Transcript for Pop!Tech Richard Alley

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So let me give you an optimistic view of a very difficult problem,

RICHARD ALLEY POP!TECH 2004

which is how can we make money and make a better life

by cleaning up the earth's air.

I want to show you, first of all, a few pretty pictures, just for the heck of it.

These are going to to be a few folks who are interested in global warming.

There's one little penguin sitting right down there in front,

watching the icebergs melt.

That would be an Adelie penguin.

And they are pretty; if you get the chance to see them,

there's a whole bunch of them.

This one, you can probably guess the name.

This is a Chinstrap penguin.

Gentoo. This is home, by the way.

This is a penguin nest, and those rocks are very important to that Gentoo penguin.

This a happy Weddell seal on an ice floe.

This is a really happy Weddell seal!

Rocks to sleep on—yes!

Okay, this is still one of the more amazing things I have ever seen in my life.

We are in the middle of Greenland; we are two miles up in the atmosphere;

it is -30; we are 200 miles from the nearest rock.

And this fox comes trotting into camp to see what's for dinner.

It's just really amazing.

Now, not all of the polar creatures are quite as attractive, but—

[audience laughter and moans]

Okay. Appreciate this!

The newspapers are USA Today, they are six weeks old at this point.

But it really doesn't matter—

[laughs]

Okay. Now remember, this is a good day in Greenland.

This is a good day in Greenland.

This is a bad day in Greenland. [laughs]

[audience laughter]

Oh, yes. Okay. So at any rate, we went up there to drill ice cores. The ice is two miles thick.

It doesn't melt in the summer, because it's really cold and it's really high,

and it's been piling up for a very long time.

This is Catherine from Alaska, drilling ice cores.

These are ice cores.

And you take them out in three-foot-long chunks,

but you add them all up, and it's two miles.

And they have this amazing record of the history of the climate.

This is one lying on its side, from a mile down.

And you'll see the layers.

This is a winter and a summer and a winter and a summer and a winter.

And we count these things.

And we look for the volcanic ash, and we fingerprint it to the volcano

to make sure we're counting right.

And we look at the trapped bubbles that have history of air in it,

and we look at the fallout of sea salt and of dust, and of cosmogenic things,

and we build up this history of what the climate has done.

And from that we try to learn something that might be useful to real people.

Things like this.

This is a record from Joe McConnell.

250 years of Pb flux and enrichment at Summit

I am going to show you so many wiggly lines you won't—at any rate, here are some wiggly lines.

1750, the year 1750 is on your left, up to the year 2000 on your right.

Just look at the red one. This is lead in snow in Greenland.

Now you actually can find the plumbum from the plumbing of the roamings.

There's a little tiny bit of it in Greenland, but not much.

And when we got serious about an industrial revolution,

we changed the world.

We had a big, big Depression, you may remember, that sort of messed up the economy,

and that's that dip right there,

and then we got really serious about leaded gasoline, so that the car wouldn't ping.

And then we said, You know, this isn't a good thing.

We're going to poison ourselves with too much lead.

Maybe we should clean it up.

There you go.

Okay? Can we change the world? Sure.

Can we clean it up? We are changing the world.

You know, you fly in here, and you look out the window and everything's been altered.

And you go and look for big fish in the ocean.

We may have taken 90% of the big fish out of the oceans.

And we've got lead. And I'll show you the atmosphere.

We have changed the composition of the atmosphere; we are changing it.

Very crudely. Very, very, very round numbers, we're using half of what nature makes available

for us and our immediate friends, for soybeans and dogs and cows and a few others.

We're sort of using half of it.

If we double and we keep using the same levels,

the other things on earth are in for an interesting idea.

And that's not value judgment; that's a summary of observations.

And so we are changing the world.

Here's some pictures showing us changing the world.

These are ice core data. In each case, the year 1000 is on your left, and today is on your right.

The first one is carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

It's running along, yeah, not much happening, not much happening,

and we start burning fossil fuels, and whoop! it's gone way up.

Methane concentration, cow flatulence, and rice patties, is down here,

not much happening, not much happening. Whoops! There's humans.

Nitrous oxide, fertilizers, and other things, not much happening, not much happening.

Whoop! There's us.

Acid smokestack emissions, you know, here we go, not much happening.

Whoop! We made it real dirty, and then we said, Hey, let's clean it up a little bit.

And we've cleaned it up a little bit.

This is from Greenland! You get the same thing from Antarctica.

Have we changed the atmosphere? Of course we have.

Okay? Does this matter? Is the climate changing?

Well, yeah. If you measure temperature with thermometers,

and you write it down for a hundred years, and look at the temperatures, they are getting warmer.

If you throw away the ones in the cities, because you're not sure about urban heat islands,

it's still getting warmer.

If you go to the glaciers and ask, Are you melting?

Yes, they are.

You ask the tree rings, Are you growing in a warmer world?

Yes, they are.

Is the ocean getting warmer? Yeah, the ocean's getting warmer.

Is the ground getting warmer? The ground's getting warmer.

Do the satellites see warming? The satellites now see warming too.

The world is getting warmer.

Okay, and here it is. The year 1860 is on your left, in this top panel.

The year 2000 is on your right, and there's the history of globally averaged temperature from thermometers,

as best as we can tell.

And, yeah, it sort of goes wump, wump, wump, wump, wump, but it's getting warmer.

If we go and look at a longer record, we ask if the trees and the ice cores and the corals—

well, how cold or warm was it in the past? There's more uncertainty,

but what one finds in the year 1000 on your left, in the bottom panel,

to today, on your right, and this warming that we're having is starting to look big

compared to what nature has done in the past.

And so we really are coming out of the natural noise in the system,

and it looks like something's really happening.

Not everybody sees it. Some may not want to see it, but not everybody sees it.

This is 1976 to 2000.

A big red dot is a lot of warming; a blue dot is cooling.

And you'll see that there actually are places that have not warmed.

A little bit down here, a little bit up here.

There's places where the data are pretty stinky, and most people are seeing warming.

So it's not—everybody doesn't get the same thing, but on average, yeah, the temperature's up.

Okay, why— We're watching the sun, we're watching the volcanoes—

it's not those anymore.

It's mostly us, and it's mostly burning of fossil fuels.

And let's face it—if you've got a car, and you're like most people,

you go and get a hundred pounds of gasoline every week.

And you give them 30 bucks for it, and you put a hundred pounds of gasoline into your car,

and you turn it into 300 pounds of CO2, and you leave it in the atmosphere.

And every week — how hard do we work to get 300 pounds of CO2 made from our cars every week?

Nature matters, but we're faster than nature now.

We're really good at this.

Most of the fossil fuels we're using accumulated over the last 500 million years.

And we're going to burn them in 500 years.

So we're sort of a million times faster than nature at this point.

And so, you can look at this and say, nature has changed the climate.

You look back anywhere in the past, you see climate changes.

There's no doubt about this.

But we now are coming out of the natural variability,

because we're working so hard at changing things.

And let me show you this.

There's three panels here.

In each panel, we're going from the year 1860 to today, and the red curve is that history

of temperature on the surface of the earth from thermometers.

So in each case, the red curve is what happened, wobbles and wiggles, but general warming.

The gray curves are model runs.

We take a model of the earth's climate system, and we tell it something,

and ask it what should have happened.

And in the upper left one over here, the gray curve is,

let's tell the model what nature did.

Our best guess at how the sun changed, from sun spot cycles,

our best guess at how much the sun was blocked by volcanic eruptions.

And the model knows about those changes, and then you ask the model what should have happened

from the sun being blocked by volcanoes, and the sun changing its brightness.

And that's that gray curve, and you know, there's some similarities.

It was cold back here because the sun wasn't very bright, and because there were a lot of volcanic eruptions.

And the warming from that is partially natural.

And then recently, the sun has not been doing much, and there's been a few volcanoes,

and, in fact, nature has been saying, get a little colder, but it hasn't.

And so this is what a model thinks would have happened from natural forces.

Now the one in the upper right there, is what a model thinks would have happened from us,

our CO2, our methane, and our smokestack acid rain that tends to block the sun.

And you see, those two look fairly similar over there, but there's some differences back there.

And if we tell the model what nature did, and we tell the model what we humans have done,

then you get the one in the lower panel.

And, you know, what happened and what the model thinks happened are pretty similar.

These models are not bad.

Nature has changed climate; humans have changed climate;

it is increasingly clear that what is happening now is mostly us.

It is not mostly nature.

Now, is this going to stop?

Well, the CO2 we put up goes for centuries or millenia.

The more we put up, the longer it's likely to stay, because we fill up other places to hide it.

And let's face it. Burning fossil fuels is nice for us.

We can have lights. I can fly up here and visit you.

And so, there's other people who want to do this too, so are we just going to stop it?

No. Come on. There's a real chance that we're going to see a lot more CO2 in the future.

And there's a real chance that we're going to see more warming in the future.

Arrhenius in 1896 says, Hey, if you put CO2 up in the atmosphere, it's going to get warmer.

He pretty well got the size of the change right.

Because it's physics.

And if you've ever known a lot of physics students, they're really bright, and they get a lot of resources,

and they only work on really easy questions.

Because as soon as it gets hard, they say,

Oh, that's chemistry. Oh, that's biology. Well, that's sociology.

We don't do that.

[audience laughter]

This is physics!

And you put more CO2 up and it gets warmer. That's physics!

And it's highly likely to happen. Physicists are really good at answering the questions they choose to answer.

[laughs]

Okay. So, here is CO2, a thousand years ago is on your left—

not much happening, not much happening.

We are raising CO2; we're right there.

And by the year 2100, we're going to be somewhere over here,

depending on what you think about the economy and things like that.

So the change that's happened so far really is not much.

We're headed way higher than that if we keep acting like we are.

And it's worth noting, this is the year 2100. That's not the end of civilization.

And all of those curves are still going up.

And some of them are going up really fast.

And so we have not gotten very— What we've done now is just a down payment

on what we're likely to do if we don't change our behavior.

Temperature changes— If you look at the right panel here, the year 1800,

the year 1900, the year 2000, we're right there.

We've had that much warming from the little ice age.

And all of these projections have uncertainty.

We don't know how far it's going; we don't know what humans are doing.

But all of them show the future warming being very big compared to what has happened so far.

Even the most optimistic view says we haven't really started yet.

We've made a down payment, but we're not seriously into paying off the mortgage here.

And so the change to date is a little tiny thing compared to what we expect.

Not everybody gets the same thing.

Down here, this would be warming; this is looking out to CO2 doubling,

so most of a century out, and some places are only warming a degree or so.

And some places are warming 10. That's Celsius, 18 Fahrenheit.

So if you're a polar bear up there you're in a very different world.

You mention Dennis Quaid— that little bull's eye of not much warming

is, Greenland starts melting and the fresh water goes in the North Atlantic,

and it freezes in the winter.

And in this model, there's not much warming there.

In some models, this bull's eye is cooling

and, in fact, you do freeze England in the winter by global warming.

You don't start a new ice age, but you can make some places colder from global warming

in some of the projections.

Okay. So, who cares?

Nobody cares. Come on. This is what you care about.

What does it mean to me? What does it mean to other living things on earth?

I'm a geologist; I'm a paleoclimatologist; I'm not a social scientist.

So I'm just going summarize things that other people have told me about this.

The skinny version— If you have winter, so that the blizzards close down the airports,

if you have air conditioning, so you can work in the summer when it's hot,

and if you have bulldozers so that you can make a seawall to keep the rising sea level away,

a little bit of warming is good for your economy.

It may hurt your hunter-gatherer societies, it may hurt your ecosystems,

but it's good for your economy. Too much warming is bad for the economy.

If you're missing any one of air conditioners, winter, or bulldozers,

all warming's a bad thing.

So that's the skinny version of what it means.

And, of course, most of the world's people are missing one or more of those three,

and most of the world's economy is not.

And so there's this interesting high latitude, low latitude thing.

Ecosystems, if you're a polar bear or a pica and you like it cold, you're in deep doo-doo.

Because cold's going away.

Anything out there has migrated as the climate changed.

And nothing out there has migrated across a Wal-Mart parking lot when the climate changed.

And so, yes, things are able to migrate in response to changing climates,

but we're in the way. We have cornfields. We have soybean fields.

If you like ecosystems, as the climate changes and it forces ecosystem migration,

we have real troubles in trying to keep ecosystems together.

Because they will need to move, they will need to move long distances,

and it's hard to do now.

And so that's sort of what one looks at as impacts.

You know, the spread of tropical diseases, and more drying in the grain belts in summer,

and so there's some impacts of these things that add up to the point

that even fairly hard-nosed economists are starting to talk about doing something about this,

because it would be good for the economy in the long term.

Could this be wrong? Sure.

This is science, this is not Truth with a capital "T," but it's hard to make it a lot better,

and it's really easy to make it a lot worse.

There's a lot more room out there for weird, wonky, and scary things to happen

than there is for nothing to happen.

If we looks at these models, and the models are very good,

if we ask the model, reconstruct the Ice Age, reconstruct the world of the dinosaurs,

the models do fairly well at it.

But the models don't tend to change quite as much as the real world did.

And that makes you wonder whether their projections are right,

or whether it might change just a little more in the future than the models think.

All those futures I showed you were smooth,

but if there's one thing the climate never is, it's smooth.

It's never smooth. It always jumps, bumps, and wiggles,

and sometimes those jumps, bumps, and wiggles are big and scary.

And so let me try to show you that.

This is some records that I helped make in central Greenland,

with a very large and very good team that you paid for,

and I've done something to you. Please bear with me for a moment.

We drill from the surface down, and so whenever we get into deep time,

old is on your right. 10,000 years ago is now on your right; today is on your left;

I switched time. I'm sorry.

And the green curve—just focus on the green one—this is temperature in central Greenland.

This is not the world; it's central Greenland.

But most of the records from around the North Atlantic look like that green curve.

A broad arch from features of earth's orbit that are changing the sunshine

and a lot of wiggles from other causes that we can argue about.

This particular one right there, you will hear a lot more from Brian Fagan about—

I believe this is a Medieval warm period.

It's a time when if you were a Viking sitting in a little open boat,

you could sail around the North Atlantic without running into frozen ocean.

And so they did. And they settled Iceland, and they settled Greenland,

and they explored the new world, and there were people there that didn't want to be settled,

so they traded with them instead.

And so that's a nice time to zip around the North Atlantic in a little open boat.

And then it started getting cold.

And the ocean starts freezing, and the trade tanks,

and the Vikings in Greenland are getting in deep doo-doo,

and they're bringing the farm animals into their houses in the winter,

and, in fact, that year, right there, they ate their dogs, and they left.

Because they couldn't maintain their way of life on the coast of an ice sheet in a cooling world right there.

That is the size of climate change that doesn't control people, but it affects them.

And Brian has written amazing things about this that you'll want to read and hear about.

But the little ice age there affected people.

That's climate change that affects people.

This is climate change that we ought to understand.

This is real. That is 10 degrees Celsius; it is 18 degrees Fahrenheit in a decade.

That's Moscow to Madrid. It's somewhere between Chicago and Minneapolis to Atlanta in a decade.

And so this happened. Perfectly naturally.

I want you to notice a pattern here. The ice age, down here on the far right, it ends.

Boom. Big jump. It staggers back, and it ends again.

Because you will see that pattern a couple more times.

The ice age—it ends; it staggers back; it ends again.

This is the Vikings. And this is serious.

Now, that pattern, the ice age, it ends, it staggers back, it ends again,

is right over there on the left, and there's the Vikings freezing out of Greenland right there—

and this happened. The biggest one of those is 28 degrees Fahrenheit in a few decades.

It happened. It's a big thing.

So they sort of got boring up here where we think about as being normal,

and there's been a lot of weirdness in the world.

This was not caused by CO2, but maybe it was.

And again, the ice age, it ends, it staggers back, and it ends again,

and here's the CO2 record from the ice cores in green down there.

Now, I come from a university town, and it has been observed on rare occasion

that on a Friday night, or a Thursday night, or a Wednesday night,

a student will become inebriated.

I don't know if you've ever observed this behavior, but it does happen.

And, you know, if you leave a drunk alone, he just sits there,

and when you force him to move he sort of staggers.

And when the climate—when the CO2 wasn't changing, the climate was sort of boring.

And when CO2 is forcing it to move, rather than warming smoothly, it staggered.

And it's an interesting hypothesis—it's not yet fact, but it's an interesting hypothesis—

that the climate goes from here to there by staggering rather than by going smoothly.

Now, one more thing we should look at, this is sea level—sea level has been rising about an inch a decade—

and if you go to Cape Cod or you go the Outer Banks,

they're busy hauling back the lighthouses before they get knocked in the ocean.

And New Orleans—part of their problem is sea level rise; it's not the only one,

but when the hurricane gets them, they're swimming around to the business meetings.

And—sea level matters, and it's been rising sort of an inch a decade.

If we look at projections from the year 2000 out to the year 2100,

we expect sea level rise to continue and to accelerate, not hugely,

but enough that it matters.

From warming of the ocean making it bigger, because warm water takes up more space,

and from melting of the mountain glaciers.

This projection, which is sea-level rise, matters; it's going to go faster than we've been dealing with in the future.

This assumes that the big ice sheets do nothing.

Actually, they help us. It snows more on the big ice sheets in a warmer world.

And that's starting to get a little worrisome.

I want to take you— Here is Antarctica, and Antarctica's a big chunk of ice.

And up here in the peninsula there's been some warming going on.

And there's a little tiny chunk of ice up there, but we're going to go right there,

and take a look at something.

This is a satellite picture; this is the Antarctic Peninsula mountain range,

with glaciers dripping off of it, coming down.

This is the sea over here on your right in black, with icebergs floating around in the sea.

And this is a floating extension, called an ice shelf.

And this funny modeling on it is meltwater pooling in cracks.

And it's been warming in the peninsula, really rapidly, and the meltwater pooled in the cracks.

And the next time that the clouds cleared it looked like this.

It fell apart. It just— Boom. It fell— Watch this. This is cool.

Oops, sorry.

Here it goes. It falls apart.

It just falls apart. And then the ice behind it speeds up a whole bunch

and starts dumping ice into the ocean, and it'll raise sea level.

Now this has not gotten to the big ice yet.

There's only a little bit of ice behind this one.

But the models that we have assume that it could never get to the big ice.

And we're not quite as confident of that as we'd like to be.

So I'll show you this picture—this is not a prediction, but this is something to think about.

If one lost either Greenland or West Antarctica— Miami Beach is north of the Everglades.

And if one loses all of the ice, Miami Beach is in Georgia.

And if we burn all the fossil fuels—looking out centuries, not decades,

but centuries, we're going to put CO2 to the levels that when they last existed on earth,

by our best estimate, we didn't have any ice.

And so a century out, don't push any huge alarm bells, but if you look in centuries,

we have to start at least understanding the possibilities of this,

because we can't rule it out.

Okay. Now, is it perfect? No. Come on. It's science.

My students are better than I am. But this is good.

And I will virtually guarantee you that every day they're making laws in Washington;

they're passing budgets based on less understanding of the future than we have right here.

[Scattered applause]

Okay. Now if you're a real person, you say, Well, wait a minute.

I've read in the newspaper that there's a big argument about this.

So why do real people have such a very different view than the scientific consensus?

And I think there's three reasons.

I think, one, we all have a conflict of interest. We don't really want this to be true.

Because, you know, I want to fly home. I don't want to walk home.

And if we tried to stop this right now, I'd end up walking home, and that's not going to work.

So we hope this is wrong.

There have, indeed, been some people, some organizations,

that have spent a little money to raise the other side, and it's worth remembering that

the tobacco companies used to claim that smoking was scientifically safe, too.

And there's very clear studies, now.

The press has bent over backwards.

There's a thousand scientists on one side, and one on the other—

they'll get one and one. And you'll hear that in the press.

And so what you will see is not reflecting the scientific certainty.

So should you get depressed and leave?

I don't think so. I'm an optimist about this one.

We've heard some of them.

You're going to spray your roof shingles with a biological agent that does photoelectricity.

We heard that this morning. There's things that can be done.

We can take the CO2 and put it in the ground. We can pull it back out of the air.

We can conserve. We can use other energy options.

And there's people— Nobody knows what this is going to cost.

There's wise people—including the German government—have been looking at it.

And there's a number that sort of keeps popping up, which is of the order of magnitude

of one percent of the world economy to clean this up.

And one way to look at that is, how much do we spend cleaning up after ourselves now?

What do we spend on sewers? What do we spend on catalytic converters?

What do we spend on getting somebody to pick up our trash and take it away?

One percent is not the end of the world.

We couldn't do it right now, because I don't want to walk home.

But this is doable.

And I have this impression, having lived through a few of these things,

that CO2 is just like the other environmental crises.

The freon's getting the ozone hole.

The phosphate detergent's getting Lake Erie. The DDT getting the birds.

The scientists say, Hey, we've got a problem.

And then somebody who stands to lose a lot of money, says, Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute!

Oh, no, no, no, no. There's no problem, and if there is a problem, it's nature and not humans,

and even if it is humans, we couldn't possibly afford to fix it, and—

Oh, look! I just invented something that will fix it for you. Let's solve it.

And it's very often that people that sort of know about the problem that come up with the solution,

and they get it, and then we say, How did we ever live in the old days?

And I just have this nagging suspicion that when the first person said,

Let's put a sewer in London, there was somebody sitting there saying,

Why can't I just dump my chamber pot out the window?

And so, I think we can do this. But it's not going to be easy.

A coal-fired power plant lasts a long time, and it's hard to walk anywhere from where I live right now.

And a lot of other people want to do what we're doing, and the earth is fairly slow to respond.

And so we've already invested in some future problems that are up there now.

And so we're going to need a lot of bright ideas.

But suppose we get serious.

Suppose we say we're going to spend one percent of the world economy on solving this problem.

That's $250 billion a year.

And so if you're an industrial planner, you're a futurist, or what have you,

and you say, Okay, make a list of the $250 billion a year industries that are likely to grow in the near future.

And, you know? This one looks interesting.

And so I would like to leave you with a picture of Greenland not yet melting,

and it's my personal hope that it will not. And thank you.

[applause]

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