An Inconvenient Truth: Transcript
From: http://forumpolitics.com/blogs/2007/03/17/an-inconvient-truth-transcript
March 17, 2007
Introduction
You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind.
You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a cow. You feel
the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It’s quiet; it’s peaceful. And all
of a sudden, it’s a gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and going,
“Oh yeah, I forgot about this.”
Earth Rise
This is the first picture of the Earth from
space that any of us ever saw. It was taken
on Christmas Eve 1968 during the Apollo 8
mission.
More…In relatively comfortable
boundaries… But we are filling up that thin
shell of atmosphere with pollutants.
I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president
of the United States. [laughter and applause from audience] I don’t find that
particularly funny.
I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as I’ve failed to get the
message across.
I was in politics for a long time. I’m proud of my services.
(Mayor of New Orleans in background).
There are good people who are in politics who hold this at arm’s length because they
acknowledge it and recognize it as a moral imperative to make big changes.
And they lost radio contact when they went around to the dark side of the moon and
there was inevitably some suspense. Then when they came back in radio contact
they looked up and snapped this picture and it became known as Earth Rise. And
that one picture exploded in the consciousness of the human kind. It led to dramatic
changes. Within 18 months of this picture the modern environmental movement had
begun.
The next picture was taken on
the last Apollo mission, Apollo
17. This one was taken on Dec.
11, 1972 and it is
the most commonly published
photograph in all of history. And it
is the only picture of Earth from
space that we have where the
sun was directly behind the spacecraft so that the Earth is fully lit up, and not partly in
darkness. The next I’m going to show you has almost never been seen. It was taken
by a spacecraft called the Galileo that went out to explore the solar system. As it was
leaving Earth’s gravity it turned its cameras around and took a time lapsed picture of
one day’s worth of rotation here compressed into 24 seconds. Isn’t that beautiful?
This image is a magical image in a way. It is made by a friend of mine, Tom Dan
San. He took 3000 separate satellite pictures taken over a 3 year period, digitally
stitched together. He chose images that would give a cloud free view of every square
inch of the earth’s surface. All of the land mass is accurately portrayed. When that is
spread out it becomes an iconic image.
The Most Ridiculous Thing
I show this because I want to tell you a story about two teachers I had,
one that I did not like that much, the other who was a real hero to me. I
had a grade school teacher who taught geography by pulling a map of
the world down in front of the blackboard. I had a classmate in the
sixth grade who raised his hand and he pointed to the outline of the
east coast of South America, and he pointed to the west coast of
Africa, and he asked, “Did they ever fit together?” And the teacher
said, “Of course not! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
That student went on to be a drug addict and a ne’er do well. That
teacher went on to be a science advisor in the current administration.
But you know, the teacher was actually reflecting the conclusion of the scientific
establishment at that time: “Continents are so big that obviously they don’t move.”
But actually as we now know they did move. They moved apart from one another, but
at one time they did in fact fit together. But that assumption was a problem.
It reflected the well known wisdom:
“What gets us into trouble is not what
you don’t know, but what you think
you know that just ain’t so.”
This is actually an important point,
believe it or not because there is
another such assumption that a lot
people have in their minds right now
about global warming that just isn’t
so. The assumption goes like this:
“The world is so big is that we can’t
possibly have any lasting, harmful impact earth environment.”
Maybe that was true at one time, but it is not true any more. One of the reasons it is
not true anymore, because one of the most vulnerable parts is the atmosphere
vulnerable because it’s so thin. My friend the late Carl Sagan used to say that if you
have a globe with a thin coat of varnish on it, the thickness of that varnish relative
that globe is pretty much the same as the thickness of the earth’s atmosphere
compared to the earth itself. It is thin enough that we are capable of changing its
composition.
That brings up the basic science of global warming. I’m not going to spend a lot of
time on this because you know it well. The sun’s radiation comes in the form of light
waves and heats up the earth. Some of The radiation that is absorbed and warms the
earth is re-radiated back into space in the form infrared radiation. Some of the
outgoing infrared radiation is trapped inside the atmosphere. That is good thing
because it keeps the temperature of the earth within certain boundaries, keeps it
relatively constant and livable. But the problem is that this thin layer of atmosphere is
being thickened by all of the global warming pollution that is being put up there. What
that does is it thickens this layer of atmosphere. More of the outgoing infrared is
trapped. So the atmosphere heats up worldwide.
Carbon Dioxide Levels
This is the image that started me in my interest in this issue. I saw it when I was a
college student because I had a college professor named Roger Revelle who was
the first person to have the idea to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the
earth’s atmosphere. He saw where the story was going. After the first few years of
data, he intuited what is meant, for what is yet to come. They designed the
experiment in 1957. He hired Charles David Keeling who was very faithful and
precise in making these measurements for decades. They started sending these
weather balloons every day. They chose the middle of the Pacific because it was the
area that was the most remote. He was a very hard nosed scientist. He really liked
the hard data. It was a wonderful time for me, because, like a lot of young people, I
came into contact with intellectual ferment, ideas that I’d never considered in my
wildest dreams before.
He showed our class the result of these measurements after only a few years. It was
startling to me. He was startled and he made it clear to our class what he felt the
significance of it was. I soaked it up like a sponge. He drew the connection between
the larger changes in our civilization and this pattern that was now visible in the
atmosphere entire planet.
He projected into the
future where this was
headed unless we made
some adjustments and it
was as clear as day. After
the first seven, eight, or
nine years you can see
the pattern was
developing. But I had to
question why does it go
up and down once each
year? He explained that if
you look at the land mass
of the earth, very little it is
south of the equator. The
vast majority of it is north
of the equator. And most
of the vegetation is north
of the equator. When the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun as it is in our
spring and summer, the leaves come out and they breathe in the carbon dioxide and
the amount in the atmosphere goes down. When the northern hemisphere is tilted
away from the sun as it is in our fall and winter, the leave fall down and exhale the
carbon dioxide and the amount in the atmosphere goes up again. It’s as if the entire
earth once each year breathes in and out.
He started measuring carbon dioxide in 1958. By the middle sixties when he showed
my class this image, it was already clear that it was going up. I respected him and
learned from him so much I followed this.
Political Journey
When I went to the Congress in the middle 1970’s I helped organize the first hearings
on global warming, I asked my professor to be the lead off witness. I thought that
would have such a big impact we’d be well on the way to solving this problem, but it
didn’t work out that way. I kept having hearings, and in 1984 I went to the Senate and
really dug deeply into this issue with science round tables and the like. I wrote a book
about it. I ran for president in 1988 partly try to gain some visibility for this issue. In
1992 went to the Whitehouse. We passed a version carbon tax and some other
measures to try to address this. I went to Kyoto in 1997 to help get a treaty that is so
controversial, in the US at least. In 2000 my opponent pledged to regulate the CO2
and that was not a pledge that was kept. The point of this is all this time you can see
what I have seen all these years. It just keeps going up. It is relentless.
Effects of Global Warming
• And now we’re beginning to see the impact in the
real world. This is Mount Kilimanjaro more than 30
years ago, and more recently. And a friend of mine
just came back from Kilimanjaro with a picture he
took a couple of months ago. Another friend of
mine Lonnie Thompson studies glaciers. Here’s
Lonnie with a sliver of a once mighty glacier. Within
the decade there will be no more snows of
Kilimanjaro.
• This is happening in Glacier National Park. I
climbed to the top of this in 1998 with one of my
daughters. Within 15 years this will be the park
formerly known as Glacier.
• Here is what has been happening year by year to
the Columbia Glacier. It just retreats more and more every year. And it is a
shame because these glaciers are so beautiful. People who go up to see
them, here is what they are seeing every day now.
• In the Himalayas there is a particular problem because more than 40% of all
the people in the world get their drinking water from rivers and spring systems
that are fed more than half by the melt water coming off the glaciers. Within
this next half century those 40% of the people on earth are going to face a
very serious shortage because of this melting.
• Italy, the Italian Alps same site today. An old postcard from the Switzerland:
throughout the Alps we are seeing the same story.
• It’s also true in South America. This is Peru 15 years ago and the same
glacier today.
• This is Argentina 20 years ago, the same glacier today.
• 75 years ago in Patagonia on the tip of South America, this vast expanse of
ice is now gone.
Ice Cores: The 650,000 Record
There is a message in this. It is worldwide. The ice has a story to tell and it is
worldwide. My friend Lonnie Thompson digs cores in the ice. They dig down and they
bring the core drills back up and they look at the ice and they study it. When the
snow falls it traps little bubbles of atmosphere. They can go in and measure how
much CO2 was in the atmosphere the year that snow fell. What’s even more
interesting I think is they can measure the different isotopes of oxygen and figure out
the very precise thermometer and tell you what the temperature was the year that
bubble was trapped in the snow as it fell.
When I was in Antarctica I saw cores like this and the guy looked at it. He said right
here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act. I couldn’t believe it but you
can see the difference with the naked eye. Just a couple of years after that law was
passed, it’s very clearly distinguishable.
They can count back year by year the same way a forester reads tree rings. You can
see each annual layer from the melting and refreezing. They can go back in a lot of
these mountain glaciers a thousand years. They constructed a thermometer of the
temperature. The blue is cold and the red is warm. I show this for a couple of
reasons. Number one the so called skeptics will sometimes say “Oh, this whole thing
is cyclical phenomenon. There was a medieval warming period after all.” Well yeah
there was. There it is right there. There are one there and two others. But compared
to what is going on now, there is just no comparison. So if you look at a thousand
years worth of temperature and compare it to a thousand years of CO2 you can see
how closely they fit together. Now, a thousand years of CO2 data in the mountain
glacier. That is one thing. But in Antarctica, they can go back 650,000 years. This
incidentally is the first time anybody outside of a small group of scientists have seen
this image. This is the present day era and that’s the last ice age. Then it goes up.
We’re going back in time now 650,000 years. That’s the period of warming between
the last two ice ages back. That’s the second and third ice age back.
CO2 Concentration Is Above 300 PPM
Now an important point: In all
of this time, 650,000 years, the
CO2 level has never gone
above 300 parts per million.
Now, as I said, they can also
measure temperature. Here is
what the temperature has been
on our earth. One thing that
kind of jumps out at you is. Let
me put it this way. If my class
mate from the sixth grade that
talked about Africa and South
America might have said, “Did
they ever fit together?” Most
ridiculous thing I ever heard.
But they did of course. The
relationship is very
complicated. But there is one
relationship that is more
powerful than all the others and
it is this. When there is more
carbon dioxide, the
temperature gets warmer,
because it traps more heat
from the sun inside. In the parts of the United States that contain the modern cities of
Cleveland, Detroit, New York in the northern tier. This is the difference between a
nice day and having a mile of ice above your head. Keep that in mind when you look
at this fact. Carbon dioxide having never gone above 300 PPM, here is where CO2 is
now. We give off where it has never been as far back as this record will measure. If
you will bear with me I would like to emphasize this point. It’s already right here. Look
how far above the natural cycle this is, and we’ve done that. But ladies and
gentleman, in less than 50 years it’s going to continue to go up. When some of these
children who are here are my age, here’s where it’s going to be in less than 50 years.
You’ve heard of off the chart. Within less than 50 years it’ll be here. There’s not a
single fact or day or number that’s been used to make this up that is in any
controversy. The so-called skeptics look at this and say, “So, that looks seems
perfectly okay.” On the temperature side: If this much on the cold side is a mile of ice
over our heads, what would that much on the warmer side be?
This is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue. If we allow that to
happen, it is deeply unethical. I have such faith in our democratic system, our self-
government, I actually thought and believed that the story would be compelling
enough to cause a real sea change in the way Congress reacted to that. I thought
they would be startled and they weren’t.
Children
The struggle, the victories that aren’t really victories, the defeats that aren’t really
defeats can serve to magnify the significance of trivial . and exaggerate the seeming
importance of massive setbacks.
It just turned my whole world around. How should I spend my time on this Earth? I
really dug in, trying to learn about it much more deeply. I went to the South Pole, the
North Pole, the Amazon…
The possibility of losing something that was precious to me… What we take for
granted might not be here for our children. It turned my whole world upside down. It
shook it until everything just fell out.
My way of being in the world. It just
changed everything for me. How
should I spend my time on this
earth? I really dug in, trying to learn
about it much more deeply. I went
to Antarctica, to the South Pole,
North Pole, the Amazon. I went to
places where scientists could help
me understand parts of the issue I
didn’t really understand in depth.
The possibility of losing what was
most precious to me, I gained the
ability that I maybe I didn’t have
before, but when I felt it, I felt that
we really could lose. What we take
for granted might not be here for our
children.
The 10 Hottest Years
These are actual measurements of
atmospheric temperature since our
civil war. In any given year it might
look like it’s going down, but the
overall trend is extremely clear. In
recent years it is uninterrupted and
it is intensifying. In fact, if you look
at the 10 hottest years ever
measured in this atmospheric
record, they have all occurred in the
last 14 years. The hottest of all was
2005. We have already seen some
of the heat waves scientists are
saying are going to be a lot more
common. A couple of years ago in
Europe they had that massive heat wave that killed 35,000 people. India didn’t get as
much attention, but the same year the temperature there went to 122 degrees
Fahrenheit. This past summer in the American west, there were a lot of cities that
broke all time records for high temperatures and for consecutive days with 100
degree temperature or more. 200 cities and towns in the west set all time records.
And in the east there were a lot of cities that did the same thing, including,
incidentally, New Orleans.
It’s Natural!
So the temperature increases are taking place all over the world, including in the
ocean. This is the natural range of variability for temperature in the ocean. You know
people say, “Aw, it just naturally go up and down, so don’t worry about it.” This is the
range that would be expected over the last 60 years. But the scientists that specialize
in global warming have computer models that long ago predicted this range of
temperature increase.
Ocean Temperature and Storms
Now I’m going to show you, recently released, the actual ocean temperature. Of
course when the oceans get warmer, that causes stronger storms. We have seen in
the last couple of years, a lot of big hurricanes. Hurricanes Jean, Francis and Ivan
were among them. In the same year we had that string of big hurricanes; we also set
an all time record for tornadoes in the United States. Japan again didn’t get as much
attention in our news media, but they set an all time record for typhoons. The
previous record was seven. Here are all ten of the ones they had in 2004. The
science textbooks that have to be re-written because they say it is impossible to have
a hurricane in the South Atlantic. It was the same year that the first one that ever hit
Brazil. The summer of 2005 is one for the books. The first one was Emily that socked
into Yucatan. Then Hurricane Dennis came along and it did a lot of damage,
including to the oil industry. This is the largest oil platform in the world after Dennis
went through. This one was driven into the bridge at Mobile. And then of course
came Katrina. It is worth remembering that when it hit Florida it was a Category 1, but
it killed a lot of people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage. And then, what
happened? Before it hit New Orleans, it went over warmer water. As the water
temperature increases, the wind velocity increases and the moisture content
increases. And you’ll see Hurricane Katrina form over Florida. And then as it comes
into the Gulf over warm water it becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. Look at
that Hurricane’s eye. And of course the consequences were so horrendous; there are
no words to describe it.
Sirens, background music, Mayor Ray Nagin. The water is up to my neck. I don’t
think I’m going to make it.
How in god’s name could that happen here? There had been warnings that
hurricanes would get stronger. There were warnings that this hurricane, days before
it hit, would breach the levies and cause the kind of damage that it ultimately did
cause. And one question that we, as a people, need to decide is how we react when
we hear warnings from the leading scientists in the world.
Winnie’s Warning
There was another storm in the 1930’s of a different kind, a horrible unprecedented
storm in continental Europe. Winston Churchill warned the people of England that it
was different from anything that had ever happened before, and they had to get
ready for it. A lot of people did not want to believe it and he got real impatient with all
the dithering. He said this:
“The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing, and baffling expedience of
delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”
Making mistakes in generations and centuries past would have consequences that
we could overcome. We don’t have that luxury anymore. We didn’t ask for it, but here
it is.
2000 Election
Background: 2000 election debacle in Florida. We’re officially saying that Florida is
too close to call. Supreme Court throws the decision to Bush.
Gore: While I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the
finality of this outcome. Well, that was a hard blow. But you make the best of it. It
brought into clear focus, the mission that I had been pursuing for all these years. I
started giving the slide show again.
Insurance
What is often
unnoticed the fact that
global warming causes
more precipitation but
more of it coming in
one time big storm
events because the
evaporation off the
ocean puts all the
moisture up there
when storm conditions
trigger the downpour
before it falls down.
The insurance industry
has actually noticed
this. Their recovered
losses are going up.
See the damage from
these severe weather
events. And 2005 is not even on this yet. When it does, it will be off that chart.
Effects of Global Warming
Europe has just had a year very similar to the one we’ve had where they say nature
has just been crazy crazy, all kinds of unusual catastrophes like a major hike through
the book of Revelations.
Flooding in Asia, Mumbai, India this past July (2005): 37 inches of rain in 24 hours,
by far the largest downpour that any city in India has ever received. A lot of flooding
in China also. Global warming paradoxically causes not only more flooding, but also
more droughts. This neighboring province right next door had a severe drought at the
same time these areas were flooded. One of the reasons for this has to do with the
fact that global warming not only increases precipitation world wide, but it also
relocates the precipitation. Focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of
the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there and there are a lot
reasons for it. Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies. One of the factors that
has been compounding this is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought. This is
Lake Chad, once one of the largest lakes in the world. It has dried up over the last
few decades to almost nothing. That has been complicating the other problems that
they also have. The second reason why this is a paradox: Global warming creates
more evaporation of the ocean that seeds the clouds, but it also sucks moisture out
of the soil. Soil evaporation increases dramatically with higher temperatures. And that
has consequences for us in the United States as well.
Change and Timescales
Gore revisits the family farm. His father grew up on the farm. Learning it from your
dad on the land, that is something special. Eight months in DC in a hotel apartment
and the rest of the time on the farm. As a kid it took me a while to learn the difference
between fun and work. The places where people live were chosen because of the
climate pattern that had been pretty much the same on Earth since the end of the last
ice age. Here on this farm, patterns are changing. It seems gradual in the course of a
human lifetime but in the course of time as defined by this river, it’s happening very,
very quickly.
A Canary in the Coal Mine: The Arctic
Two canaries in the coal mine. The first one is in the Arctic. Of course the Arctic
Ocean has a floating ice cap, Greenland on its side there. I say canary in the coal
mine because the Arctic is one part of the world that is experiencing faster impact
from global warming. This is the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice
Shelf. It just cracked in half a year ago. The scientists were astonished.
Melting Permafrost
These are called drunken trees just going every which way. This is not caused by
wind damage or alcohol consumption. These trees put their roots down in the
permafrost and the permafrost is thawing, so they just go every which way now. This
building was built on the permafrost and collapsed as the permafrost thawed. This
woman’s house has had to be abandoned. The pipeline is suffering a great deal of
structural damage. Incidentally, the oil that they want to produce in that protected
area in northern Alaska, which I hope they don’t. They have to depend on trucks to
go in and out of there and the trucks go over the frozen ground. This shows the
number of days that the tundra in Alaska is frozen enough to drive on it. 35 years ago
it was 225 days a year. Now it’s below 75 days a year because the spring comes
earlier and the fall comes later and the temperatures just keep on going up.
Fastest Temperature Increase Occurs at the Arctic
I went up to the North Pole. I went under that ice cap in a nuclear submarine that
surfaced through the ice like this. This thing started patrolling in 1957. They have
gone under the ice and measured with their radar looking upward to measure how
thick it is because they can only surface where the thickness of the ice is 3 and half
feet thick or less. So they have kept a meticulous record and they wouldn’t release
because it was national security. I went up there in order to persuade them to release
them, and they did. And here’s what that record showed. Starting in 1970 there was a
precipitous drop off in the amount and extent and thickness of the arctic ice cap. It
has diminished by 40 percent in 40 years. There are two studies showing that in the
next 50 or 70 years in summertime it will be completely gone. Now you might say,
“Why is that a problem? How could the arctic ice cap actually melt so quickly?” When
the sun’s rays hit the ice, more than 90 percent of it bounces off right back into space
like a mirror. But when it hits the open ocean more than 90 percent is absorbed.
As the surrounding water gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of the ice. Right now
the arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror. All the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90
percent, to keep the earth cooler. But as it melts and the open ocean receives that
sun’s energy instead more than 90 percent is absorbed. So there is a faster build up
of heat here at the North Pole in the Arctic Ocean and the Arctic generally than any
where else on the planet. That’s not good for creatures like polar bears that depend
on the ice. A new scientific study shows that for the first time they’re finding polar
bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find the
ice. They did not find that before. What does it mean to us to look at vast expanse of
open water at the top of our world that used to be covered by ice? We ought to care
a lot because it has planetary effects.
Earth’s Climate is an Engine
The earth climate is like a big engine for redistributing heat from the equator to the
poles. It does that by means of ocean current and wind current. They tell us, the
scientists do, that the earth climate is a non-linear system. It’s a fancy way they have
of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in
big jumps. On a world wide basis the annual average temperature is about 58
degrees Fahrenheit. If we have an increase of 5 degrees, which is on the low end of
the projection, look at how that translates globally. That means an increase of only 1
degree at the equator but more than 12 degrees at the poles. So all those wind and
ocean current patterns that have formed since the last ice age and have been
relatively stable, they are all up in the
air and they change.
One of the ones they are most worried
about where they have spent a lot of
time studying the problem is the North
Atlantic where the Gulf Stream comes
up and meets the cold wind coming
off the arctic over Greenland and
evaporates the heat out of the Gulf
Stream and the stream is carried over
to western Europe by the prevailing winds and the Earth’s rotation. Isn’t it interesting
that the whole ocean current system is all linked together in this loop. They call it the
ocean conveyor. The red are the warm surface current, the Gulf Stream is the best
known of them. The blue represents the cold currents running in the opposite
direction. We don’t see them at all because they run along the bottom of the ocean.
Up in the North Atlantic, after that heat is pulled out, what’s left behind is colder water
and saltier water, because salt doesn’t go anywhere. That makes it denser and
heavier. That cold, dense heavy water sinks at a rate of 5 billion gallons per second.
That pulls that current back south.
Disruption of the Ocean Conveyor
At the end of the last ice age as the Vlad glacier was receding from North America,
the ice melted and a giant pool of fresh water formed in North America. The Great
Lakes are the remnants of that huge lake. An ice dam on the eastern border formed,
and one day it broke. All that fresh water came rushing out, ripping open the St.
Lawrence, there. It diluted the salty dense cold water, made it fresher and lighter so it
stopped sinking. And that pump shut off and the heat transfer stopped, and Europe
went back into an ice age for another 900 or 1000 years. The change from conditions
we have here today to an ice age took place in perhaps as little as 10 years time.
That is a sudden jump. Of course that’s not going to happen again, because the
glaciers of North America are not there. Is there any big chunk of ice anywhere near
there? Oh yeah, (pointing at Greenland). We’ll come back to that one.
Politics: Reagan, Bush1 and Kyoto
It is extremely frustrating to me to communicate . and we are still by far the worst
contributor to the crisis. I look around and look for really meaningful signs that we are
about to really change. I don’t see it right now.
Reagan: Very reputable scientists have said that one factor of air pollution is oxides
of nitrogen from decaying vegetation. This is what causes the haze that gave the Big
Smokey Mountains their name.
Bush I: This guy is so far off on the environmental extremes, we’ll be up to our neck
in owls and out of work for every American. This guy’s crazy!
This is perhaps the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated on the American
People. If it is not on the tips of their constituents tongues, it’s easy for them to ignore
it. They say, “Well, let’s deal with that tomorrow.”
Predator/Prey Disruptions and Misplaced Cities
So this same phenomenon of changing all these patterns is also changing the
seasons. Here is a study from the Netherlands. The peak arrival date for migratory
birds 25 years ago was April 25. Their chicks hatched on June 3, just at the time
when the caterpillars were coming out: Nature’s plan. But 20 years of warming later
the caterpillars peaked two weeks earlier. The chicks tried to catch up with it, but they
couldn’t. So they are in trouble. There are millions of ecological niches that are
affected by global warming in just this way. This is the number of days with frost in
southern Switzerland over the last one hundred years. It has gone down rapidly. But
now watch this. This is the number of new exotic species that have rushed in to fill
the new ecological niches that are opening up. That’s happening here in the United
States too. You’ve heard of the pine beetle problem? Those pine beetles used to be
killed by the cold winter, but there are fewer days of frost. So the pine trees are being
devastated. This is part of the 14 million acres of spruce trees in Alaska that have
been killed by bark beetles, the exact same phenomenon. There cities that were
founded because they were just above the mosquito line. Nairobi is one. Harare is
another. There are plenty of others. Now the mosquitoes with warming are climbing
to hirer altitudes.
Infectious Disease
There are a lot of vectors for infectious diseases that are worrisome to us that are
also expanding their range, not only mosquitoes but all these others as well. We’ve
had 30 so-called new diseases that have emerged in just the last quarter century. A
lot of them like SARS have caused tremendous problems. The resistant forms of
tuberculosis. There has been a re-emergence of some diseases that were once
under control. The Avian flu, of course is quite a serious matter, as you know. West
Nile Virus came to the eastern shore of Maryland in 1999. Two years later it was
across the Mississippi. And two years after that it had spread across the continent.
These are very troubling times.
Coral Reefs
Coral reefs all over the world because of global warming and other factors are
bleaching and they end up like this. All the fish species that depend on the coral reef
are also in jeopardy as a result. Overall species loss is now occurring at a rate 1000
times greater than the natural background rate.
The Second Canary: Antarctic Peninsula Sea Ice
This brings me to the second canary in the coal mine, Antarctica, the largest mass of
ice on the planet by far. A friend of mine said in 1978, “If you see the break up of ice
shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, watch out, because that should be seen as an
alarm bell for global warming. If you look at the peninsula up close, every place
where you see one of these green blotches is an ice shelf larger than the state of
Rhode Island that has broken up in just the last 15 to 20 years. I want to focus on just
one of them called Larsen B. I want you to look at these black pools here. It makes it
seem almost as if we are looking through the ice to the ocean beneath. But that’s an
illusion. This is melting water that forms this pool. If you were flying over it in a
helicopter, you’d see it 700 feet tall. They are so majestic, so massive. In the
distance are the mountains, and just before the mountains is the shelf of the
continent. This is floating ice, and there is land based ice on the down-slope of those
mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. They thought this
would be stable for about a hundred years, even with global warming.
The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they
were looking at these images. Starting in January 31, 2002, in a period of 35 days,
this ice shelf completely disappeared. They could not figure out how in the world this
happened so rapidly. They went back to figure out where they had gone wrong.
That’s when they focused on those pools of melting water. Even before they could
figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the
floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land. The
land-based ice then started falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a
bottle. There’s a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. It’s like the
difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water, which when it melts
doesn’t raise the level of water in the glass, and a cube sitting atop a stack of ice
cubes, which melts and flows over the edge. That’s why the citizens of these pacific
nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand.
West Antarctica Land Based Ice
I want to focus on West Antarctica, because it illustrates two factors about landbased
ice and sea-based ice. It’s a little of both. It’s propped on tops of islands, but
the ocean comes up underneath it. So if the ocean gets warmer, it has an impact on
it. If this were to go, sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet. They’ve measured
disturbing changes on the underside of this ice sheet. It’s considered relatively more
stable, however, than another big body of ice that is roughly the same size.
Greenland
Impact of 20 Foot Rise in Sea Level
In 1992 they measured this amount of melting in Greenland. 10 years later this is
what happened. And here is the melting from 2005. Tony Blair’s scientific advisor has
said that because of what is happening in Greenland right now, the map of the world
will have to be
redrawn.
If Greenland broke
up and melted, or
if half of
Greenland and
half of West
Antarctica broke
up and melted,
this is what would
happen to the sea
level in Florida.
This is what would
happen in the San
Francisco Bay. A
lot of people live in
these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating. The area
around Beijing is home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around
Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta and, to the East
Bangladesh the area covered includes 50 million people. Think of the impact of a
couple hundred thousand refugees when they are displaced by an environmental
event and then imagine the impact of a hundred million or more. Here is Manhattan.
This is the World Trade Center Memorial Site. After the horrible events of 9/11 we
said never again. But this is what would happen to Manhattan. They can measure
this precisely, just as the scientists could predict precisely how much water would
breech the levy in New Orleans. The area where the World Trade Center Memorial is
to be located would be under water. Is it possible that we should prepare against
other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other
problems as well.
Civilization and Earth
This issue is the same for China as it is for the US.
Separating the truth from the fiction and the accurate connection from the
misunderstanding is part of what you learn here. When the warnings are accurate
and based on sound science, then we as human beings, whatever country we live in,
have to find a way to make sure that the warnings are heard and responded to.
We both have a hard time shaking loose the familiar patterns that we relied on in the
past. We both faced completely unacceptable consequences.
We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth. There are three
factors that are causing this collision.
1. Population - when the baby
boom generation was born
after WW II the population
had just crossed the 2 billion
mark. I’m in my 50s and it’s
already gone to 6 « billion. If I
reach the demographic
expectation for the baby
boomers, it will go over 9
billion. If it takes 10,000
generations to reach 2 billion
and then, in one human
lifetime, ours, it goes from 2
billion to 9 billion, something
profoundly different is going
on right now. We’re putting
more pressure on the Earth.
Most of it’s in the poorer nations of the world. It puts pressure on food
demand. It puts pressure on water demand. It puts pressure on vulnerable
natural resources, and this pressure is one of the reasons we have seen such
devastation of the forest, not only tropical but elsewhere. It is a political issue.
This is the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. One set of
policies here. Another set of policies here. Much of it comes not only from
cutting, but also burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into the
atmosphere each year is from forest burning. This is a time-lapse picture of
the Earth at night over a six month period showing the lights of the cities in
white and the burning forests and brush fires in red. The yellow areas are the
gas flares like these in Siberia.
2. The scientific and technological revolution is a great blessing in that it has
given us tremendous benefit in medicine and communication. But this new
power that we have also brings a responsibility to think about its
consequences. Here’s a formula to think about. Old habits plus old
technology have predictable consequences. Old habits plus new technology
can have dramatically altered consequences. Warfare with spears and bows
and arrows and rifles and machine guns, that’s one thing. But then a new
technology came. (Atomic bomb blast. We have to think differently about war
because the new technologies so completely transformed the consequences
of that old habit that we can’t just mindlessly continue the patterns of the past.
In the same way we have always exploited the Earth for sustenance. For
most of our existence we used relatively simple tools: the plow, the tractor.
But even tools like shovels are different now. A shovel used to be like this.
Shovels have gotten bigger and every year they get more powerful. Our
ability to have an effect on the surface of the Earth is utterly transformed. You
can say the same thing about irrigation which is a great thing, but when we
divert rivers without considering the consequences, sometimes the rivers
never reach the sea. There were two rivers in central Asia that were used by
the former Soviet Union that were used for irrigating cotton fields unwisely.
The Aral Sea was fed by them used to be the fourth largest inland sea in the
world. When I went there I saw this strange sight of an enormous fishing fleet
resting in the sand. This is the
canal that the fishing industry
desperately tried to build to
get to the receding shoreline.
Making mistakes in our
dealings with nature can have
bigger consequences now
because our technologies are
often bigger than the human
scale. When you put them all
together they made us a force
of nature. This is also a
political issue. This is a
computer map of the world
that purports to show the
relative contribution to global
warming. In our country we are responsible for more than all of South
America, all of Africa, all of the Middle East, all of Asia all combined. The per
capita average in Africa, India, China, Japan, EU, Russia, here’s where we
are way, way above everyone else. If you take population into account it’s a
little bit different. China’s playing a bigger role, so is Europe, but we are still
by all odds the largest contributor. And so it is up to us to look at how we think
about.
3. The way we think about it is the third and final factor that transforms our
relationship to the Earth. If a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it jumps
right out again, because it senses the danger. But the very same frog if it
jumps into a pot of luke warm water that is slowly brought to a boil, will just sit
there and it won’t move. It will just sit there even as the temperature continues
to go up and up. It will stay there until.. until.. it is rescued. It is important to
rescue the frog. The point is this: Our collective nervous system is like that
frog’s nervous system. It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become
aware of a danger. If it seems gradual, even it is really adapting quickly, we
are capable of just sitting there and not reacting.
The Tobacco Industry
I don’t remember a time when I was a kid when summertime didn’t mean working
with tobacco. I used to love it. It was during that period when working with the guys
on the farm seemed like fun to me. Starting in 1964 with the Surgeon General’s
report, the evidence was laid out on the connection between smoking cigarettes and
lung cancer. We kept growing tobacco.
Nancy was almost 10 years older than me, and there were only two of us. She was
my protector and my friend at the same time. She started smoking when she was a
teenager and never stopped. She died of lung cancer. That’s one of the ways you
don’t want to die. The idea that we had been part of that economic pattern that
produced the cigarettes that produced the cancer, it was so painful at so many levels.
My father, he had grown tobacco all his life. He stopped it. Whatever explanation that
seemed to make sense in the past, just didn’t cut it anymore. He stopped it. It’s just
human nature to take time to connect the dots. I know that. But I also know that there
can be a day of reckoning when you wished you had connected the dots more
quickly.
Three Misconceptions
1. Isn’t there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real
or not? Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every scientific
article in a peer reviewed article written on global warming in the last ten
years. They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the
number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we’re
causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero.
The misconception that there is disagreement about the science has been
deliberately created by a relatively small number of people. One of their
internal memos leaked and here is what it said according to the press. Their
objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact. This has
happened before. after the Surgeon General’s report. One of their memos
leaked 4 years ago. They said, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best
means of creating a controversy in the public’s mind.” But have they
succeeded? You’ll remember that there were 928 peer reviewed articles. Zero
percent disagreed with the consensus. There was another study of all the
articles in the popular press. Over the last fourteen years they listed a sample
of 636. More than half of them said, “Well, we are not sure. It could be a
problem, may not be a problem.” So no wonder people are confused.Hey!
What did you find out? Working for who? .Scientists have an independent
obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it.”Why do you directly
contradict yourself in the testimony you’re giving about this scientific
question?”
"That last paragraph in that section was not a paragraph which I wrote. That
was added to my testimony.”"If they force you to change a scientific
conclusion it is a form of scientific fraud by them.”"I’ve seen scientists who
were persecuted, ridiculed, deprived of jobs, income simply because the facts
they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth that they insisted on
telling.”"He worked for the American Petroleum Institute and in January of
2001 he was put by the president in charge of environmental policy. He
received a memo from the EPA that warned about global warming. He had no
scientific training whatsoever, but he took it upon himself to overrule the
scientists. I want to know what this guy’s handwriting looks like. This is the
memo from the EPA. These are his actual pen strokes. He said, “No, you
can’t say this. This is just speculation.” This was embarrassing to the
Whitehouse. So this fellow resigned a few days later. The day after he
resigned he went to work for Exxon-Mobil.You know more than a hundred
years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: “You can’t make somebody understand
something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it.”
2. The second misconception: Do we have to choose between the economy and
the environment? This is a big one. A lot of people say we do. I was trying to
convince the first Bush administration to go to the Earth Summit. They
organized a big Whitehouse conference to say, “We’re on top of this.” One of
these viewgraphs caught my attention and I want to talk about it for a minute.
Here is the choice we have to make according to this group. We have here a
scale that balances two different things. On one side, we have gold bars.
Mmmmm. Don’t they look good! I’d just like to have some of those gold bars.
On the other side of the scale we have. The Entire Planet! Hmm? I think this
is a false choice for two reasons. Number one, if we don’t have a planet. The
other reason is that if we do the right thing, then we are going to create a lot
of wealth and we are going to create a lot of jobs, because doing the right
thing moves us forward.I’ve probably given this slide show a thousand times.
I’ve tried to identify all those things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles
to them understanding this. Whenever I feel like I’ve identified an obstacle, I
try to take it apart, roll it away, remove it, blow it up. I set myself a goal:
communicate this real clearly. The only way I know to do it is city by city,
person by person, family by family. And I have faith that pretty soon enough
minds are changed that we cross a threshold.Let me give you an example of
the wrong way to balance the economy and the environment. One part of this
issue involves automobiles. Japan has mileage standards up here. Europe
plans to pass Japan. Our allies in Australia and Canada are leaving us
behind. Here’s where we are. There is a reason for it. They say that we can’t
protect the environment too much without threatening the economy and
threatening the auto makers, because auto makers in China might come in
and just steal all our market. Well, here is where China’s auto mileage
standards are now. We can’t sell our cars in China today because we don’t
meet China’s mileage standard.California has taken some initiative to have
higher mileage cars sold in California. The auto companies have sued
California to prevent this law from taking effect because as they point out,
eleven years from now this would mean California would have to have cars
for sale that are as efficient eleven years from now as China’s are today:
clearly too onerous a provision to comply with. Is this helping our companies
to succeed? Actually, if you look at who’s doing well in the world it’s the
companies that are building more efficient cars. Our companies are in deep
trouble.
3. Final misconception: If we accept that this problem is real, maybe it is just too
big to do anything about. There are a lot of people who go straight from denial
to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing
something about the problem. That’s what I would like to finish with: the fact
that we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this
problem. We’ve got to do a lot of things, not just one. Increasing end use
efficiency we can remove global warming pollution that would other wise be
put into the atmosphere.
o More efficient electrical appliances
o Higher mileage cars
o Other transport efficiency
o Renewable technology
o Carbon capture sequestration
They all add up and pretty soon we are below our 1970 emission. We have
everything we need, save perhaps political will. In America, political will is a
renewable resource.We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause
of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that with the
things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make
choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in
our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.
States and Cities
Are we going to be left behind as the rest of the world moves forward? All of these
nations have ratified Kyoto. There are only two advanced nations in the world that
have not ratified Kyoto and we are one of them. The other is Australia. Luckily
several states are taking the initiative. The nine northeastern states have banded
together on reducing CO2. California and Oregon are taking the initiative.
Pennsylvania is exercising leadership on solar power and wind power. US cities are
stepping up to the plate. One after the other, we have seen all these cities pledge to
take on global warming.
Rising to the Occasion
What about the rest of us? Ultimately this question comes down to this: Are we as
Americans capable of doing great things even though they are difficult? Are we
capable of rising above ourselves and above history? The record indicates that we
do have that capacity. We formed a nation. We fought a revolution and brought
something new to this Earth, a free nation guaranteeing individual liberty. America
made a moral decision that slavery was wrong and that we could not be half free and
half slave. We as Americans decided that of course women should have the right
vote. We defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic
simultaneously. We desegregated our schools and cured some diseases like polio.
We landed on the moon, the very example of what’s possible when we are at our
best. We worked together in a completely bipartisan way to bring down communism.
We have even solved a global environmental crisis before, the hole in the
stratospheric ozone layer. This was said to be an impossible problem to solve
because it’s a global environmental challenge requiring cooperation from every
nation in the world. But we took it on, and the United States took the lead in phasing
out the chemicals that caused that problem. So now we have to use our political
processes in our democracy and then decide to act together to solve those problems.
But we have to have a different perspective on this one. It is different than any
problem we have faced before.
Our Only Home
You remember that home movie of the
earth spinning in space. One of those
spacecraft continuing on out into the
universe, when it got 4 billion miles out
in space, Carl Sagan said, “Let’s take
another picture of the earth.” See that
pale blue dot. That’s us. Everything
that has ever happened in all of human
history has happened on that pixel. All
the triumphs and all the tragedies, all
the wars, all the famines, all the major
advances: it’s our only home. And that
is what is at stake: our ability to live on
planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.
I believe this is a moral issue. It is your time to see this issue. It is our time to rise
again to procure our future.
There’s nothing that unusual about what I’m doing. What is unusual is that I had the
privilege to be shown it as a young man. It is almost as if a window was opened
through which the future was very clearly visible. See that? That is the future in which
you are going to live your life.
Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves. “What were our
parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?”
We have to hear that question from them, now.