A concept sketch of a HOLOSCENES aquarium. Image: Peter Zuspan / Lars Jan

TED Fellow Lars Jan, the director of the multi-disciplinary art lab Early Morning Opera, is seeking everyday personal rituals from collaborators — perhaps, you? — for a work-in-progress called HOLOSCENES. This public-performance installation — inspired by humanity’s relationship with climate change and flooding — will be made up of three aquariums, each enclosing a performer enacting a looped, choreographed ritual as water rises and falls driven by environmental data drawn from the internet.

Would you like to contribute? Read on.

Can you give us an example of the kinds of rituals you’re collecting?

We had a collaborator on the border of Myanmar who met a family and documented a daily face-painting ritual. It’s for beautification, but it also acts as a sunblock. It involves a kind of wood called thanaka, which is ground on a particular kind of stone with a little bit of water to form a paste, which is applied on the face. This ritual is mostly done by women, who also apply it to their children, often in beautiful patterns. This particular woman used a toothbrush to apply it every morning. That’s the thing that’s important — the ritual might be something that happens in hundreds of thousands of households, but the point of the project is not to recreate the ritual in a generic fashion. We’re making contact with very specific individuals who perform their own ritual in a very specific way. I make coffee in the morning like a lot of people, but I also have my own idiosyncrasies — a personal pattern to this daily ritual that is all my own.

Will the rituals you’re collecting form the basis of the performances inside the aquariums?

Yes. The choreography and design of the physical behaviors inside the aquariums are all sourced from people we make contact with who live near any one of the 52 coordinates that we generated randomly across the globe. Our performers simulate these rituals inside the aquariums based on documentation collected by collaborators. Sometimes the people we’re contacting are far away – I’m communicating with people who are, say, in Uganda, having been handed from one interested person to another to another to reach people who are close to a coordinate and want to collaborate with us. What I wanted to do was to create a semi-open source network, dependent on an unpredictable cascade of online and in-person encounters.

A rendering of what HOLOSCENES will look like when staged. Credit: Peter Zuspan

Will the contributors get to participate in performances?

Yes, by providing the source material for the choreography and design at the heart of the project.
The entire collection process is actually referencing 500 years of what could be called a colonialist collection process, starting with imperial menageries, cabinets of wonder or curiosity, down to zoos and world’s fairs and aquariums. And we want to depriortize catastrophe as a lens through which to look at the world.

The project is inspired by flooding. In the last decade, I’ve found myself looking at a lot of places I had never seen before, and the reason I was looking at them, by way of beautiful photographs online and in newspapers, was because they were devastated. I wanted to find a more democratic way to look at the planet and the people on it. Rather than highlight people at the extremes, at their lowest, I wanted to cultivate and collect the mundane — and sacred — everyday behaviors of people across the planet.

How do the rituals then relate to climate change and flooding?

That’s partly where the conceptual and aesthetic leap is. Ultimately, the project is putting the rhythms of daily behaviors and human-scale patterns in conversation with longer-term patterns, such as those driving climate change. That’s a question at the heart of the project: What’s the future of long-term thinking? Are we, as individuals, communities, and a global society, capable of evolution in terms of recognizing complex, long-term patterns and then adapting our everyday behaviors based on that rational understanding?

The aquariums flood and drain with water at varying speeds. What drives the hydraulic system to make water going up and down in the tanks is environmental data scraped from the internet and other sources. Sometimes it floods incredibly slowly, sometimes very quickly. It’s a material data visualization: the water level goes up and down, but rather than seeing it from a remove, the data driving the water movement flooding and draining is dramatically affecting the ritual being performed, and dramatically changing the environment of the person in the tank. I’m curious to see the visceral empathic response viewers will have seeing the water flooding and draining, flooding and draining while a person — a performer — copes with the very mythic yet increasingly present-tense condition of deluge.

This visceral, visual metaphor — a person fighting through flood in an aquariam — is partly about our collective myopia in the face of these changes and our persistence and adaptive capacities in response to our changing environment — a multi pronged, complex visual metaphor that radiates out and connects with all kinds research and thinking, from behavioral science, climate science and palaeontology to questions like “What’s the neurology of long-term thinking? What’s the evolutionary future of empathy in an increasingly mediated world?” All those things are woven together in the project.

Where will HOLOSCENES be performed?

The full public, three-aquarium iteration of HOLOSCENES will premiere at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco in 2015, and likely premiere in a one-aquarium iteration sometime in 2014. Ultimately, it is meant to be a public performance intervention in an urban environment, running 24-hours a day for 7 days. The intention is to become a pivot for a public discourse and awareness outside of an exclusively artistic context. My collaborators and I are interested in reaching a far broader audience.

To find out more and contribute a ritual to be considered for HOLOSCENES, visit the website »

Photographer James Balog grew up skeptical about climate change. But in 2005, he headed to Iceland on assignment for National Geographic and found himself captivated by the spectacular beauty of the icy landscape and devastated by how it was quickly changing before his eyes. Balog had an idea: the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of 25 time-lapse cameras that would document Arctic glaciers as they melted over a period of three years.

At TEDGlobal 2009, Balog shared images from the survey. He explained what led him — an artist — to capture one of the most moving pieces of physical evidence pointing to climate change. He also shared that the project was being expanded, with 33 cameras continuing to capture the damage for a longer period of time.

In the new documentary, Chasing Ice, Balog gives far more of the story than he could in his 18-minute talk. The soaring footage — from the producer of The Cove — shows Balog and his team risking life and limb to set up their cameras, and reveals how they weather-proofed the equipment and made decisions about which scenes to capture.  Overall, the film depicts a man on a mission to make everyone on the planet more aware of the irreversible effects of their choices.

Chasing Ice premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and is currently playing in select cities. (See showtimes here.) If it’s not yet in your area, you fill out a petition to get the film in your local theater, or sign up to host your own screening. See Balog’s powerful TED Talk below.

For anyone watching the three presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, two words were surprisingly absent: “climate change.” It’s a strange omission given that 73 percent of Americans shared in a recent poll that dealing with environmental concerns, particularly global warming, was “extremely important” or “very important” to them. Not to mention that just four years ago, in the 2008 election, almost every candidate spoke to the dangers of global warming.

In a Frontline special called “Climate of Doubt,” journalist John Hockenberry (who gave the recent TEDTalk “We are all designers” and interviewed sculptor Tom Shannon for “The painter and the pendulum”) looks at the rise of the climate change skeptics movement, which promotes the idea that manmade climate change is a hoax. Hockenberry interviews several leaders of the movement, including Myron Ebell, Tim Phillips and S. Fred Singer, and explores how the movement has managed to virtually erase the words “climate change” from the political dialogue.

Hockenberry spent the past year doing research for this documentary, and it is both fascinating and chilling. The full report can be seen on Frontline’s website. And tomorrow, Oct. 25 at 2pm (EST), Hockenberry will take part in a live online conversation about it, along with Catherine Upin (who produced the report) and Elizabeth Kolbert (a New Yorker writer who focuses on climate change). They are welcoming any and every question.

With just three weeks to go before the 2012 presidential election in the US, eyes around the world are on the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. As shown in last night’s debate, the election may well come down to a few key issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll on the issues that citizens want the next president to prioritize. Conveniently, these are topics that speakers often address on the TED stage. So, every week until the election, we’ll bring you a new playlist focusing on one of the top-rated issues.

One of the most significant issues for Americans is concern for the environment – specifically, curbing the rapid rate of global warming. In this poll, 73 percent of Americans said that this was an “extremely important” or “very important” priority from their perspective.

To help spur some thinking — and maybe even inspire some action — we’ve compiled some of our most striking talks about the environment.

Al Gore warns on latest climate trends
In this talk from TED2009, Al Gore delivers jarring facts about global warming with footage of ice caps melting in real-time and rising water levels throughout the world. He debunks the myth of “clean” coal and presents truly clean alternatives.

Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic
“Let’s talk trash,” says Capt. Charles Moore. In this talk, also from TED2009, he illustrates how we are living in a “throwaway” society with a plastic addiction. Tracking the migration of our trash, we find that they end up in massive patches of waste in the ocean that then washes onto our shores.

Vicki Arroyo: Let’s prepare for our new climate
Vicki Arroyo knows it is important to be realistic when it comes to climate change. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, she says that we need to start preparing for the dangerous effects now, as farmers’ dry spells are leading to threats of national security all around the world. Here, she shows examples of proper preparation, from communities who haven’t ignored the need to adapt.

Richard Sears: Planning for the end of oil
While we’re on the topic of adapting to the climate crisis, Richard Sears lays out a plan to prepare for the inevitable extinction of oil. At TED2010, he expresses the need for innovation that will take us from this age to the next.

Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal
In this compelling talk from TEDSalon London Spring 2012, Tristam Stuart takes us through his crusade against food waste, which began when he was 15-years-old and trying to feed his pig. The key to combating our global food hemorrhage, he says, is to make it socially unacceptable to waste food.

Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff
Dan Phillips is a master of recycling. Making beautiful homes from others’ garbage, he takes us through the rooms he built from soda cans, items found in antique stores, and even eggshells. At TEDxHouston 2010, Phillips describes the social forces that lead us to pollute instead of reuse.

Lucianne Walkowicz: Look up for a change
Lucianne Walkowicz directs our eyes sky-wards in this talk from TEDxPhoenix. As she describes the dangers of light pollution, she shows us the swiftly declining beauty of space — a thing we don’t even realize we are missing out on.

Jason Clay: How big brands can help save biodiversity
In this talk from TEDGlobal 2010, Jason Clay explains that, in our consumer culture, corporations actually have a lot of power to do good. Through transformation, he assists big companies in revamping their structures in order to make more with less — a resource-friendly approach.

Graham Hill: Why I’m a weekday vegetarian
Ever unsuccessfully tried to be a vegetarian? Graham Hill has too. In this talk from TED2010, he shares why he became a “weekday veg” — to help stem the harmful environmental impacts of eating meat, without having to go all the way. With this strategy, Graham cuts his meat intake by 70 percent, and still gets a burger when he really wants one.

Natalie Jeremijenko: The art of the eco-mindshift
Natalie Jeremijenko is head of the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU – whose purpose is to give patients prescriptions to heal their environments. At Business Innovation Factory, she shares how this effort to combine public art and engineering is addressing environmental issues.

Vicki Arroyo knows a thing or two about climate change. A lawyer by training, she is the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, which works on policies to help government leaders (and the world) deal with climate change’s inevitable disruptions. But that’s not the only reason she’s familiar with climate change. As she tells us, she also grew up in New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a disaster in which 1,836 people died, nearly 300,000 homes were lost, and in which her mother and sister were caught up. They were able to get away in time, but their homes — with everything in them — were destroyed.

Other parts of world have been hit by storms in devastating ways, too. And scientists tell us we’re in for more extreme weather, fueled in part by record-breaking temperatures. As we move toward an ice-free planet, as our glaciers disappear, many sources of drinking and irrigation water and hydropower are disappearing. “What,” she asks, “will happen to the millions who depend on them when that’s gone?”

Melting glaciers and intense storms are just two impacts of climate change. While some are still in denial, the evidence is undeniable. In fact, she says, we may have already reached a tipping point. “Climate change is already affecting our homes, our communities, our ways of life,” she says. “This talk is about how we adapt.”

One positive? The changes that are under way will largely manifest at a local level, meaning that we can all play an active role. She quotes the Bob Dylan anthem, bravely singing the punchline: “The times they are a-changin’.”

So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt? She looked at three specific areas of change:

Adapting to storms and floods
Rebuild better. In New Orleans, Interstate 10 has been rebuilt 21 feet higher to cope with storm surges. Brad Pitt and Make It Right have designed and built raised, energy-efficient homes. “Even the church my mother attends has been rebuilt higher, and is poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country,” she says. “Thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more, their electricity bill in March was $48.”

While technology is important, the human element is even more critical. Many of those affected by Katrina refused to leave, because the evacuation vehicles didn’t allow them to take their pets with them. “Imagine leaving your own pets behind,” she says. In the US, the 2006 Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS) removed the need to make that agonizing choice.

Preparing for heat and drought
Heatwaves killed tens of thousands of people in western Europe in 2003, and in Russia in 2010. In Ethiopia, 70% of the population depends on rainfall for its livelihood. Arroyo describes a project sponsored by Oxfam, SwissRe and the Rockefeller Foundation to help farmers build hillside terraces and conserve water. Stability gives farmers confidence to invest and helps them become more productive. “It’s a virtuous cycle that can be replicated throughout the developing world,” she says.

Interesting initiatives are taking place in the U.S., led by Chicago and Washington DC, which last year became a leader in green roofs, funded in part by a 5 cent tax on plastic bags. They split the costs with home and building owners and the result is tamped down heat, reduced emissions, and reduced stormwater runoff. A “win win win,” she says.

Adapting to rising seas
“Sealevel rise threatens coastal ecosystems, agriculture, major cities.” She shows what might happen to San Francisco airport with 16 inches of flooding. It’s not pretty. And there are other effects of rising seas too. Already, San Francisco is spending $40 million to retrofit its water and sewer systems. If those pipes are flooded with saltwater, that would cause backups at the plant and harm bacteria needed to treat the waste.

Again, she urges us to think beyond technical solutions, and shows a picture of raised ventilation grates in New York City to show that solutions can be both attractive and functional. “Designers can integrate the natural environment with climate change in mind,” she says.

Then she sounds a note of caution. “Adaptation is too important to be left to the experts. Why? There are no experts. We’re entering uncharted territory, yet our expertise is based on the past,” she says. The thing is, we can’t rely on established norms any more. Times are a-changin’.”It’s up to us to look at our homes, our communities, our vulnerabilities, our exposures to risks, to find way not just to survive but to thrive. It’s up to us to plan, prepare and call on leaders to do the same even as they address the underlying causes of climate change.”

“There are no quick fixes, no one-size-fits-all solutions. It’s all learning by doing, but the operative word is doing,” she continues. “Adaptation will not be painless and it won’t be perfect, but inaction — no action — is not an option.”

And with that, Arroyo closes her thought-provoking presentation by returning to New Orleans, describing the jazz funeral and its shift from sadness and mourning to celebration and dancing. (It’s illustrated with a picture of her mom, dancing in her wheelchair with the Tremé brass band.) And she concludes, “Just as New Orleans and my people survived adversity in Hurricane Katrina, we can all be open to the radical and, yes, sometimes wrenching changes that climate change will bring. We can work together to protect the cultures and the people that each of us holds most dear.” Lovely.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Drawn into controversy

Wearing his wide-brimmed hat, climate scientist James Hansen starts his TEDTalk by asking, ”What do I know that would cause me, a reticent midwestern scientist, to get arrested in front of the White House, protesting?”

Hansen studied under professor James Van Allen, who told him about observations of Venus — there was intense microwave radiation — because it’s hot, and it was kept that way by a thick C02 atmosphere. He was fortunate enough to join NASA and send an instrument to Venus. But while it was in transit, he became involved in calculating what would be the effect of the greenhouse effect here on Earth.

It turns out the atmosphere was changing before our eyes and, “A planet changing before our eyes is more important, it affects and changes our lives.” The greenhouse effect has been understood for a century. Infrared radiation is absorbed by a layer of gas, working like a blanket to keep heat in.

He worked with other scientists and eventually published an article in Science in 1981. They made several predictions in that paper: There would be shifting climate zones, rising sea levels, an opening of the northwest passage, and other effects. All of these have happened or are underway.

That paper was reported on the front page of the NY Times, and led to him testifying to congress. He told them it would produce varied effects, heat waves and droughts, but also (because warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor) more extreme rainfall, stronger storms and greater flooding.

All the global warming ‘hoopla’ became too much, and was distracting him from doing science. In addition, he was upset that the White House had altered his testimony, so he decided to leave communication to others.

The future draws him back in

The problem with not speaking was that he had two grandchildren. He realized he did not want them to say, “Opah understood what was happening, but he didn’t make it clear.”

So he was drawn more and more into the urgency.

Adding carbon to the air is like throwing a blanket on the bed. “More energy is coming in than is going out, until Earth is warm enough to raiate to space as much energy as it recieves from the Sun.” The key quantity is the imbalance, so they did the measurements. It turns out that continents to depths of tens of meters were getting warmer, and the Earth is gaining energy from heat. That amount of energy is equivalent to dropping 400,000 Hrioshima bombs every day, over a year, and there is as much in the pipeline as has already occurred.

If we want to restore energy balance and prevent further warming, we need to reduce the carbon levels from 391 parts per million to 350.

The arguments against

Deniers contend that it’s the sun driving this change. But Hansen notes the biggest change occurred during the low point of the solar cycle — meaning that the effect from the sun is dwarfed by the warming effect.

There are remarkable records in the Earth of what has come before, and we’ve studied them extensively. There is a high correlation between the overall temperature, carbon levels, and sea level. The temperature slightly leads carbon changes by a couple centuries. Deniers like to use that to trick the public. But these are amplifying feedbacks, even through it’s instigated by small effect, a cycle is set up that feed in on itself: More sun in the summer means that ice sheets melt, which means a darker planet, which means more warming. These amplifying feedbacks account for almost entire paleoclimate changes.

The same amplifying feedbacks must occur today. Ice sheets will melt, carbon and methane will be releaseed. “We can’t say exactly how fast these effects will happen, but it is certain they will occur. Unless we stop the warming.”

The view of the future

Hansen presents data showing that Greenland and Antarctica are both losing mass, and that methane is bubbling from the permafrost. That does not bode well. Historically, even at today’s level of carbon, the sea level was 15 meters higher than it is now. We will get least one meter of that this century.

We will have started a process that is out of humanity’s control. There will be no stable shoreline, and the economic implications of that are devastating — not to mention the spectacular loss of speices. It’s possible that 20-50% of all species could be extinct by end of century if we stay on fossil fuels.

Changes have already started. The Texas, Moscow, Oklahoma and other heat waves in recent memory were all exceptional events. There is clear evidence that these were caused by global warming.

Intergenerational injustice

Hansen’s grandson Jake is super-enthusiastic, “He thinks he can protect his 2 and a half day old little sister. It would be immoral to leave these people with a climate system spiraling out of control.”

The tragedy is that we can solve this. It could be addressed by collecting a fee for carbon emissions, distributed to all residents. That would stimulate the economy and innovation, and would not enlarge the government. Instead of doing this, we are subsidizing fossil fuels by $400-500 billion per year worldwide.

This, says Hansen, is a planetary emergency, just as important as an asteroid on its way. “But we dither, taking no action to divert the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes.”

“Now you know some of what I know that is sounding me to sound this alarm. Clearly I haven’t gotten this message across. I need your help. We owe it to our children and grandchildren.”

Today, photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand launched his movie Home, an environmentally conscious tour of our planet through panoramic vistas that focuses on human impact — our mistakes and possibilities for improvement. Yann took some time out of this busy day to answer a few questions for the TEDBlog by email, going beyond his recent TEDTalk to give us insight on his attempts to document and save our home and humanity.

How was your experience at TED? Did you enjoy giving a TEDTalk?

Wonderful experience, especially the audience and the people I met during the sessions. It would be great if we did something similar to TED in France.

As you can see and hear, even with a lot of rehearsals, I’m not a great speaker. I guess that’s why I take pictures and made a movie.

Have you seen your TEDTalk online? What did you think of it?

Not yet. The last few days have been hectic.

Today is Home’s world premiere. It’s happening in more than 100 countries, in 33 languages and on 65 TV channels from Nepal to Burkina Faso, from Russia to Argentina, and of course in the United States.

Is there anything you would have liked to say in your TEDTalk, but didn’t have time to?

Don’t tempt me. I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.

Why the aerial photography? How did you come to decide that this was the perspective for you? Not scared of heights, we take it?

I learned to be a hot-air balloon pilot to take tourists over the Masaï Mara Reserve, in order to earn some money and finance the work I was doing with my wife Anne. We were studying the life of a family of lions for more than two years. Taking pictures was a way to capture information we could not put in words.

What are the mechanics behind getting your aerial shots? Your website says that helicopters are best, but what do use when one isn’t available? Do you use harnesses for safety?

I have the impression that I’m photographing life, not landscapes. For me an aerial picture is no different than a close-up portrait. It’s a question of framing and angle. Helicopters are great for that. But I’ve also used planes. Of course, I always have a harness.

Any close calls when leaning out of an aircraft to capture an amazing shot? Would you like to share the story?

After Hurricane Katrina, over New Orleans, my helicopter crashed and the pilot and I were only saved because we fell on the roof of a flooded house that absorbed the shock. When the helicopter was spiraling downward out of control, I didn’t expect to survive at all.

You’re a photographer, but also an environmentalist in many ways. Was there a particular experience or time in your life, maybe in your childhood, that sparked your commitment to building awareness of our environment and your fascination with nature?

My fondness for nature goes back to childhood, but it was as an adult that I became an advocate. Like a lot of people, it was in 1992, during the Earth Summit in Rio, that for the first time I heard expressions like climate change, biodiversity, sustainable development. I felt like an urgency to act — or to put it in another way, to use my work for this cause.

READ MORE: Yann talks about more about Home and “6 billion Others,” moving from photographs to film and projects still to come.Can you speak a little more on your movie, Home? Tell us how the project started, why you believe this concept can make a difference and the impact you expect it to have on release.

I discovered Al Gore’s documentary and I decided to help promote it in France. We showed An Inconvenient Truth to the French deputies and senators, because as a whole they didn’t think climate change was an important matter. The legislative power didn’t reflect the opinion of the French people. Polls were showing that climate change was important to them and politicians were lagging behind. This film really helped get the message through. Cinema — moving pictures — is a very powerful medium so I decided to use it and follow in Al Gore’s footsteps.

With regard to your other recent project, “6 billion Others“, can you explain what inspired the move from huge shots of nature to up close and personal interviews? If there’s a connection for you, what is it?

I wanted to learn more about and from the people I was flying over. We must share this planet, but we don’t know anything about our neighbors.”6 billion Others“, like Home, is an invitation to act.

When putting together the project, were there any testimonials that really stood out to you? In other words, do you have any favorites?

Not really. What is special is that you feel during the interview, that the person is saying things she never said before to anyone.

How was the move from still photographs to film? Was that totally seamless for you?

I discovered moving pictures through a series of documentaries from French public television. I didn’t know anything and discovered that, aside from working with a bigger team, it’s the same logic and I got a grip on it.

Any more projects on the horizon?

Maybe a Home 2. At the end of the year, for the Copenhagen meeting, we’ll be interviewing people in different countries — scientists, but also ordinary people — on their perception of climate change.

Watch Al Gore’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2000 times. I’m giving a short slide show this morning that I’m giving for the very first time so — well it’s — I don’t want to read a raise the bar; I’m actually trying to lower the bar — Because I’ve cobbled this together to try to — to meet the the challenge of this session.

And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong’s fantastic kind of presentation. That religion really properly understood is not about believe but about behavior. Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. How dare we be optimistic. Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief. An intellectual posture. As Mahatma Gandhi famously has said, You must become the change you wish to see in the world. And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone. Except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word “behavior” it is also I think sometimes misunderstood in this context. I’m a big advocate of changing the light bulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house and dug the geothermal wells and done all of that other stuff. But as important as is it is to change a light bulbs it is more important to change the laws. And when we change our behavior in our in our daily lives. We sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. In order to solve the climate crisis and we have to solve the democracy crisis. And we have one.

I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. I was reminded of that recently by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her seventies, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction also just staring at me. And so I said, “How do you do?” And she said, “You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore.”

Many years ago when I was a young congressman I spent the an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control — the nuclear arms race. And the military historians taught me during that quest that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global World War. Strategic conflicts. And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources a different approach, a different organizational model. Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories and most of what we think about our local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast and from Western Europe to the Arctic and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide global mobilization for renewable energy conservation efficiency and a global transition to a low carbon economy. We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized in order to mobilize the resources.

Let me show you these slides here. I thought I would start with the logo. What’s missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. Greenland remains. 28 years ago, this is what the polar ice cap — the North Polar ice cap — looked like at the end of the summer at this fall equinox. This last fall I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Post-Graduate laboratory. This is what’s happened in the last 28 years. To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. Here’s what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically. Doesn’t look quite the same size but it is exactly the same size as the United States minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. The amount to disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. Comes back them in the winter, but not as permanent ice. As thin ice. Vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland.

Already around the Arctic circle — this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California. “They were the best of times, they were the worst of times.” The most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a “Tale of Two Planets.” Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth’s diameter is about 400 kilometers larger but essentially the same size. They have exactly the same amount of carbon. But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas et cetera. On Venus most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperatures 59 degrees on average and on Venus it’s 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much out of the ground as quickly as possible and putting it into the atmosphere. It’s not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. It’s three times hotter than Mercury which is right next to the sun. Now, briefly, here’s an image you’ve seen as one of the only old images but I I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate. The global scientific community says, Man-made global warming pollution put into the atmosphere thickening this is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. You all know that at the last IPCC summary. The scientists wanted to say, How certain are you? They wanted to answer that 99%. The Chinese objected and so the compromise was “more than 90%.”

Now, the skeptics say, “Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in the — in this energy coming in from the Sun. If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere. If it’s more coming and if it’s more being trapped on the way out then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the a lower atmosphere. Here’s the stratosphere. Cooler. CSI: Climate.

Now here’s the good news. 68% of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming . 69% believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key. When given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. What is missing is a sense of urgency. If you if you agree with the factual analysis, but you don’t feel the sense of urgency, where does that lead you? Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with CurrentTV who did this pro-bono did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. This is with the winner.

NBC — I’ll show all of the networks here — the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates. Two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions. Two about the climate crisis. Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. From laughs to tears. This is one of the older tobacco commercials.

So here’s what we’re doing. This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. But it’s not just the developed nations. The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace and actually their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent of where we were in 1965. And they’re catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations. By 2025 they will be essentially where where we were in 1985. If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia. Over — over thirty years.

This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The 60s. 70s. 80s. 90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. We have the technologies. We have to have a unified view of how to go about this. The struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions. Paul has a single very simple solution. People say, “What’s the solution?” Here it is. Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax. Revenue neutral. To replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck, some things have changed since the 19th century.

In the poor world we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted if we do not solve the climate crisis. But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. This was from Nature Magazine. These are concentrating solar renewable energy plants linked in a so-called “supergrid” to supply all of the electoral power to Europe, largely from developing countries. High voltage DC currents. This is not “pie in the sky;” this can be done. We need to do it for our own economy. The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these, so I’ll have a disclaimer there. But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovaltaics, efficiency and conservation.

You’ve seen this slide before, but there’s a change. The only two countries that didn’t ratify — and now there’s only one. Australia had an election. And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. Lot of other things contributed to it. But the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia’s position on Kyoto and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. This is lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullins said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names we’d call one in the southeast now Katrina and we would say it’s headed toward Atlanta. We can’t wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture.

Here’s more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the US are up to 780 — and I thought I saw one go by there. Just to localize this. Which is good news. Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. What we need is another hero generation. We — those of us who are alive in the United States of America today, especially, but also the rest of the world — have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice. Just as Jill Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. We now have a culture of distraction. But we have a planetary emergency. And we have to find a way to create in the generation of those alive today a sense of generational mission. I wish I could find the words to convey this. This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. We can do this. Don’t tell me that we don’t have the capacity to do ot. If we had just one week’s worth of what we spend on the Iraq war we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. We have the capacity to do it.

One final point. I’m optimistic because I believe we have the capacity at moments of great challenge to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying “Oh, this is so terrible. What a burden we have.” I would like to ask you to re-frame that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? That has a challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, They were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let’s do that. Thank you very much.

Q: For so many people at TED there is deep pain that basically a design issue — at the end of the day, a design issue on a voting form. One bad design issue meant that your voice wasn’t being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. That hurts.

A: You have no idea. (laughter)

Q: When you look good so what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now — I mean this — are you excited by their plans on global warming .

A: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominees — certain nominee — John McCain, and both of the — of the finalists for the Democratic nomination — all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that — as illustrated by the questions — that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters by the way, the analysis of all the questions — and by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, “clean coal.” I’m — has anybody noticed that? Every single debate has been sponsored by “clean coal.” “Now, even lower emissions!” The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. So they’re saying the right things and they may, whichever of them was elected — may do the right thing — but let me tell — When I came back from Kyoto in 1997 with a feeling of great happiness that we got that breakthrough there and then confronted the United States Senate. Only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say. This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilizations. CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. So that’s why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. Demand — change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy — We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. Have a moratorium — we shouldn’t have any new coal fire generating plants that aren’t able to capture and store CO2. Which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible — This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign — grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper — with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fisherman. We need help. We need help.

Q: And — in terms of your own personal role going forward, is there something more than that you would like to be doing?

A: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? Buckminster Fuller once wrote, iIf the future of all human civilization depended on me, What would I do? How would I be? It does depend on all of us but, once again, not just with the light bulbs. We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. We can change things, but we have to actively change. What’s needed really is a higher level of consciousness. And that’s hard to — that’s hard to create — but it is coming. There’s an old African proverb that some of you know that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” We have to go far quickly. So we have to have a change in consciousness. A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge.

Q: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED.

A: Thank you. Thank you very much.

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You’ve all seen lots of articles on climate change, and here’s yet another New York Times article just like every other darn one you’ve seen, it says all the same stuff as all the other ones you’ve seen, it even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you’ve seen.

(slide of NYT article entitled “How Industry May Change Climate”)

What’s unusual about this one, maybe, is that it’s from 1953. And the reason I’m saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent, that people have just sort of figured out about it now, with Kyoto, and the governator, and people beginning to actually do something- we may be on the road to a solution. The fact is- uh uh. We’ve known about this problem for 50 years, depending on how you count it, and we have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so, and we’ve accomplished close to zip.

This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere, you’ve seen this in various forms- but maybe you haven’t seen this one.

(chart showing CO2 emissions, in various forms, rising over a 20 year period, as explained below)

What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating, and that it’s accelerating even faster that what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible. That emissions would never grow as fast as that red line- but in fact, they’re growing faster.

Here’s some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year’s minimum of the Arctic Sea ice-

(chart- “And, it’s melting quicker than models predict”- showing shrinking ice cover, 1979-2000)

-and it’s the lowest by far. And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models. So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel, and politicians signing treaties, in fact you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative, ’cause it’s just consumed a lot of jet fuel. In terms of what we- (laughter) No, no no! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing- our big economy- we’ve really hardly started. Really, we’re doing this-

(cartoon showing speaker speaking- “blah, blah, blah,…” with windmill spinning in front of his mouth- sign on stage says “Renewable Energy Sources- Harvesting the Wind”)

-basically. Really, not very much.

I don’t want to depress you too much. The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that’s reasonably cheap. Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. So, the problem is soluble, and the way we should go about solving it, is say dealing with electricity production, which causes something like 43 or so percent and rising of CO2 emissions, and we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation, and wind power, nuclear power, and coal to CO2 capture which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment, and work. And all we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. Instead we spend our time talking.

But nevertheless, that’s not what I’m going to talk to you about tonight, I’m going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing.

(chart showing
“Human actions that change climate–> Climate System–> Climate impact on human welfare”
each chart entry captioned below by (in order) “Mitigation,” “Geoengineering,” and “Adaptation”)

And it’s this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don’t stop the emissions quickly enough and you need to deal- somehow break the link between human actions that change climate, and the climate change itself. And that’s particularly important, because of course while we can adapt to climate change, and it’s important to be honest here- there will be some benefits to climate change. Oh yes, I think it’s bad. I’ve spent my whole life working to stop it. But one of the reasons it’s politically hard is there are winners and losers, not all losers. But of course, the natural world, polar bears- I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic- they will completely lose, and there’s no adaption.

So this problem is absolutely soluble- this geoengineering idea, in it’s simplest form, is basically the following. You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles- sulfates- into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they’d reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. And I know for certain that that will work- not that there aren’t side effects- but I know for certain it will work, and the reason is, it’s been done. And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature.

(photo of volcano erupting)

Here’s Mount Pinatubo in the early 90s, that put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere- with a sort of atomic bomb like cloud- and the result of that was pretty dramatic. After that, and some previous volcanoes we have, you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere-

(two charts- one showing temperature change in the lower atmosphere over time, and one of temp. change in the stratosphere, both show eruptions of Agung, El Chichen, and Pinatubo shown by date)

-so this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes. But you’ll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere and the surface, it cools down, because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit. There’s no big mystery about it. There’s lots of mystery in the details, and there’s some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer, and I’ll get to that in a minute- but it clearly cools down. And one other thing- it’s fast. It (sic) really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do- like slowing emissions- are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions. And not only that, when you cut emissions, you don’t cut concentrations, ’cause concentrations- the amount of CO2 in the air- is the sum of emissions over time. So you can’t step on the brakes very quickly. But if you do this, it’s quick. And there are times you might like to do something quick.

This- another thing you might wonder about, is does it work. Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2, and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally? And the answer seems to be yes. So here’s the graphs you’ve seen lots of times before. That’s what the world looks like under one particular climate model’s view-

(“Models suggest the compensation is quite good”- top chart shows global temperatures on a map with double CO2 emissions, bottom shows double CO2 “and 1.8% reduction in solar intensity”, with lower temps throughout the globe)

-with twice the amount of CO2 in the air, the lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8% less sunlight, and you’re back to the original climate. And this graph from Ken Caldera, it’s important to say, came because Ken, at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid-90, Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said geoengineering won’t work, and to the person who was promoting it said- the atmosphere’s much more complicated, there’re a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn’t do a very good compensation- Ken went and ran his models, and found that it did.

This topic is also old. That report that landed on president Johnson’s desk when I was two years old, 1965-

(slide of Johnson’s report-”Restoring the Quality of Our Environment”- paragraph highlighted- The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings. The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes therefore need to be thoroughly explored. A change in the radiation balance in the opposite direction to that which might result from the increase of atmospheric CO2 could be produced by raising the albedo, or reflectivity, of the earth. Such a change in albedo could be……”)

That report, in fact, which had all the modern climate science- the only thing they talked about doing was geoengineering, it didn’t even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. I’m not saying we shouldn’t cut emissions, we should- but it made exactly this point.

So in a sense, there’s not much new. The one new thing is this essay.

(“Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma? An Editorial Essay. Paul J. Crutzen”)

So I should say, I guess, that since the time of that original president Johnson report, and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy, 1977, 1982, 1990- people always talked about this idea. Not as something that was full-proof, but as an idea to think about. But when climate became, politically, a hot topic, if I may make the pun, in the last 15 years, this became so un-PC we couldn’t talk about it. It just sunk below the surface. We weren’t allowed to speak about it. But in the last year, Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what’s all been said before- that maybe given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem, and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. He said, roughly, what’s been said before- the big deal was, he happened to have won the Nobel Prize for ozone chemistry, and so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts. And, in fact, he had some ideas to make them go away.

There was all sorts of press coverage, all over the world, going right down to “Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth,” from the Economist,

(slide of Economist article)

-and that got me thinking- I’ve worked on this topic on and off, but not so much technically- and I was actually lying in bed, thinking one night, and I thought about this child’s toy-

(photo of radiometer, a glass ball with suspended black and white paddles inside that spin in sunlight)

which is- hence the title of my talk- and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin round in the child’s radiometer to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly, the other problem is they’re right in the ozone layer, and I’d prefer them above the ozone layer. And it turns out- I woke up the next morning, and I started to calculate this- and it was very hard to calculate from first principles, I was stumped- but then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic, because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. So it seems there’re already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere, about a hundred kilometers up, that already have this effect.

I’ll tell you very quickly how the effect works, there are a lot of fun complexities that I’d love to spend the whole evening on, but I won’t. But let’s say you have sunlight hitting some particle, and it’s unevenly heated.

(“Photophoresis”- “Uneven illumination”–>”Temperature gradient across particle”- drawing showing sunlight striking particle, warm energy deflected back up, cool reflected back down, net force gradient heading downward)

So the side facing the sun is warmer, the side away cooler, gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity, because it’s warm, and so you see a net force away from the sun. That’s called the photophoretic force. There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit, and of course, we may be wrong, this hasn’t all been peer reviewed, we’re in the middle of thinking about it, but so far it seems good. But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes- much longer than before, because they’re levitated. We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem. I’m sure there will be other problems that arise. And finally, we could make the particles migrate to over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles, which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet where we live, and do the maximum job of what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles, in case of planetary emergency, if you like.

This is a new idea that’s crept up, that may be, essentially, a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in. Whether this idea is right, or some other idea is right, I think it’s almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things than just putting sulfur in. That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this, it’s amazing how we can affect the planet. The one thing about this is that it gives us extraordinary leverage.

(engraving of Archimedes moving the planet with a large lever)

This improved science and engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet. To control the planet. To give us weather and climate control, not because we plan it, not because we want it, just because science delivers it to us bit by bit. With better knowledge of the way the system works, and better engineering tools to effect it.

Now suppose that space aliens arrived on- maybe they’re going to land at the UN headquarters down the road here, or maybe they’ll pick a smarter spot- but suppose they arrive and they give you a box. And the box has two knobs. One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature, maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box. Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. We have no global governance. And different people will have different places they want it set. Now I don’t think that’s gonna happen, it’s not very likely.

But we’re building that box. The scientists and the engineers of the world are building it piece by piece, in their labs. Even when they’re doing it for other reasons. Even when they’re thinking they’re just working on protecting the environment. They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet, they develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it, I do not- but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously, because sooner or later we’ll be confronted with decisions about this, and it’s better if we think hard about it, even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it.

I’ll give you two different ways to think about this problem, that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this, we need a broader debate. A debate that involves musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering, and think seriously about what its implications are. So here’s one way to think about it, which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions, because it’s cheaper. I guess the thing I haven’t said about this is it is absurdly cheap.

(chart showing rise of geoengineering, instead of mitigation, in tandem with rising emission rates)

It’s conceivable that, say using the sulfates method, or this method I’ve come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001% of GDP. It’s very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It’s not a good idea, but it’s just important- I’ll tell you how big the lever is. The lever is that big. And that calculation isn’t much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real (laughter).

So because of this, we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions, and just as the concentrations go up, we can increase the amount of geoengineering. I don’t think anybody takes that seriously. Because under this scenario, we walk further and further away from the current climate, we have all sorts of other problems like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere anyway, nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this.

But here’s a case which is harder to reject.

(same graph, paired with one showing reduced emissions AND “Geoengineering to take the edge of the heat”)

Let’s say that we don’t do geoengineering, we do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. But we don’t really know how quickly we have to cut them. There’s a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. So let’s say that we work hard, and we actually don’t just tap the brakes, but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions, and eventually reduce concentrations, and maybe some day, like 2075, October 23rd, we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. And we have global celebrations, and we’ve actually started to- you know- we’ve seen the worst of it. But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next hundred years, and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. That’s an absolutely possible scenario. We might decide at that point that even though geoengineering was uncertain, and morally unhappy, that it’s a lot better than not geoengineering. And that’s a very different way to look at the problem. It’s using this as risk control, not instead of action. It’s saying that you do some geoengineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not that you’d use it as a substitute for action.

But there is a problem with that view. And the problem is the following.

(chart- “Knowledge that geoengineering is possible–> Climate impacts look less fearsome–> A weaker commitment to cutting emissions now”)

Knowledge that geoengineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. This is what economists call a moral hazard. And that’s one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about, and in general I think it’s the underlying reason that it’s been politically unacceptable to talk about this. But you don’t make good policy by hiding things in a drawer.

I’ll leave you with three questions, and then one final quote. Should we do serious research on this topic? Should we have a national research program that looks at this? Not just at how you would do it better, but also what all the risks and downsides of it are. Right now you have a few enthusiasts talking about it, some in a positive side, some in a negative side- but that’s a dangerous state to be in, because there’s very little depth of knowledge on this topic. A very small amount of money would get us some. Many of us- maybe now me- think we should do that. But I have a lot of reservations. My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem, and I don’t really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. I think there is a serious problem as you talk about this, people begin to think they don’t need to work so hard to cut emissions.

Another thing is, maybe we need a treaty. A treaty that decides who gets to do this. Right now we may think of a big rich country like the US doing this, but it might well be that, in fact, if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this, and they may just decide they’d really rather have a geoengineered world than a non-geoengineered world, and we’ll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision.

So here’s one last thought, which is said much, much better 25 years ago in the US National Academy report than I can say today- and I think it really summarizes where we are here.

(slide in background- “Interest in CO2 may generate or reinforce a lasting interest in national or international means of climate and weather modification: once generated, that interest may flourish independent of whatever is done about CO2″-1982 US National Academy study- Changing Climate)

That the CO2 problem- the climate problem that we’ve heard about- is driving lots of things, innovations in energy technologies that will reduce emissions- but also, I think inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control whether we like it or not. And it’s time to begin thinking about it even if the reason we’re thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn’t do it. Thank you very much.

“The key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming … What we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this.” (From the FT)