All right, well let's get started. Welcome everybody. I think we'll expect people to keep filtering in. And of course, as always at New America, we're live streaming this until we will also have an audience joining us online. And this will live forever on the web. So be aware of that.  I'm Sharon Burke, and I'm a senior advisor here at New America. I run the resource security program and also a new project called the phase zero project, which is looking at the root causes of war and how to address them. We got a number of our project team here today, Denise Ross, Brackson Bridgers, Emily Gallagher is here somewhere. She's out there waving to us. So we're delighted to be the co-host for this event. And what I'd like to do now is introduce our panel and then we have a special guest that's gonna join us on the phone and I will introduce him last. So first right next to me, in the first word that I haven't written down, is David Tintley, who right now is a professor of practice at the Department of Meteorology at Penn State University. And he's the founding director of Penn State Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. What you need to know, he's also a rear admiral. He served in the United States Navy for 32 years. And his last, I have to read everything that the last job was, because it's gonna sound like it's a whole resume, but it was all one job as a matter of fact. See if I can get it. Commander, no, that's a little job. He was the oceanographer of the Navy. And in that capacity, it's also, you're the communications lead for the Navy also, right? It's like information dominance. Back then it was. Back then it was. Maybe change the name three times in a sense. Right. But what you need to know is it's a two star important command position in the Navy. And Dave has an extensive background both as a line commander and as a scientist of climate and meteorology. So he combines two worlds so well. It's just a pleasure to work with him. I really think he's one of the nations through experts on climate security. So it's a real pleasure to have him here and to partner with us in holding this event. And so we will turn to Dave in just a moment to talk to us about the science behind the hurricanes and attribution and questions like that. Now I'm gonna skip over. I'm gonna come back to you, Lindy. To judge Alice Hill. I have to put the judge in there because, you know, if I were a judge, I'd make you all call me judge. Who's a research fellow at the Hoover Institution right now where her work focuses on building resilience to destabilizing catastrophic events, including the impacts of climate change. Now, prior to joining Hoover, which is when I got to know Alice, she was a special assistant to the president of the United States and the senior director for resilience policy in the National Security Council. And she came to the White House by way of the Department of Homeland Security where she was a senior advisor, a very senior official there. And before that, she was in my hometown of Los Angeles where she was a supervising judge on both the superior and municipal courts. So Alice is also one of the nation's top experts on resilience with a very laudable career. Lundin, who is, Lundin Patton, who is very well known to our panel, I'm meeting for the first time and absolutely thrilled to meet her because she came so highly recommended. She's a lawyer with Earth and Water Laws, name of the firm, correct? And she's a strategic leader with a broad range of experience in financial services, data analytics industries, and as a practicing attorney, she's advising a very wide range of clients and especially in the private sector in the insurance and reinsurance industry. And that was one of the reasons we were so excited she could join us today because these storms, as much as we wanna talk about the science and how you as a community, as a population, deal with them, it's all about the money in the private sector too. And Lundin's gonna be able to share some special insights with us. Now, before we get into our discussion, and thank you, beautiful audience, for being here, you will also be part of the discussion, so be ready. I wanna introduce someone who's gonna join us by phone. And there's a reason that he's joining us by phone. Rich Olson is a professor and director of Extreme Events Research at Florida International University, and we have some friends here from FIU today as well. He, in his career, has focused on natural disasters all over the world, both research and field experience, and since the, you know, going back into the 1980s. So this is someone who's been studying this forever, not to say that he's old or anything, he's a vibrant researcher with field experience who knows what he's talking about, but he probably didn't expect to be talking about his home town. He's gonna be calling us from Miami. And what Professor Olson is, why I asked him to start us off, and by the way, he's widely published, but I had to tell you the title of one of his books because I love the title so much. Some buildings just can't dance. Oakland, California, after the Loma Prieta earthquake. So it gives you a sense of the kinds of, with a sense of humor, and the kinds of things that he's writing about. So he's gonna call into us right now and just give us a few minutes about how things look on the ground in Miami so that we're starting our conversation about this with a very real overview of what it feels like to be in the middle of this and how it looks, not only to someone who's an expert, but to someone who's dealing with it in real time. Professor, are you on the line with us? I am, and thank you very much for inviting me. How do things look in Miami? If I could, am I getting through or is there an echo? Getting through, and we'd love to hear what you had to tell us about Miami. Well, let's see, the first thing about this storm was a lot of us went through Katrina and Wilma. This was a side-slip event for Miami and really the east coast of Florida. I mean, we never really saw much beyond tropical storm category one force wind. So we need to put that in perspective. I guess the second point is on a destruction, damage, disruption scale, we've gone through, we really saw damage, but mostly disruption to systems. And the power, the electricity, water and communications which are really lifelines for real life. A lot more damage and disruption than we expected. That's going to be a topical issue here for some time to come because you only have to think about what would have happened if the core of this storm had come into the east coast of Florida as opposed to the west coast. I would make sort of my fourth point. It isn't uncommon in disasters to have one site that accounts for or a neighborhood that accounts for a lot of the fatalities. And this for Florida, it was Miami and it was the Hollywood Hills Rehabilitation Center with 12 deaths already attributable. And that, those deaths reflect a preparedness, lack of preparedness to be honest, and response, lack of response, a set of problems. And I don't know, there's talk down here it's going between civil and criminal issues. And so that fatality site will not go away. I guess the last point is we saw unexpectedly high evacuation numbers heading not only from the coastal zone inland but all the way north and out of state in some respects. Gasoline problems, the restricted arteries, but we saw and the research will have to determine roughly how many people really evacuated the whole Southeast Florida area. But the numbers were unexpected. And I would chalk that up to a Harvey effect because we were all watching the events in Texas even as we were watching the approach of Irma. And I think added to that was the relentless messaging. It's called hide from wind and run from water that came from the National Hurricane Center, the media, Governor Scott, and all of the local emergency officials. It was relentless. And I think it had an effect on the behavior of a lot of us. I've been through a couple of these and so we hunkered down at home, but if we had been in coastal areas, I would have been evacuating too. So those are my sort of summary observations if that helps. Question for you and then I'll keep an eye out for your comments on my device. So if people see me checking my phone, it's not cause I'm talking to my mom because I'm listening for comments or that. Although these days it is really interesting to follow texts and Twitter. The last question I just had for you is, so I mean considering what you said that this was a side swipe and not a direct hit, do you think Miami's ready? If it had been a category four hurricane hitting on the nose, how much worse this would have been? Almost incalculable at this point. I think, I mean part of the problem is when you move into category four and God forbid category five, we're talking about impacts, not just wind but storm surge. And if it stalls flooding that we aren't ready for. Cap three, we are going to have to, as a community, as a region, we're going to have to revisit with the lessons of Irma. We're going to have to revisit how confident we are because a direct hit with the population and economic assets that we have now along the east coast of Florida, a direct hit I think is going to be much worse than we were expecting. But I'm going to defer to the scientists in particular about what the wind combinations would be the windfield and the storm surge because again, the storm surge traditionally is the main killer along with flooding in hurricanes. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Rich, Professor Olson for joining us and we'll look forward to talking to you again at future events and in the meantime, keep safe. You're not out of hurricane season yet so we'll be thinking of you in Miami. Take care. Yeah, and I just wanted to say thanks again for inviting me and I wish I were there. Although I'm pretty locked in here for the next few weeks. Thank you. We'll raise a glass for you down there, so take care. All right, Dave, we're Admiral Tiddly.  Talk to us. So it's not just we've had these hurricanes, wildfires out west, we started the year with catastrophic floods in Peru but talk to us about these hurricanes. Is this just bad weather or bad luck? Sure, so when we look at attribution of these storms to climate, what I kind of look at for understanding climate in general, really science in general, and then we'll kind of drill down into these storms in particular, in some ways it could be a three-legged stool and if people have their printouts, just sort of look at the, okay. Sorry about our iPad. Yeah, we had a couple technical issues here so unfortunately we're onto paper there but that's okay. Really understanding comes from three things. Do we understand the physics and the basic theory? Do the observations, does the real world support what we think's going on? And finally, can you predict it? And can you show that there's a difference? And if you can answer with high confidence, yes to all three, then you have really high confidence in what's going on. So we don't need to make tonight sort of general climate science, that's not why anybody's here, although I'm happy to talk about it in Q and A. But for climate writ large, the answer is yes, yes, and yes and that's why you hear so many climate scientists talk so confidently about the changes that are coming. Now if we kind of drill down into sort of the what's going on in hurricanes, as Sharon mentioned, there's a lot more extreme events that have already happened this year just in the United States, I mean let alone the world, but just in the United States. Some of them, in fact I think it's, I'm afraid my slide gets built here so I don't have it, but no it's not that one. The, but the, You can't explain this, right? Oh, yeah, don't worry about this slide. I'm gonna give a different talk because I can't have these things, but I'm happy to talk about this stuff. But in general, the number of extreme events that we've already had, I think it's about on the second or third when you count as billion dollar, adjusted for inflation, but billion dollar disasters before the hurricanes, we're already running at near record levels. A number of tornadoes and severe thunderstorm issues, California of course had a lot of flooding issues already. So there've already been a number of these, but these are sort of being in the one to five, one to 10 billion dollar event. Lindean's gonna talk about the numbers, but add a couple zeros onto those numbers now for each of these hurricanes. So these are just gonna disaster and damage wise just completely overwhelm it. But I'd just like to point out, if you go to the slide that kind of looks like Oklahoma, because well, it is Oklahoma, that should look like that. Not all these extreme events count as billion dollar disaster, so this is just a screen capture from the Oklahoma Mesonet from the middle of February, February 11th of this past winter. And those numbers on it, those are temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit. So I mean, you do not have to be Michael Mann to figure out that it's not supposed to be 99 degrees in Oklahoma in the middle of February. And that's what it was. So it doesn't count as a billion dollar disaster, but we're getting more and more of these extreme events. So what's climate? Climate is simply the average of weather in space and time, averaged in some way. I tell people we plan for climate, but we live in weather. So this is what we're actually living in. So we've had lots and lots of these extreme events. Now when we get to the hurricanes, you know, and I've, yes, I've got the obligatory pictures. So we've got three of them in about six to eight weeks there. And the question is, of course, how much of that can we attribute to climate? So it turns out, if you go to the next slide called Attribution of Specific Events, the National Academy of Science happened to do a study on just this very question. And I was privileged that I got the chair, share that committee. The graphic on the left basically shows sort of the relative confidence we have for different types of specific weather events. Now this doesn't mean our hurricanes in general affected by climate. This means for a given specific storm, how much can we attribute either its frequency or its strength to the change in climate? And what you can see is that temperature events, we can actually do that attribution really pretty well. And this is a really big change.  We really had no attribution event 10 years ago. My guess is if we did this 10 years from now, we won't only be talking about the past events, but there'll be forecast, whether it's the National Weather Service or private companies or whatever, that are gonna kind of tell us how many a basket, if you will, how many extreme events we can reasonably expect in a year or in a summer. And then we'll be able to verify that. And people will say, see, these things are happening. Right now, we're somewhere in the middle of those two things. We've been doing, we, the science community has been doing this for about a decade. Heat and cold or lack of cold, I should say. We're really have quite high attribution confidence. The next thing is rainfall, droughts and extreme rainfall. And then you see that tropical cyclones are down there. There is some ability to attribute these, but frankly, not maybe as much as you hear in the news. So we have, we understand the physics, warm water. Basically, you need warm water for hurricanes, but not every hurricane that's over warm water becomes a category four or a category five. Yes, there are 100 plus years of data on hurricanes. It turns out the way you collect that data has been very different as you go through the years. Satellites, who flies into aircraft? Believe it or not, I'll bet Admiral Gunn knows that we used to fly aircraft into Pacific Typhoons. We stopped that for budget reasons back in the mid-80s. So you have all these different ways in which you actually look at satellites, you try to determine their intensity. So this means when somebody just goes back through the record and says, oh, look at this trend or lack of trend, it doesn't mean as much as it might look to you. So observations were kind of shaky. And then to try to figure out sort of the size of these hurricanes, their track and intensity relative to sort of in today's climate versus let's say a climate of 100 years ago, there are ways you can do it. You kind of put the storm down, put all the winds blowing the same way, but then let's say change the temperatures to ocean temperatures to what they would have been 100 years ago, press start and see what happens. The only problem is, is half the time today we can't even get the darn models to give us the right answer all the time today. So if you don't believe today's answer, why would you believe the answer from 100 years ago? It's not totally hopeless, but it's not like a slam dunk. So if you go back to my school, the first slide, the school, physics, we understand. Warm water leads to stronger hurricanes and we're certainly kind of seeing that. So the physics one I'd say, yeah, check, we've got that. Observations, are we really seeing a change, not in an individual storm, but in the overall trend, starting to come out of the noise, but not quite there yet. And the modeling, again, is starting to come out but not quite there yet. And that's why the committee, and if you've ever been on a National Academy of Science Committee, it turns out that it gets reviewed by more people than write the report. That was fun, because I had to answer every question. But that's why the Academy puts tropical cyclones fairly low, although certainly not zero on attribution. So when we're getting back to Sharon's very simple question, when we look at the water, the water was about one to two degrees Celsius above average, the long-term average. That could happen by chance about one third of the time. So it's kind of like there's a little smoke from the gun, but it's not a massive signal there. What's happened this year? It's very similar to 2004, 2005, as the atmosphere has been very conducive to when you get a disturbance these last eight weeks, it's off to the races. And it gets up to close to about as strong as it can. We seem to see this for about every one or two years, every let's say 10 to 20 to 30 years in the Atlantic. Nobody knows exactly why. It's a great research topic. I don't see anybody here who wants to do tropical cyclone research, but if you do, it's a really good topic to do. But the potential is coming up. And as we continue to put greenhouse gases into the air and warm the atmosphere, 90% of that heat ends up in the ocean. So when you get to August and September, what now would seem to be a warmer than normal in 15 or 20 years will be average and their warmer than normals are probably gonna generate hurricanes even stronger than what we have. I wish it was gonna be otherwise, but the trend is probably to be when everything else lines up, when the whole atmosphere lines up, you can get some really, really strong storms. And we may be seeing this a number of catfives. We're starting to see some trends. Is it that the science loves this 95% confidence interval if you've ever worked with scientists to hear them talk about that? We're not there yet, but to make money in the slot machines, I don't need 95%. If you give me 55%, I'll say, fine, I don't have 95%. You can wait there, give me your money, and I can make something for it. So I think we're seeing the beginnings of the observations move here, but you will still hear some caution from most of the scientists on this. And frankly, you should. But there are increasing lines of evidence that these storms are in fact changing. And unfortunately, we will expect to see more of this, not less, in years when, when the atmosphere allows it. So let me stop there. I can, yeah, I'm just gonna stop there. Later on, if you wanna ask, why do I have this stunning-looking Excel spreadsheet in the back? We can talk about that, although Lindyne can probably talk about that as well, but sort of how we communicate risk gets into the what do we do about this issue? And, and, but well, let's, let's save that for later, later round. There'll be some good back and forth on that. So when we hear the reporting that the rains that came with Harvey, and in fact that this is the third year in a row that Houston's had 500 to 1,000 year storms, or at least storms, flooding that wasn't that probable. Or it wasn't considered that probable. Is that still not entirely accurate to say that those are indicators that the trends are moving in it? So, you know, back to the stool, one of the things physics is very certain about is warm air holds more water vapor. We know that there's a fancy equation called Clausius Claperon, 7% increase in water vapor, which means kind of rainfall for every degree Celsius. So we know that very well, but with Harvey the interesting thing is not that it came in on somewhat warmer waters, but the darn thing stalled, right? That's why they got 50 inches of rain. It stopped for three days and it stopped right on the coast. So it's the worst of all worlds. It's stopped where it's gonna rain on a ton of people and on our coastal cities, but it's close enough to the coast where the hurricane itself can do a pretty good job of maintaining its structure and intensity. And actually I've got a research project right now at Penn State to see whether the winds in hurricane season along the coast, are we getting more times where there is very weak steering flow because the, to a first order, think of a tropical cyclone as a cork, a hurricane as a cork, and it flows in the atmospheric river. So if that river stops, the storm stops. And if it's over you, you get 30, 40, 50 inches of rain. So yes, there is a contribution from a warmer atmosphere, but if the storm had kept moving, that's sort of the difference between getting, let's say, seven inches of rain and nine inches of rain. 40 to 50 inches of rain is because the darn thing stopped. And nobody's done the research to say, are those conditions more likely, less likely, or did they really just get unlucky? Or is this, again, something that we're starting to see in the data? I don't know. Ask me back in about eight to 10 weeks when we crunch the data. I've got 100 gigabytes of data I'm looking at right now on daily winds for 70 years. And we'll go figure this out. Okay, we'll get back to you on that. So Alice, Judge Hill, if I, and you can roll your eyes if I'm just mangling this too much. But while it's really hard to say right now, if the frequency or severity of tropical cyclones have increased because of climate change, it won't be so hard in the future as we watch this trend continue. That what we've seen in Houston and Puerto Rico, Miami, we're gonna see more of. So how do we, you run resilience policy for the United States. How do we get ahead of the curve? What is it possible to, or do we just hunker down like Professor Olson and hope for the best and expect the worst? What do we do? Professor Olson did sum it up. We are unprepared, that's the harsh truth. We don't prepare for the storms that we see already, much less those that are predicted by the scientists that will occur in the future. It really requires us to change our way of thinking so that we're basing our decisions on how we build on future risk, also incorporating historical events. But right now, all of our building standards, all of our model building standards across the United States are based on historical risk. So when we put up a building, even if it's to the best building code that's out there, it's only looking at what's happened in the past. Separately, our flood maps reflect historical risk, not future risk, and often unfortunately are inaccurate. We are receiving a lot of lessons from these events. Professor Olson referenced one that our electric grid is critical to really any lifeline sector, health, the economy, transportation. Once the electric grid goes down, we see cascading effects. You'll recall when Sandy came in, it wasn't even a hurricane when it hit Manhattan. But once that storm surge, and we haven't talked about increased sea level rise, so when the storm surge hits, we see higher water coming in than we anticipated, Manhattan had planned for 12 feet. Sandy brought close to 14 feet. It flooded a substation, and you'll remember those iconic pictures of lower Manhattan, completely dark, except for golden sacks. Was all lit up. There's a certain irony in that. But even a Gary Cohn, who was the COO at the time, remarked that our building came through beautifully. They had put a lot of sandbags. They had done a lot of preparedness work, but nobody could get to work. You could see the cars floating in front of the building. So our whole system fails. We've seen that in Puerto Rico. Professor Olson has alluded to the fact that Miami was also surprised by its failures of its electric grid. We have all the warning signals. We do not have in place the policies that will get us to resilience. Unfortunately, we are about to embark on one of the greatest infrastructure projects that we've embarked on in recent memory because we're gonna be doing a lot of rebuilding in these communities. And we don't have the standards that tell us how high to build. The one standard that we did have that would have been nationwide, President Trump has chosen to revoke 10 days before Harvey. He does not have a replacement. So as we rebuild, there is no requirement to build higher, even if you do take the federal dollars that we'll undoubtedly pour in to these communities as a result of supplemental appropriation. Even as we embark on that major infrastructure project, hopefully we will build it better so that they can handle greater stormwater, greater winds. But the question really becomes as Admiral Titley has alluded, these billion dollar events are mounting. It's becoming a great drain on our treasury. The government accountability office has said that climate poses a high risk to the federal government because of our flood insurance program and the hits to our federal assets. Think about that. A high risk to the federal government treasury. And so the question is, as we make these payouts, what do we ask of the communities in return? Houston and Florida really rely on property tax. And that gives them a great incentive to allow a lot of development because they want that tax revenue. They don't really have a strong state income tax system. So we've had a lot of what now turns out to have been unsafe development in floodplains within accurate maps, but also known floodplains. Houston has said they wanna engage in a six billion buyout of those properties which makes a great deal of sense. But if they allow future building in risky areas, what's the obligation of federal taxpayers who live in Oklahoma, who might have their heat events or their tornado events or whatever to pay for choices that are made by communities who for other reasons are motivated not to build back as strongly? No answers to these questions, but they're, as Lundin I'm sure will tell us, there are huge economic consequences to the choices that we continue to make if what we're doing, if we just keep down the current path we're on. We are not prepared now and we will certainly not be prepared for another Harvey, Irma or Maria going forward unless we change how we approach our building and where we locate our communities and look at the safety factors plus the economic strength and our ability to get back to business quickly. So that's my cheery message to you. I was gonna say it, and now for the really good news. Lundin Patten Esquire, tell us the really good news. What's the bill, what does the private sector think about this? So a couple of comments and you'll figure out why a lawyer is working on this in a couple of minutes in terms of where I think we're going. I went back to a series of contacts and asked them what they thought we were looking at in terms of orders of magnitude. No one would agree to give cost estimates at this point for purposes of attribution. However, I was able to get some ranges which were done not only from not for attribution but also through aggregating independent estimates and integration. So remember that we're talking about what many people in my sector are calling herma. That would be a combination of Harvey, Irma and Maria. So for herma, we have three separate events which are all in relative temporal proximity of very different characters and different geographic locations that hit highly different economic and physical environments. So in the context of Harvey, you had an event which it looks like based on what the at least existing retrospective analysis as nascent as it is has been that this is primarily a water event. I'm sure that doesn't surprise anybody but how much of a water event is relevant when you try to understand what I look at which is who's gonna pay. So the estimates at this point for direct damage this is not economic disruption which of course is secondary and would include lost jobs and disruption of tax streams and other things is looking to be somewhere and this is a rather large range between 50 and 190 billion US dollars. Now of that, it looks as if approximately 10% of that may be a wind event. So let me repeat that. People who are looking at direct damage context because this is primarily a water event are thinking that this is about a 10% wind event. For those of you who haven't been in the area of allocation of damage issues you might say well who cares? It's damages. Everybody cares because if the wind comes first private property coverage pays. If the water comes first flood insurance pays. And so if you start looking at a number, yeah so look in your pocket, how's it going? So if you look at that, that means that it's a very modest amount and so I should step back and say that for a lot of the work that I've done over the last couple of decades looking at how much of natural disasters were really being paid for by private insurance as contrasted with public disaster funds. If you look 30 years ago you would have a ratio where about 70% of direct loss content was paid for by private insurance and about 30% was left for federal or state disaster aid. About 10, well maybe probably 20 years ago that completely flipped and it was then a 30, 70 split meaning that you were down to about 30% of that loss content being paid for by private insurance and 70% with disaster aid. Today if you look at what we're talking about now with a 10% split in a wind event and with other kinds of loss experience over the last five years, you really are looking at a continued inversion and that's occurring for a wide number of reasons which I'll mention overall. But if that's the Harvey part of Irma, when you get to Irma, you have somewhere, people are thinking between maybe a 50 and 100 billion dollar event with perhaps that being 20% wind. Now I was surprised, I expected that to be more of a wind event rather than, or more, maybe at least even. So those numbers of course are nascent like everything else, but if it really is gonna turn out to be 20% from the direct damage and again, that is a very substantial amount of public disaster aid which we'll need to try to rebuild. And then in the context of Maria, direct damages for the US component only are looking to be somewhere between 45 and 95 billion without economic damage interruption and that will have wind and water components to it but a probably much higher wind event. It's so much newer that no one's talking about even a guesstimate of what that percentage might be but looking at the statistics from those events, the physical statistics from those events and maybe Dave can comment on that. It's looking like it will be more of a private insurance event to the extent private insurance was purchased. And so that's the other issue we have. Depending on the region where you are, depending on whether you're in the US, whether you're in a protector, whether you happen to be in a non US country in the Caribbean, the insured component is quite different for most property loss. So again, why is a lawyer looking at this? I'm not only looking at it for purposes of understanding the allocations and understanding how physical events as they potentially become more aggravated, more energetic and more severe in their impacts are impacting the industry that I've worked with for a long time. I'm interested in what parts of property, what parts of insurance coverage are being impacted. Like Sandy, the Harvey event is going to have a very large component of it which will also be auto. It won't be huge but it'll be auto claims because they've got flooded out. Now that's gonna be private. That's not a flood problem in most cases. So there's gonna be a lot of auto insurance claims paid but remember you're talking about an auto, you're not talking about a home, you're not talking about a piece of infrastructure. So you have to, in the insurance side, when you're looking at the private and the public side, you have to look at property risks. You have to look at flood risks. And remember, residential is primarily going to be a federal government national flood insurance program event and there's going to be medium sized commercial coverage but there is also some amount of private flood insurance which is provided primarily for high wealth homes, residential homes and for very big commercial environments where the private insurance will come in. But, and then of course there's gonna be disaster. The other thing I look at is casualty. So you heard what Dave was talking about saying if you look at his chart and there's other work but this is pretty calibrating work that's being done by the academy that there has been an improving level of certainty in the understanding of whether an event is attributable to climate change. So what I've been looking at over the last decade is, well what happens when that certainty increases? Does this mean that this property event becomes a casualty event? So for those of you who aren't in the business, what is casualty mean? Casualty means all the other junk. That's professional liability, directors and officers liability. That impacts engineers, architects, it impacts public officials in some cases. And so the question is, when the numbers get big enough and there's not enough private insurance coverage, what else do you see emerging? And there are patterns of this in history. There are certainly patterns of this involving pharmaceutical litigation. There are serious patterns involving asbestos exposure that when, typically when municipalities began to realize that they were going to be bearing very large health impact costs associated with asbestos and there were large cohorts of individuals who were impacted, you began to see dynamics change. But how those in the environment space, you also saw that. So you began to see in circumstances as understanding of environmental pollution improved over time, beginning in the 70s and 80s and 90s. In the insurance industry, we saw circumstances where what an engineer should have known and what should have been foreseeable in 1982. It's quite different, let's give you an example from a dry cleaner release, a dry cleaner release about how that contaminant might migrate into a local well. What they would understand in 1981 would be way different than what the expected standard of care would be in 2017, all right? So if you look at what Dave was talking about in terms of attribution science, all the scientists have been focusing on, from a lawyer's perspective, how many angels dance on the head of the pin, because you wanted 95% certainty. Lawyers don't look for that, the law doesn't look for that. In a civil context, it looks for more likely than not, that would be 51%. When you start talking about what's foreseeable. So the kinds of other claims that we're beginning to see, we already saw them with Katrina, were those where someone was damaged as a result of the failure of an engineered system, whether it was a levy, whether it's a building. And then their questions begin to be asked, not only of designers who might have designed the original structure, but those who were responsible for maintaining it. Was that civil engineering work done in a matter that reflected what a reasonable civil engineer similarly situated should have foreseen as expected physical forces that would impact them? And just for those of you who know, I did write an article with some friends of a client, or Sophie Majanak and Jim Thornton that was put out in Nature Geoscience that kind of walked through how this works, but this applies to directors and officers and others. And so I think that people have been spending a lot of time thinking about, well, what is the responsibility for emissions from mitigation and how do you allocate liability that way? I'm slightly more pedestrian. I'm interested in what's happening with casualty cover, professional liability and how might those standards change? And I would think that I'm seeing some movement in that area. There's a professor at Carnegie Mellon who is looking at how all civil engineering standards are being impacted by foreseeable events associated with climate change. And there is an active investigative project which is looking at the certainty of climatic events and how that impacts chemical engineering standards at the AICHE.  I was sitting in a room with a group of chemical engineers who were talking about post-Harvey experience. And one of them said to me, did you understand that when Harvey came over Texas, that that was the equivalent to taking all of the facilities because of the record low pressure of the physical event, that was the equivalent of taking every single facility and raising it up to 3,000 feet in elevation. So what does that matter in terms of chemical engineering standards? That matters because most of the chemical engineering work is done assuming standard temperature and pressure. It means that you rely on gravity. It means that if you have a floating roof on a tank, who would imagine that?  If it fills up with water, then you've really changed your dynamics and have a different pollution exposure. If your STP changes and you've got a chemical mix and you've got an exposure to that atmosphere, then you might have a different type of fire, oxygen mix type of risk. Alice, I wanna ask you a question based on what Lynn Dean was saying, and I see you taking notes, so I assume you've got things to say, but I also wanna give people in the audience a chance to ask questions and make comments. So if we take the numbers and their early estimates, so I'm sure they'll change, but if we take the high end of your ranges, it's about a 500 billion. Three step? Okay. Well, my math isn't great, but I'm gonna guess that it's up in that neighborhood or it's going to be. That's a lot of money, and is it just human nature that we're not gonna make the front end investments to mitigate that risk, and we're just gonna have to pay? Or are you, based on all the work you did, do you think that it's gonna be possible to convince people as the risk factors are shifting and this was becoming more likely to happen to make front end investments in resilience so that you don't have a 500 billion dollar bill at the end of the day? The science is there that we should be doing this. The cost benefit analysis could be tightened up, but it's pretty clear that if you invest a dollar pre-event, you're gonna save $4 in the back end. So pre-disaster risk reduction makes huge economic sense. To your point, I think that we are learning, this may have a lot to do with politics. For local politicians, there's an expression N-I-M-T, not in my term. I've read some folks who comment that you see this politicians engage actively on climate change towards the end of their terms. They've been a 20 year mayor and they've become interested. President Obama in his second term was much more active on climate change than he was in his first term. So you have a political dynamic that it's easier to pay attention to crime, to immediate education needs of your population. But ultimately it's a challenge to accurately assess risk for humans. And a lot of work has been done and it's increasingly done on the behavioral heuristics or prejudices that we bring to our decision making. Two very pertinent examples are optimism bias. Now I just described a very grim picture to you and that's really what I've seen after a lot of study. But most people want to find hope so they're gonna think it's not gonna happen to me. Most communities think it's not gonna happen to me. You remember that Freakonomics? Why do people still get married when the divorce rate is 50%? You know, it's forever, well not really. So there is a huge optimism bias that we all bring and that helps us get through life, frankly. So that affects our risk and we don't, we tend to overvalue the loss of something so we're very tied to place. We don't want to invest in a future gain which would be risk mitigation. We can't do that very well. And then the last is recency bias which is very difficult in this area. Recency bias is, and you see this all the time with these extreme events, we've never experienced anything like this. Well think about climate change. That's what's gonna be happening all the time because it's getting warmer and the events get more severe, they come more frequently. So we are in a record-breaking era, that's true, but we're constantly surprised that we are. So it's very difficult and until we can find the communication skills that allow us to engage and help people have an accurate risk assessment, ultimately my friends in the insurance company have insurance world and the reinsurers have said that it's gonna be difficult to get people to buy the necessary insurance and to make those choices upfront. That's just the reality. What that means for us economically is very serious because we are underinsured. My last point, optimism bias, seismic risk, huge known risk in California. The uptake on earthquake insurance in California is between nine and 12%. So talk about an uninsured, enormous known risk. And in fact, the predictive capabilities for seismic risk are improving at a very rapid rate, not that it will occur in a span of a certain timeframe. But we've got human nature working against us, so I don't know if we will be able to put in place true risk mitigation measures in a highly political sized environment. You're gonna be working on it. I'm always working on it. I'm always working on it. And I say that my colleague Emily Gallagher and I have been working on a severe weather in the United States project and it's certainly one of the things that we've seen is that people wait until the disaster happens, but sometimes after the disaster, then people are more willing to make longer term investments. So I mean, we saw that in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, we're in the mid 80s, they had catastrophic floods, people died, there was terrible public outcry, and they had a very innovative, strong-willed mayor at the time who took some very aggressive flood protection and including they moved people out of the flood plain, which is one of the hardest things to do to mitigate risk. But all these years later, it worked, right? But now people are getting a little complacent about the level of risk because they think it was solved and they're starting to move back into the flood plains. And so it's a very interesting picture of physical resilience and human complacency can be kind of a dangerous dance. So it'll be interesting to see where you go with this research. Well, I would just remark the recency bias could work in your favor in that you just had this event so we find that people tend to overvalue that risk if there's been, well, actually the risk of terrorism is probably because of 9-11 is higher than the actual risk, any individual experiences. And that's a recency bias and affected very much decisions in the federal government as to funding. So it can work in your benefit or to your detriment. Just depends. You've been very busy there. I know, okay. So I, you know, just kind of listening to these, I mean, there's really a few key points, I think both Lundin and Alice made there. When I talk about climate, I try to make it three things because I can only remember three things. It's about people, it's about water. We've been talking about the water and it's about change. And of those three, you know, when people talk about climate change, it's not the climate per se because unless you live in San Diego, Hawaii, it's not ideal, but it's changing. And we have always looked backwards to figure out what it was gonna be. In the Navy, we would call that steering by your wake. That is not meant as a compliment. But it's worked. As long as you have something stable, that works. And for all of your lifetimes and your children's lifetimes and your grandchildren's lifetimes, it's gonna change.  So it was interesting in Harvey about a day before, two days before Harvey hit, the new FEMA director tweeted that no one could dream of this kind of flood. To which I tweeted back, sir, you need better dreams. Because this is part of that kind of change. And I think Alice just said it. We are going to keep setting these kinds of records. Now, when I talked about some of the challenges with attribution of specific storms, it's also, I think, important to realize that there is no evidence, there is zero evidence that hurricanes will become weaker or they will become less damaging. That's not gonna happen. The sea level rise keeps coming up. When we start looking at these numbers, $400 billion, starting to approach 2% of GDP, give or take. I tell people this is the carbon tax that no one voted for. That's what we're paying. We're paying the carbon tax no one voted for. And we're gonna keep paying it. So enjoy. The last piece of this conversation between Sharon and Alice is really interesting in this. How do you fix things? And can you fix it before? When the military, we might call that left of boom. Can you fix things before the really bad thing happens? And it's interesting that Tulsa seems to say, well, maybe things can get fixed or at least afterwards. So I used to own a house 10 miles from landfall of Katrina on the wrong side of Katrina.  I can show you the pictures. The governor at the time, very conservative governor, Haley Barber, basically marshaled massive amounts of national goodwill, if you remember back in September of 2005, brought in all kinds of new urban designers, pro bono. We did charrettes along the coast. I was down there. It was gonna be great, walkable, livable, wonderful transportation, da-da-da, the whole thing. Basically those guys needed security to get out of the town halls because the people who lived down there just wanted it back like it was. They were convinced it was never gonna happen again and it was gonna come back. People also tend to learn the wrong lessons. I would say Camille, 1969 category five, killed another 200 people in 2005. Why? Because Camille was like the worst it could be, cap five. I know the water came here, people took two steps back, said I'm okay because Camille didn't get here and they probably got killed by Katrina. It's which lessons get learned is really fascinating. I'm a physical scientist, but this whole psychology of how people learn, what they do, what they ensure for how they manage risks. In general, I mean, Ladeen can tell you, in general we do a massively poor job as individuals of assessing risk and how we do this and these risks are now changing. It's not like we did it great when they were stable and now they're changing and they're getting worse. I mean, we've had our gun and CNA Military Advisory Board three years ago, we put out a report called Just That, the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change and I would say that's a pretty good way we have it. So the change is coming, it's already here, it's gonna keep coming and if you don't try to look forward you're gonna get burned really badly and we're gonna pay. We are paying and how do we do this smarter and that's to be determined. For our listening audience, the Lee we keep referring to is Vice Admiral Lee Gunn who's here with us today who is the Vice Chair of CNA's Military Advisory Board who's played a very important role in understanding the security implications of climate change. So Lee, it's really great to have you here. If you have questions, please identify, raise your hand. We'll get a mic to you and please say your name and your affiliation and also please don't go on a long disquisition or you will force me to be rude and I don't wanna do that. And while we're getting the mic, no, not like you did, as we're getting the mic, do we have mics? All right, you can just stand up and ask your question, we're all friends here. But Lentine, just on the way to your question, Rich sent me a question and Alice did touch on it but I just wanted to see if you have anything additional, he said that he was interested in the reinsurance industry and how it's gonna look at this. And I know Alice talked about it but do you have anything to add on that? There are some, the answer is very different in each locality and so I will make a couple of very general comments. It's important to know that the structure of the property, especially residential property insurance market is quite different in each place where Harvey, Irma and Maria hit. So in the context of where Harvey is, you have a set of more traditional, what I would call more traditional US-based residential property insurance programs which are part of larger insurers and it's true in the commercial space also and cross-collateralized as you find in many of those. Which means that there will be reinsurance that's impacted there and it will be, but I think everyone so far thinks that this is within, given the percentage allocations that they're within their management capacity. The situation in Florida is quite different and it's quite different not necessarily for the, well for the reinsurer, there are several reinsurers and what's important to remember is that as a result of some long history that I don't have time to go over here, the residential property insurance market in Florida is dominated by a series of small, local companies, I mean, I don't mean that they're small, but they're smaller than a national typical insurer and they are generally, in many cases, reinsured by citizens, which is the Florida controlled reinsurer. Before Irma hit, I believe that the citizens had about $17 billion in surplus available and I've just told you what the magnitude of the loss that's wrong constantly at the beginning of it. So I would say that what that means is that for the residential property insurers, it's gonna be very important to understand which portion of this goes to NFIP, which forces that it goes to win, those numbers are far from certain, it would be irresponsible to make any comments about it, but I would say that that is something to watch because the economic outcome for that industry is could be quite different in Florida than it would be, for example, in Texas. But then you have Puerto Rico, which again has a different regulatory environment, but it also is part of an event which went across many countries, Caribbean islands. And so I think that there's a tremendous amount of focus that's being had by the global reinsurance industry in that event more than one might expect given how the numbers allocate out, but the reason that that focus is probably gonna be greater there and involvement would be greater there is because of the distribution of loss experience, the nature of the event, how that's gonna allocate to private insured or government reinsured functionality. So I'm not sure that helps you in any way, but...  I think that how the money allocates out and there's clearly gonna be a lot of disaster aid which gets impacted here, but each one of those circumstances is gonna be very, very different in just a bit of environment. Sorry to keep you waiting. Oh, here's a microphone, yay. Because online they won't be able to hear you if you don't use the microphone. My name is Clara Vondrich, I'm the director of Divest Invest Philanthropy and I wanted to first thank you so much for citing the Freakonomics stat about the fundamental irrationality of marriage because as someone that turned 40 yesterday and has never been married, I'm validated finally in my bad luck. So thank you very much. My questions are twofold. The first has to do with, I just participated in a presentation by AIR Worldwide, the Catastrophe Modeling Firm and Peter Sison has talked about all the usual suspects that we're talking about here, the increasing frequency, intensity, bizarre changes in the hurricane, things that could make them more severe. But he also said that six of the 10 highest loss causing hurricanes happened in the first half of the 20th century. So I was confused about that and I was wondering if you guys could help me understand that. The second is climate-wise, this coalition of investors, insurance companies, came out with a report last year that talked about the insurance gap and they identified $100 billion in uninsured, or gap between insured and uninsured losses. It sounds like these three storms alone this year could be hitting up against that boundary. Why not? And the last question has to do with litigation risk for the insurance companies. So obviously fossil fuels companies are being the subject of litigation more and more and Jeffrey Sachs talks about how that threat is gonna become more and more common and they're gonna get sued. Now looking at insurance companies sort of ancillary risk as third party insurers, what do you foresee as the potential there and does it have more in common with the asbestos litigations where insurance companies were actually on the hook for considerable amounts or is it more like the tobacco litigations where ultimately there weren't a lot of claims made against private insurers? Okay, so yes. Okay, that's probably a whole seminar right there and in questions. Let me talk about the first part that you asked with the cat risk modelers. And the reason you see these kind of strange things like big losses early part of the century, this is that whole thing that I got into in the attribution being relatively low. This is what I call the law of small numbers, okay? So insurance 101 hazard times vulnerability or exposure times vulnerability, right? So if you take just a few big storms and they go in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can get massive, massive damages. Galveston, I mean is a kind of a classic, Key West or Miami hurricanes in the early 20th century there. So no warnings, no building whatsoever. You kill thousands of people, slick the whole place. It doesn't, it only takes one, right? It only takes one or two of these storms and then you can go years and not have any. And this makes the attribution of a given storm because there just aren't many of these really big storms challenging for the science community. But this is why people need to be careful and jumping on the bandwagon of oh, that is climate change, that's a smoking gun. There are plenty, the weight of evidence is massive for climate change. We honestly don't need one hurricane to that's not gonna do it anyways. But that's basically why you can get this, what may seem like a paradox. It's like, hey, I heard all these people talking about more storms, stronger storms, whatever. This is why the attribution is relatively low. And I tell my climate friends, be careful on this because you sort of sell, not you, but it can sell the wrong message there. No, and it's, yeah, so I mean, I absolutely believe the cat risk modelers. There were some very, very big losses there. This is law of small numbers. The difference in prediction in Galveston, that storm, that hurricane came through, no preparations. Everyone thought it was a beautiful sunny day.   Unfortunately, we have far better and we are improving all the time. That is one thing, by the way, that a bipartisan, on a bipartisan basis, Congress has been able to pass legislation this year on increasing predictive warnings for these kinds of storms. But I'll ask, we'll turn to Lindean to answer the other question. One comment on your question, though, when you said the estimates were $100 billion. It's one of, you know, something you said really hit me. One of the problems is that we base a lot of our predictions on hindsight and literally models are validated by hindsight by making sure that they would have predicted accurately what happened in the past. So we're in uncharted territory, increasingly, where we're having unpredicted and record-breaking events happen. And so it's almost like are we surprised that we're surprised? Like, these numbers are gonna keep breaking. It's like the theme of the record being surprised. Right, like you said. You shouldn't have done it. Shouldn't have done it. And in fact, they probably had done exercises, tabletop exercises, that had those scenarios in them. Would be my guess. Houston, we had done one. Right. So there was no question that they would be, they knew there would be a toxic spill because I was there at the exercise. We knew it would happen. So it's not a surprise. Not only that, but they were supposed to be ready for it. Whether or not they were is another story. So I think it's interesting that we talk about models and forecasting as if they are synonymous. In fact, they're really not for the purpose of underwriting in any way. They're not for other things either. But it's important to know that in the insurance industry, the insurance industry has used modeling to forecast impact losses for a long period of time. Now how much that forecasting is impacted based on history versus futures is I think a very concerning discussion at the moment within the industry. And I think that's probably what you heard from some of the presentation. If you look at press reports, when modelers in the last couple of years have been asked, are you including climate change and you're modeling, many of them answered, no. For a variety of reasons, but the majority of them continue to indicate that they just thought that, and remember, the climate community doesn't necessarily mix with the natural catastrophe modeling community at all. And so their perception in many cases based on what they said publicly was look, the certainty is so poor. And I would come back and talk to some of them and say, ah, it depends on what you're talking about and what is uncertain. So I think there is a rather large discussion going on at this point about should that knowledge about expected forecasting differences be incorporated and there are some modeling companies that are experimenting with that now. And certainly insurance carriers are experimenting with that now. How that gets translated in terms of premium calculations is impacted by politics, it's impacted by regulation, it's impacted by politics, so that's complicated. I think your other question was about the emerging fossil fuel litigation. So remember, I think Dave said this, but if he didn't, I will tell you other people say it. Well, it is possible to model counterfactual expected events for forecasting purposes and it's possible to create a model which conforms to a prior event and have a estimate, a probabilistic estimate about what may happen in the future. Nobody that I know who works in attribution science has ever told me that they can do a deterministic statement about whether a particular event was caused by climate change period. All they're doing is that allocation. So part of the challenge I think here is if you are trying to sue an entity and your goal is to do emission reductions, boy, that's a long little logic chain to get that through a litigation environment in a court, whether it's a judge or a jury, I don't care, that's long from point A to point B. Part of why I've been looking at other, let's say more well-tread paths is that trying to decide what is what a responsible professional would do and what an individual with obligations or a duty be that a director or officer should have done or should have foreseen is a much simpler path to walk down once the information is available, especially if that information is now being charted and described in a way which has got specific percentages that track what the way that the law deals with these issues. Getting from an understanding of whether an event was more likely than not increased in its severity as a result of emissions, okay, so maybe you could, you do get to those numbers, perhaps the complexity, I mean, one thing that Dave didn't mention is the reason why we've got some of these types of events farther up the curve right now is because they're more simplistic atmospheric models that output that and the complexity of getting to the models that deal with hurricanes is higher, but to me, remember I'm a lawyer, I have a little science background, but it's just an integral, right? So it's a question of how many pieces you put together in the computing capacity today is so much better. I get it, I mean, I know it's not that sad I told you, I'm a little simple about this stuff, but I know somebody will be working away to try to resolve lots of that and they are working away, but even if you get to the point where you say that, that's only one part in the logic chain of allocating liability. How do you get from that gap between you should have known that this could happen and as a result of your omissions or products, you should be responsible for that piece. I wrote a book in 2012 and I'm in the midst of writing, I've written a bunch of articles recently where I looked at the legal theories that are available. The only thing that looks like that out, I mean, there's a path to go for professional liability, there's a path for directors and officers liability, there are paths for other things, but to try to actually work this back to individual emitters when the scientists are flat out gonna tell you, I can't tell you that that carbon molecule caused that damage. You're left with having to come up with a novel legal theory. That's a little hard. That did happen in the context of pharmaceuticals. I have written about this, I'm writing about it more. For those of you who have done anything about market share theory, the problem is here, the market involves governments and private actors. And funny, those private actors are actually exploiting government assets in most cases as the basis for those emitters. From a logic chain perspective, it's a challenge, but even if you get that far, the barrier to extending the pharmaceutical-based market share theory liability allocation mechanism to any other toxic turret to date has been that the basis for that allocation has been the proof that the impacts, the materials that were sold, in that case, pharmaceuticals, and those impacts were fungible. It didn't matter whether you bought philitamide from manufacturer A, I'm making this up, or manufacturer B, or C. The chemical compound was the same. Now for those of you who do a little bit in the greenhouse gas space, funny, we all talk about CO2 equivalence. I've written this before, that's pretty fungible to me, but that doesn't get you back to the simple argument, the relatively simple argument, which certainly wasn't done when it was put forth, of pharmaceutical-market share allocation, then extending that to everybody who was in the chain about that fungible product. We've kept you already well over the time, a lot of time for this event, so we could take one more question if someone has one. Otherwise, I know that you had a comment there, so please. Hi, my name is Madison, I'm from MIT Washington, and I had a question specifically for Lanine. You had mentioned that there was this continued inversion between the funding that comes from the state versus funding that comes from the private sector, and I was wondering if you could go into a little more detail about why we're seeing that, and if possible, are there any policy suggestions to reverse that? That's a, I'll be as quick as I can. It is a construct of both the capital markets and a policy function, so people purchase insurance when they find it to be an acceptable price for the risk that they identify, but for residential coverage particularly, it's not true for commercial coverage or for some special high-value residential coverage, but for individual consumers, it's a regulated market, and so there is always an intermediary, kind of like a utility commissioner who allows pass-through rates. In the case of insurance, if you are in a regulated market, you have to submit your basis for your rating. If the basis for the rating won't permit a consideration of climate change or other driving factors that an underwriter considers, that underwriter may choose to either reduce its risk load in that space, it may choose to set a higher price, or it may choose not to offer in that market. However that works, the reality is at some point, even if they set the price high enough, nobody might buy it, so you're seeing a situation where also as a consequence of the history with flood exposure in the United States, there was a decision taken which resulted in the 1968 National Flood Insurance Program that that would be a government-run program, and so the more that you have weighted events that involve flood exposure, which is the result both of zoning, but it's people to the risk and severity of events, it's a constellation of events, you do tend to mix that, so it's the impacts of policy that you are just seeing, it's also terribly impacted by the fact that we are much more of an urban population today than we are rural, and so that push gets heightened because you're in an urban environment, not a rural environment, you get much more load on public assistance, public funds than you do on insured funds. Last words? You have just some last comments? Two that will take less than 60 seconds. Lindy talked about a phrase that makes people cringe on attribution is, was event X caused by climate change? That's an ill-posed, what we would call an ill-posed question. Translated, roughly that means it's a bad question. Yes, there are such things as bad questions, that's one of them, and a much more interesting way and an answerable way to ask this is, was that event either less likely or more likely to occur? Was it weaker or stronger? And those are questions that science is much more able to answer, but if you hear somebody say that X, drought, heat, whatever, was caused by, that's probably not good. The way to think of these extreme events, irrespective of the attribution of the different ones, who's been to the beach? Everybody, right? We're all being to the beach. Okay, watch the rising tide. The rising tide is a climate change. The waves on top, when you see that big wave, that's kind of like kind of an extreme event. And as the tide comes up, what do those big waves do? They tend to get bigger and they come further up. So unfortunately, the tides though, they then go back out. It will happen, but it's gonna be about 20,000 years for this one to go back out. So for effective human civilization, we have a tide that right now is coming in and we're trying to stop the rising tide. We're not making it go back, but we're trying to stop it. But then on top, you have the waves. And some are small and some are big. And those big ones are the ones that we're seeing like these hurricanes and some other events. But that's kind of like when you have to explain this in two months to that crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. You use that. Thanks. That's helpful. Allison, last words? I just wanna thank you all for coming. I think we talked about how grim this can sound. We can't solve it. There's no question that we can make great progress. And the first step in that is getting people to care. So that you're here and as Dave said, talk about it at Thanksgiving. Yale says, none of us are talking about it enough. And engage your friends, your neighbors and try to find a way to get people to care so we make the right choices that protect all of us and future generations. And I'll also vote again again and say as my last comment that we're seeing the strain on our military forces on both active duty and especially national guard for these events. And they don't necessarily plan and resource for defense support to civil authorities, which is what disaster relief is called at home and around the world. And not only that, but our national guard takes it on the chin for sure for these kinds of events. They're also heavily deployed right now to fights overseas. We're asking a lot of our all volunteer force and we're also asking them to be prepared for things that they're not really preparing for. And to me, something's gotta give in there and I know Lee's gonna keep working on that and Heather Massara too, other people here will keep working on that question and we will as well. So that's something I'm definitely concerned about with readiness. And Lundin, I think you've been the star of the show so any last comment before? Okay, thank you all for coming. We appreciate having you here.


Hey, what's going on everybody? My name is John Hammond and welcome back to another YouTube video tutorial We're still looking at Python. We made a cool little thing here that actually doesn't do a whole lot But it's going over the basics conceptual stuff with input and output and variables and now we're gonna move on This time around since we're starting to get into more actual cool and important and things Programs that actually do stuff. We're gonna have to make sure our code is good We have to make sure our code is compliant with Python standards and things like that So in Python, there's this actual thing like that's called pep8 It's the it's a standard and kind of a visual style guide that Python has set out to make sure the Python code that you write is pretty smart and I don't know similar to everything else that other people write so it's discusses things about indentation discusses arguments How much how much spacing you should have between? Code how you should comment things and display variables, etc. Etc. I recommend you totally read through this But there is something that can kind of help Our code be this way So I'm gonna actually run through a little presentation that was put together by Audrey Roy Seems like a really awesome individual.  You can't live without and it's really about co-readability style comments, etc. And how to make your Python code awesome clear and understandable It really gets into self-documenting code It really gets into making sure that you're documenting things with comments and doc strings and it gets into the Zen of Python 2 Python is is something that's Not only a programming tool, but also a conceptual thing where you Have a certain code style and I don't know a way of programming that Is supposed to be great So I want to show this off this this module that keeps in mind Python's philosophy as you as you are a software developer and software engineer So I'm gonna fire that up an idle Just so it's a Python interpreter that looks pretty good If you haven't heard of idle it is the integrated developments learning environment I think for Python if you don't have it installed you can see to app get install idle and then You should be able to install it. Just fine. I've already have it installed. So I'll fire it up And then inside idle we can import this the syntax that they're using right there Just importing a module in Python and it tells us about the Zen of Python Beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit, etc. Etc. Really just this philosophy and mindset that we should have when you're writing Python code So To do that we want to be in line with that Python pep8 standard Pepe8 really argues that you should have been using four spaces no tabs blank lines, etc. etc so It's good to have all the stuff in the back of your mind, but it would be pretty awesome if we had some tools I can make sure our Python code Does this Just tools that automate the process for us like some plugins and sublime text to let's check out and install this Sublime linter is apparently something that can do this for us. We can install that package in Sublime text. I just hit control shift P to get the command palette up and then sublime linter after I search for a package It should okay now. Let's just install awesome. So now in our Python code Sublime linter looks like it's already cranking stuff out for us. It really hates all of my Spaces, so let's convert Looks like I can't find it in the menu as to how to convert our tabs to spaces, but we should be able to do it in the command palette Yeah, indentation convert to spaces and that works just fine for us And all of these trailing stuff within parentheses, I shouldn't have because pep8 does not like that It wants to have All of everything with inside parentheses. It wants to have No spaces so okay sublime linter looks pretty awesome for us and what else is there? command line pep8 checker. Oh, it looks like that's just a tool pep8. We can probably set up and install If I actually look in my terminal, it is something we can install from the repositories Awesome. So now that pep8 is available We can run that on the script that we just ran and we don't have any output or any errors So it looks like we're good Pilant looks like it can do pretty similar stuff Let's check that out. Pilant variables. Oh Wow, this is really cool. I actually haven't seen this before valid constant name I Wonder what all that stuff is Checking line comes like variable names are well-formed according to your coding standard. This is really cool I actually haven't seen Pilant before So this is definitely something to look into if you are interested in the kind of stuff that it looks like it's given out and valid name What else is there? And then the rest of this goes into important stuff That you can do with Python. That's pretty awesome But I really wanted to show off the pep8 standard. I really recommend you read through this but the sublime lint Package that we just installed looks like it'll be really awesome for us It'll make sure that the code that I write and also the code that you guys write is within the pep8 standard because actually I recorded a lot of these videos a While back and the standard that I use I had like really disgusting code braces that would represent like I actually commented out cold Code braces to represent my logic flow and I would end each line and Python was a semi colon Which was just hideous. No one liked it. I got I got a lot of flag for it So I'm trying to do a lot better with this time around so having these tools like pep8 That command line utility and now pilot. I want to look more into that and the sublime linter to keep things within the pep8 standard That should be pretty cool I hope you guys enjoy it and can actually follow along and use that same same tool with me So, all right, uh, that's really all I want to show off in this tutorial nothing big But keeping track when that pep8 standard and making sure the code that we write is within a certain compliant standard Thing so yeah, thanks for watching guys. See you soon


Synthetic biology is a young science. While it may feel like a foreign concept, chances are you've already encountered the fundamentals of it in your everyday life, from plant-based burgers to sourdough bread. In the very near future, this science will make the leap from engineering everyday things to creating cells that take instructions and can edit the human body. The implications of this new science will literally change life as we know it, but how do we ensure these changes are for the better? Life is becoming programmable. Now, what might we do with this emerging technology? Well, the answer is a lot. It's not somewhere off in the distant future, it's now. And there's not a single industry that bioengineering will not at some point touch. So what exactly is synthetic biology? Amy Webb, futurist, author and assistant professor at New York University, explains how the science works. How can we navigate the potential as well as the potential perils that come with being able to program the living world? Here's what you need to know about synthetic biology. This is an emerging field of science that's roughly 10 years old. And the point of synthetic biology is to see if we can harness what already exists in nature, understand it at a molecular or a code level, engineer or re-engineer organisms to have new or improved purposes. Life is becoming programmable, which means that just as computers speak in the language of ones and zeros and can be programmed, life speaks in the letters of ATCG and it can similarly be programmed just as we program code on a bunch of computers. So, you can think of this as combining the fields of traditional engineering and computer science and even artificial intelligence and other areas of biology. Programming life sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but synthetic biology is already being used in industries ranging from agriculture to healthcare. The mRNA vaccines used to fight COVID are one such innovation. Messenger RNA vaccines are really amazing because what they do is send a new set of instructions to your body. And in the case of COVID, those instructions said, hey, look out for this spiky-looking thing that's really dangerous. Attack it, change the code of it and then get out. So it wasn't an attenuated virus as are contained in other types of vaccines. So what does the future hold for such a quickly evolving science and what could we use it for? Imagine a future in which a fast-fashion retailer that currently sells very cheap clothing that relies on a lot of intensive resources and a challenging and complicated supply chain. What if you could buy a t-shirt for $3, wear it twice and never wash it? What if your clothes came with an expiration date and they were intended to turn into compost? What's really interesting about this is that this form of creating new clothing would be less resource-intensive, require less water, require less human capital, and also would result in less waste. So if we think of carbon dioxide as another example, what if we could take the excessive amounts of CO2 currently plaguing us and turn that CO2 into food that could be eaten? There are already some researchers working on this very project and in fact have created food out of thin air. It's taking the CO2 as a feedstock and translating that into a type of product that could be made to consume. They've already done this. There are some noodles that look a lot like Japanese soba noodles that were simply made out of CO2. It's a different way of thinking about something that exists and is totally commonplace. To me that's really great analogy for what the future looks like. It's taking what we already have and re-perceiving it. Just as this technology might revolutionize all facets of our lives, it could also bring a host of risks, some that are difficult for us to even comprehend right now. One of those has to do with a new form of cyber-bio-malware. There was a case where a scientist sent out a nine biological code to another place to have it sort of printed so that he could get that material back in the mail. I know that sounds super sci-fi, but that's kind of how the field works right now. Nothing very special about it. However, there was something called a man-in-the-middle attack. This is a pretty normal cyber attack that happens in other places. In this case, it happened in synthetic biology. And somebody was able to intercept that new genetic code when it got sent out. And what left the lab as a totally innocuous genetic material was sent potentially back as a deadly pathogen. A high-security lab might be totally locked down in terms of hazardous materials, but a lot of IT departments don't update their software very often. People are using out-of-date browsers, and that creates new, terrifying vulnerabilities. One of the biggest risks has to do with dual use, meaning sometimes technologists, scientists, they create something that has really beneficial purposes, but if used in a way that they weren't intended to be used, can turn into something incredibly deadly. And, you know, that the case is true when it comes to something like engineered biology. Synthetic biology's increasing presence and capacity to do good, as well as harm, means there are conversations we need to have now so we're prepared and to make sure that this technology doesn't further entrench the divisions and inequalities of today. You know, there are lots of other types of issues we ought to be talking about. If we can engineer people at some point to be more resistant to certain disease, you know, that's probably a good thing, but will everybody have that same level of resistance? Meaning, are we going to democratize this technology and make it freely or easily acceptable and available to everybody? Because if the answer is no, then we wind up with a new type of digital divide in a way, a new type of genetic divide where we have genetic haves and genetic have-nots. Engineering life takes science fiction to a whole new level. Synthetic biology's advanced tech means it's possible to create life that isn't organic, which leads us to ask, what is a living thing? We live now in a world in which a new type of life exists whose parents were not people or mammals or other living organisms, the parents were computers and the scientists entering code into those computers. Now it's teeny tiny, it lives so small that you would need a microscope to see it, but it's been created. So it does beg the question, what is life? What is alive? These seem like somewhat philosophical discussions to have, but they're important to have because the answers intersect with religion, with our personal beliefs and our values, as well as things like rules and regulations of a country and other things like economics. So I get that people are concerned, but this technology is already here. It's not somewhere off in the distant future, it's now. And there's not a single industry that bioengineering will not at some point touch. Every single person on this planet will at some point encounter everything that I've been talking about. So now is the time to have the conversations about ethics, about morals, about guardrails, about restrictions, about geo-economics, and about multilateral agreements. Frameworks are needed because they don't yet exist. They do with bio weapons. You know, when we're talking about something like this type of biotech, we're going to need global collaboration because biology has a tendency to carry on regardless of what we want it to do. So having these conversations isn't really a waste of time, it's an effort towards potentially embracing this technology for the betterment of all.


Welcome back to the All Dispersons show presented by Buffalo Wildwings. I'm Sam Murray joined now with Stevenson Men's Volleyball Head Coach All Dispersons and Coach had your Nall Girl Mac game against Wilkes. Three set wins. Talk about the win there. Thanks Sam. Yeah it was historic. It was awesome. I mean the guys played at home and that was first match at home. They played really well and Landon, our outside hitter, Landon Schwartz won Player of the Week for the conference and I was just really happy. I got it. My two goals, number one was to win the match and number two was to get everybody in and I was able to accomplish both. Yeah you mentioned Landon Schwartz. He hit over 800 in the game to win those Player of the Week honors. I'm watching him play. You're up significantly and he's still getting his team riled up trying to get the next point. Talk about his leadership and what he brings. Well he's a junior so you know he's been to the NCAA Final Four and he wants to get back again so yeah I'd say in practice when everyone's tired like two hours into it he'll be you know slapping his hands and saying let's go let's go because he knows to beat the best teams you have to push you know right to the very end and he did that in the Wilkes match. We were you know pretty much dominating but the key in volleyball I think a lot of team supports is to if you're dominating to just annihilate the opponent and get out of there and go watch a Super Bowl. You mentioned some of the top teams there. First you have Misericordia on Thursday and other Mac opponent there in their inaugural year and then the weekend you're at Springfield in a tournament will your host or your play host Springfield and then play either Harvard or New Paul. It's a team that you already saw this year. What's the game plan going into the weekend? Well the top priority is to win the conference match against Misericordia and that I'm not the team isn't taking any of those matches lightly. Robert Wenger who's a Stevenson alum is coaching there so I'm sure he's gonna have his team ready. That's on Thursday it's on the way up to Springfield where the Morgan classic will be played for those of you that don't know William Morgan invented volleyball in 1895 and they have a Hall of Fame tournament named after him and that's where the volleyball international volleyball Hall of Fame is and so there'll be yeah the Springfields number one in the country I guess the polls coming out again today for D3 and they they're undefeated so they should still be at the top and Sunni New Paul so we lost to already once they played in the finals last year against Springfield so they're really good and they invited Harvard D1 program that's strong so that's like Landon was playing hard because he knows those kind of matches are coming. Well coach we wish you the best luck this weekend and we'll see you back here next week. Okay. For coach Aldis Berzins I'm Sam Murray and this has been the Aldis Berzins show.


Man, this week has probably been the worst one ever for Linus Sebastian and Linus Media Group, the company behind Linus Tech Tips.  So that revenue channel literally being down for like a day or day and a half, pretty big impact to your bottom line. But also it's a tech tips channel, like it's more or less a technology company. And so for your company to have their bottom line hit by a pretty low hanging fruit cyber attack, like a little bit of social engineering to take over your YouTube channel, reflects really badly on the company. But at this point, that screw-up is small peanuts. That's just a little flub compared to what has recently come out. The fact that Linus Tech Tips has been getting the one thing that they're supposed to be good at, product review and product testing wrong. And in some cases actually knowing that the data that they're putting out in their videos is incorrect, but they just go ahead and choose to publish the video anyway. Now, I don't know about you guys, but one of the only things that I really ever watched Linus for, like Linus Tech Tips was those product reviews, specifically for new CPUs and new graphics cards. I used to watch his channel a lot more back when I was working at Best Buy. In fact, myself and all of the other sales associates in the computer's department were recommended by the manager to watch channels like Linus Tech Tips. I actually can't even remember any other channels that they were recommending to us to watch other than like the official Best Buy e-learning stuff, of course, but for like homework and stuff like that, he would oftentimes tell us, hey, we're gonna be getting new HP Spectres or new Dell XPSes pretty soon. Linus Tech Tips just made a video about it. Why don't you go ahead and watch that so that you know about it when the product comes in so that you can better sell it to the customers. And I actually did watch Linus a little bit before then, like 10 or 11 years ago. He was really the only game in town as far as professional grade, I guess, technology reviews. But I bring up the Best Buy thing to really hit home the point of how far his content goes and how much it actually affects people's purchasing decisions because it's not just the millions of people or the tens of millions of people that are like actually watching his videos that it's affecting people like me, like people who are Best Buy sales associates, and I'm sure people working at Walmart and other brick-and-mortar electronic stores are watching his videos, thinking that they're getting educated, they're better understanding a product so that they can sell it to their customers and they're probably repeating a lot of that information that incorrect data to their customers. I mean, this isn't something that was a Best Buy policy to watch Linus Tech Tips. I'm sure it's not the same case at Walmart either, but anyone who's trying to do their job well, any electronic sales person is probably gonna end up watching somebody like him online thinking that it's additional education, thinking that they're doing the right thing to give their customers correct data about the products. Now, this big can of worms with Linus Tech Tips knowingly publishing incorrect data in their videos was opened up by Steve from Gamers Nexus. Now, Steve and Linus have actually had a bit of a beef for I think well over a year now, and he went ahead and dropped this massive bombshell, this 44-minute video called The Problem with Linus Tech Tips, Accuracy, Ethics, and Responsibility, where he gives detailed examples of LTT and other LMG videos publishing this incorrect data and making these mistakes in their videos just so that they can meet some kind of self-imposed deadline. Like I get the idea that they wanna be the first person to publish a review, they wanna be the first channel to publish a review about a new product because that is good SEO, right? Like if you're the first person to talk about something that a lot of people are searching on any platform, a lot of people are going to end up clicking on your video or your post, especially if you're a big verified channel that the algorithm is already really favorable to. But at some point, you have to kind of realize your position on the platform, right? Like you're the biggest tech channel on the most popular video platform. And at that point, it's probably a better idea to slow down your pace a little bit and focus more on quality instead of quantity. Like that's the same thing that I've started doing with this channel over the past couple of years, instead of trying to pump out like a video every single day or like five or six videos a week or something like that, I try to slow them down so I can focus more on the quality, take more time to edit them and things like that instead of just spamming a bunch of videos. I think across all of the channels, Linus is putting out something like 25 or 26 videos a week. The only explanation that I can think of to explain Linus' behavior is that he must be blinded by greed. I mean, it makes sense to me because most of the big controversies that it seems like he's been involved in with his channel go back to greed, things like shilling companies that are paying him more money to lead better reviews on his products, him selling his screwdriver for a crazy marked up price on his website, him calling the people who watch his videos, like his fans, calling them who watch videos with ad block enabled thieves. And there's also this big thing. I mean, this is probably the greediest thing he's done that Steve talked about in his 44 minute video where apparently some company had sent Linus a prototype. I think it was like a water block, like a water cooling block for him to review. And Linus actually left that product to bad review. Okay, fair enough. But this is a prototype that Linus was supposed to send back. Instead of doing that, he decided to auction it off at one of his events. I mean, that's crazy. You've got like the guy who's running the biggest tech channel on the biggest video platform, selling other people's copper, engaging in literal crackhead behavior. Like there's over a hundred employees that work at Linus Media Group, okay? It's not like Linus Tech Tips is just one guy who's got to wake up really early in the morning on the day that a new product comes out so he can get to Best Buy or Micro Center before everyone else get his hand on that product, run back home and then do a test, you know, do testing on it, do a video, edit the video, make a thumbnail, publish it, chill it on his social media. It's not like he's doing all of this stuff himself in his basement somewhere.  He's running a company. He's got all these people working for him. I think his company was also valued at like a hundred million dollars recently from somebody that was trying to buy it. I don't know how accurate that is because I think the source is basically Linus. So, you know, how trustworthy is that? But still, he's not some small struggling content creator that, you know, we can excuse like, oh yeah, he's just rushing trying to make it big. Like, no, he's already made it big. He's already on top. He should really just slow down so that he's not making these ridiculous mistakes in his videos. Like one of them that I remember from Steve's 44 minute video is that LTT made a comparison between, I think it was a 3090 TI and a 4090 showing frame rates in different video games and one of the video games was Cyberpunk or a different triple A title where they showed the 4090 having 300% better performance than the 3090 TI, okay? Like that's insane. If somebody didn't even own either of those cards and they just wanted to, I guess, fake like a benchmark comparison video, they probably wouldn't even make, end up making a mistake this big. And again, these videos have a huge impact on people's purchasing decisions. I used to watch them with my German roommate who was also an employee at Best Buy. He was actually the Apple master, which is like a lead sales position in the computer's department and you specialize on Apple hardware. And granted, we didn't just watch Linus, we also watch Gamer's Nexus and Der Bauer and we also watch Lewis Rosman. In fact, Calvin, the Apple master, he was the one who put me on to Lewis Rosman and I still watch his content to this day. So our information might not have been that bad, you know? I mean, we had one bad source of data and probably three, at least three other good sources of data, but then again, me and Calvin are actual nerds. Like you would think that everybody who works at a Best Buy or who works at a Geek Squad or maybe even works at the electronics department at Walmart is a nerd, but that's not the case. For a lot of people, they just sell computers for a living, like it's just their job, they're not a big geek or a nerd or anything like that.  But to be honest with you guys, I don't even really think that the greed, the theft, the inaccuracies, even the sexual harassment allegations that are being brought against Linus Sebastian are going to be enough to sink Linus Tech Tips. Because there's a big difference between Linus Sebastian the Man and Linus Media Group the company. I don't even think that Linus is the CEO of his company anymore and hasn't been for a few years. And I also vaguely remember him making a video, I don't know, maybe a couple of years ago saying that he was getting burnt out, like he was kind of getting tired with making all these YouTube videos or running the company, whatever. So I think probably the best move, like definitely the best corporate strategy would be for Linus to basically take all of these sins just upon himself.  So that stuff like that is never going to happen again. And he could just kick back at his Canadian estate and continue receiving a check maybe every week or every couple of weeks from Linus Media Group. That's one outcome. Another possibility is Linus Media Group might Papa John's him, like basically take his company away from him and then he doesn't get to reap any of the financial benefit from then on out. That's what I think are the most likely outcomes of this whole debacle. But let me know what you guys think is going to be the fate of Linus and Linus Media Group in the comments below. Be sure to like and share this video to hack the algorithm. Follow me on Odyssey. Have a great rest of your day.