project was understanding the complexity of water demand and farm demand versus urban demand and a lot of it hinges on, and this wasn't all just from that project but from some research at Portland State University looked at water demand by neighborhood in Portland and there really is a sort of local culture. If everybody in your neighborhood lets their laws go brown in the summer and that's okay, then that neighborhood has much lower water use than another neighborhood where everybody wants green laws in the summer. That kind of thing really affects the water demand. In the case 00:44:00of our project, displacing farm land with urban land a lot depends on what the patterns of demand are. Indoor water use, whatever you use, goes back into the plumbing and eventually finds its way back in the Willamette River. If you're outside of the summer season where people are watering their lawns, adding people doesn't hugely change the total amount of water in the river. It does change what the water utilities have to provide but from an aggregate system it's pretty complicated. The other big factor, though, that we didn't really get into adequately was there are 13 dams on the Willamette River basin. They're all off the main stem Willamette.

They've helped really reduce the risk of flooding on the Willamette. We haven't 00:45:00had a really big flood since February of 1996. In a changing climate at some point we need to reevaluate how the spring flood management is done because what we saw in 2015 was very poor snowpack and yet to avoid a possible March flood, the reservoirs were drafted as normal but there wasn't enough snow or enough spring precipitation to refill the reservoirs so we went into what turned out to be a very dry summer with very low reservoirs. Everybody was following the rules. That's the way the system was set up. The project flagged this is something we're going to need to figure out. It would take another pretty massive study to look at how the risk of flooding is changing through time and how the reservoir management might be tweaked to have a higher probability of 00:46:00filling the reservoirs in the summer for recreation and other uses.

ET: Can you talk about how you got involved with the inter-governmental panel on climate change and what that experience was like?

PM: The inter-governmental plan on climate change was started in 1998 to provide independent scientific advice to the international policy process around climate change. I was aware of it happening when I was in graduate school. I got a copy of the first report which was about an inch thick. Actually I have it on my shelf here. Then in 1996 the second report came out. In 2001 a third report came out and that third report was the one that finally said humans are doing this. It was much more confident than the previous two reports. I used the IPC reports 00:47:00as references and to increase my own understanding and then I was encouraged to apply to be an author for the fourth assessment report by my long-time mentor Susan Solomon who was actually the one who figured out that the ozone hole had a primarily human cause. She had by that point gotten into climate change. Had been appointed as the co-chair of IPCC, the physical science volume, and she said we could use you. I had the opportunity to be an author for that fourth assessment report which was released in 2007 and then shared the Nobel Peace Prize and then I reupped for the fifth assessment report which came out in 2013.

ET: You worked on the cryosphere chapter for that report?

PM: Yeah, for both the fourth and fifth reports I worked on the chapter on 00:48:00what's called the cryosphere or basically everything frozen: ice, snow, permafrost.

ET: Did that experience influence your future career objectives or opportunities?

PM: I think it gave me an understanding of the value of a really rigorous report process and also how difficult it could be to really wrap your mind around all of the material around a given subject and accurately portray what is known and what's not known. The fact that I happened to be on board when the IPCC was awarded the Nobel peace prize was kind of a good career move. Completely inadvertent and unexpected. I'm always quick to point out I did not win the Nobel peace prize. I was part of the IPCC which won the Nobel peace prize. They 00:49:00mailed all of the authors a very nice rendition of the actual prize recognizing the work of the IPCC rested on the volunteers who did the work, even if we didn't actually show up in Stockholm for the award. It was a great opportunity to connect with people internationally and also to be part of something that got this really fabulous recognition.

ET: You've also been involved with the National Climate Assessment Committee, is that right?

PM: Yeah, the National Climate Assessment is something that congress requires every 4 years, requires 11 federal agencies to collaborate on producing a report. The U.S. Global Change Research Act passed in 1990.

It was around the same time that the IPCC got going and the first national climate assessment was produced in around 2000, so right around the end of the 00:50:00Clinton administration and I was involved as the lead for the Northwest report and the Northwest chapter. The second report came out during the Bush administration and it was a much smaller affair and then the third National Climate Assessment came out in 2014 and it was a huge effort and I was involved with that again. Now the fourth National Climate Assessment will come out in 2018 and I'm involved with that as well.

ET: Now I'm going to move on to some broader questions around climate change. What were your earlier conversations on climate change like and how have they shifted over time?

PM: You know I remember the very first time I heard of climate change was this class that I was taking in college. It was really about the dynamics of the 00:51:00atmosphere. Why air moves the way it does. I remember the professor saying the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going up and it's a heat trapping gas so we expect that someday we'll find out that it's been warming our planet. At that point there had been a little bit of warming observed but it had sort of, it was sort of in the noise level. It was not what you could say was unusual. Of course since then it's a totally different story. In the summer of '88 it turned into more of a national conversation. Then I found myself talking with people more about it, you know just in the public. Since about 2007 it's become much more polarized and a lot of that had to do simply with the fact that Al Gore took it on as a cause and came out with a movie An Inconvenient Truth and he was going around giving talks. So he did a lot in the way of public education but it also turned out as an unintended consequence that republicans 00:52:00and democrats shifted from being fairly similar in degree of acceptance of science to having it become almost a tribal thing. If you're a republican you almost can't get elected if you admit that humans are changing the climate, which is a really unfortunate development. The conversations that we have with the public now have to be much more nuanced and have to recognize that there are political differences that exist and to focus more on scientific evidence and on things that we know are happening and that people can observe are happening and on solutions and not beating people over the head with this is a catastrophe, these are things that are a moral failure on our part but rather we want to leave a better planet for our children so what role does renewable energy have 00:53:00in that? It's made it a much more difficult conversation to have in the general public and even within the scientific community I think it's become a more challenging topic to study in recent years and a lot of funding agencies are reluctant to be seen as sponsoring climate research. It's been a challenge.

ET: Do you think that's a challenge unique to American scientists in the way that climate change has become politicized in our country?

PM: Yeah, that is unique to the U.S.A. There are other countries where there's a minority of people who are outspoken about no climate change isn't happening or no humans are not responsible it's all natural. They're a very small percentage of the population in those places and more importantly there are no major 00:54:00political parties in those countries that espouse the view that basically it's all natural or we don't really know. Polling indicates that a fairly large majority of Americans accept the science, something like 2/3, but that is not reflected in the halls of congress. I should be clear: public statements from members of congress don't line up with that. There are indicates that a great many politicians who publicly are ambivalent or equivocal about whether humans are causing climate, in private they will say yes, we know that this is something we need to be working on solving.

We know that this is a big issue but everybody learned the lesson of a couple of Republicans in 2010 who lost primary elections because they were seen as a 00:55:00little too far outside the party orthodoxy about this subject, which is, again, it's really unfortunate.

ET: You've already touched on this, but maybe you could speak a little further about the community of climate change researchers at OSU and how that institute help facilities that community.

PM: One of the purposes of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute is to connect faculty and facilitate research on climate topics. We've put a lot of effort into finding out who those faculty are, not just at OSU but also PSU and U of O on the Bend campus and even Southern Oregon University. Reaching out to them and engaging with them, we created an annual conference, the Northwest Conference, that rotates among Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It's a good way for scientists to connect with managers, present their own work on the region. 00:56:00We've also facilitated a lot of proposal development efforts and some of those have been successful. Then we've had campus gatherings of all different sorts. We've had monthly lunches. We've had late afternoon get togethers. We've had lecture series. Every year we look for ways to connect faculty and get to know what they're doing and see if we can collaborate.

ET: Do you foresee diminished funding for climate change research during the Trump administration and if so, how do you foresee coping with that?

PM: Over the last several years, not just when Trump was president, the 00:57:00congressional directions have been downward for climate research. Agencies have tended to move away from being very explicit that it's climate. I think there's probably some climate research that is ongoing but isn't being presented that way. I think the bigger problem isn't just political. It's the fact that the federal government spends a huge and growing amount of money every year on middle class entitlements on servicing the national debt and it's just putting a squeeze on all sorts of discretionary programs. I think science, generally, not just climate science, but I think science generally is going to feel the squeeze more and more in coming decades because of those factors.

ET: What policy changes would you like to see happen in the U.S. with regard to 00:58:00climate change. Do you have thoughts given your research experience on effective changes that you think would help?

PM: I think the first policy change is just recognizing formally climate change is in fact caused by humans and that alone would actually be a really huge step. It would require the republican party to go back to where it was 10, 15 years ago on this issue and affirm more generally that science has something to tell us about the kinds of challenges that we are facing as a species. I think there's a 2-prong approach that's needed. One is to reduce emissions and there's been a policy debate for many years about a cap in trade approach to reduce 00:59:00emissions versus a carbon tax approach. States have tried both. I'm really not qualified to weigh in on which of those approaches is better. In Oregon and California because a tax requires a super majority, the cap in trade system is the more politically viable, but on a national scale if there were some way of incorporating the costs of carbon into the emissions activities then economists say that would produce a more efficient economy in that we're currently essentially externalizing the cost of emissions. Every negative consequence of climate change is not reflected in the price of burning fossil fuels.

Whichever of those approaches is used to... or a third approach. What the Obama 01:00:00administration attempted to do was simply pick away at it through regulations, so vehicle fuel efficiency regulations, power plant regulations, and that piecemeal approach was better than nothing. I'm not really going to pick a specific federal level policy and say that's what I'd like to see, but there's some very appealing incentives that have helped individuals make choices to be more carbon neutral, incentives for electric vehicles and solar panels are two examples. Again, that's just picking away at little pieces and really what we need is some kind of comprehensive approach and energy utilities have been asking for this for a long time. They want certainty and it's hard for business 01:01:00if they're concerned about what polices might eventually be enacted but they don't know yet which kind or once something is chosen then they can plan and they can act.

ET: Do you have thoughts on changes to public education that could help Americans better understand climate change or potentially change our behavior?

PM: Wow. I think more generally it's troubling that there are two connected developments in education. One is this sense that everybody's entitled to their own facts. Certainly, everybody's entitled to their own opinion but facts are facts. Often facts challenge what we believe or what we want and the sense that 01:02:00you can go on Goggle and look up your own set of facts and develop your own truth is an unfortunate byproduct of both the ubiquity of information through the internet and also the increasing tribalism where people affiliate more and more with people who think like them and our own little Facebook communities become these echo chambers where we all believe the same thing and we all get mad about the same thing and there's less of a sense that there are universal norms and universally accepted facts. Connected to that is a sort of erosion of critical thinking. I would love it if every graduate of OSU was able to grapple with the role of facts around a certain issue, whether it's climate change or 01:03:00GMOs or vaccinations or fluoride in drinking water. There's science around each of these issues. In some cases the science challenges political beliefs. If you want to pull a certain political belief in defiance of the facts, at least be honest that the facts say this, but I choose to believe that in spite of the facts instead of saying oh well, those 88 studies showing that fluoride is good for your teeth, those are bad studies and this one over here is the one I want and gravitate, pick your own facts.

ET: Are you hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change?

PM: It depends on whether I've had my coffee [laughs]. I'm inherently optimistic but I would say over the last couple of years there have been more and more 01:04:00occasions where I've just thought I've been at this for 20 years now talking about climate change in the public and I remember thinking 20 years ago that solutions were immanent, that we had the technology. There was enough public interest. It was so clearly good for us to transition away from fossil fuels for so many reasons and the clarity of what we were learning back then about the connection between climate change and wildfire, disappearing snowpack, rising sea levels, surely would be enough to motivate people to action. I remember having a conversation in 2004 with a colleague about why haven't people in America woken up to this and gotten on board?

What would it take? I remember him saying a really bad hurricane season. Later 01:05:00in 2004, four tropical storms or hurricanes crisscrossed Florida and caused all sorts of damage and yet it didn't really move the needle. Then 2005 happened with Katrina, Rita, Wilma-the biggest Atlantic hurricane season ever as far as we can tell. What we're seeing now, and there's a professor here at OSU who's done some interesting research about the way communities react to natural disasters. In fairly blue communities they're more likely to blame an event whether it's a tornado or a flood or whatever, on climate change, and their acceptance of doing something goes up. What she found is in communities that are more conservative, they actually have the opposite reaction. Not even natural disasters that we can link to climate change are persuasive. It just underscores 01:06:00how polarized the issue has become and that I think is to me the most discouraging part of this, is that the whole science enterprise itself is now suspect because of conclusions that we've reached.

ET: Well, that concludes our interview.

PM: On that cheery note!

ET: Thank you for your participation. I appreciate it.

PM: You're welcome.