By Maggie Dolan, news staff
Terms like “climate change” and “global weirding” have replaced the more controversial “global warming” in recent years due to findings that some areas of the planet have actually cooled. Brian Helmuth, a Northeastern professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, spoke about the implications of this “weirding” at the New England Aquarium on April 6.
Helmuth said environmental changes will produce winners and losers, but figuring out the differences is crucial to human survival. Plants and animals react to changes in their ecosystem’s temperatures, but it may be possible that some species are benefitting from climate change, he said.
“By focusing on patients you cannot save, you neglect species that you have a chance of saving,” he said.
Helmuth spoke as part of the Aquarium Lecture Series, a weekly program in the aquarium’s Simons IMAX Theatre that is free and open to the public. The series aims to be an educational resource to anyone interested, no matter their gender, race or economic status, according to the aquarium’s website.
“Climate change isn’t one thing all across the world, and that’s one thing I hadn’t been particularly aware of,” said Joan Prince, a Marblehead, Massachusetts, resident. “That was a big point in his talk and that was all new to me so it was very enlightening.”
Helmuth demonstrated some of the advanced technology marine biologists use to determine how species’ temperatures change based on their surroundings. He showed pictures of “robomussels,” thermometers disguised as California mussels that track the exact temperatures of the mussels in an ecosystem.
Helmuth also used an infrared camera on the audience and projected its results onto the IMAX screen, showing different colors representing different temperatures for people’s body heats and the air around them. Scientists use these types of equipment to discover how much an organism’s temperature can change before it is no longer able to reproduce, and how much more before it cannot survive.
“We need to know for food security,” Helmuth said. “How do we diversify what we hunt and fish for?”
Helmuth’s lecture was the first Aquarium Lectures Series event for Caitlin Trentin, a sophomore environmental studies major at University of Massachusetts Boston. She is new to the major, and said she appreciated the visual aspect of the presentation as someone with little background in studying climate change.
“I enjoyed how relaxed it was,” Trentin said. “I thought it was a good environment to grasp all this stuff, because he tried to gauge it more toward what someone who doesn’t have experience or prior knowledge could understand easily.”
Helmuth said it is important to study how species behave when their environments are altered. If certain fish are dying, but others are thriving in the changing water, it impacts what people can eat, so fishermen need to know, he said.
“What if we look at something that isn’t a human that takes a whole different look of the world than we do,” he said. “But that actually has really big implications to us.”
As a firm believer in climate change, Helmuth said conversations among people who disagree about climate change topics need to discuss the positive benefits of protecting the planet from practical standpoints. He said that if business is a priority, explain the economic impacts of climate change, and if religion is a priority, discuss protecting God’s creation.
“It’s really starting with something they care about,” Helmuth said.
