The Climate Reality Scientists Don’t Sugarcoat

00:00:05:07 - 00:00:26:23
Mike Collignon: Hello and welcome to the impact series on the Green Builder Media Network. I'm your host, Mike Collignon. On this podcast, I'll have one on one conversations with leaders and innovators from a wide variety of disciplines. We'll talk about how they got into their field, the lessons they've learned, and advice they have for future generations of leaders. Today, I'm very excited to spend some time with Doctor Jim White.

00:00:26:27 - 00:00:46:13
Mike Collignon: He is the Craver family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining uncW in 2022, Jim was the acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder for five years, and had been a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences since 1989.

00:00:46:17 - 00:01:14:10
Mike Collignon: An internationally recognized expert in climate science, his research focuses on past behaviors of the Earth's climate system, the evidence for rapid climate change in the past, and the dynamics of the modern carbon cycle. Jim has published over 200 peer reviewed journal articles, is a highly cited researcher in the field, and regularly gives public talks on climate change and sustainability, and he was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014.

00:01:14:15 - 00:01:17:08
Mike Collignon: Jim, welcome to the impact series.

00:01:17:10 - 00:01:19:16
Dr. Jim white: Well, thank you for having me, Mike.

00:01:19:19 - 00:01:37:09
Mike Collignon: You know, I'm happy to be talking with you again. We've had a lot of interactions over the past, probably 10 or 15 years. I've enjoyed every conversation that we've had, going back to the days when I was a lowly attendee of the weather and climate summit put on by storm center. Remember those?

00:01:37:16 - 00:01:39:12
Dr. Jim white: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

00:01:39:15 - 00:02:07:06
Mike Collignon: You know, for our audience, if you ever attended any of those, you know what I'm talking about. They were incredibly enlightening. However, the online attendance numbers were not large. So I would be stunned if we had fellow CS, the tendies, listening to us now. And honestly, it's okay because those annual events were meant for TV meteorologists. I really don't remember how I even found out about it, but they were really cool.

00:02:07:06 - 00:02:17:06
Mike Collignon: And it was. It was a really great way to get climate information into the minds of very trusted members of their respective communities, and you were a big part of that.

00:02:17:12 - 00:02:43:29
Dr. Jim white: Yeah. No, it was a I was very privileged to be invited. I can't remember what year it was. I think I, I went to many of them more than Ted might have been, as many as 20 of them, but it was an opportunity to interact with and to provide information for people who, you know, they have a what I call a real, real bully pulpit.

00:02:44:04 - 00:03:20:02
Dr. Jim white: You know, they're in front of a camera. So when you have the opportunity to speak to people from the Weather Channel or to speak to people from, you know, on national networks from this, you know, that's important. And I thought it was important for us to be able to provide them with the best information we could possibly give them at the time so that, you know, if they if questions were brought up by viewers about, you know, I'm seeing these things about whether changes, what does that mean in terms of climate change?

00:03:20:02 - 00:03:43:14
Dr. Jim white: What does that mean in terms of changes in hurricane intensities, changes in tornado frequencies and things like that? They could have the best information or they had the best information possible at the time. So it was a and plus I learned a lot myself. I mean, I came and talked about climate change. I came and talked about ice cores and sustainability and a whole bunch of civil rights, bunch of stuff like that.

00:03:43:14 - 00:04:07:08
Dr. Jim white: But at the same time, I got to listen to really, you know, the world's climate experts talk about things like, you know, how's the jet stream responding to changes in temperature and how our, you know, stuff like that. It's just really. And, you know, are there is there any good data that says that, you know, we're seeing more more tornadoes than we used to?

00:04:07:09 - 00:04:30:12
Dr. Jim white: Things like that. We're not in my area where I found very informative as well. Finally, my great group of people, I mean, you know, if you if you want to assemble a group of extroverts, you get a group of folks whose job it is to get up in front of a camera and talk. And they were a just a fun, fun group to hang out with.

00:04:30:14 - 00:04:57:07
Mike Collignon: Well, and that was the, you know, the the diversity of that group was really incredible, right? Because you had meteorologists, like you said from the Weather Channel, I'm a pole. Goodloe was there. Jim Cantor would go. But then also, you had local meteorologists, and it wasn't just from large metropolitan areas. You had people from New York City, but you had people from Kentucky.

00:04:57:10 - 00:05:08:25
Mike Collignon: You had people from I know one of the local meteorologists here from Saint Louis was there. Kent Earhart was the name. And it just it was from all over the country.

00:05:08:27 - 00:05:44:01
Dr. Jim white: No, it's true. And I thought even more importantly, it was we weren't vetted by whether or not they were willing to say the climate change is real. That was not you know, if it was, you come will invite a whole spectrum of people with a whole spectrum of backgrounds. And that was also really, to me, fascinating because not only did you talk to them in in meetings, but, you know, you had dinner with these folks and we would sit down and talk about, all right, you know, I know that you're a skeptic on the issue of climate change.

00:05:44:02 - 00:06:05:23
Dr. Jim white: Tell me more about, you know, very you know, it's what people, you know today, you know, sort of the mon we don't do anymore, which is to have, you know, really good conversations with somebody that, you know, from the beginning, you don't you don't agree with their fundamental where they come from, but you can have a conversation and that that was a good place to do that.

00:06:05:26 - 00:06:25:25
Mike Collignon: Yeah. Yeah. Now obviously people are kind of getting a sense of this. The interesting background that you have from the intro and what we've already talked about, and I want to get into all of that. Now, I know you're at uncW now and we'll we'll get to that part, but let's go back to when you got your masters and your PhD from Columbia University.

00:06:26:01 - 00:06:31:13
Mike Collignon: What's the first job that you had with your brand new doctorate?

00:06:31:15 - 00:06:57:15
Dr. Jim white: So the first thing I did when my brain actually the first thing I did was brand new doctorate, was I ran the carbon 14 dating lab at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. It was sort of a fill in. My advisor, Wally Broker, needed someone to do that. And it turns out I'm pretty good in the lab. So that was that was a short term job that lasted for a fairly short period of time.

00:06:57:22 - 00:07:26:07
Dr. Jim white: But then I, I did a post-doc postdoctoral research with the Franchise Court Group in a in a lab just outside of Paris in France. The French were at the time partnering with the Russians or actually the Soviet Union time on the ice core. And they were beginning to measure things like basic temperature records, which is what I measure in my lab.

00:07:26:07 - 00:07:56:13
Dr. Jim white: Stable isotopes base. They were measuring carbon dioxide. They were measuring other greenhouse gases. And it was just a fantastically exciting time to be seeing, you know, the basic the records that today form the backbone of what we understand is the relationship between greenhouse gases and climate. From an observational point of view, it was really fascinating to be there and watch this in real time and to be able to, you know, I did a lot of copy editing as well.

00:07:56:13 - 00:07:59:02
Dr. Jim white: So.

00:07:59:04 - 00:08:04:14
Mike Collignon: Which prepared you for being in academia, because then you ended up at the University of Colorado Boulder.

00:08:04:16 - 00:08:22:26
Dr. Jim white: Yeah, we you know, that's what we do as scientists. We do a lot of writing. We do a lot of reading. But as the the the native English speaker in the group, that was one of the things that I helped out on. But it was like I said, it was just really these are plus these are brilliant people.

00:08:22:29 - 00:08:43:10
Dr. Jim white: Was my boss in France, and he is just one of the smartest people I've ever met and a really excellent person as well. And that was that was one of the it still is. I think one of the, you know, one of the I'd say, say fun aspects. It is fun, but I don't know if that's the right word of the ice coring community.

00:08:43:10 - 00:09:09:02
Dr. Jim white: It's international and it's populated with really nice people. You know, whether they're in French group or the Danish group or the American group or, you know, Japanese, Australian, New Zealand, you know, all just really wonderful people. And that was the that made it all a whole lot more fun. I mean, not only did you know you were doing something important for trying to understand how our planet works, but you were doing it with people that you really enjoyed being with.

00:09:09:03 - 00:09:17:26
Dr. Jim white: And frankly, you had to, because sometimes we are stuck in the same ice core camp for six weeks. If you didn't like the problem, right?

00:09:17:27 - 00:09:19:25
Mike Collignon: Figure out how to get along pretty quickly.

00:09:19:26 - 00:09:22:22
Dr. Jim white: Yeah, absolutely. You got no choice. Yeah.

00:09:22:25 - 00:09:41:11
Mike Collignon: So let's let's talk a little bit about your work with ice cores. The research that you've done in that field has helped inform sea level rise projections. What is the most current researcher data on sea level rise projections?

00:09:41:13 - 00:09:45:05
Dr. Jim white: It's.

00:09:45:07 - 00:10:18:23
Dr. Jim white: Sea level rise is inevitable from a warming planet. You simply cannot warm up the air. And particularly you can't warm up the ocean. The ocean is even more important and not melt the edges of the big ice sheets. Greenland and Antarctica. When we first started to look at this. It was the the the the the predictions, the calculations were pretty, I'd say straightforward if not kind of rudimentary that, you know, there's a certain amount of how fast can you melt chunk of ice.

00:10:18:25 - 00:10:42:13
Dr. Jim white: And that would sort of give you an indication of how fast sea level could rise, that those sort of simple calculations became much more sophisticated as time goes by from two avenues. One is an understanding of how I sheets behave. So. So, believe it or not, there are ice streams in an ice sheet. You know, that sounds kind of unusual.

00:10:42:14 - 00:11:08:02
Dr. Jim white: You don't think of ice as, you know, flowing down. But there are places on ice sheets where there's really no friction between the ice and the rock below. There's water. There's it forms a slick place for ice to flow over rocks. And those are places where a lot of ice can come out into the ocean in a fairly short period of time, fairly short being, you know, decades to centuries.

00:11:08:05 - 00:11:36:28
Dr. Jim white: But that's we now understand better that the the pace with which sealable is going to rise is going to depend on our understanding of these ice streams. And we now have also said there's a couple of things we've learned. The other is that we've spent a lot of time looking at at sea level positions in the past, and trying to get a record of how rapidly has suitable, how rapidly can see level rise over time.

00:11:36:28 - 00:12:03:14
Dr. Jim white: And the the answer is, is not all that great for us, because silicon indeed rise by meters in a century, and it has done that in the past. So this is something that we have to be paying attention to. And frankly, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. I mean, both in Greenland and Antarctica, we see we need to know better how these how are these ice streams behaving?

00:12:03:14 - 00:12:52:26
Dr. Jim white: What's what are the ways in which they can either rapidly pump icebergs out into the ocean, which are going to melt, or are there slow spots? And, you know, from a practical point of view, are there places in the sea level rise curve where it's going to pause for a while? And can we reliably predict those? And because that gives us as a society an opportunity to retreat and then, you know, retrench or however you want to put that, but the pace of sea level rises is going to be it's going to be important for us to understand that not only, you know, the fact that it's rising and it's, you know, over the over the next century, it'll be feet of sea level rise. But could it be even more than that?

00:12:52:28 - 00:13:06:08
Mike Collignon: And for the for the novices who are listening to this like myself, you said okay in the past that the sea level rise has happened rapidly.

00:13:06:11 - 00:13:31:04
Mike Collignon: From that moment to now, did sea level rise then kind of go back down, or did we just or did our coastlines just adjust based on sea level rise? I guess ultimately where I'm going, Jim, is is there a way for us in any way, shape or form to undo or to fix what we're doing?

00:13:31:06 - 00:13:59:27
Dr. Jim white: Not on timescales of you and I would really care to think about. Not on human, you know the. So ice is a very it's slow to accumulate. It's slow to come off of land masses and it has some it has a large amount of inertia to it. And that inertia is driven by the fact that when you warm up water, when you walk the ocean, it doesn't immediately cool off quickly.

00:14:00:02 - 00:14:23:01
Dr. Jim white: I mean, you know, this it I used to when I give talks about sustainability and climate change, I, I ask people, you know, do a thought experiment, but put two pots on the stove, identical pots, pour two cups of water and one of them no water in the other one. Turn the heat on identically. Wait five minutes. Come back.

00:14:23:04 - 00:14:41:28
Dr. Jim white: You can put your finger in the water and it may be a little bit more than a thought experiment. You could put your finger in the other one and the the sound is the sizzling of your finger. Same amount of energy went into both pots. Why is it that the water pot is not, you know, boiling already? It's because water has a lot of heat.

00:14:42:01 - 00:15:03:11
Dr. Jim white: It takes a long time to warm up, but it also then takes a long time to cool off. So once we, you know, most of the heat energy we've added to the atmosphere from greenhouse gases has actually gone into warming the ocean. And so it's, it's it's warmer, it's going to stay warmer for a long time. And it's, and it's warm water that chews away at the edges of these ice sheets.

00:15:03:13 - 00:15:17:08
Dr. Jim white: And so yes, I mean on time scales that we care about, you can't reverse it right away. This is not a as I as I tell people frequently, you do not live on planet instant gratification.

00:15:17:10 - 00:15:36:25
Mike Collignon: Well, yeah, it's a multigenerational. Yes fix or impact or, you know, change. And it reminds me of another question that I hadn't thought of ahead of time, which was the warming of the ocean is also messing with some of the currents. Is that correct?

00:15:36:28 - 00:15:38:24
Dr. Jim white: Can yeah. Does.

00:15:38:27 - 00:15:46:07
Mike Collignon: And so are we seeing are we seeing those current start to change a little bit as well.

00:15:46:10 - 00:16:11:01
Dr. Jim white: You know this is something we keep a very close eye on. So what you're what you're talking about is there's a, a very large flow of water in the Atlantic that flows up towards the southern coast of Greenland, and it cools off enough, and it's salty enough that it begins to sink towards the bottom of the ocean, and it forms the conveyor belt circulation, a very large circulation.

00:16:11:02 - 00:16:34:27
Dr. Jim white: It's actually a global circulation, but it brings a lot of heat up into the North Atlantic. If you look on a map, you can ask yourself, why is it that England is habitable when it's, you know, at a latitude which should make it really cold and snowy all the time, and it's because the ocean's pumping a lot of heat up into that part of the world.

00:16:34:29 - 00:16:54:03
Dr. Jim white: If you don't have if you have fresh water coming off of the Greenland ice sheet, that monkeys with the density of the water and makes it harder for that water to sink up there. So that's sort of in a simple sense, you know, one of the things that we are watching very carefully, this North Atlantic, it's called North Atlantic de Bois Formation.

00:16:54:05 - 00:17:11:19
Dr. Jim white: Is it slowing down? Is it how fast can it stop? How fast can it can it change? These are fundamental questions that we've been asking throughout my career. We still don't have full answers, but we understand how sensitive this system can be.

00:17:11:21 - 00:17:22:28
Mike Collignon: And we're going to set aside the Greenland topic for a moment, because we're not going to fix that bizarre obsession that seems to be in the national conversation right now. But I want to ask a broader question.

00:17:23:01 - 00:17:30:04
Dr. Jim white: Very nice people, I tell you. Very nice. Been to Greenland many times. Very nice people. Go on.

00:17:30:06 - 00:17:50:21
Mike Collignon: Know, I knew you had a lot of experience in Greenland. So I was thinking about that as we were getting ready to do this. But but I do want to ask kind of a broader question. And you hit on it a little bit, which was, you know, we're still trying to figure this out. You've been working on this in this field for nearly 40 years.

00:17:50:24 - 00:18:04:02
Mike Collignon: Is this type of climate research at risk right now? And if so, are you and your colleagues able to do anything to kind of overcome that?

00:18:04:04 - 00:18:37:14
Dr. Jim white: So the short answer is, yes, it is. And the statute or second question is not really the so the, the you know, we get most of our funding here in the United States from the federal government through National Science Foundation, but some of it through Noa, NASA, other other governmental agencies. They make the decision of what areas they want to fund, in what areas they think are important.

00:18:37:14 - 00:19:06:20
Dr. Jim white: And throughout my career, I have seen politics play out in this. So there have been times when writing proposals with the words climate change was not a problem. There have been times when writing a proposal with the words climate change in it would guarantee it. You got tossed out. So you, you, you know, I you have to live within the, the, you know, the times you're, you're given, the political times you're given.

00:19:06:20 - 00:19:30:02
Dr. Jim white: And I understand that that's a, you know, it is taxpayer money. So I understand how that works. But you just, you know, you have to figure out how you're going to adapt to that. And, you know, there are things you can study that you know, are overtly climate change. There are things, you know, we still need to understand the physics of ice.

00:19:30:04 - 00:19:51:21
Dr. Jim white: We still need to understand the physics of ocean circulation. They basic things like that. And so sometimes it's really a question of of just getting back into the basic science in that that seems to be something that that continues regardless of whether the politics as you.

00:19:51:24 - 00:20:16:25
Mike Collignon: Yeah. And well know and you have a lot of experience with this. And I think what's interesting is that you've got, you know, in essence, you've been doing a lot of benchmarking and this is really important to build that history to understand which way are things trending. What do we risk by neglecting some of this important scientific benchmarking?

00:20:16:28 - 00:21:03:10
Dr. Jim white: Frankly, a lot. So if you look at the, you know, just from sea level, rise up the the economic fallout of sea level rise is going to be huge. You know, if, you know, it's no shock and no surprise to anybody, that's a lot of expensive real estate along the coast. And those people pay taxes which funds communities, built roads, does all the stuff it does, as you, you know, as the value of those homes decreases because of the erosion of the beach and sea level rise and homes falling into the ocean, which we see now.

00:21:03:12 - 00:21:33:27
Dr. Jim white: They're not paying those taxes anymore, and they can't insure those homes anymore. And the so the fallout to the communities could be can be very substantial. And certainly the fallout to the insurance company and to the reinsurance companies is also something that people think about. It gets harder and harder to get insurance for homes that are right on the beach, which is also has economic impact.

00:21:33:29 - 00:22:04:07
Dr. Jim white: That is something that is you you can see and in it's right there. Some of the other impacts are even larger in are less obvious. So for example, a very large fraction of the world's population lives near the coast around the world. And there are whole countries now which are at threat from sea level rise. And eventually those folks have got to move from where they are to someplace else.

00:22:04:13 - 00:22:40:00
Dr. Jim white: And we're not exactly, we don't have a really good track record of welcoming people into other countries when, you know, when this is globally, globally. Right. Imagine, you know, Bangladesh, is there a lot of low lying area? A lot of people have to move. Where are they going to go? So the climate refugees, sea level refugees is a problem that we're punting to our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren.

00:22:40:00 - 00:22:59:11
Dr. Jim white: And that's going to be expensive because figuring out somewhat because, you know, just think of the the geopolitical unrest that comes with that and the costs that come along with that. There's there's a lot there. And it's.

00:22:59:13 - 00:23:24:23
Dr. Jim white: We are passing off these problems to future generations. Frankly, it's something that bothers me deeply. I'm a grandfather now. And it's it really bothers me a lot. I you know, there are times when I look at my grandkids and I wish I didn't know what I knew about where we are and where we're going, because it is it is going to be a lot of expense to them and a lot of problems in them.

00:23:24:26 - 00:23:28:22
Dr. Jim white: And it's preventable, right?

00:23:28:22 - 00:23:59:04
Mike Collignon: Because it's not just the the rolling back of of some of the funding. It's also the literal retreat from some of the international organizations. And I read an interesting article that talked about how, you know, those groups kind of rely on the United States, to some degree, to contribute their scientific knowledge. And if you take that out of those organizations, they're kind of like, well, we can continue.

00:23:59:04 - 00:24:04:29
Mike Collignon: But it's like having a really valuable partner just walk out. And that leaves a gap.

00:24:05:02 - 00:24:31:18
Dr. Jim white: The well not only leaves a gap, but, you know, from the United States point of view, it takes us out of the the solution process. Right. And there's some you know, I am not an economist, but I know that you can make money when things are going well and you can make money when things are not going well, and you know, when things are not going well and you have to have alternative forms of energy and you have to deal with a lot of these other prompts.

00:24:31:18 - 00:24:52:15
Dr. Jim white: There are ways to make money from that, and we're not going to be as part of that as we would be if we were a player in the international community. So there's a, you know, it is it? I mean, I think there are very good arguments for why just staying involved in the international discussion is an important thing.

00:24:52:21 - 00:24:55:06
Dr. Jim white: And we're not.

00:24:55:09 - 00:25:01:10
Mike Collignon: Knowing what you know about your colleagues internationally.

00:25:01:12 - 00:25:10:20
Mike Collignon: Do you think privately they're sitting there going, okay, we get it. We'll keep the seat warm for you?

00:25:10:23 - 00:25:15:01
Dr. Jim white: I don't know.

00:25:15:03 - 00:25:56:20
Dr. Jim white: I wish I had a much better understanding of international politics than I do. And I say that in all seriousness. You know what? When I started as a climate scientist, it was mostly I was a scientist. I was jealous, that was, you know, fascinated by photosynthesis and why water flows and streams and things like that. As I became more aware of where we are in in the whole realm of sustainability and climate change, I began to realize that understanding human behavior was just as important, if not more important, than understanding how the earth functions.

00:25:56:21 - 00:26:24:22
Dr. Jim white: Because we are, we humans are the number one agent of change on the plan in so many ways, and so understanding why we make the decisions we make. What are the what are the political drivers? What are the social drivers? What are the you know, that, in my opinion, has become probably even more important than understanding the physics of climate change because we know it's getting warmer, we know sea level is going to rise.

00:26:24:24 - 00:26:34:24
Dr. Jim white: Yes, we can work out some details here, but you know, what are we going to do about it is a lot harder than whether or not sea levels rise.

00:26:34:26 - 00:26:38:06
Mike Collignon: It reminds me of the quote, I have seen the enemy and he is us.

00:26:38:08 - 00:26:43:17
Dr. Jim white: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

00:26:43:20 - 00:26:51:11
Mike Collignon: And one other thing I want to hit on before we move to a different topic. And that was you mentioned insurance and reinsurance and.

00:26:51:12 - 00:26:52:02
Dr. Jim white: Yeah.

00:26:52:04 - 00:27:23:19
Mike Collignon: Boy, I'd love to have somebody from those industries on this as well, because that to me was something that I started to pick up through the weather and climate summit that was put on by Storm Center. And then I saw it a little bit more, believe it or not, Jim, in some of the energy code hearings that I would go to, where you would have some people who would hang out in the back of the room or that would be hovering around and you would go, why is this person from Lloyd's of London here?

00:27:23:19 - 00:27:44:17
Mike Collignon: Or why is this, you know, Swiss Re here? Because, you know, why are they here? And then you start to kind of put the, you know, connect the dots and go, because they're the ones who have to put all of the noise, you know, get a mute all the noise and just simply look at, okay, what is really happening.

00:27:44:18 - 00:28:02:02
Mike Collignon: And I have to then project forward and make adjustments. And those adjustments from reinsurance companies is what really moves the markets. And I think it's why we're seeing a lot of the insurance changes in California, Texas, Florida, even here in Illinois.

00:28:02:04 - 00:28:34:12
Dr. Jim white: Yeah, absolutely. It's a you know, one of the things I've studied my entire career has been something called abrupt climate change. You know, there are times when the climate system seems to be capable of jumping large or large changes in temperature in a very short period of time, as as scary as that is. And as important as that is the abrupt tipping points, if you will, in the human system, I think are just as important.

00:28:34:13 - 00:29:05:17
Dr. Jim white: And insurance is one of those things. When you can no longer get insurance for your home, that's a big that's a fundamental change in in how you view, you know, climate change, how you view the world, how you know, all of this stuff. That's a fundamental change. And so I think and those can be very rapid decisions like, I'm sorry, we're no longer going to insure anything on the, you know, a beach that's a wow.

00:29:05:19 - 00:29:31:16
Dr. Jim white: You know, at that point, unless you are wealthy enough to buy a home and and willing to write it off, you're not going to have you're not going to buy them. So these these insurance I think is one of the really key human tipping points in this system. And. And that can be a very rapid, you know, like, all right, we're done.

00:29:31:21 - 00:29:43:04
Dr. Jim white: You know, we paid so much on this last hurricane, we can't afford anymore payments here in, you know, in some community. And what do you got to do.

00:29:43:06 - 00:30:07:00
Mike Collignon: Well, and you talked about the costs earlier of climate refugees. I mean, we see the, the the costs of climate change with, like you said, those disasters in FEMA money that's going out, it's taxpayer dollars. It's to help you as citizens. That's fine. Right. It's helping those who live where those affected areas are. But you're dishing out billions of dollars, billions.

00:30:07:00 - 00:30:16:06
Dr. Jim white: And you know, the the sadly, we are coming to the realization that it's not just on the coast that that.

00:30:16:09 - 00:30:48:02
Dr. Jim white: That's one of the things because I work on ice sheets, that's something that that I have worked on my entire career. But the reality is that the the probability of a very large rainstorm, much larger than we've seen in the past, not much larger, but certainly more frequently very large rainstorms that has gone up. And we saw that here in Western Carolina when Helene came through, it's like, wow, you know, when you can get a couple of feet of rain, you know, in a short period of time that has a devastating impact.

00:30:48:02 - 00:31:15:07
Dr. Jim white: And now we have an atmosphere which is warmer, which hold more moisture, and you have these storms that can harm and from, from the ocean and just dump it. And yeah, I mean, if you look at the frequency of large rainfalls, particularly in the eastern United States, have gone up and up and there's so you don't have to be on the coast to be in trouble with the insurance folks, as we found out.

00:31:15:08 - 00:31:16:15
Dr. Jim white: Western Carolina.

00:31:16:19 - 00:31:39:17
Mike Collignon: Yeah. And the other thing I was just reminded of was like the the heavy rains, the flash flooding that we saw in the hill country of Texas, that, that that camp. And yeah, so you're right, it's not just a coastal issue. Okay. So now you're at uncW, Chapel Hill. Let's talk about the transition from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains.

00:31:39:17 - 00:31:46:21
Mike Collignon: I know you like to ski. So what was that like that move for you?

00:31:46:24 - 00:31:52:12
Dr. Jim white: It was so it was easier than you might think. So I was born and raised in East Tennessee.

00:31:52:13 - 00:31:53:03
Mike Collignon: Okay.

00:31:53:10 - 00:32:25:07
Dr. Jim white: So I'm kind of going back to, you know, an area that I understand I got. My peeps are here. I thought, I've got a family, you know, in the general area. And so it was for me a, you know, first of all, it's an opportunity to come to a university that's a top five state public university. And that that's, you know, you don't turn that down, but it's also an opportunity to come back to a little bit, a little bit of my roots and closer to my family.

00:32:25:10 - 00:32:59:16
Dr. Jim white: I give my wife, Chris, huge credit for this because her family is in Boulder, Colorado. We, you know, and we lived there for 30 years. I very, very sheepishly, Mike came home one day and said, you know, what would you think about moving to North Carolina? Because I had applied and I expected to spend the night on the couch or not even inside the house.

00:32:59:18 - 00:33:13:25
Dr. Jim white: But she said the sweetest thing. She she said to me, you know, we spent 30 years living close to my family. It's time we spent more time with your family. And I thought that was the sweetest thing. I just said I'd give all the credit.

00:33:13:27 - 00:33:18:08
Mike Collignon: That is, that is awesome. That is really cool. So the.

00:33:18:08 - 00:33:22:13
Dr. Jim white: Move was as excuse me, but as the saying goes, buried up.

00:33:22:18 - 00:33:28:28
Mike Collignon: So I can relate.

00:33:29:00 - 00:33:49:13
Mike Collignon: Now, at the same time that you got the family element to that, I've got to think that that move also represents a new challenge for you too, because you're going from one of your city where you spend a lot of your career. Now you're going to a brand new university. Like I said, a top five public university. Has it lived up to your expectations?

00:33:49:17 - 00:34:33:06
Dr. Jim white: Sure, yes. Look, Chapel Hill is a fantastic university. It is. You know, it's been a lot of fun working within an environment where the students are just the top and faculties. Excellent. And the state supports higher education here. So that that has been been really important. And I, I will say that that while for most of my life my primary passion was to understand how the world functions, that was that drove me as a young person that I used to hike and camp in the Smokies, drove me throughout most of my career as a climate scientist.

00:34:33:07 - 00:35:10:25
Dr. Jim white: As I grew older, I also started to appreciate more the value of education, the value of. And I got a liberal arts education at university college education, and I began to appreciate that more and more how important that was. And so I I'd say equal now in terms of my passions, is the value of a liberal arts education, the value of a college education, and the opportunity to be a champion in that space is something that I could not turn down.

00:35:11:02 - 00:35:25:27
Mike Collignon: Part of what you've done there, you and see, is you've led a transformation of the College of Arts and Sciences, where you're the dean. Can you give us kind of a little bit of an overview of that transformation? But more importantly, can you talk about why that occurred?

00:35:25:29 - 00:35:28:23
Dr. Jim white: So here are at Colorado. Are you.

00:35:28:26 - 00:35:30:12
Mike Collignon: At unk?

00:35:30:15 - 00:35:59:04
Dr. Jim white: At unk. So I'm not sure what the what what you're thinking about there, but we so we have a new general education curriculum. Yes. And by the way, that doesn't happen very often in academia. Exactly. Universities are not you know, we are we are ocean liners. We are not nimble speedboats. But it was an opportunity. They had made that change.

00:35:59:04 - 00:36:28:19
Dr. Jim white: I came in and it was up to me really to figure out how we're going to implement that, how we're going to make that work. But that was actually a it was a challenge, but it was also a lot of fun. I think that, you know, universities shouldn't be static. They should be constantly analyzing. How is it that we are getting, you know, the basic education, the information that we want to get to our students, how are we doing that, and are we doing it well?

00:36:28:21 - 00:36:54:07
Dr. Jim white: And can we measure that? And can we we justify spending money here and not spending money there? These are really important things that that I think are critical. And, you know, it's like I said, I just enjoy working with the faculty here. They're, you know, they're really smart. They you know, they hold my feet to the fire when my feet need to be held to the fire.

00:36:54:07 - 00:37:03:28
Dr. Jim white: But they're they're working with us, knowing that we have to make changes, knowing that we have to do things differently. I've been very impressed with how willing they are to do that.

00:37:04:02 - 00:37:10:05
Mike Collignon: That's great. That was awesome. That's I mean, to be in that kind of supportive environment is really cool. So I'm happy.

00:37:10:05 - 00:37:39:16
Dr. Jim white: For you. Typically, if you go to any university, particularly state public universities, but also the privates, you know, there's a it's kind of a given that the faculty will not like the administration that still that's how we worked. This happened to me at Colorado. I mean, I spent 30 years on the faculty with people, working with people. And when I was appointed interim dean, I, I remember the first meeting I had with the chair of the departments of the college.

00:37:39:18 - 00:37:58:15
Dr. Jim white: I walked into the room and I said, you know, you all know me. You've known me for a long time, but I can tell you that when I walked over the threshold into the dean's office, suddenly I had the Darth Vader helmet on and I became evil. I said, we can't work like this. We have to find a way to trust each other.

00:37:58:15 - 00:38:22:11
Dr. Jim white: We have. And that's actually been one of my mantras as Dean all along, is, is it's really important to find a way to earn the faculty's trust and then to keep faculty trust and communicating often and letting them know what you're thinking about and, you know, taking responsibility for the bad things and giving responsibility for the good things or ways to do that.

00:38:22:13 - 00:38:32:23
Mike Collignon: And I would posit that, you know, your time with ice core research probably help with that, right? You know, you got to spend six weeks with these people. You better be able to get along with them.

00:38:32:25 - 00:39:01:08
Dr. Jim white: Yeah. No. That's true, that's true. I, you know, I, I never set out to be a deemed or actually to be an administration that was not on my list of things to do. I'm one of those folks who I enjoy helping people. I'm a service oriented person. It gives me great satisfaction to help people succeed. So I guess I'm suited to that.

00:39:01:11 - 00:39:16:07
Dr. Jim white: But it wasn't, you know, I didn't have plans to be a dean. It's one of those things you find out you're good at it, and then people just keep appointing you. And and at some point you look back and you go, what happened? You know.

00:39:16:09 - 00:39:19:14
Mike Collignon: You weren't scheming for the Darth Vader helmet. Is that.

00:39:19:17 - 00:39:44:04
Dr. Jim white: I wasn't that scheming for the Darth Vader helmet. And I, you know, and it's I actually I think some of the best administrators I've worked with over the years have been those who. Yeah, I wouldn't say they fell into it, but it was, you know, they weren't campaigning for it. This is something that they, you know, they knew they were they had they had both the science skills and the people skills and they realized they could do this.

00:39:44:09 - 00:39:55:13
Mike Collignon: Okay, okay. You mentioned the family earlier. The grandkids. How are they doing? Do you get to do you get to see them very often now?

00:39:55:15 - 00:40:23:25
Dr. Jim white: So here's you know, there are times in your life, Mike, when changes occur and you just know you did the right thing. And in this particular case, my I, we have two kids who had lived in Colorado, son and a daughter. Both of them decided to move to North Carolina. And we did not put any pressure on them or anything.

00:40:23:26 - 00:40:31:26
Dr. Jim white: And I believe I've had all sorts of fellow grandparents look at me and go, how did you get so lucky? And I said, not anything I did.

00:40:31:29 - 00:40:32:13
Mike Collignon: So they.

00:40:32:13 - 00:41:00:24
Dr. Jim white: Followed you? Yeah. My son is boys followed us out here. He lives about ten minutes away from us. And my daughter always wanted to live in the South. She's now here with her two kids, and she lives in Durham, which is about 30 minutes. So I, you know, I get to see my grandkids frequently. As a matter of fact, you know, we we have a house that has a couple of bedrooms upstairs.

00:41:00:24 - 00:41:19:21
Dr. Jim white: And our grandkids, particularly those in Durham that are 30 minutes away, they have their own bedrooms now. They they know exactly where they're going when they come in the door. In life we go and, you know, if they deign to say hi to me, you know, fantastic. If not, they're in the house.

00:41:19:24 - 00:41:22:26
Mike Collignon: That's awesome. I'm very happy for you, sir. That's awesome.

00:41:22:28 - 00:41:40:12
Dr. Jim white: And everybody's happy. And everybody, I think they're doing really well. And that's just, you know, it's it's whatever we did to to bring the family here was a really good thing. That's cool. Yeah.

00:41:40:14 - 00:42:00:08
Mike Collignon: So as we've established, you've been in academia a long time. You get to interact with future leaders every day. You're around students who are thirsting for knowledge all the time. What advice or counsel are you giving them?

00:42:00:10 - 00:42:05:28
Dr. Jim white: The. Well, first of all, I try not to.

00:42:06:01 - 00:42:11:22
Dr. Jim white: Because, you know, the the old fart syndrome. You don't see.

00:42:11:24 - 00:42:42:23
Dr. Jim white: But I, I have to say, I've been very impressed with the with the current generation and previous generation students who have a their mindset is one of we want to make this world a better place. And I think that's the right mindset. They're there and I, I when I tell them is both at Colorado and here at Carolina, you know, you have an advantage.

00:42:42:26 - 00:42:57:16
Dr. Jim white: You you are first of all, you're smart. You're going to a, you know, large you're going to a state public university. You got in you got to be smart to begin with. You're going to do well in your career.

00:42:57:18 - 00:43:37:15
Dr. Jim white: Use some of that energy to turn around. And as I said it, folks, you know the R word responsibility. What is your responsibility? It's your responsibility just to yourself or is it to your community as well as to yourself. And that's one of the things that I tell them a lot that particularly today, you know, we're in a time when we need citizens of this country and of the global society that that understand and stand up for things like democracies and, you know, where we are in that space.

00:43:37:15 - 00:44:02:19
Dr. Jim white: And nations require educated citizens, but also require good citizens, citizens that that think about their communities, think about their states, think about their countries as well as themselves. And I have been impressed with the with the, the students that I see today and their willingness to take that seriously. I think I have hopes, I, I always have hopes.

00:44:02:20 - 00:44:15:11
Dr. Jim white: I mean, I the you as I say to folks, you cannot work at a university and not think the future is bright because you get to see the future every day and it's really impressive.

00:44:15:13 - 00:44:18:05
Dr. Jim white: I'm not sure I answered your question, but it was.

00:44:18:07 - 00:44:34:08
Mike Collignon: No, no, because, you know, you're right. I mean, in my opinion, you do have to think beyond just yourself and your little bubble because you can't go through life completely by yourself. It just doesn't work, right. I mean.

00:44:34:10 - 00:44:56:09
Dr. Jim white: Well, you can, but it's it's it's I don't think it's nearly as satisfying a life as a life that where you, you, you take some of your energy and you give it back. You give it back to your to your neighborhood. You give it back to your wherever the state local. I mean, you don't have to run for office, but you can be active, you can talk to people.

00:44:56:11 - 00:45:23:15
Dr. Jim white: I think that's, you know, and our form of government and, you know, many forms of government around the world require that we have, since you know, that it this university dates back to the to the Revolutionary War. And at the time, the universities that were forming in the United States. And this is one of them. It was the first state public university.

00:45:23:17 - 00:45:47:17
Dr. Jim white: The need was the need is articulated, was really we need citizens. We have a fledgling democracy. And it's not at all clear that it's going to work. It's not going to hold together. We but we need people. We need citizens who are willing to work for the country. And that's really what early on, that's what our universities were all about.

00:45:47:19 - 00:46:05:21
Dr. Jim white: You know, yes, we we trained folks in technical skills, but it was it was all it was at the time, all about that liberal arts education. I want really well educated people because they're going to be the ones who are going to step up and lead the country.

00:46:05:23 - 00:46:18:11
Mike Collignon: Yeah. Well, Jim, thank you so much for appearing on the podcast. I hope that the spring semester goes really well. And thanks again.

00:46:18:13 - 00:46:26:05
Dr. Jim white: Mike. Thanks. Great catching up with you. Hope to see you again soon. Take care. Thanks for for giving me, you know, chance to speak.

00:46:26:06 - 00:46:36:13
Mike Collignon: Oh no problem. I always love talking with you. Appreciate it very much. Stay tuned for more episodes of the Impact Series podcast on the Green Building Media Network. I'm Mike Collignon and I'll see you again soon.