Day 4

I started the day in the meeting rooms, getting turned around between identical fiberboard walls. Room 8, hosting an SBSTA meeting, was hidden in a corner. I managed to duck inside before the doors closed.

There were no seats without microphones--I felt like I was meant to be somewhere else. People with purple Party badges filtered inside, grabbing place cards. A British man with a tight collar announced the beginning of the session. Two women shuffled past the desks with stacks of papers. They appeared to be amendments on the SBSTA's priorities, especially regarding the GCOS system.

One item on the agenda caught my eye: the Parties had proposed better monitoring of extreme weather. I agree. The IPCC still doesn't have a great amount of certainty about the anthropogenic effect on storms, and we need to implement better weather adaptation practices in LDCs. Dr. Emily Pidgeon from the wetlands presentation had mentioned a typhoon that cleared 80% of the mangroves on the Visayan Islands. That's not just the loss of a valuable ecosystem--it's the destruction of thousands of livelihoods.

The man, whose place card said "co-chair" and nothing else, let us read for five minutes. I opened a new document on my laptop and took some quick notes.

"Five minutes have passed," he said softly, matching the muted atmosphere in all the meeting rooms. "Are there any points of contention?"

Nobody moved or spoke.

"I will take that to mean we're in agreement," said the co-chair. "Thank you for your time."

This was when I realized that I was in meeting 2 of 2.

I missed everything interesting in the first meeting, during which these amendments were apparently made. The second meeting was a check-in to make sure that the Parties were happy with the decisions. It was my one attempt at a policy-focused event, and I blew it.

Everyone stood, and the crowd flowed out of the room. I sat in my chair next to the fancy microphone and felt very, very stupid.

Thankfully, I recovered some dignity later, when I attended the "Oceans Under Pressure" event at the US Center. I think that marine science is fascinating and I was excited to see NOAA and NASA experts working together.

I got to the pavilion a little early.

The presenters: Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a member of the French National Center for Scientific Research and several other prestigious institutions; Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald, a chief scientist in the NOAA's office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research; and Michelle Gierach, a member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the California Institute of Technology.

I felt much more competent listening to these presentations, since I'm familiar with the science. Gattuso did a brief overview on the importance of the ocean to climate. It's a huge heat and carbon sink, and it's been regulating our climate successfully for thousands of years, up until too much atmospheric carbon dioxide began turning it to acid. Gattuso also estimated the economic value of the ocean. Current use puts its economy at a value of 2.5 trillion USD, and the value of the ocean as a whole could be measured at 24 trillion USD. (Anyone have an extra 24 trillion lying around?)

Gattuso identified four main response options to the impacts of climate change. In a general sense, we can mitigate, adapt, protect, or repair ocean resources. "We are not very good at repairing ecosystems, especially marine ecosystems," he said, flipping through graphs on the health of phytoplankton and crustaceans. Some members of those organism groups need to extract calcium carbonate from the ocean in order to develop structures. That's hard to do when all they're finding is carbonic acid. The health of the ocean isn't excellent, but even optimistic climate models (such as RCP2.6) predict further damage to marine ecosystems. It's basically inevitable that the oceans are going to take a hit.

The next presentation was only slightly less damning. Sandy MacDonald stepped up to discuss the methodology behind his data collection. He has teams that take regional water samples, testing pH and aragonite saturation. Aragonite is an ion of calcium carbonate--higher levels are better. The data's showing some pretty significant decreases. MacDonald and his team continue to collect data via boats and buoys on a local scale, providing a valuable source of information. They do the detail work that NASA can't.

However, if you need information that's relevant on a global level, Michelle Gierach's satellite images are the place to look. She's very excited about the current satellite fleet. A series of altimeters have been collecting sea height data since '93, and some satellites can measuring changes in ice sheet mass by noting minute differences in gravitational pull. The most exciting future project is the PACE satellite, due to launch around 2022, which uses imaging spectroscopy. Forgive me for butchering the science; I think that, rather than sensing one to three spectral bands, it monitors a wider continuum. This means that PACE might be able to tell subspecies of phytoplankton apart--from space.

I managed to catch Michelle Gierach after the presentation. I wanted to talk so that I could try to understand imaging spectroscopy a little better. It was nice to meet a scientist who was as confused with all the policy decisions as I am--after a short discussion, she gave me some key search terms and her card.

I'm accumulating surface level details on too many interesting technologies. I'm tempted to drop another week of school just to study the new information.