A really Inconvenient Truth

Instructor: Dan Miller Institution: Fora.tv

Dictated by: 박고은, 박지영, 박상우, 신희경, 최정훈

[0:00] Delighted to introduce our speaker tonight, Dan Miller, former CEO of Ask.com, co-founder of the Roda Group, an investment group that mainly invest in green and clean technology, and he’s gonna tell you why we are really fucked. So, Dan? Take it from there. Good evening, everybody? I’m starting off with this slide. This is the first slide from “the Inconvenient Truth” slide show. I was part of the Empire of the Climate project, which is Al Gore’s group that trained the thousand people, actually now it’s a little bit more than that. To go around the country and around the world, giving the inconvenient truth talk. It’s part of that training he explains how there is a certain hope budget and you really should not get too dire because you’ll turn everybody off if you do that. I was once giving a talk at Cornell and they were filming it, you are not allowed to film the Inconvenient Truth talk cause of the copyright issues. So I decided to give a different talk where I didn’t follow those rules. It got a pretty good reaction; I think people really like to be told the truth, even if it’s not very pretty. So instead of on Inconvenient Truth, we are gonna talk about a Really Inconvenient Truth. We are gonna go beyond the inconvenient truth. By the way show up hands, how many people have seen the movie, The Inconvenient Truth? Almost everybody.

But not everyone. So, the really inconvenient truth is that the recent information we’ve all been given about climate change, the main source of that being the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change, an IPCC. That information that came out in 2007, and it’s a report that says things are going to be really bad, if we don’t do something about climate change. So the really inconvenient truth is that that report is essentially a best case analysis. And the reason for that is that there’s a lot of reasons, the information that’s in that report, had to be submitted years earlier, before updated information was available, there is governments that are overseeing what the scientist can put in the report, and China doesn’t want to see certain things that, so there are sort of this consensus building thing. So everything in the reports pretty much assured that’s gonna happen, but there is a lot of things that’s gonna happen that aren’t in the report. And so we’re gonna go beyond that. And instead of considering the best case possibility, we’re gonna take a look at what the more expected case is going to be. And one way to look at this is to take a look at sort of a probability curve, higher it is the more likely something is.

[03:02] And on the left side is the better outcomes from climate change, and on the right side, are the worse cases of climate change. So you put the IPCC it’s sort of on the left side, sounds pretty bad when you read the report, but that’s pretty much the best we can hope for. What’s more likely is something that I’ll call biblical. Because it really would fit the description of what’s in the Bible. And on the right side, unfortunately not a very tiny probability, with the reasonable probability, it could be game-over. And game over means we’re not here anymore. We’re gonna see why that could happen. Well, one reason that the IPCC report is conservative, I’d call it or sort of a best case

scenario, is that it use linear models. Linear models are easier to formulate, they’re easier to agree upon, which is very important in consensus building thing. And so, that’s how it is, but the real world, doesn’t tend to work that way. The real world is discontinuous. And let’s take a look at a very practical version of that. We all know what H2O is. It’s water. Actually it’s water when it’s warmer than 32 degrees Fahrenheit. But when it’s less than 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s ice. And it doesn’t like slowly transition from one to the other, it’s either that or it’s this. And this is actually a rather apt example too, because this is pretty important in terms of the ice in the Arctic, and Antarctic. Because we’re warming it up, right now. And it’s crossing over 32 degrees. So, in fact, let’s take a look at a chart from the IPCC where it’s predicting what, how soon this summer ice in the Arctic is going to melt. So this is from the starting point, a 100 percent means there will be no ice left in the Arctic, and they predicted that basically around 2080, about 2100, all the ice would melt. But in the reality, the ice is melting very quickly, it’s about half gone now. So, it’s gonna be all gone by next five or ten years. And if you don’t believe that, you can take a look at actual satellite images taken early years in the summer of Arctic starting about 1979, 1980. And then, there in the middle, I think if you play forward in your mind just a little bit, you’ll see why it’s pretty important now. Such an amazing thing. This is by the way, not very subtle, this is something you could observe from the moon, if you were there.

And the problem is that ice reflects about 80 percent of the sunlight hitting it and dark water absorbs about 80 percent. So as the ice melts, there’s more water exposed, more sunlight heats it up more, makes the ice melts faster. That’s an example of a feedback. And there’re a lot of other feedbacks in the climate that sort of feed back on themselves and make things worse.

[6:02] And after awhile, if any of these kick in, they can put out, for example, more CO2 or heat up the planet faster than we are. Once that happens, then it’s out of our hands. So we’re gonna work on this. By the way this is a chart showing, outer line is sort of the average from 1979 to 2000 summer Arctic ice. In 2005, they dropped a lot, and they thought Oh, wow, they dropped a lot. In 2006, it was about the same. And then in 2007, in one year, it lost as much ice equal to three times a size of California. That’s, that’s a lot of ice. And this year, the last two years of tracking about in 2007, slightly more than 2007, but there’s other problems too, ice that remains, is thinner ice than before. It’s younger ice, and so that’s why this is already, most scientists think, this is already a done deal. This is gonna be all gone. And the other problem, now, this is ice floating in the water, so it doesn’t raise sea level. It’s like if you melt ice in a glass, when the ice melts, the water level doesn’t change. Ice on land, like in Greenland, if that melts, it floats into the ocean that would raise sea level.

We’re gonna talk about that as well. But even though it doesn’t raise sea level, it will make it the earth a lot warmer, because it will be dark water instead of the mirror reflecting the sun away in the summer time. And the other thing it will do is to speed the melt of permafrost and we’re gonna go back to that. So, this used to be the scariest graph I have ever saw. I’m going to show you a scarier one later. This is actually a graph from an Inconvenient Truth that shows CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the last 650,000 years, and it compares its to the temperature of the last 650,000 years, and you’ll notice they track pretty well. And the reason, and it just shows that CO2 is a really good reflector of heat. It’s only 0.04 percent of atmosphere, It sound like it’s almost nothing, but it’s actually a really good at trapping heat. It’s acts like a blanket. And that’s really good, because without that, the world would be a frozen ice, ball and we wouldn’t be here. But it’s sort of just right the way it was, and we’re sort of doubling that blanket. And that’s gonna make it warmer. So that’s, what you’re seeing here, is this where it was, and then in the last Ice Age, it was, this was temperature. So, it was about 5 degrees cooler, and the CO2 concentration was 100 parts per million less. So you might ask, why does this go up and down every hundred thousand years or so. Over a year of period about a hundred thousand years the earth’s orbit changes very slightly. It changes its shape a lit bit, and Earth tilt a little bit differently, the earth wobbles around its axis every 20,000 years and the orbit changes over certain numbers of years. And then once in a while, it lines up just right, so the earth is just tilted a little bit more away from the sun, while it’s little bit farther away from the sun.

And that makes the temperature drop just a little bit, because it’s farther from the sun.

[9:00]

That starts a bunch of feedbacks that reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere, which makes it cooler, which reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere which makes it cooler and you end up with an Ice Age, end up two miles of ice above New York City, when it was 100 million parts per less than it is today. So where are we now? Well, now, we’re 100 parts million above where we were in preindustrial times. So again, when it was 100 parts million, there was two miles of ice above New York City, and now we are going, we are already in parts million above and we are expected to be, in my lifetime, actually it’s much more than that. 600 parts million maybe more by the end of the century. It’s actually this is IPCC level data and it’s actually worse than this so far, and emissions pass on today. It’s hard to imagine what this means, but there’s another graph that actually folds this information and so it’s another form that we will be able to do. Now, this is a model from the IPCC, again this is the old data showing the earth temperature since about 1880. And you’ll notice whenever there is a volcano, it cools the earth off by putting smoke in the atmosphere, reflecting the sun away. And then it drops a little bit, but over time, you’re still going up, and that’s because of the global warming. And then in starting in 2000, it’s obviously not historical data anymore, it’s prediction for the future. And there’s different lines based on different emission scenarios. It turns out that so far the actual emission so far are worse than the worse case assumed by the IPCC. I translated this into the degrees Fahrenheit, so you can see. So, we’re talking about the Arctic being 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. But we are gonna, and you will see these are degrees C over here. So the 5 degrees C that you see, the actual emission so far are worse than that line

assumes. Now, MIT put out a study this January, where they took all these data and they did a probability assessment of different temperatures over this century. They did the same study back in 2003 and they basically said there’s a 50 percent chance we’re gonna hit 2 degrees C by the end of the century. But they just re-did their calculations based on updated information. And you’ll see that if we heat, these are the red lines. We cross 2 degrees C around 2050. 2 degrees C is important numbers. The number, the temperature increase that scientists say we better not go above 2 degrees C. And there’s a really good book called, 6 Degrees, which explains what, one, two, three, four, five, and six degrees warmer than today means.

[12:04]

I’ll summarize it for you. One degree is really bad, because it causes the Arctic to melt, it causes Antarctic to melt, it cause hurricanes and droughts and everything we’re seeing. And we’ve warmed about a degree and two degrees is really bad, it’s major sea levels rise, wiping out major cities around the world, war, famine and all kind of that stuff. Three is the Bible. Don’t know how to say than any other way, it’s just beginning of the collapse of civilization. Collapse of agriculture, certainly collapse of economies. Four, five, and six degrees is sort of like hey, is anybody there, is mad-Max kind of stuff going on. And six degrees is silence. We are basically not around. And we are gonna talk about.

This but let’s understand this graph a little bit better. It says, there is a 95, by the way, this graph assumes business as usual, which is what we are doing right now. That means, going along, not taking major action to reverse the trends. And you are gonna understand why we need to reverse the trends. 95 percent chance that we’ll be at 3. 5 degrees C, 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today at the end of the century, crossing 2 degrees, roughly 2050 or so. That alone is unacceptable. 95 percent chance. 50 percent chance, that will be a 5 degrees C, very close to game-over that time. And a 5 percent chance that where 7 degrees C, which is certainly, a game-over. Keep in mind that it doesn’t stop in 2100. You know, we’re all on this path, and we only hit the, let’s say 3. 5 degees, we can say 5 degrees, and you know, 2120, and something like that and 2130, so 2100 is sort of an artificial path, so onething I have to emphasize, things are gonna be getting bad. Well, first things are getting really bad already in the first place, like Australia and certain parts of Africa. It can be really bad here in about 10 years in Southwest. And it’s gonna be really bad for most places in 2020. And that the, well let’s not worry about that, hey, it’s not in my lifetime, certainly we’ll see it our kids will live it, and it’s a question about whether our grandchildren will get through it. But talking about parch per million and degrees C, this chart I might as well just told you that an asteroid is headed for earth. And that’s really the impact we’re really talking about. But when I say, four, five hundred parts per million or I say 5 degrees C, no one understands. It doesn’t build up.

We gonna talk about psychological climate change little bit later, but basically this kinds of numbers means nothing. Anyway so what I try to do is to change, to translate, to come up with an analogy of what these all really means.

[15:00] So we're gonna take a look at what does two degrees mean. The something that we understand in more of our daily life (hopefully not daily life by the way) so the plus two degree c is about like driving your car into a brick wall at 20miles an hour. Ok? you're gonna be damaged, you're probably gonna be hurt, you might get killed. There is a reasonable chance you might walk away or at least go away in an ambulance right? 4degrees c is like hitting your car into a brick wall 40miles an hour. You might make it through. Less chance for that six degrees is like hitting your car into wall 60miles an hour and by the way I forgot to mention no air bags, no seat belts, and all your children and future grandchildren are in the back seat. So that's the kind of thing that we are talking about here. Take a look at some of the data from around the world. Greenland is melting rapidly. Everything in just the last two or three years scientists have found that everything they thought is much worse than they thought. Greenland is melting rapidly, we can measure it using satellites that measure gravity so they can actually see how much ice is there. Water is pulling on the top of Greenland ice sheet and then it goes down to the bottom at lubricates the bottom of the ice sheets, and they flow out to the sea faster. So the IPCC said oh they will be about a two foot sea level rise at the end of the century and they have asterisk there. We only included two of the three causes of sea level rise because we weren't sure about how to calculate the third one. The third one is about collapse of ice sheets.

Ice sheets, falling off the side into the water. That is by far the largest piece of sea level rise and when you add that in Jim Henson who is one of the leading climate scientists in the world, said he's used the word 'certain' that it would be a multimeter sea level rise in the century. Multimeter means 6 feet plus. Two feet by the way is really bad. Two feet is really bad. Six feet, it's hard to imagine. That means all the major cities in the world world had wiped out and we are talking about the century. The Antarctic. There is the west Antarctic ice sheet over there is being held in by two glaciers that are as they say on thin ice I guess. These glaciers are unlike other glaciers in Greenland which are on land, a lot of these glaciers are actually in the water but shallow enough that there are actually anchored to the ground under the water. But the problem is the warmer water from the ocean is underneath and it’s undermining them and they can collapse much sooner than people think and once they collapsed, behind them is the entire west Antarctic ice sheet. If that sheet goes about eighteen feet of sea level rise just for that alone.

[18:00]

Greenland by the way if it melts eighteen or twenty feet of sea level rise all on its own and just to give you an idea what that mean. This is if the west Antarctic ice sheet goes. That's what Florida looks like. By the way Florida's gonna look like that in next couple of hundred years certainly but with this is possible in the next hundred years. Not likely cause this is but again the predictions are more in the six feet range for this century again everything we're learning that goes faster and faster and faster even the last of couple of weeks the data from the west Antarctic ice with articles about how it's melting four times faster than they originally thought so we really don't know

but this is reality and by the way the time to stop buying Florida real estate is now. Not that this is gonna happen soon but as soon as everybody realizes this is gonna happen that's when the price drop right? I can tell you now this is gonna happen and it's gonna be conventional wisdom in a little while but it takes a while not a secret though. By the way oceans will rise. This is not prediction, this is historical data. This is a different CO2 concentration, we're currently around here. This is what the ocean level was. Though it says everyone the scientists are saying that we'd better stop at five fifty parts per million. Now they're saying four fifty and actually Jim Henson says we have to stop at three fifty but already we're at three eighty seven. It says we can't go above three fifty, we have to go back. But if we went to five fifty that’s the sea level was a hundred and fifty feet higher than today. And that's what's happening, we are already at the current three eighty eight that it's about fifty feet higher than today. That's where we're heading. The arctic is melting, the Antarctic is melting, when it's all gone it's two hundred and eighty feet higher than today. And it's happened in the past it’s not like this theoretical. It's happening now it just takes a long time to happen but we're letting it happen, we're letting this happen to future generation. Other problems that can happen this century is the Amazon is drying out because of the changing weather patterns. The trees there are not meant to withstand draught. It's supposed to be a tropical rain forest not supposed to be something that can stand draught. The worrisome draughts are little while ago for a couple years in a row and this is a ship on the Amazon river, they're actually flying water up to villages using helicopters

on off the Amazon river, that's bizarre. But if it, draught goes for three to five years then all the trees will burn because they're not designed to withstand the draught and that will release tremendous amount of Co2 which will heat up the atmosphere more which will make essentially the whole Amazon collapse and turn it into savannah. This is not predicted. Again this is not part of the, 2007 IPC sneak model. They are updating those models now. So if you have to be scared of one thing, there are actually lots of things to be scared of. But if you asked me what's the one thing I worry about the most in the near term, it's the permafrost melting.

[21:00]

The Permafrost is, as it says, frozen ground around the arctic that contains organic material. It's old plant maybe a dinosaur here or there or something like that. But It's mostly like peat frozen, peat moss if you think of like that. And it's frozen so it hasn't decomposed into Co2 and methane. It contains as twice as much Co2 as the entire atmosphere halt and it is melting now. We really don't know how fast it's melting, we don't know how much Co2 is giving off, we know it's happening, there's some estimate. It's a lot already, the humans give off about thirty billion tons of Co2 a year excess C02 since methane is twenty times more powerful than Co2 as it heat trapping gas. It's estimated that the amount given off in the last couple years might be equivalent to about a billion tons of Co2. What's happening in this picture? Is this a lake in Siberia but it's a lake formed because of melting permafrost water underneath. Someone poked the hole in the ice and lit a match.

(Video clip sound) You're not supposed to see a stream of fire coming out of a frozen lake. That's because there is methane trapped under there and it poked a hole and the beast, it lit a match, within the match like lighting that gas stove and that is happening all over the arctic now is there are just saw an article on this two days ago where they just took us little patch of the arctic sea and did sonar see methane plums coming out of the bottom of the sea. Actually that's coming from something else. Which will get to in moment? So the oceans are been absorbing a lot of the Co2 that we put into the atmosphere as you've heard of getting more acidic as they get more acidic shells can't grow and that sort of the plankton and three kind of things that have hard shells and little shrimp and it's gonna reach a point where they can't grow at all, that sort of the bottom of the food chain, they are worth of top of the food chain so in the bottom of the food chain goes everything above it 23. 30 and also as the ocean warms, it also can absorb less Co2 and also as it gets more Co2 in it, it also absorb less Co2. So it's already absorbing less of the Co2 that we're putting out than we used to and if we get to the point, we get so bad, it actually starts giving off Co2 that ever happens that's game over. This is not one of scientist UC Berkely that studies this. That this is not like the nearest term thing to worry about, this is the longer term thing to worry about. But certainly it gives the fact absorbing less Co2, is a problem so that means when we cut back our Co2 which we have to do, we have to cut it back more than we think because Ocean isn't helping us as much as it used to.

[24:09]

So this is one of the things that I want to get to what the bubbling, there is another sorts of methane. It's stored, there's a tremendous amount of stored methane frozen in ice under the ocean, under high pressure and cold temperatures. That looks like a burning snowball. That's a methane clathrate and if that ever goes, there's so much of that, that would release incredible amounts of a methane into the atmosphere and we've gone pretty soon.

Fortunately, most of it’s pretty deep where it’s still pretty cold and the warming that existed happening so far happening more at the surface, so this is not been disturbed. But the one place is an exception is in the arctic sea wherever it's covered in the ice all the time and now it's not into warming up fairly rapidly up there and that's where they've been measuring this methane coming out a lot but most of it gets absorbed by the ocean before we reach to the surface and doesn't get into the atmosphere but it also makes the ocean more acidic too at the same time. So this one is something to worry about but not is near term problem as the permafrost although we're learning more about this all time. So that's some of the bad stuff that's going on and this is all I have to tell you what I give this topic I sometimes feel like I'm either giving a science fictions, talk or something like that doesn't seem real to me either but I've talked to the scientists and I tell you, they tell me things that are just unbelievably scary and they' re doing it everyday so they don't even notice it sometime. It's real, we have choices, it's amazing to me that we're not doing anything about this, this is not, nothing I've told you today is a secret. It's all well understood. There are a lot more information recently that not everyone's up to speed on that the things are getting far worse. But let's look at some of the choices that we have now. Some people believe that the climate change isn't real and that we shouldn't do anything. So let's take a look at a very simple matrix maybe climate change isn't real or maybe it is and we have two choices, we do something or we don't do anything. Well, if climate change isn't real, and we do something about it, we're gonna waste money. Now we'll develop new technology and the world be better for other reason, there's no problems to solve of course I don't believe that but still you wanna look at it that way. Now if we don't do anything in climate changes in real world, life just goes on and it'll still be better off anyway because we're gonna run out of oil and things like that but putting those uh…. energy security things ,besides. But a climate change is real and we do something about it.

We're not wasting money, we're spending money, we're gonna develop new technologies we're gonna make a better world, we're gonna improve the economy and we're gonna improve energy security and all these other wonderful things so it's good thing.

[27:03]

Well, the climate change is real and we don't do something about it. Billions of people are going to die, there's gonna be wars everywhere over resources, famine and draught which is beginning already, by the way food production around the world is gonna dropping for the last of few years because of the climate change, we've been eating more grain and we've been growing for the last few years. There’re already is tremendous flooding and draught in different parts of the world. It will be the end of the world we'll as we know it, essentially the collapse of civilization it won't be any economy. It'll be again mad max kind of existence. I don't think that's a good choice and unfortunately five columns of the first column is not true. So we're really left with just one choice. Now this amazes me that we all know that is pretty factual stuff yet we're not doing anything. So I started looking into reading up on the psychology of climate change it turns out they've done some studies on this that turns out we've evolved over the millions of years to act on certain information and to ignore others and that's actually useful thing for evolution, if you ever reacting to everything, you won't focus on the important things and your species will die out so we learn to react, humans learn to react a certain kinds of threats. There are six characteristics. So let's take a look at those characteristics and compare them to the threats posed by climate change. First of all, visible. Imagine you are on the Serengeti and there's a lion shows up there close to you, there he is, so now you're gonna react to that. Climate change is invisible.

It's a beautiful day out today. Historical precedent. The lion ate your brother last week and you know to be scared of lions. Well, climate changes happened in the past but we don't remember it long time ago and so it's essentially that unprecedented. Immediate. The lion is coming towards you right now. You’d better do something. You’re really geared to react to that kind of thing. I'm talking about ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years. Might as will be forever right? Simple causality. He's going to bite your head off; you're going to be dead. So when you cannot understand pretty clearly, climate change parts per million translates to degree in sea which causes changes in the climate, you know they're all the things way complicated for most people. Caused by another tribe or an enemy, in this case, the lion and climate change, it's us. This is a very easy one to think about to see how we would react if there was’nt an enemy behind us. Imagine you read in the newspaper tomorrow that we find out that all of excess Co2 in the world is being released by Al Qaeda. Think about that. Would we react?

[30:00]

Would we react? Of course, we would. We would spend any amount of money, well we just did, to fight that, right? We would spend a trillion dollars which we just did. And, unfortunately, this is actually caused by us, so we can’t say that.

And the last one, direct personal consequences. The line’s gonna eat you, so you’re gonna run. Climate change is more our children and grandchildren and stuff like that so that makes it less… so basically climate change scores zero out of six. Well, we all know it’s a problem and yet we find reasons not to do it, so there’s another study done about the denial strategies for climate change. And you can find your favorite up here. I have my favorite. But basically, these are the reasons people give for not doing something about it, and it’s just normal human behavior. I think one of the things that we have to realize is that humans are not rational. You know, I got over that a long time ago, giving talks on climate change. We’re not and we should recognize that fact. And maybe try to use that to figure out ways of communicating and convincing people because this is real. This is the most serious threat we have ever faced in all of history. It’s happening very rapidly. So we have to get over these things. Let’s talk a little bit. If you run a business, what does this mean to you? There will be a decline in products that are carbon intensive. It’s already happening somewhat. Cars, we have seen recently. Bunkers, trying to make more fuel-efficient cars. But this is gonna happen more across the border. Relatively short time frame, by the way. This is an unusual situation.

If I was to tell you in early 90s, there would be this incredible thing called the internet. It’s gonna change everything. And you believe me, and you acted on that information, you’d do really well for yourself. This is a very similar thing. This is a for-sure thing that’s happening now. And almost everyone’s ignoring it. I mean we talk about it a lot, but we’re not doing anything. So if you actually act on it, you can actually do quite well, but at the same time, it’s not gonna be all rosy here. So there can be impacts on your business and your employees, your customers. There are going to be hurricanes. We already lost a city, a major city and bunch of small ones. We’re gonna lose more of them in the next decade. There is drought. There are more wild fires up 50% probably even more by now actually. More flooding and more droughts. Pandemic, we’re seeing now. Sea level rise is gonna start more slowly and then pick up a little later. You have to watch out for optimized systems. Just in time inventory and things like that. Because what happens when the factory making your widget in Florida gets hit by a hurricane or a flood or something like that and you don’t have it. So you have to think a little differently. Rather than optimizing, you want to be robust. Optimized means you’re best for a certain set of conditions.

But what you want to be is robust.

[33:00]

You want to work well under a wide set of conditions. And there’s gonna be a lot of unforeseen impacts. All of you know what black swans are. There’s a book called the black swan. Black swans are basically unforeseen events that change everything like the transistor, or 9. 11 or the internet. And global warming is gonna cause a lot of black swans. And you think they’re rare events that aren’t predicted but they really end up changing the world we’re living in. Okay, so that’s the bad news. What should we do? Well it turns out, there’s a lot we can do and there’s a lot that we really have to do. I’m gonna start off by talking about what you can personally do. And the first thing I have on that list is to ask your children for forgiveness because no matter what we do at this point it’s gonna be really bad for them. And we’re sort of gonna leave them this really awful mess. You can do things like get a fuel efficient car. We have someone here who can tell you all about that. Eat less beef. Turns out that one third of all the non- ice covered land, on Earth is used for beef production, between pasture lands and grain growing for the beef, and that’s why they’re cutting down the rainforest in Brazil to grow soy beans and pasture land, or to grow soy beans for cows. And it turns out because cows give off methane, which is very effective, it turns out that about 18% of all the green house gases come from beef production. Another way of thinking about it; eating a pound of beef is like driving your car for an

hour and a half with all the lights turned on at home. So that’s one way to think about it. You should change your light bulb, there’s a compact one involved in the antique one back there. You’ll save money immediately when you do it, there’s no downside to it anymore. And by turning your thermostat down or up, as the case may be depending on the season, wearing a sweater will keep you warm. Those kinds of things can help. More importantly though, you need to talk to your family and friends and colleagues about what’s happening and get them engaged on the subject. If you work for a company you can get them to go green and you can leverage your own impact into a much larger cause. And perhaps the most important thing you can do is to talk to your elected leaders. Because, we’re about to see, the thing we really have to do, really happens at the national, global level. And the biggest obstacle to change right now is the Congress. People want to do something about it. So what should our country do? We need to implement a cap and trade system or tax on co2 as quickly as possible. The one that’s in Congress now is really watered down and will not be effective in turning the problem around.

[36:02]

But it will put the structures in place so when everyone panics a few years from now, we won’t have to spend a few more years putting those structures in place, we can just sort of increase the numbers a bit. Increase the tax or increase the mission targets and things like that. So it’s important to pass that law. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that that’s actually gonna solve the problem. We need to have mandatory energy efficiency standards around the country.

Folks in Berkely pioneered this about 25 years ago, actually a little more than that now, and as you may know, in the last 25 years, while the rest of the country increased its energy per capita by 50%, California stayed the same. And basically that’s because of its title four building standards. And I don’t see more suffering in our buildings compared to you know, New Jersey or anything like that. So there’s really no excuse for not having that nationwide and much more strict than it is now. And by the way, buildings are about 45% of all green house gases. We have to ban coal-fired power plants because they give off the most co2 per unit of energy and there’s just no excuse for doing that anymore. And we also have to get rid of the ones we have, which is a lot harder to do but we have to do it because as Jim Henson said, we have to get down to 300 parts per million, we’re already at 387 and climbing at about 3 points per year. And the only way to really get down is to get rid of coal plants and eventually other fossil fuels. We have to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. We get billions and billions of dollars every year to subsidize fossil fuels. We can take that money away from fossil fuels, and subsidize clean technology. We have to increase research spending a hundred fold. This is actually compared to the Bush administration. We’ve already gone up a lot in the Obama administration. But this is tiny amounts of money compared to what needs to be spent in the future but we have to understand the problem, understand how fast the permafrost is melting. We have to understand how fast methane is coming. We don’t know these things. This is just a few billion dollars. We have to spend this money. Right now the military spending is about this much and medical spending is that

much and energy spending is that much. And believe me, the energy and the military spending is gonna go way up because of climate change if we don’t do something about it. What more can we do? We need to phase out beef, I already explained why earlier. It’s gonna happen anyways so we have to prepare for extreme weather and droughts and floods and wildfires and war and things like that and sea level rise. So the planning they’re doing now for the sand walking, delta, the dikes and things like that they’re assuming a couple of sea level rise. Well, they should be rethinking that about what it’s really gonna be. We need to research geo-engineering.

[39:00] I have a whole section coming up on geo-engineering in a moment so we’ll skip this. Well, geo engineering essentially is trying to artificially control the climate planet wide. We’re doing it anyway by accident. That’s what climate change is. We’re accidentally doing a global experiment on what happens if we increase co2 in the atmosphere. We’re about to find out. We need to support global family planning. There’s too many people on earth right now. This is by the way typically a taboo subject in climate change. You can’t really talk about controlling population. But it’s going to be controlled one way or the other. I just think we should do it the humane way and this December in Copenhagen, is the follow on to the Kyoto protocol, where the world is coming to figure out what to do about carbon and the next phase. And I can’t tell you with certainty that there’s gonna be a really good result out of that. And we really need to.

This is now the time. This is not a problem. If we wait even 10 years to start to tackle this problem, it will be too late. Once the permafrost starts putting out more co2 than we do, it won’t matter what we do in terms of reducing emissions. We can stop the next day and it’s gonna get worse and worse and worse. That process could happen a few years from now. I’m not saying it will happen a few years from now. But it could happen that soon. And certainly within the next ten, twenty years. So there’s no time for waiting. But I spoke to a climate scientist in UC Berkeley, I had lunch with her, and I asked her what do you think the temperature’s gonna be in 2100? Because she is the one who worked on the IPCC report that was the best case, and now she’s doing all the updates with all the feedback mechanisms, and the new emission plans and things like that and she said, “……mm 6 to 7 degrees warmer than today. “C.” I said, “Do you know what you just said?” and she also said she could see no plausible scenarios where we reduce our emissions in time to avoid catastrophe. Nothing. Not the dictator of the world. Nothing you could do at this point. That leaves one thing. Plan B. First of all, plan A is you must reduce your emissions drastically. Plan B doesn’t work unless you do plan A, also. But it may not be enough.

So what geo-engineering is, is intentional control of the climate. We’ve been doing the accidental control of the climate. So this is stepping up and trying to be a little more intelligent about what we do. As I mentioned, I personally, this is not a consensus at this point, although the discussion of geo-engineering just the last 6 months, has been elevated quite a bit.

[42:06] It used to be a little quiet thing to be talked about. But now it’s in mainstream press as well. But if you believe it’s already too late to solve the climate problem by only reducing emissions, than your only choice left is geo-engineering. Now be a little careful. In some people’s minds, geo engineering is only a certain set of rather intrusive things you do. To me, I include everything you do to lower this carbon in the air, or to control the temperature of the planet including the benign things you do, a no-brainer. Just be a little careful. I use the term geo engineering a little more broadly than some people do. But in any case, some people like the concept of geo-engineering because they think it’s an excuse for not doing anything about climate change. Oh we’ll just fix it later using geo engineering and continue to emit the carbon that we do. That will not work. You need to use geo engineering to get rid of the carbon that’s already there. If you continue to spew it out, all you’ll be doing is just reducing somewhat the amount you’re putting out, but you won’t be getting to the problem. And like chemotherapy, some forms of geo-engineering have really bad side-effects. Like chemotherapy, you might lose your hair and feel really really sick. But the alternative isn’t quite acceptable either, is it? Let’s look at some examples of geo-engineering.

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the main ones. The one that’s talked about the most, and is somewhat easy in some ways, is blocking sunlight. You only have to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting earth by about 2 % to reverse the amount of climate change. And there are two main ways of doing that. The most talked about one is reducing smoke or putting sulfates in the upper atmosphere using planes or rockets or other things. And we know that will work because that’s what happens after a volcano. And the earth does cool down after a volcano so we wait a couple years after the smoke settles out of the air so we know that will work. Now turns out, there are bad side effects, like one study shows that you could reduce the temperature by a couple degrees but it would stop raining in India and those kinds of things. Also the problem with this is, this is not solving the problem, it’s just masking the problem. So once you start this you have to keep doing it, and if you ever stop, the temperature in six months is gonna spike up by a few degrees and then you’re gone. So you know, if you don’t have the budget to fly the planes anymore. So this is just a temporary solution maybe to solve a short-term problem like the melting of the permafrost, while you’re doing other things to fix the co2 in the atmosphere.

[45:00]

The other one is to build ships that take sea water and pulverize it and throw it up in the atmosphere, and create low-level clouds. Ships do this anyway with their smokestack, but it’s what makes the big clouds. And, you can make the ships if you want them, and it can be very strategic about that, some very interesting capability about them. The other thing to do, and this is somewhat controversial, is to put iron in the ocean. And iron is sort of a fertilizer for you to make the algae grow, and algae eats CO2, and then hopefully they die and sink to the bottom, and stay there for a really long

time, if you do it in the right parts of the ocean. Recent study show that it doesn’t quite work as they hoped, that fish eat the algae pretty quickly, and it keeps the carbon up near the surface. So, more study needs to be done on this sea, weather so that this is actually going to be effective. It’s relatively cheap, though, compared to lots of other things. This one I actually kind of like; it’s called a ‘biochar’. And biochar simply take in any plant material turning into a charcoal. You heat something without oxygen, it doesn’t turn into CO2, it turns into C, because there’s no O2, there’s no air in there to react with. And so, that’s how they make, for thousand years. You put the wood in an oven that’s really hot, and you close off the vent so the air can’t get in, and eventually it turns into charcoal. Well, that’s good, because you can take this charcoal and just throw back down on the ground, and it retains water, excess of soil, soil stabilizer, not exactly a fertilizer, but it helps plants to grow. And so, if you grow really large amounts of biomass, or just take all of the leftover biomass from corn and other plants and turn it into charcoal, it won’t integrate to the CO2. You do this in a really large scale, you can actually suck carbon out of the atmosphere. And it’s relatively cheap. There are issues that it does make gas, which you can use as a fuel, there’s some, you know, bad part of the gas that you have to deal with and things like that.

Now, compared to a lot of other things that happening, maybe one of the more benign form, if you know what I mean. The most obvious thing to do is to reforest the planet. Our friend has been working in a program where can give solar cookers to families in India, so that they don’t go and burn the wood, dead trees or cut the trees down. And they also have to walk for miles every day to get the wood, may also get some rechargeable flashlights, and they also burn propene, and also they get some free cell phone.

And both of the flashlights and cell phones are rechargeable only when the solar cooker is hot. So, it kind of encourages them to do that. And then if they use the cell phone, uh, I am sorry, they use the solar cooker and keep the cows out of the land, then they get free cell phone minutes. So, this is, uh, doing this on experiments right now, what’s pretty promising, but this shows what happens when you keep the cows off the land for just a few years. There are some same shot, basically, just a few years apart.

[48:01] So, there’s others, this one actually kind of I like. This is just building machines. Big, expensive machines that just suck carbon out of the air. And then you compress it, and you pump it under ground where it came from in the first place. You pump it into all the oil-wells and aqua fortis and things like that. This will cost trillion dollars at least, a year to run. And it will be the biggest bargain we’ve ever had if we can do it. A bunch of people working on this right now, there are small, small prototypes and things like that. And there’s a lot of issues that we have to actually overcome. But this is, whenever anything started with fan, this is something we are probably gonna do. First of all, I actually think we should do is heavily researching on this now, ‘cause you don’t wanna find out the bad effects or the worst you’ve ever fixing on this. So we should research them and understand them really well, and pick all of the ones that seemed like to work, and try them all. And hopefully, even if this one can suck out 100% percent of CO2 we need to suck out, who knows? It might not work well. So, let’s also reforest.

Let’s also try the biotrum. Let’s try them all. And see which ones work, and which ones don’t work. So, I think the good news is that some things in our horizon. But again, if you use it as an excuse for not limiting your CO2, this won’t work. So, there’s some positive things of what I saw, when I talk the scientists work on this field. So, this is sort of one opulent thing, I have seen it for a long time. So, there’s some other good news. Supposedly, we are gonna passing the “Cap & Trade” law for the United States, pretty soon. Yeah, it won’t be enough, but we’ve started in the right direction. It will also, no one else is really gonna, China and India are not gonna do much things about it until we do. Although, the Chinese are pretty smart about this. They are already the largest solar power producer in the world, making solar panels, and they are becoming the largest wind manufacturer, wind turbine manufacturer in the world. So, they are already moving in this direction. They know it is the future, and they just decide to do it. They don’t have all the, I guess the lobbyists are also coming to them stopping them, from doing what’s the right thing. So, we are really being kind of dumb about all this right now, do we are doing it aggressively. But that’s a good news if we do that. Again, it won’t be enough, but it will get us to the right direction. The other good news is that this is the biggest economic opportunity ever. We are about to change all of the energy and the transportation, infrastructure of the world in the next fifty years.

That’s a lot of money. We invested to a company that’s growing oil from algae to make fuel. Fuel is a one-trillion-dollar-a-year business. And they think that they will be able to make it cheaper more than fossil fuels in just a few years. That’s pretty good opportunities. So, there’s a lot of opportunity out there. And again, there’s a lot of bad things that happen.

[51:00] But if you understand what it is, and what’s happening, and you take steps to make it better, there’s tremendous economic opportunity. Now, if you want to learn any more about what I was talking about tonight, there’s a bunch of things; “Weather Makers” has a nice overview goes beyond “an inconvenient truth”, covers lots of areas, Tim Flannery is a good writer. “With Speed and Violence “is scary tipping points and stuff, that goes into four or five of the major tipping points. And it’s scary. One book I highly, highly recommend is “Six Degrees”. “Six Degrees”, as I’ve already mentioned earlier, explains what changes PPM in degree C and to what the world to be like at different temperatures. It should be required reading to every member of congress, but. And “Climate Code Red” is an interesting book that goes far more. It’s like my talk, but it goes into far more detail, and it referents like a report, footnotes and things like that. You can go to the internet and download it. I think they do charge for it now. But it is pretty detailed, if you really wanna get into that.

If you buy the copies of the slides, or a video we were doing in an early version of a talk, hopefully the new one will be in the internet soon. Or if you want links to the references, and the books and thing like that, if you go to my website, “climateplace. org”, and you can download slides and you should go around giving this talk to yourself, tell everybody about it. And I wanna thank you for listening, and opening up to questions. (Question) Yes, Sure. There you go. Again, if you go to “climateplace.org”, there are direct links to the books and things, if you want to get more information. Yes. (A student asks a question) Well, I am against carbon, but. Oh, okay. Well, I should mention this for the recording. The question was, sort of a question, the comment, is, while we are talking about nuclear reactors, because there’s kind have been neutral, and a form of energy.

[54:00]

First of all, I think CO2 is the most dangerous thing. And the rests of the nuclear are nothing. Nothing compared to those. So, I’m so doing anything that gets us away from Co2, including a nuclear. From what I know about nuclear, I think it’s difficult to implement at the scale we need, but I don’t have a problem with doing it, and actually there’s lots of interesting small-scaled things that they are working on. I just put it in there, but I am not against it at all. And I think we should do, you know, the risk of Chernobyl was nothing compared to the risk sort of everyone dying. So, they are getting better and safety issues and things like that.

So I think the real evil thing out there is CO2. So I don’t actually disagree with you. Didn’t cover all the solutions. There might be a lot more, I gave a whole of talk on energy solution. That’s not in this talk. Yes? Yeah, there are issues about in and there’s thorium, you can’t turn into a bomb, things like that. But again, at least, get some new energy from nuclear things like that. I think there are time and cost issues, too. And a lot of people argue that if you are gonna do the nuclear, you might just go with wind and solar from energy storage because it is actually cheaper. Forget the safety issues or anything like that. So, I mean I think there are some argument issues like that. (Question) yeah. You also have to look at, also, CO2 given off to making them of panels. In my understanding, I don’t know it’s like a year or so before, there were sort of a bank to save CO2, considering a lot of energy goes in producing. Well, there’s, by the way, one reason I think we should spend, I mean I’m not sure if that’s true, by the way. But if it is true, that’s what we have to spend lots of money on research, so we don’t go down. For example, corn and ethanol turned out to be, probably worse for the environment in terms of net CO2 when you take land use, and food and stuff like that. So, maybe some good effects and they paid off the other things. But it’s really worth spending lots of money, again, relatively small amount of money compared to building power plants everywhere. But the research understands these issues so that we make right choices. Other people argue, and I agree with them, is that we have to really think about the amount of CO2 that’s left to release in the atmosphere before we really get down to

zero. And that has to be dedicated to building all the green technologies, right? If we just kind of use it for powering cars and stuff like that, and then we will realized that we have to build solar panels or whatever, or wind power.

[57:05] It takes energy to do that, and initially there will be CO2, because we have fossil power plants. Eventually, they will be replaces by the renewables. So there are some issues. Well, the front, there first? (Question) That particularly charges 600 dollars for year, because they had gone farther. You know how they drill the holes in the arctic and every level there are some trapped gas in the ice and measure the CO2 content into the ice. And look at ionization to figure out temperature and things like that. That’s what, I didn’t cover a lot of basics about climate change and how we know what we know. I think the movie “an inconvenient truth” does a really good job of that, and I certainly recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it to see it. It’s really good about the ‘why’s and ‘how’s and stuff, it doesn’t go into what’s gonna happen very much, but terms of basic, educational stuff about climate change, which I’ve just skipped in this talk. It’s actually pretty good. So, if someone talks about that in books, and I forgot how far they can go back now. They can go back many, many, tens of millions of years, using other sediments of the ocean, and rock, and things like that. Yeah. That is actually one chart I have from the actual talk. Yeah. (Question) So, the comment is that, whilst climate changes degree in the same year that other

scientists, and Primen disagree. First of all, if your child had cancer, you would probably take them to a doctor. Not a car mechanic, not a statistician, probably take them to a doctor. And not just any doctor. You would take them to an oncologist. And not just an oncologist, you will probably take them to pediatric oncologist. You will probably to that. This is the same thing. The people that know what the problem is, are climate scientists. 97 percent of climate scientists disagree with this assumption what I am saying here today. Now, if Primen Dison doesn’t, there are meteorologists that disagree. Geologists disagree. But, you can find people disagreeing about everything. This stuff, by the way the fact that CO2 heats the atmosphere, this is like physics. There’s no controversy whatsoever. You can measure it in the laboratory. This is like physics, it’s not, there is no controversy whatsoever.

[60:04]

You can measure it in laboratory. There is no controversy whatsoever. The only controversy is how much will the atmosphere heat up. But it’s already heating up and all the data so far, shows that it’s actually worse than the conservative predictions before the actual data. The arctic is melting much faster. You can’t explain that any other way except for soot perhaps.

(Student asking a question) say again? Well the temperatures in the last, most of the temperatures in the last ten years have been the hottest ever. 1998 was a little warmer. I’m going to give you a prediction right now. The next five years, some of the years in next five years will be the hottest years ever in recent history. Because two things that happened recently, that keep the temperatures, by the way last year 2008 was a “quote” relatively cool year still one of the top 10 hottest years ever that little cooler than 1998. So people “ah it’s getting cooler now” Two things have been happening. It’s been La Nina cycle in the last five years and the sun has sun spots that go on a 11 year cycles and where so in minimum those things added together cooled the earth tiny bit and made those last couple years probably little tiny bit cooler than they would have been and only a tiny bit cooler than they have been 1998, but still far warmer than the last 30 years ago, let’s say the next five years both those things are reversing. It’s El Ni No year which gonna warm up already and also the sun is going to start putting out little bit more those two things are going to put a speck on track and I have to say personally these scientists that say These non climate scientists who say this stuff are wrong you know Einstein when he came to the United States the German was kinda unhappy with him. You know he was pretty famous for his theory of relativity so they put out a book, 100 scientists against relativity and someone asked Einstein about it. He said “well if I was wrong it would only take one.” So the fact that they have these list of scientists who disagree they just getting all the people, they don’t know what they are talking about to assign something. That’s really easy thing to do. Climate scientists you talk to them they are going to studying it everyday by the way they don’t want this to be true. I mean this concept that they have some reason to do it. They would win, if someone re prove this is wrong you’d get a novel prize, there is

no incentive to say this unless it’s true. So I have to say this, there you go (Student asking a question) it was never really………….. What? Nuclear winter? Thank god it didn’t happened.

[63:00]

You know what nuclear winter is? You are talking about global cooling. (Student asking a question) That is true if we took all the pollution out the atmosphere tomorrow, the temperature would double. Global warming temperature would double, it would go up another degree immediately. So this pollution by nuclear winter means you have a nuclear war and you block out sunlight and everything dies so that will still happen if we have a nuclear war right? You’re talking about pollution so it is true the pollution has artificially been cooling the planet off and if we can even look back after the war, we industrialized in the temperature drop and then we past the clean air act and then right after that the temperature starts going up again it was going up anyway cause the climate change was catching up to the pollution and now it’s ahead but that’s a problem actually as we clean up the air and switch to renewable fuels, we are going to have less pollution that’s going to cost the temperature develop. So that’s actually things are complicated. (Student asking a question) That’s what the geo engineering is. That’s what putting sulfates in the air. It’s artificially closing, putting smoke in the air to reflect sunlight. And the other bad things happen when you do that that is a year term solution if you ought to call it that, maybe to preventing the arctic from melting too fast. You’d better re-spending your time really fast because that’s only, it’s essentially a temporary solution, but I don’t disagree. (Student asking a question) Well I think most people talk about it 80 to 90% reduction in CO2 by 2050 and we really better do that I think it turns out, you can do in a short run there is so much you

can do, there is so much, we put out twice as much CO2 per person anywhere else in the world except for us like Australia. Even Europe, compared to Europe we put out twice as much as Europe we put out five times more than average Chinese so there is a lot we can do just by thinking smart. You can change your light bulb at home tomorrow and that would have a huge impact I think, I don’t know when it kicks in but they are banning incandescent bulb. That’s a really smart thing to do. You save money, you save energy so there is a lot of things you can do right now. That might have a longer payback but they are still financially smart things to do and you can get down 20%.

[66:02]

Most companies have done this have found at that they’ve saved money. Wall mart is a great example. They did all these things to help their pr and they ended up saving hundreds and millions of dollars too at the same time. So just thinking smarter and what’s good about it although it’s not enough cause even if you do it, not everyone can do it very quickly. Say again? (Student asking a question) Things are going down 20 years, therefore we are going, I hope we are actually going to build green technology if you or someone invest in that and have them at the ready when the world starts to demand them you will do well. (Student asking a question) Well what is wrong…. It gives a proper intention well there is different ways of looking at it, you can look at it like we are fighting the war which I do think it’s by the way the reasonable way to think about it but that takes that kind of effort and that’s directly off the topic this is what we are going to do. I don’t care what you say we are closing down the car plants we are going to turn them to wind farm, wind turbine factory whatever, so you can do kinda that thing too and I think we should do some measure of that but in the mean time till we do, it seems to me that actually that private industry is doing the most with some government incentives.

That’s the way its set up right now by the way places like China, in places like china they’re just telling people what to do not enough. One of our company is doing something it’s only part of the solution that’s not to be enough, but it’s part of a solution There is a couple scientists I know one down at Columbia. And I forgot where the other guys out at, and you know it’s barely just a research stage. Columbia is one of them that’s an early, by the way that doesn’t look like that right? Yeah it gives you the idea…