VOA -- CONNECT
EPISODE 30
AIR DATE: 08 10 2018
TRANSCRIPT
FULL TRANSCRIPT
OPEN ((VO/NAT))
((Banner))
Protecting the shore
((SOT))
I am just going to be here. It’s very important that we do our part. Miami is a beautiful place. We don’t want it to be impacted by sea level rise.
((Animation Transition))
((Banner))
Rising CO2
((SOT))
Rice is important for a number of different reasons. It’s the sole source of calories for almost two billion people in the world.
((Animation Transition))
((Banner))
Urban Beekeeper
((SOT))
When we talk about honey bees, we’re talking about pollination. One thirds to one half of all of the food on our plates is grown, thanks to the labor of the honey bee.
((Open Animation))
BLOCK A
((Banner: Rising Seas))
((PKG)) FLORIDA FLOODING
((Banner: Citizen Scientists))
((Reporter/Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: Miami, Florida))
((TIFFANY TROXLER, FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY))
What we’re trying to communicate is that sea level rise is not an issue that we need to deal with in the future. It’s something that we need to deal with right now, in terms of developing solutions to address sea level rise, and so with these events, these Citizen Science Flood Reporting events, we use the king tide as an opportunity to bring people out of their homes to observe the flooding, and also participate in solutions, which is in collecting information that will help us to better understand the impacts of sea level rise, locally.
((KIRAN BHAT, MIAMI AREA RESIDENT))
So long as we’re going to be here, it’s really important that we do our part making sure that the data gets collected, that the people who are working on this problem have a real reason to move forward, and if you have all the data, then you can really, sort of, make projections and figure out what’s going on. So, I want to do my part for the city, and Miami is a beautiful place. We don't want it to be impacted by sea level rise in the way that the projections are, sort of, putting out there. So, we want to do our part to mark sure that folks who are in the know and who were able to build a plan, have the data that they need.
((NATS))
Who's ready to take some samples? Yeah!
((MIAMI RESIDENT))
So I’m a consultant. I advise cities on sea level rise planning, and one of the things we talk a lot about is the importance of citizen science. So, this is my first opportunity to actually get my hands dirty and do it myself.
((NATS))
Put the filter on the syringe.
((TIFFANY TROXLER, FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY))
It is a manpower thing, because you simply can't cover the number of sites that we're working on today with the research infrastructure that we have at our disposal. But I want to say that it's just as important to engage people in this way so that we can communicate the issues of sea level rise.
((NATS))
((ROSANNA OVIEDO, FIU STUDENT))
I've probably seen it, of course, but I haven't paid attention because I didn't know what it was, and what was it about. The sea comes, and you get flooding in the middle of the street. So yeah, now we know.
((TIFFANY TROXLER, FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY))
I think, even for myself, I don't think I really appreciated how urgent the issue of sea level rise was, until I saw the water coming out of the drain, and it just doesn't stop, it just continues. It continues to come out, and the area that’s being inundated by flood becomes larger and larger. And until you see that really, you know, dynamic aspect of the flooding, I think it’s difficult to really understand what’s going on around us.
((PKG)) FLORIDA MANGROVES
((Banner: Protecting the land))
((Reporter/Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: Florida Keys, Florida))
((ROB BRUMBAUGH, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY))
When (Hurricane) Irma came across the Keys, the eye came across the keys about 20 miles (32 km) east of here. So, just up the Keys. This mooring field here was devastation. There were boats up in the mangroves throughout here. Many of the boats were on their sides or upside down or on the docks. Even just a little bit of mangrove can make a big difference. It made all the difference in the world for our marina. I'm convinced of it. We know that mangroves provide a physical buffer. They literally wring the energy out of waves when the waves pass through them. They literally break the wake, or the wind, and they can, or if you have enough of them, they can actually provide, sort of a sponge effect. They literally soak up some of the water before it gets too much further through them.
((AABAD MELWANI, RICKENBACKER MARINA))
You know, this is not a seed. A lot of people think this is a seed. This is actually a fully germinated, this is a seedling and this is the actual bud. This is called the terminal bud. And so this one is actually a pretty good example of a, you know, viable seedling. It’s natural protection against storm surge. It's natural protection against erosion. It keeps all the sediment and the shoreline intact and then once they're fully mature, they also provide, you know, this really vibrant ecosystem for juvenile fish, crustaceans, birds, all sorts of native species.
((ROB BRUMBAUGH, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY))
That's also beaches and dunes, but it's also the coral reefs that sit further offshore. So, it's a multilayered, sort of, system of natural infrastructure that can actually protect us.
((PKG)) FLORIDA REEFS
((Banner: Preserving the sea))
((Reporter/Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: Miami, Florida))
((Banner: Restoring reefs with corals adapted to warming oceans))
((Courtesy Chyron: Dalton Hesley, University of Miami))
((Popup Banner: Off the coast of Miami, divers stake coral twigs and other corals to the ocean bottom))
((DALTON HESLEY, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI))
We can take a large boulder coral, fragment it into a lot of small, coin-sized pieces, increase their growth and then fuse them back together to create a larger coral colony than we started with in a fraction of the time. It’s called the coral gardening process. It’s a great simple, effective way to create a lot of coral from small amounts initially. Coral is important for a number of different reasons. First and foremost, it protects our communities. It provides us with food and shelter and it’s the main reef building structure that marine organisms rely on for their habitat, their livelihood.
((ANDREW BAKER, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI))
You could cut this and put it on a paired thing. Just recently, these events, these natural (climate change-induced) coral bleaching events, are becoming more and more common, more and more severe. And we just lost over the last couple of years, almost 50 percent of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef for example, as a result of the worldwide spread of coral bleaching. We’re interested in trying to leverage this great effort to restore reefs using these coral species by actually trying to figure out if there’s a way that we can make them more heat tolerant, more stress tolerant. So that instead of planting out the next set of coral victims, we're actually planting out corals that we think are going to be more heat-tolerant in the future. Despite having been really severely bleached just a couple months ago, they've actually recovered really well. And you can see that they've started to grow new branches. Where you see that sort of growing white tip is active calcification, kind of shooting forward and then the algae, which is this yellowish, brown color slowly kind of catching up from the rest of the colony. It’s a question of communicating what we’ve lost but also communicating what we still have to lose and trying some of these novel methodologies to try to intervene and boost the chances of survival for these ecosystems.
((Courtesy Chyron: Dalton Hesley, University of Miami))
((DALTON HESLEY, UNIV OF MIAMI))
To date, we’ve out planted over 11-thousand corals back onto local reefs, each site varying from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand.
((Courtesy Chyron: Christine Da Silva, University of Miami))
((DALTON HESLEY, UNIV OF MIAMI))
We can't rebuild every reef around the globe. So, that's why education is the second biggest part of our program and our efforts.
((NATS))
TEASE ((VO/NAT))
Coming up….
((Banner))
Rising CO2
((SOT))
Keep in mind that it’s more than just people. It is going to affect all living things because all living things depend on plants as a food source.
BREAK ONE
BUMP IN ((ANIM))
BLOCK B
((Banner: Eco Science))
((PKG)) HUMAN IMPACT
((Banner: Human Impact))
((Reporter/Camera: Elizabeth Lee))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: Los Angeles, California))
((NATS))
((FARMER))
See, there isn’t even any moisture.
((BILL PATZERT, NASA JET PROPULSION LABORATORY))
Well, the earth’s climate has been changing over millions of years, but we’ve never seen this much change over a hundred years. So, we’re living in a warmer world. We’re living in a melting world. We’re living in a world where sea levels are rising.
((RICHARD SOMERVILLE, SCRIPPS INSTITUTE OF OCEANOGRAPHY))
The fact is that the warming we are seeing now in recent decades is human caused. It’s not natural. If it weren’t for human activities, the world under natural causes like changes in the sun and volcanoes, would have actually cooled slightly in recent decades and yet it’s been warming. And the warming is due to human activities primarily through carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases and particles that mankind has put into the atmosphere. We’re using the atmosphere as a free dump for the waste products from an energy system based on coal and oil and natural gas and that is causing the planet to warm up. We’re quite sure of that.
((NATS))
((BILL PATZERT, NASA JET PROPULSION LABORATORY))
And so the thing that worries me the most is not the next thousand years or the next ice age, but the next hundred years.
((NATS))
((PKG)) ARCTIC DRILLING
((Banner: Secrets of the Ice))
((Reporter/Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: Greenland, East Grip Camp))
((TREVOR POPP, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
We're here to drill an ice core to the bedrock.
((Popup Banner: Meet the scientists drilling through 2.5 km of Arctic ice for clues about the climate's past, and future))
((TREVOR POPP, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
Minus 28 in there. Just come in and look to your right. You'll see an ice core, I think.
((TREVOR POPP, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
So, this ice comes from 754 meters down, and it's on the order of 6,000 years old.
The snow that we're getting in this ice core did not fall at this spot because this is an ice stream that's moving. So this snow fell some hundreds of kilometers away from here and has moved to this spot. At this depth, we can still see one year to the next to the next to the next. So, when we study the climate, we are actually getting information for every year. So, we get the seasonal signals in dust and water isotopes and other impurities that tell us about atmospheric circulation. They tell us about the temperature. They tell us about processes in the ocean and then the bubbles will give us the concentrations of constituents in the atmosphere -- methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide.
((JORGEN PEDER STEFFENSEN, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
So we are pulling these cores out and the bubbles have 60 times atmospheric pressure, then the ice can't hold it. So it becomes explosive, so it starts to crack on the table spontaneously and all the gases escape.
((TREVOR POPP, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
And as a driller and scientist, it, kind of, breaks your heart when you do all this. You get these beautiful cylinders up, put it on the table and it starts to just, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. You can hear it like rice crispies (cereal).
((JORGEN PEDER STEFFENSEN, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
And that's what we call a brittle zone. And it's really, really terrible as a glaciologist to watch this perfect core disintegrate in front of your eyes. So, we actually, and this is, it sounds completely ridiculous and backwards, but actually we mounted a freezer unit in a snow cave inside the Greenland Ice Sheet and that is simply to control the temperature.
We say, well what do you say, oh it must be cold in there! Yes, but it's not cold enough so we are putting a freezer inside the ice sheet. That, that's hilarious. But anyway, so we know that Greenland now is shrinking because there is enhanced melting around the sides. Very easy to understand, because it corresponds to rising temperatures at the coastline. So, you will have much more runoff. And that will make the Greenland Ice Sheet lose mass. So right now, I think, the contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet to world sea level changes is just beginning to show, but we don't know if this shrinking is going to be a linear, straightforward process that you can predict. And that's why we're drilling at East Grip.
((JORGEN PEDER STEFFENSEN, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
You can monitor the surface.
((JORGEN PEDER STEFFENSEN, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN))
The trouble is all kinds of funny stuff is going on at the base of the ice sheet.
If something odd is going on at the base in these ice streams, and there are a lot of ice streams in West Antarctica too, then it can upset the entire applecart. All of a sudden you would have an unstabilized sheet that might break away, not over several centuries, but over a couple decades. And that would be disastrous.
((NATS))
((PKG)) CO2
((Banner: Rice and Rising CO2))
((Reporter/Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Zdenko Novacki))
((Map: Beltsville, Maryland))
((Courtesy Chyron: FAO))
((Banner: US government researchers say rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) affects crops like rice.))
((LEWIS ZISKA, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE))
Now, we know that CO2 is plant food. We think there is a dilution effect as the plants become bigger with more CO2, and there is an imbalance between all the additional carbon in the air and the soil nutrients that are not compensating for all that additional carbon. So, what happens is that carbon to nutrient variation goes up. So, we think there’s a dilution effect, but, there’s also some other things that are happening. Plants become more efficient under high CO2, and so their need for nitrogen, which is an important nutrient, may be less. But they’re bigger, so they may require more. So, there’s some change in there as well in terms of physiology and function that may be affecting the nutritional status as well. In addition, there are also changes in terms of the water flow through the plant, and all the nutrients that go with the water flow. Basically, as you give the plants more CO2, the pores in the leaves that are called stomates, tend to become smaller. They shrink in size, and so the water, evaporative loss of water is less, and therefore, the nutritional movement through, from the soil to the plant is less and that may also be impacting overall micronutrient concentration.
Rice was going to respond, and rice is important for a number of different reasons. But one of the primary reasons is that it is the sole source of calories for almost two billion people in the world, and so whatever happens to rice is going to have a big impact on the global community. So, looking at how CO2 was going to affect rice, looking at how it was going to impact nutrition, growth, trying to find out which variety of rice is going to respond, what are the implications in terms of culture, what are the implications in terms of food, and so on. There’re so many really cool questions associated with that and that intersection between climate change, CO2, and rice biology.
TEASE ((VO/NAT))
Coming up….
((Banner))
Young Ecologists
((SOT))
Each student is environmentally conscious and so through ecology club and the use of our gardens, students become conscious of how butterflies and how the garden help our environment.
BREAK TWO
BUMP IN ((ANIM))
BLOCK C
((Banner: Tiny Helpers))
((PKG)) BUTTERFLY GARDEN
((Banner: Suburban Butterflies))
((Reporter: Faiza Elmasry))
((Camera: Mike Burke))
((Adapted by: Aisha Henderson))
((Map: Warrenton, Virginia))
((NATS))
Come on out. Come on out, Ecology Club members.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
The Ecology Club has been in existence (for) probably about 14 years out of the 15 years that I’ve been here, and we’re quite active.
((NATS))
That other sweet potato here, and then maybe another one here.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
We talk about the need for a certain plant for an organism to survive. We talk about the cycles, because we’ve got eggs, we’ve got our larva, caterpillar,
((Courtesy Chyron: PB Smith Elementary Ecology Club))
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
and then we’ve got this chrysalis, and then they’re waiting patiently for it to emerge.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
And every day it’s an adventure and a discovery because there’s so much that we see.
((KEELY SCOTT, FOUNDER, BUTTERFLY GARDEN))
We had a butterfly bush at my house, off the side of my deck, and we actually had to cut it down when we built our deck, and I missed it so much and I loved looking at all the butterflies and I was like, vow, well we have a decreased population in our area. And I thought, oh, well, I can fix that. So, I developed this idea, and Ms. Dennee supported me one hundred percent.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
This attracts bees, and if you rub this, I bet you can tell me what that smells like.
((KEELY SCOTT, FOUNDER, BUTTERFLY GARDEN))
I don’t know, maybe I’m not smelling it right. It smells, like, minty.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
Well, it is in the mint family, but it’s licorice.
((KEELY SCOTT, FOUNDER, BUTTERFLY GARDEN))
Oh, I didn’t get that.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
Today, we didn’t see any monarchs, because I think it’s a little early, but we did see swallowtail caterpillars. That was the big one.
((AMELIA JAKUM, ECOLOGY CLUB MEMBER))
The swallow tail butterfly likes to eat dill, and that’s one of its favorite foods to eat. I thought all butterflies liked milkweed.
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
So we have all these different butterflies, and their larvae, but they’re not eating the same things. So, they’re not competing for the food and they can live harmoniously, like we should be doing.
((NATS))
((BARBARA DENNEE, TEACHER))
Inside there is a very smart caterpillar. It has actually made a cocoon out of the leaves, and inside, if you gently open one of them, maybe you can open up this one, just real gently, Maggie, you will see a little black caterpillar, and I believe it’s a painted lady.
((LINDA PAYNE SMITH, SCHOOL PRINCIPAL))
The garden has brought great joy to P.B. Smith, and when we first were charged with coming up with a mission statement for our school and our students, one part of it is that each student is environmentally conscious, and so through ecology club, and the use of our gardens, and our outreach of Mrs. Dennee from Kindergarten, preschool through fifth grade, students become conscious of how butterflies and how the garden, help our environment. So, our hope is that it will continue and our love for the environment and what is happening here at P.B. Smith, we hope to see go to every school at Fauquier County.
((NATS))
((PKG)) CITY BEES
((Banner: City Bees))
((Reporter/Camera: Yuan Ye))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: New York City, New York))
((NATS))
((ANDREW COTE, URBAN BEEKEEPER))
Keeping bees in New York City might sound a little odd, but people have been keeping bees in New York city and in other cities in the world for a very long time.
((ANDREW COTE, URBAN BEEKEEPER))
My name is Andrew Cote. I’m a beekeeper in New York City.
Here, we’re on top of the New York Hilton Midtown, and we’ve got six beehives, and they have a very short flight to 1,000 acres (400 ha) of beautiful flora in Central Park. As far as beekeeping businesses go, we are modest and small in size, but what we lack in number of beehives we make up for in spectacular locations.
((NATS))
((ANDREW COTE, URBAN BEEKEEPER))
Generally, mass produced honey or mass produced bread or mass produced anything is not of the same high quality of a small craft brand, be that bread or beer or certainly honey. One of the biggest difficulties with urban beekeeping is just the element of dealing with people and the opportunity to educate them about bees and honeybees and their gentle nature is a nice challenge, but a challenge.
((NATS))
((ANDREW COTE, URBAN BEEKEEPER))
Most people, when they think of honeybees, they think of honey, and that’s understandable because that’s the product that they can taste and feel and see. But really, when we talk about honeybees, we are talking about pollination. One third to one half of all of the food on our plates is grown, thanks to the labor of the honeybee.
((NATS))
((ANDREW COTE, URBAN BEEKEEPER))
I help run a charity called Bees Without Borders, and via that charity, we travel all over the world, and recently we visited China. When I met the local beekeepers in the Hangzhou area, I was very impressed to see their methods of pollen collection, and their methods of queen rearing, and we looked at their methods and compared them to our methods, and found that they’re more alike than different, but still I think we have something that we could learn from one another, so I look forward to returning and spending more time and getting to know them better.
((NATS))
((ANDREW COTE, URBAN BEEKEEPER))
Actually, this is my only job. I’m probably the only full-time beekeeper in New York City. Or, if there’s another I’d love to hire that person for a little help.
((NATS))
NEXT WEEK / GOOD BYE ((VO/NAT))
((Banner))
Opioids in America
((SOT))
CLOSING ((ANIM))
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BREAK THREE
BUMP IN ((ANIM))
SHOW ENDS
