A sustainable dialogue: Climate Speaker Series wraps up its second year

Image of climate-speaker — **TOWER VISIT** — Sunny Wescott spoke to Sandians on Nov. 1 about the grim impact of climate change. Her visit to Sandia included a tour of the National Solar Thermal Test Facility. (Photo courtesy of Sunny Wescott)

The forecast is decidedly not favorable if climate change continues unaddressed.

In a talk at Sandia on Nov. 1, meteorologist Sunny Wescott presented on extreme weather hazards made more extreme by climate change — wildfires, floods, droughts, extreme heat and extreme cold — painting a picture of their intensifying toll on agriculture, transportation, manufacturing and public health.

The discussion that followed was notable for audience members who expressed both gratitude and alarm. Two called the presentation “terrifying.” A third deadpanned, “Are you saying we might be in trouble?”

Wescott, the lead meteorologist for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, emphasized that most of today’s infrastructure was built for resilience using standards and historical data that don’t address the frequency or severity of hazards emerging now.

“I think my mission is getting people to understand that,” she said in an interview with Lab News after her talk. “We weren’t paying attention to certain underlying effects, and now we’re going to pay the price at an expedited speed. Had we been paying attention, we would have seen this coming like a shockwave.”

Wescott’s was the 12th talk this year to be presented by Sandia’s Climate Speaker Series, which began bringing external speakers to Sandia in early 2022 to promote engagement and discussion on topics related to the Labs Climate Security Strategy. In 2023, speakers have included top climate advisers and researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and multiple universities and research institutions. The combined attendance for these events is about 4,500.

“The Climate Speaker Series has brought in a top-tier slate of guests to discuss some of the biggest challenges — and greatest opportunities — we face as a nation in addressing climate security,” said Rob Leland, leader of the Labs Climate Security Strategy and director of the Climate Change Security Center. “Not only does the series enhance Sandia’s visibility as a leader in the climate domain but it also creates new opportunities for engagement and partnerships that will increase our climate change-related impact.”

Some talks, like Wescott’s, assess the scale and urgency of the climate problem; others explore the possibilities presented by the emerging science and engineering devoted to potential solutions.

Image of climate-speaker2 — **FRAGILE FUTURE** — Among other issues, Wescott’s talk addressed the effects of excessive groundwater pumping, which can result in the subsidence of land surfaces and damage to infrastructure, such as this dam spillway in California. (Photo by Kelly M. Grow, California Department of Water)

On Nov. 6, Boston University climate researcher and social scientist Benjamin Sovacool visited the New Mexico site for a talk that touched on the technical and social challenges facing a wide range of carbon-removal and radiation-management interventions. His team has visited direct carbon capture facilities in Canada and Iceland, toured a seagrass nursery in Wales and witnessed marine cloud brightening operations over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The team’s research indicates that there is not yet a broad consensus on the desirability of such approaches.

“Most key stakeholders haven’t made up their mind,” Sovacool said. “It’s not determined, which means it could be shaped in the next five or 10 years by research patterns, deployment patterns or major policies.”

Also in November, the series presented Amanda Staudt and Apurva Dave, both in climate leadership positions at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Their talk focused on new climate and climate-related security activities at NASEM.

The 2024 Climate Speaker Series is still being developed, with Melanie Kenderdine, a principal of the Energy Futures Initiative, and Milind Tambe, professor and director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University, already on the schedule. To nominate a speaker, please contact Dylan Poindexter. Watch recordings of previous Climate Speaker Series events, and find more news and events about Sandia’s work in energy and climate security.

Q&A with Sunny Wescott

In her first role at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as an infrastructure analyst, Sunny Wescott “learned a ton about critical infrastructure — why it was breaking, where it was breaking, what was breaking it,” she said. The data kept pointing her in a familiar direction. “It turned out that most often when we saw damage in the U.S., the actual impacts to the nation were coming from weather events.”

Today, as the agency’s lead meteorologist, Wescott is an expert for multiple climatological events, such as drought, subsidence, wildfires, tropical cyclones and extreme winter weather events. After her Climate Speaker Series talk, Wescott met with numerous Sandia teams and toured the concentrating solar tower at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility. She also sat for a brief interview with Lab News, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Lab News: Is there a challenge in persuading infrastructure owners to have a sense of urgency about extreme weather threats?

Sunny Wescott: Getting them to take action is still very difficult. They still, in many cases, refuse to acknowledge the underlying reason why they need to take action. The approach involves showing them failures that have occurred elsewhere and asking: If the same event happened here, can you definitively tell me — with statistics — that you’re good? In many instances, they’re looking for a single safeguard that will reduce their need to pay attention to this.

LN: Is it possible for us to adapt ourselves out of harm’s way completely?

SW: Can we prevent the event from happening? Absolutely not. We started the tidal wave; we must ride it at this point. The goal is to stay above water the whole time. I believe every scientific community that does climate studies is aware that the forecasts that we put out five years ago were so rosy that the new forecasts are going to seem borderline apocalyptic.

LN: Are there particular adaptation strategies that you think deserve special attention at the moment or that seem especially promising?

SW: Albedo shifting is one of the best, fastest moves you can make. Heat is really one of our main problems. Painting rooftops white to cool them is super easy to do. That has the immediate impact of cooling down areas that need it most. That can be done very quickly.

Another ideal move is water resiliency at the local level. Getting on black and gray water recycling — out of all the resources, all the things you need as a human being or as an animal on this planet, water is first and foremost.

LN: You spent two full days here at Sandia. Any immediate impressions or takeaways?

SW: There’s a lot of really cool research being done, which is great, and there’s a lot of ability at Sandia to weigh in on — for example, how we’re weighing different impacts, whether it’s surface or upper atmospherics, whether we’re coordinating data the right way, certain databases of forecasted impacts and modeling of those forecasted impacts.

LN: Fun question. Do people ever tease you about being a meteorologist named Sunny?

SW: I get it at work sometimes — even now. And I’ve met people who go by the nickname Sunny, who are in the weather community. They don’t like that I’m “naturally” a Sunny.

Sandia LabNews

A sustainable dialogue: Climate Speaker Series wraps up its second year

Q&A with Sunny Wescott

Recent articles by Stephen Scott