[A]s a geography professor at the University of Vermont, Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux teaches courses on remote sensing techniques and climate science. Her faculty duties have included an unusual function for the past 22 years: being the Vermont state climatologist.
More recently, Dupigny-Giroux was selected from a group of almost 200 hundred experts to be the lead author for the Northeast chapter in the second part of the fourth national climate assessment. That report, which came out on Nov. 23, focuses on human health, economic and environmental impacts of climate change in the U.S.
Under both high and low modeling scenarios, the Northeast is predicted to be more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than the pre-Industrial era by 2035. Winters in the region have been warming three times faster than summers, says the report.
“This would be the largest increase in the contiguous United States and would occur as much as two decades before global average temperatures reach a similar milestone,” the report authors say.
VTDigger spoke with Dupigny-Giroux about her job as a state climatologist and about the recent report. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you become a climatologist?
A: I’ve always been interested in the environment around me — the atmosphere and what happens when things like precipitation reach the ground. And I was always the one who, when we flew, I would have the window seat to check out the landscape below and all that sort of stuff.
So when I went to university, I decided to do physical geography and development studies as a double major because I had already been exposed to geography as a discipline and it was my first love. I was fortunate in being able to select that right out of the gate as an undergraduate. I went to the University of Toronto for my undergrad, and then for my graduate work — both my master’s and my PhD — I did that at McGill in Montreal and was able to focus in on climatology as the area of speciality.
When I had to choose between all the aspects of physical geography, I did hydrology and climatology, so water and atmospheric components for my master’s, and then primarily climatology for my PhD. So I did a lot of flooding work for my master’s and then I did drought in Brazil for my PhD.
I’ve always loved that aspect of the atmosphere around us and how does that influence vegetation, agricultural patterns, wetlands — anything that brings that systems approach to bear.
Q: What does being the state climatologist entail?
A: Being state climatologist is part of my faculty duties at UVM. It allows me to bring together all of my interests in education — education broadly speaking, so how do people learn, and cognitive sciences. It allows me to work with K-12 teachers and students.
But it also allows me to delve into my love for history. So when folks ask me, tell me about the weather that took place in 1960. Or, I’m in the middle of a litigative suit and I need to know how much rain fell in this particular parking lot on this Saturday in June. It’s everything under the sun.
And then I’ll get another note that says we’re getting married on Saturday, June 3, can you tell me what the weather is going to be like on that particular day? So I get a variety of questions from Vermonters and beyond.
It allows me to take my training as a climatologist and apply it to the good of everyone involved.
Q: What makes this report different from other climate change research, like the recent IPCC report?
One of the ways of answering that is the framing of it, the scope of it, and the timing of it.
So if we think about timing, first of all, it’s the fourth national climate assessment. The last one was delivered in 2014. All of these are part of a congressional mandate that came out with the Global Change Research Act of 1990 that says you are supposed to produce a U.S. wide assessment of climate and climate change every four years or so.
The second part in this is because it’s a congressional mandate, the report focuses on U.S. states and territories. In terms of the way that it’s framed, it differs from the IPCC report, which is more of a global, 30,000 feet high look at climate change across the entire world. This particular report is unique, both in that it only looks at the U.S. and its neighbors but also because of how we, for the first time, have separated out the physical science of climate and climate change and put that into one report, which we call Volume I that came out in 2017.
And then the report that came out most recently specifically looks at the risks, the impacts and the vulnerabilities of climate change. This is the first time that it’s actually based around looking at risks — what has happened and what could happen.
Q: What do you see the biggest impacts of climate change for the Northeast as being?
A: We got together all sorts from around the Northeast, including New England, including the southern parts of our region as well, and one of the first things we wanted to do was really think about not just representing our own states, but also the interconnections around our states.
We’ve got both the rural component to us, but also an urban flavor to us. Some of our largest cities are found in the Northeast — you think of D.C. and Boston, New York — but we also have very large expanses of rural places across the region. So that was sort of at the forefront of how we approached putting the chapter together.
Two of the key messages that we settled on were a piece around rural ecosystems, environments and economies. We’re looking at changes in the seasons across the Northeast and how does that influence things like tourism, forestry and farming and how does that in short influence wildlife, and snowpack and streamflow conditions.
Yet at the same time, you have what are some of the challenges in a place like Boston or New York, where you have a large city. You have a city that’s been settled for at least 200 years, and so the different vulnerabilities there would include things like aging infrastructure and, being along the coast, sea level rise, and how does that play into affecting the ability to do commerce and have a lot of these iconic pieces that we think about when we think about some of the more urban pieces of the Northeast.
Q: This report also looks at human health impacts specific to the Northeast — what are some of the main health impacts for people in our region?
A: In trying to make sure that we covered all of the major impacts across the region, some of them we may not think of right off the bat. For example, when we think about impacts to human health, we automatically think about heat.
But that isn’t the only thing that is important for us. We need to think about waterborne diseases, diseases that may increase in prevalence because the temperatures increase or because the humidity changes, so that makes it easier for the vectors to over-winter, for example. The water quantity and water quality piece, and how that is so important to us as human beings and that is not necessarily something we can take for granted.
We also think about something that you don’t always think about or only in the summertime, which is air quality conditions or changes in atmospheric dynamics and patterns and how that could influence changes in the air quality that we prize so much in the Northeast. If we have populations that are more vulnerable to certain types of respiratory ailments, for example, that becomes of critical importance in terms of are we making sure that the populations have the information they need to know about so they can prepare and adapt.
And then the other piece too is the actual thresholds that are involved. So living in the North Country, we’re acclimated to certain heat, temperature and humidity that folks who live in the southern part of the Northeast, let’s say folks that live in Philadelphia or D.C. or different parts of Appalachia. So when we look at how human health might be impacted, it’s not the same across the board. Physical geography does matter.
Q: What are some of the main ways you have seen Vermont start adapting to climate change?
A: I’ve worked closely with state agencies for so many years because of their long-range planning, even before I became involved in the national climate assessment. A lot of agencies were particularly interested in a 5-10 plus year horizon in how to include that in their medium to long-term planning.
Others are trying to work in the latest science from a water perspective so they can do things like change the types of infrastructure they’re putting out to be proactive in mitigating future losses because it’s sized at a larger dimension than what we currently have out there. Those are some of the biggest pieces that I’ve seen because I work closely with state agencies.
Q: This report involved 13 federal agencies, yet at the same time you have a president who doesn’t believe the findings of the report. As one of the report authors, what is that experience like?
A: We’re doing this because it’s congressionally mandated and we met that mandate on time this year. We’re really happy and excited about that, so I think that’s the first feeling that I have.
The second is I’ve also been following a lot of the [national media coverage]. And one of the things that has struck me is the depth and the sophistication that the entire report has been received with and been reported on. Because I’ve been doing this for a few years now, that’s a pleasant piece.
I think it’s actually very rewarding to be a climate scientist and see some of that become so mainstream in terms of differences like climate change and climate variability, weather and climate, meteorology and climatology, and to have those so well represented in the reports is really exciting to me.
It’s a heartening thing because it means everybody is doing their job in terms of getting the word out there.
