Science to the Rescue

Last September, as students were settling in for the fall semester, devastating bushfires were raging in Australia, which was in the midst of its hottest and driest year on record. By January, the still-smoldering fires had consumed more than 42 million acres (a swath roughly the size of Florida) and destroyed 2,800 homes. Thirty-three people and millions of animals were killed. Images of cities such as Sydney and Melbourne shrouded in a toxic gauze of smoke were sadly familiar.

Last summer, wildfires in the Amazon basin destroyed an estimated 2.4 million acres of tropical rainforest and cast a similar smoky pall over Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo. In 2018, California experienced its worst wildfire season ever, with more than 8,000 fires burning 1.9 million acres and claiming 103 lives.

On a planet that just experienced its hottest decade on record, the disastrous and deadly effects of climate change have become impossible to ignore.

“These fires have been wake-up calls,” says Mathew Barlow, a professor in the Department of Environmental, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences (EEAS) who studies how climate variability and change are leading to more severe weather.

Indeed, as the frequency and intensity of wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes and floods continue to grow, climate change has emerged as arguably the greatest challenge facing our planet.

“Climate change is an existential problem that affects every facet of our lives, from food security and disease control to migration,” says Prof. Daniel Obrist, chair of the EEAS department.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver-bullet solution for a problem on the scale and magnitude of climate change, no ingenious scientific discovery that will suddenly undo a century’s worth of environmental damage. That is why faculty and student researchers from the Kennedy College of Sciences are addressing climate change on multiple fronts. They’re in the field studying how the planet has evolved and how it’s responding to change today. They’re in the lab developing ways to turn carbon dioxide into fuel for cars. They’re using computer models to predict how increasing global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions might affect weather patterns and ecosystems in the future. And they’re using their findings to educate decision-makers at every level—from world leaders at the United Nations’ climate negotiations to campus leadership setting UMass Lowell’s sustainability goals.

“Science is really the only way that we have to understand how our actions can affect our global climate and environment, and also the potential future impacts that we face,” says Assoc. Prof. of Environmental Science Juliette Rooney-Varga, one of UML’s leading voices on the climate change issue. “We have no other way but science to make sense of them.”

Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Julie Chen says KCS faculty have embraced a multidisciplinary approach to climate change, which she says is “necessary for such a complex challenge.”

“KCS faculty are contributing to our understanding of the biosphere and how earth systems—air, water, land, living organisms—interact with each other and are affected by human activities,” Chen says. “They are also leaders in educating our students, the general public, and policy and decision-makers about the science and societal impact.”

Here’s a look at some of that work being done around the Kennedy College. 

Knock on any door at the Olney Science Center, and you’ll find an expert who agrees: A leading cause of climate change is the increase in greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of fossil fuels. When scientists at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory began measuring global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in 1958, it was 315 parts per million (ppm). In 2018, it was 407.4 ppm—its highest in the last 800,000 years.

“Sooner or later, if there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere, we’re going to begin to notice it,” says Prof. David Ryan, chair of the Chemistry Department, who explains that CO2 produces carbonic acid when combined with moisture. The process has already led to ocean acidification, and it will eventually make it uncomfortable to breathe.

“We can either stop generating so much CO2, or we can recycle it into something that we can use,” says Ryan, who is collaborating with colleagues from the Physics Department to develop a “reverse combustion process” that combines CO2, water and energy from the sun to create a hydrocarbon that can fuel a conventional diesel engine.

“It has tremendous potential to basically give you net-zero carbon,” says Ryan, who recently published a paper on the process in the journal Chemical Physics Letters. The work stems from a project originally headed by Physics Prof. Mengyan Shen, whose team received a three-year, $417,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in 2012.

Ryan, who has received previous funding from the Department of Energy to find ways to sequester and store CO2 in the deep ocean and underground wells, says the challenge is in capturing the CO2 from power plants, home heating systems and automobiles. But if that can be done efficiently, Ryan can envision extrapolating the process to large areas (say, several square miles of desert) to create enough hydrocarbon to power entire cities.

Ryan is also developing technology to safely and cleanly produce hydrogen gas to power the fuel cells of electric vehicles. The process uses water, CO2 and cobalt metal particles and produces zero emissions.

“If the release of CO2 into the atmosphere could be curtailed by using a hydrogen process, that’s great,” Ryan says. “If we can consume CO2 and start to reverse the process, we’re probably better off.”

Due to warming oceans and melting glaciers, it’s estimated that sea levels are rising at a rate of about one-eighth of an inch per year. Between 1993 and 2018, the global mean sea level has gone up 3.2 inches.

As the sea rises, tidal flooding (also known as nuisance flooding) is becoming more common along the coasts. That’s where EEAS Asst. Prof. James Heiss is investigating what happens when the intruding salt water mixes with groundwater.

“It’s important because many coastal communities use groundwater as a source of drinking water,” Heiss says. “Salt water is very corrosive, so if you have more nuisance flooding, then there’s going to be saltier groundwater and sewer infrastructure may not last as long.”

Conversely, Heiss says, when fresh groundwater washes out into the sea, it changes the chemistry of the ocean. That can lead to algal blooms that are harmful to fish.

Heiss and his student researchers are installing wells and water quality sensors in areas that experience coastal flooding, including Waquoit Bay on Cape Cod. They use the collected data to build groundwater computer models to try to replicate the field observations, which leads to additional analysis.

“From a climate point of view,” Heiss says, “if we understand the impact of those increasing events on groundwater, then coastal communities can start thinking about how to distribute their sewer infrastructure to avoid areas that are going to experience nuisance flooding.”

At the Parker River National Wildlife Reserve on Plum Island in Newbury, Mass., Obrist and Ph.D. student Ting Wang are literally digging for answers, trying to figure out why the salt marshes are such a hot spot for mercury pollution.

Along with research assistants Sean Haggert and Emma Daly, they’ve spent the past two years examining the chemistry of the soils, which date back 10,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age.

“There’s a tremendous amount of mercury sitting in these soils, which we suspect is coming from some natural processes as well as atmospheric depositions,” says Obrist, an expert in the atmospheric cycling and biogeochemistry of mercury who’s been studying its environmental impact for more than a decade.

For hundreds of years, humans have released mercury into the environment through mining and industrial activities. Realizing the harmful effects of the toxic liquid metal, the international community adopted a treaty on mercury pollution in 2013. The good news is that the treaty has helped reduce global mercury emissions; the bad news is that the vast amount of mercury already in the environment is here to stay.

“We have these massive reservoirs sitting in surface soils because we dumped mercury on top through atmospheric deposition for 150 years,” Obrist says. “That mercury still sits there, making its way from those soils to the watershed, to the fish and to humans and mammals.”

Obrist and his team have found that the blood mercury levels in Plum Island’s salt marsh sparrows, a threatened species, are among the highest on the Eastern Seaboard. As the salt marshes are impacted by rising sea levels and coastal flooding, it could spell trouble for humans as well.

“If we have these disturbances or changes in the salt marshes, these large legacy pools (of mercury) sitting in these soils are going to get mobilized,” says Obrist, who is seeking NSF funding for the work. 

He’s already received a three-year, $873,000 NSF grant for another study of mercury pollution—this one conducted in a 3,000-acre forest owned by Harvard University near the Central Massachusetts town of Petersham. There, Obrist and a colleague from Columbia University are using atomic fluorescence analyzers to measure the forest’s uptake of atmospheric mercury, something that’s never been done before in forests.

Obrist has also led an international group that conducted a long-term study of the origin of mercury pollution in the Arctic tundra, which is home to nearly half of the world’s total soil mercury deposits. Their study, which was published in the journal Nature, found that 70 percent of those deposits came from mercury gas being absorbed by tundra plants and then transferred to the soil when the plants shed leaves or die.

As rapid climate change causes the tundra to thaw and erode, Obrist warns that these large legacy pools of mercury could be released into rivers, lakes and the Arctic Ocean.

On the polar opposite end of the planet, on the desolate continent of Antarctica, is where EEAS Assoc. Prof. Kate Swanger likes to spend her time studying glaciers, ice sheets, permafrost, sediment and rocks to learn about past climates. As a paleoclimatologist, Swanger has been to Antarctica eight times. She finds the continent “addictive.”

“I like it because I get cut off from the world—no internet, no phones, no email—and I can actually focus,” Swanger says. “You’re just there doing research in a part of the world that is as untouched by humans as we can find.”

In 2015, Swanger and postdoctoral researcher Kelsey Winsor spent six weeks collecting ice and sediment samples from Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys on a project funded by a $330,000 NSF grant. They believe the clean glacial ice they found a half-meter beneath the sediment surface could be 100,000 years old.

“Finding ice that old was kind of surprising, because you’d think it would have melted out by now,” says Swanger, who notes that temperatures can climb above freezing in the summer months in the dry valleys. (In February, the thermometer hit 69 degrees Fahrenheit at an Antarctic research base, the highest temperature ever recorded on the continent.)

Antarctica, which holds 90 percent of the world’s fresh water in its ice, is starting to show signs of vulnerability to climate change, Swanger says.

“Fifteen to 20 years ago, the consensus was that a lot of the Antarctic ice sheets were pretty stable. They could warm up a bit and remain intact,” she says. “But that idea has changed in the past 5 to 10 years. It might be more vulnerable to climate warming than we think, which is kind of terrifying. That means that even with 2, 3 or 4C (Celsius temperature rise), we could have a lot more ice melting than we expected.”

Unlike most places in the world where glaciers melt and “retreat” as temperatures warm, Swanger says glaciers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys actually have advanced under warmer conditions.

“They’re so cold and precipitation-starved, so when it gets warmer, they probably get more precipitation and can grow,” she says. 

“Paleoclimate is really important,” she says. “If I help to contribute anything to the climate change discussion, it would be to better understand the natural system and the fluctuations it naturally goes through. By studying the natural world, we can see how far outside the natural we are right now.”

When Juliette Rooney-Varga was a freshman biology major at Colby College, she believed science alone could solve the world’s climate woes.

“I thought, maybe naively, that policymakers would always be informed by science,” she says. “If science was able to elucidate how humans interacted with nature and how nature affected us, I thought we would use that knowledge for the betterment of society.”

As an associate professor of environmental science, Rooney-Varga now sees the climate change issue in a different light.

“Science is our best window into the future; it is always important. But it’s not where the most leverage is right now with this problem,” she says. “There’s no techno-fix to this problem. The scale is too big.”

 That’s why Rooney-Varga focuses so much of her work on climate change education, communication and decision support. She serves as director of the university’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI), an interdisciplinary group of 30 faculty members from 13 academic departments that collaborates on research, teaching and outreach activities. She also partners with Climate Interactive, a nonprofit think tank based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that develops simulations and interactive workshops that have been used by everyone from world leaders at the U.N.’s climate negotiations and bankers at HSBC to Bill Nye, “the Science Guy.”

Their latest creation is En-ROADS, or Energy Rapid Overview and Decision-Support, a free policy simulation model that debuted at the UN climate negotiations in Madrid in December. The simulator, which can be used in conjunction with a climate workshop and role-playing exercise, allows users to adjust variables such as energy supply, transportation, economic growth and carbon removal to see how they affect global temperature increase by 2100.

Rooney-Varga published a paper in December showing that taking part in the role-playing exercise (called Climate Action Simulation) not only improves participants’ knowledge about climate change, but also boosts their personal and emotional engagement with climate issues and leaves them feeling empowered to address climate change.

Rooney-Varga and EEAS graduate student Maggie Hensel are currently researching the impact of simulation-based climate and energy education tools in programs designed to foster academic success (such as Upward Bound) among low-income, first-generation college students across the United States. Called the Geo-Interactive Project, the work is funded by a three-year, $340,000 NSF grant.

Through her work with Climate Interactive, Rooney-Varga has also recently published research showing that displacing coal with wood for power generation can increase CO2 emissions and make climate change worse in the future. Nearly two-thirds of the European Union’s renewable energy comes from bioenergy, or the burning of wood, most of which is harvested from the southern United States.

“The real problem is that current policy, whether at the international, national, state or city level, views all forms of bioenergy as carbon-neutral,” Rooney-Varga says. “They want to do good, but instead they could be making things worse by upping their use of bioenergy through these types of policies.” 

Despite the dire headlines, Barlow is “cautiously optimistic” about combating climate change. He says he’s seen people come together to solve big problems before, citing the United States’ Clean Air and Clean Water acts and the Montreal Protocol to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and protect the ozone layer.

“As a global community, we’ve shown that we’re capable of making these decisions,” Barlow says. “It’s really a matter of political will and pushing back against trillion-dollar business interests. It’s not easy, but it’s doable.”

Barlow’s doing his part through two streams: research and communication.

On the research side, he’s in the final year of a three-year, $454,000 NSF grant to study extreme precipitation and flooding in the Northeast. Working with Assoc. Prof. Jian-Hua Qian and postdoctoral research student Laurie Agel, Barlow is looking at how well current computer climate models do in correctly reproducing the causes of heavy rainfall events. Barlow is also in the middle of a three-year, $216,000 NSF-funded project on the interaction between the troposphere and stratosphere.

On the communication side, Barlow is providing policymakers around the world with the most current scientific knowledge by serving as a lead author on an upcoming assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). 

Established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, the IPCC is an internationally recognized scientific authority on climate change. Every six or seven years, it issues a voluminous report summarizing the existing climate science, the potential future risks and adaptation and mitigation options. The last report, released in 2014, was 1,500 pages.

“We’re trying to make it shorter this time around, because if it’s so long that nobody reads it, then that defeats the point of communicating,” Barlow says. “Trying to do the best possible science and also get it to people in a form they can use is challenging.”

EEAS Asst. Prof. Christopher Skinner, who studies how climate change influences extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall, heat waves and droughts, recently traveled with Barlow to Cheyenne, Wyo., to visit the supercomputing center run by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

“It’s an amazing facility,” says Barlow, who learned that the computers generate so much heat that a hydro cooling system transfers the heat out of the building and into town, where it’s used to melt snow on the city’s sidewalks.

Skinner is harnessing NCAR’s supercomputing power for an NSF-funded study he’s conducting on atmospheric rivers, which are narrow bands of fast-moving, highly concentrated water vapor in the atmosphere that are invisible to the naked eye but can be detected by satellite.

“They look like rivers flying through the sky,” says Skinner, who notes that they’re most common along western boundaries of continents, providing about half of the annual precipitation for California, Oregon and Washington. “If you condense all the water in one of these events from its gaseous phase to water phase, it’s more water than you’ll find in the Amazon River, so they’re tremendously important for the hydrological cycle.”

Using NCAR’s Community Earth System Model (one of about three dozen climate models available to scientists worldwide), Skinner and a colleague from Yale University are running a series of lengthy simulations to understand how atmospheric rivers respond to changes in the earth’s system. By adjusting boundary conditions (or the “ingredients” of an extreme event) such as temperature, CO2 levels and even the presence of ice sheets, they hope to get a better understanding of how atmospheric rivers shaped hydrologic changes in the past and how they might respond to (or fuel) future climate change.

The computer model work requires patience. It takes several months in real time to run a simulation that covers thousands of years. Skinner says one of the challenges is writing algorithms that can sift through the simulation’s terabytes of data to automatically identify atmospheric river events and aggregate them for study.

While Skinner and his graduate research assistant, Tyler Harrington, focus on the physical science, he hopes that the findings can help inform people to make the best decisions possible going forward.

“If we can confidently say  that, ‘Look, if we continue on this pathway, heat waves will become  X percent more common,’ that may motivate people to make changes in their behaviors,” says  Skinner, whose portion of the three-year NSF grant is $225,000.

As part of Skinner’s NSF grant on atmospheric rivers, he had to include an outreach component that communicated the broader impact of his work. So it was serendipitous to learn that one of his EEAS colleagues, Assoc. Teaching Prof. Lori Weeden ran a professional development workshop for local K-12 teachers each summer on how to incorporate climate change education into their lesson plans.

“It became a really strong part of our grant,” says Skinner, who led a session at the workshop that showed teachers an exercise they can do with students to predict the declining number of snow days that New England schools will have as a result of global warming. Skinner will help fund the workshop for the next two years with funds from his NSF grant.

Weeden, whose research interests include soil carbon sequestration and surface water chemistry, created the workshop in 2018 with a $6,000 grant from the university’s Sustainability Encouragement & Enrichment Development (S.E.E.D.) Fund. She was inspired to do so after seeing how little climate science education kids were getting in middle school and high school.

Rooney-Varga says students’ interest in climate change has never been stronger.

“This is a critical decade for climate action, and there’s never been a more important time for students to be engaged in our democracy and the issue of climate change,” she says.

Students agree.

“I’ve always believed in climate change, but my concern has grown as I’ve gained more knowledge about it,” says David Coe, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in marine sciences and technology who is researching changes to New England’s fall season due to climate change.

Coe was among several Kennedy College students and faculty to present their atmospheric science research at the 100th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in January in Boston—where climate change made its presence felt. On the conference’s opening weekend (Jan. 11-12), temperatures soared to 70 degrees in Boston on consecutive January days for the first time since record-keeping began in 1872. That Sunday, Boston hit a record high of 74 degrees—more than 40 degrees above average. Globally, the average temperatures for the month were 2.05 degrees above average, making it the planet’s warmest January on record.

“It’s totally bizarre. It felt like summer,” says EEAS Prof. Frank Colby, who presented his research on why weather models had trouble forecasting the track of 2018’s Hurricane Florence.

As hundreds of conference attendees milled around the poster presentations at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, graduate student Michael Follensbee struck an optimistic tone when asked about climate change.

“People are no longer indifferent,” says Follensbee, who presented the NSF-funded research work being done with Barlow on changes in the Siberian hydroclimate. “I just hope that people try to be proactive about it rather than saying, ‘We’re screwed,’ and burying their heads in the sand.” 

Researchers from the Kennedy College of Sciences are doing their best to make sure that doesn’t happen.