(speaks foreign language)
-: Aloha kākou, aloha everyone.
Welcome to our office
of National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series
and our third Thursday webinar series
for Mokupāpapa Discovery Center in Hilo.
We have a great talk for you today on climate change
and how it's impacting Papahānaumokuākea.
But before we get started just quickly,
if you're having problems with your audio,
nine times out of ten, it's the audio output features,
input output features
that you have set up in your control panel.
So for this webinar, on the right hand side,
there's a GoToWebinar control panel.
There's a little audio tab in there.
Just make sure that your input and output
are set to whatever you're using,
whether it's speakers, whether it's internal audio,
or like in my case, my headphones.
So that's usually where people have problems.
Also, if you have questions during this presentation,
please type them into the question tab
on that same control panel.
And also we're going to be posting a lot of resources
and other things in the chat.
And if you have any technical problems,
please post them in the questions or the chat
and we're monitoring that
and we'll see if we can help you to resolve that
during the broadcast.
So again, thank you for joining us and we will get started.
So before we actually get into the presentation,
it's customary in Hawaiʻi to open things with protocol.
And with this, we have a wonderful name song or chant,
that was written for Papahānaumokuākea
and we're going to have our wonderful Malia Evans
present this to you.
So I'm gonna turn it over to Malia
and turn off my webcam and she will turn hers on
and over to you, Malia.
-: All right, aloha mai kākou.
Welcome to all of you, thank you for joining us.
So I'm gonna set the space for the giving
and the receiving of information and knowledge,
and hopefully by listening to the chant
and viewing the images,
you will understand why Papahānaumokuākea
is such a sacred place and so worthy of protection.
So I'm gonna turn off my camera and I will do the Oli.
(chanting in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian lanuage)
-: Wonderful, mahalo Malia.
And so before we get started,
just a little bit about our program.
So the office, NOAA's office of National Marine Sanctuaries
has 15 national marine sanctuaries across the country
and in the Pacific.
We have sites such as Stellwagen Bank,
which protects a huge bank habitat
off the northeast of the US,
Florida Keys down in the Gulf, between the Gulf of Mexico
and the Atlantic.
Flower Garden Banks, which was recently expanded
in the Gulf of Mexico.
A couple of new sites.
One is Mallows Bay-Potomac River
and also Wisconsin Shipwreck site.
So those are just designated as of this year.
So the program is expanding and protecting new areas.
On the West Coast, we have Olympic Coast
and four sites in California.
And as you move down into Hawaiʻi,
we have Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale
national marine sanctuary here in Hawaiʻi
and also Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
And down south,
we have National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa
and also Rose Atoll Marine National Monument.
So our site has 15 national marine sanctuary sites
and two marine national monuments,
protecting some of the most unique habitats
and bio for their biodiversity research interests
and many other special kind of system of underwater parks.
But we work for Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
We're the world's largest fully protected area,
582,000 square miles,
so that's about 1.5 million kilometers,
for many of our international participants
that are joining us today.
And it's the most remote part
of the most remote archipelago on earth,
stretching over 1400 miles across the Pacific Ocean.
And if you were to lay it over the United States,
you'd see a cover area from about New Orleans to Las Vegas.
So quite a vast area is the entire Hawaiian Archipelago.
Today our webinar hosts are myself, Andy Collins.
I'm the Education Coordinator
for Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
And as you saw earlier,
Malia Evans who's our
Education and Native Hawaiian Outreach Program Coordinator
and works as partner
with the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
And also Justin Umholtz who's our education coordinator.
And all three of us work over at wonderful facility in Hilo
our Mokupāpapa Discovery Center right on Bayfront in Hilo.
Unfortunately, we've been closed due to COVID
and trying to protect ourselves and our guests.
So we've been doing a lot of these online programs,
but we hope to reopen our facility soon.
And if you do get over to Hilo, please join us.
We are open Tuesday through Saturday 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
So hopefully we will all get through this safely
and we'll be able to reopen and greet our guests once again.
But today we have a very great, awesome presenter for you,
Dr. Dan A. Polhemus.
He is the manager of US Fish and Wildlife Service
for the Aquatic Ecosystem Conservation
and Environmental Contaminants Program
for the Pacific Islands Fish and Wildlife Service Office.
And he's held that position since 2010.
He's also an affiliate faculty position
at the University of Hawaiʻi
and research associate appointments
at Bishop Museum in Honolulu
and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Dan was born in California and grew up in Denver, Colorado,
receiving a BS from Colorado State University in 1980
and a PhD from the University of Utah in 1984.
Following this, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship
at the Smithsonian Institution from 1988 to '90.
Worked as an entomologist for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu
from '91 to '97,
returned to the Smithsonian as a research biologist
from '97 to 2005, and eventually returned to Hawaiʻi
to administer our Division of Aquatic Resources
from 2005 to 2010.
He's conducted extensive field work
in freshwater and nearshore marine ecosystems
throughout the Indo-Pacific,
including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands,
Fiji, Australia, French Polynesia, East Timor and Madagascar
with his most recent international work
involving protected area planning in the Maldive Islands,
impact assessments for the Mekong River dams,
evaluation of biodiversity conservation funding needs
in Papua New Guinea.
He's also the author of 218 peer-reviewed
scientific publications, two books
and numerous agency reports,
including climate change
vulnerability assessment for Papahānaumokuākea.
So please, with great honor, please welcome Dan.
And you can turn on your webcam.
I'm gonna turn over the presenter to you, my friend,
and you can take it away.
-: All right. I presume everybody
can see my screen and hear me.
So at this point.
-: I think you need to share your screen one more time.
-: Oh, share my screen, how's that?
-: There we go, that's it.
-: Are we good, all right.
Then we'll get started.
Today I'm going to talk about
how the world does not stand still,
how we're trying to understand
the dynamics of climate change in Papahānaumokuākea
and try to manage for it.
And I've got to make sure I understand how
to advance things here, here we go.
Okay, first of all, the place.
Andy provided you a nice introduction actually
to where it is and what it is.
It's the Northwestern two-thirds of the Hawaiian islands,
essentially the forgotten part of the archipelago,
where almost nobody lives.
It's got a long history of protection.
The islands themselves were designated
as National Wildlife Refuges
by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903
so over 100 years ago.
The surrounding waters were gradually
incrementally protected in various ways
by presidents, Clinton, Bush number two, and Obama,
most recently by Obama in 2016.
So the original Monument looked a bit like a kinky sausage.
The expanded Monument under Obama
looks like a big melted popsicle.
And in any case, it's large.
As Andy mentioned, it's over 500,000 square miles.
That makes it larger
than all of our national parks combined.
It's home to 7,000 Marine species,
nesting area for 14 million seabirds
and 90% of all the ESA listed Hawaiian green sea turtles.
It's got 140 native Hawaiian cultural sites.
It's home to some of the best preserved
shallow water shipwrecks from the Post-Contact era
dating to the 1800's.
And for all these reasons,
it was designated by the United Nations in 2010
as a World Heritage Site
on the basis of both its natural history
and cultural values.
The Monument is a remote place,
you have to go about 3,000 miles
to get anywhere else from the Monument.
And as a result, it's coral reefs are largely protected
from the effects of fishing, tourism,
land-based sources of pollution,
most of the things that,
cause impacts to reefs in other parts of the world.
But unfortunately, isolation still doesn't protect it
from what's happening on the rest of the planet.
And the planet, as we know,
is going through some conniptions lately.
This is the carbon dioxide curve from off of Mauna Loa,
the Mauna Loa Observatory here in Hawaii.
And as you can see, the most recent value
for atmospheric CO2 in July of this year
was 419 parts per million.
Now I'll admit I am now 63 years old.
So this curve started one year before I was born,
which means that during my lifetime CO2 has increased 33%,
which means I will never again see the atmosphere
that I knew when I was growing up
as a young boy in Colorado.
And where we go from here is largely up to us,
but there's a number of different pathways
that are plausible.
The problem is we're tracking
on the most aggressive emissions pathway.
And in fact, the recent pandemic,
although it caused a lot of economic slowdown,
really didn't put much of the dent
in our accumulation of emissions.
And so we are still tracking on a curve that right now,
without some serious policy solutions,
is going to take us to a place
where we're about four to six degrees centigrade
warmer than now by the end of the century,
which is well beyond the two degrees centigrade
that the experts tell us at the IPCC
we need to hold to,
to keep very bad things from happening.
If you look at where heat has gone since 1880,
you can see that we've essentially gone nowhere but up.
And 2020 tied 2016 as the hottest year on record,
finished off the hottest decade ever observed
since these records began in the 19th century
and 2021 is still in the running,
despite a cool polar vortex pattern
this spring in North America,
to perhaps equal or beat that.
For instance, July of this year,
is the hottest month ever in 142 years of record keeping.
So if you thought it was hot, it was.
And all that heat has to go somewhere.
A lot of it is going to the poles
and quite a bit of it is going to the Arctic
where there's been a 20% loss of polar ice since 1979.
So there's no place on the earth
that's changing faster than the Arctic.
However, what happens in the Arctic
comes back to affect the rest of us.
In 2021, the polar vortex flip,
normally the cold air is at the pole,
the warm air is in the south.
If you put warm air at the pole,
the cold air goes somewhere
and it comes down into North America and Eurasia.
This is called a warm poles-cold continents phenomenon
and when it happens,
you get something like what went on in Texas,
where Dallas was colder than the North Pole,
the electrical grid essentially ceased to function.
And you remember all the chaos that created
including basically driving up everybody else's
electrical bills across the continent.
Well, it turned out in the meantime,
you've got a mega drought
that's continuing to affect the Southwestern US
and has been for 20 years.
This is coupled with record high air temperatures
this past year.
I was in Death Valley on the 27th of June,
it was 120 degrees.
That's not unusual for Death Valley.
Portland, Oregon was only four degrees cooler
at 116 degrees and that is unusual.
This has serious impacts to terrestrial ecology.
Five of the largest six wildfires in California history
have occurred in the last five years.
The second largest ever is burning right now,
the Dixie Fire west of Lake Tahoe.
Similar fires are burning in Siberia, Turkey, Greece.
You've probably seen this on the news.
The point is that it's not just a North American problem,
it's a world problem.
And this also impacts hydrology.
Our big reservoirs in the Southwest,
upon which millions of people depend
are now only about 30% full.
And we're not going to go fill them back up anytime soon
because the next runoff season is not until next spring.
And so these are long-term problems
that are going to persist.
The point of all this is that
no matter where you live in the United States,
the effects of climate change are manifest around you.
And for details of all this,
you can see the recent IPCC report
that came out in the last two weeks.
But the problem we have with the Monument
is that these same sorts of effects end up hitting us there.
The climate-linked drivers that impact the Monument
include rising air and sea temperatures
and these create thermal stresses
for marine and terrestrial organisms.
We have rising sea levels,
which threaten to inundate many of our low lying islands
by the end of the century.
We have a higher incidence of severe storms
and associated waves, which cause shoreline erosion
and of course, this is only worse when you're building
on top of a base of sea level to begin with.
We have changes in precipitation,
which cause stresses to terrestrial biota,
particularly vegetation.
And we have changing ocean chemistry
in the form of decreasing ocean pH,
which affects how our corals to be calcify.
So let's go through some of these one by one.
The rising air temperatures.
Here's the plot globally.
These affect terrestrial ecosystems.
The problem we have in the Monument is that we don't have
any long-term terrestrial climate recording stations.
Why not, you ask?
Well, the National Weather Service
likes to put them on towers.
Towers and albatross don't mix.
And so the result is that we don't have a very good baseline
for where our air temperatures have gone in the Monument
over this past span of time from 1880 to 2000.
However, we do have good recording stations
in the main Hawaiian Islands.
And in 2019, we had our hottest summer ever.
Lihue on Kauai has a station with 114 years of record.
It broke its daily record 52 times.
And in one case for 20 consecutive days.
That's almost unheard of
at a station with this many years of record.
In fact, you can see in August and September,
essentially records were being broken
more or less every other day.
Honolulu was not far behind,
broke its daily record on 45 different days
at another station with over 100 years of record.
All that unprecedented, really.
Why does this matter?
Well, in the Monument, if things get hotter,
albatross normally incubate their eggs.
The problem starts to become,
they can't keep them cool enough,
even though they sit on them.
And if you're a sea turtle nest
and you get heated up, it influences development.
And therefore most of the hatchling come out female
and you end up with very few males.
So these air temperatures really do have an impact
on terrestrial wildlife and marine wildlife.
Ocean heat content is also steadily rising
and it's tracking fairly similar
to the air temperature curve.
Here you can see the sea surface temperatures here
from 1880 to 2020.
The sea surface temperature we have a very good handle on
cause we can get a daily reading by satellites.
And so if you go to the NOAA Coral Reef watch page,
then you can see exactly where we're going on any given day
with sea surface temperature.
Increasing ocean temperature, however,
is not evenly distributed on a global scale.
Some places warm or cool more than others.
This is a plot from the last 25 years or so.
And it shows you that the far northwestern end
of the Monument up near Midway and Kure
is actually heating slightly faster
than the main Hawaiian islands are.
These trends in sea and air temperature tend to be linked
to the El Nino Southern Oscillation pattern
that's known as ENSO.
And what we've got here is a plot that shows
how ENSO is varied from warm red El Nino phases
to cool La Ninas.
Notice that around 2015,
we had a good solid El Nino that showed up in the Pacific.
That had an effect on the Monument
in a rather dramatic way,
in regards to significant coral bleaching.
This pattern of ENSO rides on the back
of a much broader cycle
called the Pacific decadal oscillation,
which isn't really decadal,
it runs on about 15 to 20 year cycles.
We were in a cooler limb of the PDO.
We're now in a warm limb of the PDO,
which means our heat related issues
will probably simply be amplified
over the next 10 years or so.
That's not helpful, but it's simply the way it is.
Okay, rising ocean temperatures lead to coral bleaching.
Corals spit out their symbiotic zooxanthellae,
bleach and eventually die.
The first recorded instance of this in Hawaii
was about 20 years ago and it was up in the northwestern.
Because even though we're further north,
that means we're more temperate,
we're colder in the winter, but we're warmer in the summer.
As it turns out now, bleaching has moved down
into the main Hawaiian islands as well.
And so we picked it up twice in the last eight years or so.
So rather than becoming something that we never saw before,
this is now becoming something
that we're seeing fairly regularly.
And here's the impacts in the Monument.
I mentioned the 2015 El Nino.
At Lisianski Island,
we lost 95% of the coral cover on the east side.
It dropped from 70% to 1%.
And yes, these pictures show exactly the same reef
in 2014 and then in 2015.
And so losses of this sort
are simply not easily recovered from,
but it shows you what happens
when we get warm waters in the Monument in a strong El Nino.
And such events are predicted to become more frequent.
By 2030, every pixel in the Indo-Pacific
and the Atlantic with coral in it,
will probably bleach to some extent every year.
That doesn't mean it will be the extent of bleaching
that you just saw an example from Lisianski,
but what it does mean is that,
there will be some degree of heat stress on every coral,
everywhere by mid-century.
Sea level rise is another one of our major challenges
in the Monument.
This is the trendline from 1993 up to 2021.
This is the satellite altimetry record.
However, we have tide gauges in the Monument
that go back 74 years.
We have Honolulu's tide gauge that goes back over 100.
And when you lay the tide gauge records
on the satellite record, they match very well.
So essentially you can pull this same trend line back
to about the late 1800's and it still holds.
At the moment sea level's rising
at about 3.4 millimeters per year.
That translates out to about a meter of ocean rise
over the course of the century.
And given that we're starting to see some increasing melt
in Greenland and Antarctica and other land-based ice sheets,
this could well be a conservative estimate.
But at the moment, my general mantra is, add a meter.
Look at any shoreline and add a meter
and think about where that leads you.
Once again, as with the emissions,
where all this goes is somewhat up to us
because a lot of the rise in sea level
is in fact due to thermal expansion of the waters.
And therefore it's basically due to emissions and heating.
These are the same emission scenarios
that I showed you for temperature,
just plotted on to sea level.
Realize going out here to about 2,300,
but what it does show you is that
you have a reasonable expectation of a rise of one meter,
possibly 1.5 meters, that's three to five feet,
by the end of this century.
And if you happen to be a low lying protected area,
like the Monument for the most part,
that is indeed a challenge.
Sea level rise just like sea temperature,
is not evenly distributed.
It goes up faster in some places than others
for a variety of reasons.
And what you can see is that once again,
the northwestern end of the Monument
up toward Midway and Kure and Pearl and Hermes
has shown a somewhat faster rate of rise
than the remainder of the archipelago.
How do we model this?
Well, you can basically just project forward and say, "Okay,
sea level is going to come up X amount.
And let's just pull this up on the shorelines of the islands
as if everything was sitting in a nice calm bathtub."
And for Laysan Island that gives you the result
shown to the left.
However, people like Curt Storlazzi at USGS Santa Cruz
have then put wave forcing on top of this.
And what you see is that your vulnerabilities,
once you add in waves, are considerably greater.
And so you can see that
if you're on the windward side of Laysan,
at various future sea-level states, if you add waves,
suddenly you're seeing a whole set of vulnerabilities
you didn't anticipate before.
It gets even more dramatic
if we go to Midway and look at Eastern Island,
this was the island that was the airbase
during the Battle of Midway.
It's now inhabited by birds.
But in fact, it doesn't take much
in the way of sea level rise and wave forcing
to potentially inundate quite a lot of this islet
on a periodic basis.
Most of our operations are in fact based now
at Sand Island on Midway.
And this is where we have a major airstrip,
it's a major emergency diver point
for transpacific airliners.
If they can't use it,
we have to reshuffle all of the airline traffic
in the Northern Pacific.
And what you can see is that,
even at relatively modest rates of sea level rise,
we've got some issues with the airstrip at Midway.
So this was a clear cause for concern.
This is our base of operations.
This is an important site for the FAA,
and it's also extremely vulnerable to sea level rise
and wave forced sea level rise.
In addition, there's something called crossover points
that Dickinson talked about in a paper in 2009.
As it turns out, an islet on an atoll
is basically a carbonate platform, which is hard,
overlaid by alluvium, which is soft.
So you don't have to go completely over the top of an island
before it starts to fall apart under attack by waves.
All you have to do is get above
the carbonate foundation of the islet
and it starts to erode away much more quickly.
And this is what Dickinson called the crossover point.
There's a reasonable possibility we'll be there
in the Monument and many other parts of the Pacific by 2050.
Precipitation, very much like air temperature
in the Monument, the issue that we've got,
is that we've never had good long-term rainfall gauging
in the Monument the same way
that we haven't had good temperature gauging
because it's the same sort of weather station
that doesn't agree with albatross.
So we do however, have very excellent data
from the main Hawaiian islands.
The plantations back then cared about water,
they gauged rainfall and stream flow extensively.
And Delwyn Oki at the USGS
did a very elegant study where he showed
that over the course of the century,
rainfall and stream based flow
had slowly but steadily declined throughout the mains.
And there's no reason to think
that this same pattern hasn't occurred
in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as well.
Now at the same time, a warmer atmosphere holds more water
and people are starting to learn this.
If you lived in Houston in August 2017,
you got 50 inches in six days
when Hurricane Harvey showed up.
That was enough to cause a tremendous amount of flooding
and damage in Houston.
What's more remarkable, however, in the Hawaiian islands
is that we got the same amount in only 24 hours
at Waipa on Kauai on the 15th of April in 2018.
So that's nearly 50 inches of rain in one day.
And needless to say it all went somewhere,
but Kauai isn't Houston
and so it wasn't quite as catastrophic,
but I'll tell you the people who went through that,
it sure made an impression on them.
The bottom line is such events
may become more common in the future.
So the point is that you may not have more rainfall
evenly distributed through a year,
but you may have more isolated, extreme events,
which actually come with their own destructive potential.
Tropical storms under a warming climate.
Actually, interestingly enough, decrease in number
because we're changing something called
the adiabatic lapse rate.
But the individual storms themselves are often stronger
and what's most worrisome is they've shown a recent trend
of intensifying far more quickly.
Hurricane Walaka passed through Papahānaumokuākea
on the 3rd and 4th of October 2018.
This was a storm that started well east of us,
then got west, then hooked north.
Nobody was on French Frigate Shoals to see what happened.
However, we were able to use satellite instruments
to estimate that the wind speeds
were somewhere between 130 and 150 miles an hour.
We were able to track the center
by the radius of 12 foot seas.
And we do know that it basically went
from a category one to a category four in only 30 hours.
And as noted, this mirrors sort of a global trend
of rapid intensification of such storms.
The results in this case were basically catastrophic.
Here is East Island at French Frigate Shoals.
The way it looked in May
and the way it looked in October after the storm.
This was one of our major sea turtle nesting sites
in the Monument.
And you can see that it was essentially eliminated.
There's still a little piece sticking out in October,
but it's not even in the same place it was before.
So a fairly consolidated vegetated island
with a lot of sea turtle nests simply vanished overnight.
Now it has been shoaling back in.
And so we may pick some of this islet up again,
but certainly not for a long time
in the same form that it previously had.
And at the moment it's more like a shifting sandbar
than it is a stable island.
At French Frigate Shoals also, we have Tern Island.
This used to be one of our bases of operation
because the navy turned it
into an unsinkable aircraft carrier
by building an airstrip on it back in World War II.
Thus, it looks like a rectangle now.
However, you can see that on the right-hand side
from below, waves washed in interestingly
from inside the lagoon
and pushed a tremendous amount of sand
up over the old airstrip and the winds of the storm managed
to tear most of the remaining infrastructure to pieces
and pilot up in the lee,
where it created an entanglement hazard
for sea turtles and monk seals.
So we had to send people up there to scoop all that out
and get rid of it on a barge.
And in addition, this wave based erosion
is starting to expose old contaminant sites
because the Navy had buried old transformers
at one end of the island,
and they're now leaking PCBs in the waters.
So this shows you that there's a variety
of translated effects that end up
when you start having coastal erosion of this type.
Now I noted that the waves here came from within the lagoon
because of the way that the storm was spinning
when it passed.
However, on the outside of the lagoon,
that would be in the upper left,
outside of the surrounding reef,
we had one of our most beautiful reefs in the Monument.
We called it Rapture Reef and features in many
of the pictures that are on our Monument management plan,
and many of our websites,
essentially Walaka wiped it off the map
and left it as essentially a gray carbonate wasteland.
How long will it take this reef to recover?
We really don't know, whether it can
or will in a rapidly changing ocean.
It's just one more thing we now monitor
when we send our research cruises up to the Monument.
Finally changing ocean chemistry.
Isn't really due to change,
but it is due to a change in atmospheric chemistry,
which then is reflected in the ocean.
People call this ocean acidification.
I don't actually like that term because the ocean is basic
and whatever it becomes acid we're all dead.
But what happens is the ocean is taking up
an increasing amount of carbon dioxide,
and therefore it is demonstrating that declining pH value.
It's still not acidic,
but it's certainly less basic than it used to be.
And in this case, unlike all the other curves,
a declining curve is bad.
Because what this does is this lowers
the aragonite saturation point,
which makes it much harder for corals
to build their hard skeletons.
And we actually can show that
this phenomenon is playing out in the waters around Hawaii,
because there's a station out in the open ocean
about 100 kilometers north of Hawaii
that the University of Hawaii
has run since 1988 called Station Aloha.
And they've been sending research vessels out here
to take water chemistry samples and analyze what's going on.
And you can see a clear rise and dissolved CO2
and a clear decline in ocean pH.
So this is a pretty good indication
that the waters around the Monument are actually seeing
a change in their chemistry overall,
how this actually translates out
into real biological effects
in nearshore waters is more complicated
because there's a lot real metabolic signals
that play out there.
But the point is that yes, in Hawaii,
we are seeing the results
of quote unquote ocean acidification.
And this, like other variables
plays out unevenly around the planet.
This is recent data for EPA
and it shows that ocean chemistry declining pH
is changing more rapidly,
once again up towards Midway, Kure, Pearl and Hermes,
than it is in the remainder of the model.
So these are our projected values for the Monument
and we take a look at all of this.
Going forward, ocean heat content, no doubt about it,
it's going to exhibit a steady long-term rise.
Our sea surface temperatures will probably, by 2100.
In terms of sea level, it will certainly continue to rise
20 to 35 centimeters by mid century,
a meter to a meter and half by the end of the century.
The crossover point I mentioned,
where we might start to have
an increased vulnerability of our islands,
will basically be reached potentially by mid-century.
And that could happen at anywhere from about, yeah,
slightly over half a meter to slightly under a full meter.
Severe storms and associated waves, we've already seen,
it doesn't take very many severe storms
passing through the Monument
to cause a tremendous amount of damage.
And we are seeing storms tracking further western.
Changes in precipitation, it's hard to predict,
however, a warmer atmosphere does hold more water.
So the likelihood is that you're probably going to pick up
larger episodic localized rainfall events,
but your overall trend, could potentially be drier.
It's just now and then you may get drowned
in the midst of a drought.
And then finally, ocean chemistry,
looks like ocean surface pH will decline
down to about 7.9 by 2015, perhaps to 7.7 by 2100,
which creates continuing problems for corals
in terms of our aragonite saturation.
We have question time.
Malia: Okay, friend, We are going to be launching a poll.
So what's our question?
Our question is, What is the current average rate
of global sea level rise?
Your choices are 1.5 millimeters per year,
2.75, 3.42 or 4.80.
If you're in full screen, you wanna pop out,
using your control panel, to answer this question.
So go ahead and submit your answers.
Let's see how many of you were paying attention
with all of this wonderful,
this very dense data that Dan is sharing with us.
All right, so we'll give you about five more seconds.
We have about 60% of you have voted
and I am going to close the poll
and let's see what the audience has voted.
Okay, so Dan, we've got a majority of the audience
at 52% indicated 3.42 millimeters a year.
How did our audience do?
-: They did well, that means half of them were listening.
(Dan laughs)
No, that's great.
It is correct, 3.42 millimeters per year,
which averages out to about a meter of sea level rise
over the course of the century.
Okay, we'll continue.
Okay, I've showed you all the bad things that could be,
or are happening to the Monument because of climate change.
So what can we do about it?
Well, back in 2007,
about a year after the Monument had been created
by President Bush, the co-trustee agencies
developed a Monument management plan,
and it should be mentioned that
the management of the Monument is unusual,
in that it is co-managed by two federal agencies,
NOAA and The Department of Interior and the State of Hawaii.
And within those three entities,
there are seven total different programs
that are represented on a Monument management board.
So we have an interesting co-management arrangement here,
where a variety of voices are heard.
And this plan was developed,
it's actually five volumes long, it's available online,
if you really want to read it,
it's fairly dense and it covers just about everything.
But the one thing it did not cover was climate change.
Because back in 2007,
politically climate change was not something
that we were encouraged to address or talk about.
However, by 2010 things had changed both politically
and in terms of our recognition of the problem,
and it was evident that this had to be corrected.
So the co-trustee agencies made a statement
that climate change was actually,
the most significant threat to the overall integrity
of Papahānaumokuākea as a protected area.
The other major item in the running was invasive species,
which a line on a map also doesn't stop, we found out.
So in 2011, a steering committee was formed
to develop a climate change action plan
that would contain an adaptation strategies
for the Monument.
This steering committee had 13 members
and we met twice a month for five months
and came up with an options paper
that identified key impacts
and potential responsive actions.
However, that was just our view.
And so rather than succumb to group thing,
we then convened a series of expert workshops
that would have people review our findings,
have a look at research and monitoring strategies,
assess the potential impact,
consider what management responses we could implement
and how we could engage diverse audiences in doing all this.
The first workshop was in 2012,
it had 30 different natural resource managers,
cultural practitioners, academic scientists
with expertise across a wide variety of fields.
NOAA was kind enough to support it
through the Coral Reef Conservation Program.
And they came up with a draft climate change action plan.
We then took this into another workshop in 2013
with a larger group of 50 managers, cultural practitioners
and scientists, whose job was to review that plan
and then suggest strategies
by how we could actually implement
the actions that we proposed.
This was then distilled down into
a draft action plan for consideration by
the Monument management board, the MMB,
they got this in April of 2015,
they then went through a review and comment phase.
And we had a final draft by around 2016, early 2016.
Okay, what did this plan propose?
Well, among other things it said,
you need a pretty good instrumentation and data plan,
so that you can implement research and monitoring.
You need to understand what's going on up there.
And as of course I've pointed out,
we still have some significant data gaps,
particularly in terms of terrestrial, climate variables,
like air temperature and precipitation.
You need to implement appropriate adaptive actions,
to the extent possible.
But climate change is sort of like a big hammer
that hits you over the head
and it's pretty hard to make it stop.
But the one thing you can do is you can monitor the status
and trends of your key ecosystems and species.
You can determine what sorts of activities
that you might consider permitting
or not permitting at particular sites
that are either being impacted,
are becoming more sensitive to the climate change actions.
And then even more controversially,
you can consider whether in the future you might take
direct actions to restore lost reefs or islets,
through engineering solutions
or other sorts of interventions like replanting coral.
You also have to account
for climate change in your operations
because as you saw the airstrip you have today
may not be the airstrip you have in 20 years.
Your shorelines are clearly going to change.
So just assuming that you can go about business as usual
in a logistical way is not a very good assumption.
We of course, also wanted to be part of regional
and national efforts to raise awareness about the problem,
because the more people who understand this,
the closer we might be to policy solutions
and we wanted to serve as an international example
of how this stuff could be done.
The revised plan went to the board in April, 2016.
The federal agencies all approved it.
The state of Hawaii had some additional
public process aspects that needed to be dealt with.
But the bulk of the plan,
except for the proposed actions, was then published
as a peer-reviewed Vulnerability Assessment
in the NOAA science in the sanctuaries series in 2016.
And here it is, you can find this online.
And so everything I've just been telling you
is covered in far more detail in this document.
It contains most of the information in this talk
and it forms the basis
for the actual climate change action plan,
which is still in the process of finalization.
You see, well, what's taking so long?
Okay, we had the plan in place in June of 2016.
If you'll recall something else happened
in November of 2016, we had an election
and suddenly the political climate regarding climate change
changed very dramatically.
And so we essentially lost about four years.
Question number two, it's question time again.
Malia: Okay, here we go.
So, a pool of warmer than average water
in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific
is typical of which ENSO state?
So go ahead and log your vote.
Is it La Nina, El Nino or the ENSO neutral.
So let's see about 40% of you have voted,
we'll do about five more seconds,
give you a chance to log in your vote,
and let's see what that pool
of warmer than average water is typical of.
All right, I'm gonna close down the poll
and let's see what our audience members have voted.
So 83% voted that it is El Nino,
are the results correct, Dan?
-: Yeah, They're right.
And that's great because I didn't even go
over El Nino that heavily.
So it means they've obviously been tracking this
independent of just my talk.
Yes, it's El Nino.
When we have warmer water in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific.
Right now, we actually happen to be in La Nina.
So we've had cooler than average water.
And as you'll see, we're trending into ENSO neutral.
Okay, where are we today?
As I mentioned, we sort of lost a few years
when the political winds shifted after 2016.
However, we now have an administration
that takes climate change very seriously.
And the board is dusting off
that climate change action plan.
We need to update the science a little bit,
but all the basic issues haven't gone away.
We still face problems with rising temperatures,
with sea level rise, with changing ocean chemistry,
et cetera.
And so now finally, it looks like we've got some momentum
going to perhaps finalize that plan
and put it into motion.
In the meantime, here we are right now,
this is where we were in the world
from January to July of this year.
And remember I mentioned that July was the hottest month
ever recorded during any time from 1880 to now.
Okay, well, you can see we're in an interesting spot
in the Hawaiian Islands,
because we've got cooler than average temperatures
down here in the mains.
And in fact, it's been for the first time in years
or rather pleasant summer.
Whereas up in the northwestern or ends up in the Monument,
we actually are running
several degrees Celsius warmer than average.
And if you wanna look at that in the context of how much
you'll see that the main ones islands are anywhere
from near average to slightly over,
we're running much warmer than average,
by the time you get up into the Monument proper.
So we are a little warm up there this year,
in terms of your general ocean temperatures
and air temperatures.
You'll notice that one little,
kind of cool pixel down there, over Texas,
because that's still the lingering signature
of that polar vortex freeze out that they had in the spring.
And even a record hot July, couldn't erase that footprint.
Okay, degree heating weeks are how we take look
at how much heat is accumulating in the ocean.
And you can see on this plot, this is from coral reef watch
that the heat is mostly concentrated up north.
Well, I told you the Arctic is warming faster
than any other part of the planet.
And of course this is summer in the Northern Hemisphere,
so you wouldn't be accumulated beat down in the Southern,
but here in the Northern Hemisphere,
you can see that most of the heat works north of us
by a fair degree, okay?
It's up there in the big bite below Alaska,
between us and British Columbia and the Bering Sea.
So we're not actually where the heat is.
And that's a good thing.
If you wanna take a look at it
in terms of global sea surface temperature anomalies,
in other words, how much hotter is the sea surface
than it should be, then you can see that once again,
there's a nice hot red bullseye up there
between Hawaii and Alaska,
but the Monument kind of runs through that yellow area
between that and the warm water coming across
and the Kuroshio Current from Japan.
So the take home message here is that
on this particular year, we're not actually warming up
as badly as we have in some previous years.
And this is your sea surface temperature block from March.
Now, it's not really hot in the Monument in March
because you're coming out of winter,
but you can see we were running perhaps four degrees C
warmer than we should have gone.
And this was a cause for some concern coming into summer
because you built on this, this is a setup for bleaching.
You can see that by contrast down by the big island,
by Hilo, we were actually running cooler.
All right, fortunately, by the time we got to last week,
a lot of that anomaly had abated.
We're only about a degree warmer than we ought to be.
This is not going to be enough to bleach our corals
and NOAA agrees with this.
This is their 90% stress level probability chart.
You can see that at the worst,
we have a probability of reaching
a warning level of Midway by fall,
but warning isn't bleaching and my thought is that
we're simply not going to build up thermal inertia
to have a problem in the Monument this year.
But you can see the islands are trailing up there,
we're right in that little sweet spot
between two areas of higher stress.
If you look at precipitation, you can see we've been dry.
It's been a dry summer this year.
La Ninas often create wet cool winters,
whereas El Ninos create winter drought.
Well, we'll see what happens this coming winter,
but at least for now,
we've had a very dry summer in the islands.
And that pattern probably is also reflected
up in the Monument.
And then looking forward, you can see,
this is your model ensemble of climate models.
If you're below the black horizontal line, you're in La Nina
if you're above it, you're in El Nino,
and if you're on the line, you're basically ENSO neutral.
You can see we were in La Nina,
we are basically trending back under most models
to ENSO neutral into the winter and next spring.
And once again, this is a fairly benign place to be
because we tend to have a lower incidence of hurricanes
and La Nina and ENSO neutral,
and we had tend to have less coral bleaching.
So these are our current conditions.
We started out cooler than the record hot 2020,
although after July, we're trying to catch up.
This was due to that displace polar vortex pattern
in the late winter and spring.
But the Northern Pacific did carry
excess heat content through the winter
in the northeast of the Monument.
Fortunately that simply didn't come down to effect us.
La Nina conditions are waning, we are going to ENSO neutral,
that's probably going to continue through the winter
and that's fine, that won't cause any huge problems.
There is a possibility of some minor thermal stress,
the Monument reefs by late summer to early fall,
that's when we max out our thermal inertia.
But really it's unlikely that that carry over heat
is going to cause any real problems for the corals.
Tropical cyclone formation is generally low during a La Nina
and it's not heavily favored during ENSO neutral
and this year we haven't had anything really kind of close.
Although we may have on one ground, give us a bit of rain,
this coming weekend.
And finally, sea level rise continues to rise
three to five millimeters a year.
That's a problem that is not going away.
And in fact it may increase
depending on what happens with land-based ice
in Greenland and Antarctica,
because thermal expansion of the oceans
will continue to pace.
And so a lot of the additional rise
would probably be for land-based ice sheets.
So how do we adapt to climate change?
Part of it is simply by monitoring these vital signs
on a quarterly basis, providing reports to the board
and to be quite honest,
hoping we dodged bullets like we are this year.
Here's an interesting fact.
If you are age 30 or younger
and you are listening to this talk,
there has been no month in your life,
that has had below average global temperatures
based on records from 1880 to the present.
So if you are 30 or younger, congratulations,
you are at least in this regard above average,
the bottom line to take away on all this
is isolation is no defense.
Papahānaumokuākea is out there
in the middle of the Northeast Pacific.
It is basically as protected as it can be
from most major coral reef stressors,
such as over fishing, land-based sources of pollution,
over tourism, et cetera.
However, that still hasn't kept us from experiencing
rising seas, island over wash, rising ocean temperatures,
coral bleaching, an increased incidence of severe storms
and all these things will continue to happen,
because the only real solution to these symptoms
is to address the underlying causes of climate change.
And at the moment we simply have not developed a political
and social will as a country or as a planet to do so.
So the future is here.
The real question is how do we manage for it?
And with that, I'll take questions.
-: Okay, thank you so much.
And my hats off to you for fitting that much information
in the short period of time we have.
Really appreciate the amount you were able to share,
we have a ton of a question.
So, as I mentioned earlier,
most of these we're gonna have to,
Dan respond to via email
and we'll send them out to everybody,
but why don't we start
with one of the early questions that came in.
How much of climate change is natural
and how much is caused by humankind?
-: You know, there are long scale.
So, well I showed you for instance
the Pacific decadal oscillation.
I mean, there are cycles that run cooler,
warmer across the Pacific and in the Atlantic as well.
However, I think at this point,
the scientific consensus is that unequivocally
the majority of climate change
that we're now seeing as being caused by human activity.
-: And those sites that I shared
do offer some estimates I believe--
-: Yeah I do look the reason IPCC report.
That's a good place to go,
because it just came out two weeks ago.
-: We had another question related to language.
So it says, Dan you keep using the word certain
when you were talking about projected values,
are we certain 100% chance
or do you mean to say likely to raise?
-: Yeah, no, my mistake on that one,
there's always a bound of uncertainty around any estimates.
As I think Niels Bohr once said
prediction is very difficult,
especially in regard to the future.
So no, none of this is certain,
but I think we have a high degree of confidence
in many of those projected values
that I showed in the model.
-: And folks, if you do visit the IPCC report,
you'll notice that there are statements
based on degrees of certainty
based on the amount of research agreement.
So just take into account.
Do I have time for one more Andy?
Andy: Yeah, one would be good.
-: Okay, well here's one specific to coral reefs?
What are the implications for human survival
regarding coral reef lost?
Can humanity feed itself without coral reefs?
-: Well, coral reefs obviously are important areas
in terms of fisheries.
There's quite a lot of people in the Pacific
that rely on near shore fisheries that are underpinned
by healthy coral reef ecosystems.
Realize also the coral reefs are essentially
living infrastructure that buffer your coastlines
from significant impacts from storms and waves and such.
Okay, so if you lose that and have to rebuild it,
by using concrete or whatever,
it's tremendously expensive
and you still can't do the same job corals do.
Because corals fix themselves
rather than you having to go back out and fix them.
-: All right, and we'll get back to, lets see,
warming holds threats for ocean currents in many locations.
Are there any ocean current effects anticipated
for Papahānaumokuākea other than islet?
-: I'm not aware of studies in that regard,
but doesn't mean they don't exist.
I think most of that worry has actually centered
on the Atlantic
and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation,
the AMOC, which is essentially the Gulf stream system
that runs up the east coast of the United States
and across the Europe.
I think there's worries that melting of Greenland
and a creation of a cold pool down south of Greenland
could disrupt that circulation.
We don't have anything quite the same in the Pacific,
but that isn't to say there aren't similar vulnerabilities.
-: All right, and if I could squeeze one more question
or are we out of time?
-: No, no, we could do one more.
-: So you had a lot of appreciation for your presentation
the question is, are there areas
both horizontal vertical inside of PMNM,
which are more stressed by changes than others
and whether there're reasons for those differences?
-: Within the Monument, you mean?
Well, we only have two really high islands.
We have Nihoa and we have Mokumanamana,
previously known as an Necker.
Everything else in the Monument is essentially
a low lying atoll or a slightly secondarily raised atoll.
So essentially 10 of our 12 islands are
at extreme risk from sea level rise,
if it really does run to a meter and a half
by the end of the century.
-: Great, thank you all and
(mumbles)
-: Thank you Dan, for a wonderful talk.
That was very fascinating and terrifying at the same time,
(laughs)
but we really appreciate you joining us today.
And as a last little tidbit as education,
that would feel deplete
if I did not leave you with some thoughts,
the current thinking around
what we can do for climate change is that
although individual actions are great,
like driving less, flying less, certainly things like that,
eating lower on the food chain,
really the big changes that need to happen
have to happen at country level
and things like that.
Switching our energy choices to more renewable sources
and changes in our manufacturing
and things like that.
So what you can do there is certainly keep track of that
and try to advocate for those at a community
and a country level,
and that's really where the changes will take place,
that need to happen in order for us to
at least arrest the continued progress
towards putting more CO2 into the atmosphere.
So thank you for joining us.
So this webinar will be archived on our sanctuary site.
As you can see, there is with our other, sorry,
with our other presentations,
we have a whole suite of presentations in there now
from Papahānaumokuākea.
So you can practically take a course in Papahānaumokuākea,
by watching all those.
They give us about two weeks to put that up,
we need to caption it for accessibility,
and then it will be up.
You will also get a certificate of attendance
from attending this broadcast
for an hour's worth of professional development.
You'll get that in your email by tomorrow, probably,
and also please join us next month on September 16th,
when another scientist from Fish and Wildlife Service
will be really beautiful hopeful message,
because a lot of the great work that they've been doing
in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands
around terrestrial birds has been extremely successful,
including these wonderful lace and teal,
it's an endemic bird in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands.
And so Dr. Sheldon Plentovich
will be talking to us next month.
So please sign up for that.
You're gonna get an email about that soon.
And also don't forget to take our survey before you leave.
We really need this information to support these webinars
and things that we can do that you might,
that we're not doing,
that you might want us to be able to present on.
And lastly, the questions will all be sent off to Dan
and those that aren't answered he'll to answer those,
and we'll send them back out to everybody
who registered for this broadcast.
So mahalo for joining us today again.
Mahalo Dan that was excellent and stay safe and take care.
Aloha.