[Music]
so when I was 27 I got my PhD in physics
and it was really fun I got to study how
the universe attacks I got to work with
other researchers and students and some
people to help us make it happen it’s
basically a small group of really smart
people and it was a real fun for me but
I could have stayed an academic I could
stayed at the university doing this kind
of thing but life changes on you and one
of the big changes that happened to me
was I got to learn a lot more about
climate change this is what that means
what you have here is a spiral showing
the ink the excess temperature on the
planet every month since 1850 and you
can see that it’s slowly increasing over
time here as getting faster and faster
and faster towards two degrees so now
we’re in 2017 we’re almost at 1.5 No why
does this happen this here is the carbon
cycle now you don’t need to understand
slide and in all its detail the basic
things you need to get away from this is
that there’s constantly carbon dioxide
moving in and out of the natural
environment and on the most important
ones to focus on the ones that we affect
over here on the right is fossil fuels
and cement production that’s cars and
transportation and heating your house
all that is burning fossil fuels that’s
putting extra co2 into the the
atmosphere so it’s changing the carbon
cycle and on the Left we’re changing the
landscapes around us so for agriculture
we’re changing landscapes we’re cutting
down rainforests things like that and
that’s creating more co2 or other
greenhouse gases and they’re all going
into the atmosphere so the balance that
was there before is changing now what
does it mean to put greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere well the way that
planetary scientists think about this is
in terms of energy balance okay
so you have all this energy coming from
the Sun and it shines it bounces off the
top of the atmosphere that’s why we look
like a blue planet from far away and
something that goes through and warms up
and some of that light bounces back up
into space okay all that light that’s
coming on to planet Earth has to be
balanced by energy coming off of planet
Earth otherwise we just explode
okay so what’s what’s going on over here
is we have both sunlight coming back off
or infrared radiation infrared is the
kind of radiation you get from hot
objects if you see an infrared camera
and movies you’ve seen the kind of
people moving around that there you’re
looking at the infrared coming off of
their bodies in this case infrared gets
bounced off the atmosphere it’s like a
blanket and when you pile up greenhouse
gases in this atmosphere the blanket
gets thicker now the way the blanket
works is you get warmer and warmer under
the blanket until you’re warm enough
that enough infrared is making it
through the atmosphere to balance out
the energy balance okay so that’s kind
of the science of this the atmosphere is
a blanket around the planet and when we
add greenhouse gases we make that
blanket more effective at keeping us
warm and maybe two one well just how
long are we talking about well we
measure co2 in parts-per-million now
that does that seems really small okay
right now we’re in about 400 parts per
million but co2 can have very big
effects on the on the planetary
temperature from what I told you about
before every time you double co2 you
increase the long-term temperature of
the planet by a few degrees in this
slide here
that’s quite colorful you get a sense of
where we could be going by 2100 so on
the top scenarios these are scenarios
where we have warming of 3 to 5 degrees
3 to 5 degrees increase in this room may
not seem like much but that’s the
difference between like an ice age and
no ice age okay those are big
differences for the planet now this
happens if we just keep emitting and we
get 2,000 parts per million
these scenarios on the bottom there’s
the good scenarios where we met we
managed to keep the temperature on the
planet in a reasonable place and
planetary scientists think that these
are the only ones where we have avoid
suffering where we avoid major problems
in the future in your lifetime now if
you look at this line this is not
talking about the total pile of co2 in
the atmosphere it’s talking about the
rate at which we’re adding stuff to the
atmosphere and you’ll see here the blue
lines by the time you’re in 2060 by the
time you guys are my age we need to be
taking co2 out of the atmosphere not
even adding anything else to it and if
you delay this kind of progress you’re
still adding to the pile you’re making
the blanket warm bigger you’re making
the planet warmer you’re creating more
droughts more storms more sea level rise
etc in the future now what causes all
these emissions is us so each one of us
has a role to play and what we emit and
what kind of things we consume and what
kind of technologies we use but really
one of the main drivers here is how many
of us there are right now we have about
seven and a half billion people on the
planet by the time we get this is these
are projections from the United Nations
is to come where population is going to
go by the time we get to the end of the
century we could be looking at sixteen
to seventeen billion people you’re not
even sure how we could feed that many
people but that certainly will be a lot
of people emitting greenhouse gases or
we could be on a low trajectory the
green one over here and then we’ll be
plateauing and around nine billion
people somewhere around 2060 again
around the time when you guys are my age
you could be seeing something that’s
never been seen before in human history
you could be see the end of growth and
nobody really knows what that means but
that’s gonna be pretty amazing
now all these humans on the on the
planet we’re also creating other kinds
of problems or we’re coming up against
other what they call planetary
boundaries okay so in Stockholm the
Stockholm resilience is two kind of made
a survey of some of the major things
that we’re pushing up against
so here you’ve seen biodiversity loss
right now is a big issue nitrogen cycle
and you see the climate crisis in the
middle getting bigger and a whole bunch
of other things okay these are all
challenges that you guys are going to be
having to deal with within your lifetime
now I think one of these the freshwater
reviews I found it kind of particularly
visually striking an example for you
guys today this is in was Becca Stan
these are these are fishing boats from a
town a port city on the Aral Sea the
Aral Sea was one of the four largest
freshwater lakes in the world but right
now this doesn’t look like a sea does it
this is the arrow Combe desert the Aral
Sea is shrunk because it’s not getting
enough fresh water in it anymore and
this used to be a fishing community and
now it’s dozens of kilometers away from
the borders of the Aral Sea but look
it’s not all doom and gloom we have a
lot of control over our future there’s
still a lot of things we can do those
scenarios we’re in charge of them are we
going for those yellow lines that go
crazy or we’re going for those blue
lines and there are solutions that exist
today so now I’m not doing physics I’m
working on energy policy and one of the
things I’m working on is to bring things
like these windmills and solar power
into the electricity makes faster and
faster so that we can clean up the power
of the power grid and not emit as much
fossil fuel for electricity we can also
combine that with with other
technologies and to make a functional
grid that works better for us and also
we can work on wasting less energy and
wasting is a big part of the problem
that we have to manage we can also take
this clean energy from wind and solar
and we can use it for things like
transportation that’s called
electrification we take things that we
used to do by burning fossil fuel we use
clean electricity to do it instead so
look over here this is a battery
electric bus okay this thing can go a
couple hundred miles
just on the electric charge in its
batteries so it’s clean and it’s quiet
and it’s not running on a diesel engine
and these are technologies that are that
are here today so there’s plenty of ways
for us to address the climate challenge
it’s not so much about personal virtue
it’s about working together to find
solutions for society but we also are
already seeing the effects of climate
change today okay this huge image here
and you see outlines some of the islands
underneath this is hurricane Irma this
happened this September this is a
picture from September 8th the winds in
the middle of this hurricane were a
hundred and eighty five miles an hour
now I’m sure you guys have put your hand
out the window in the car when you’re
going 3040 miles an hour it feels kind
of cool you do this up and down up and
down imagine winds if your car was going
a hundred and eighty five miles an hour
and that’s just the wind see people were
experiencing that’s a crazy hurricane
this is a category five hurricane and
the weird thing is a month later there
was another one Hurricane Maria and it
hit Puerto Rico and people in Puerto
Rico still don’t have water still don’t
have electricity in many parts of the
island they’re still reacting to this
hurricane now climate change didn’t make
these hurricanes happen hurricanes have
always happened the thing that climate
change does is it heats things up mean
when you heat up the ocean you’re
basically creating more fuel for the
hurricane it’s kind of like having more
fuel for a wildfire or more heat in the
ocean mix stronger work they mix a
meaner and so we’re starting to see
stronger and harder to deal with weather
events already and this is just the
beginning
so to recap here to add to it to deal
with climate change we’re gonna have to
really change our behavior we have to
change the way society organizes we have
to be on those blue curves where we’re
taking carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere by the time you’re my age so
we’re either gonna change the way we
live and the way organ societies
organize pretty radically in your
lifetime or nature is going to do it for
us so that’s a lot of implications for
you
so I wanted to finish this talk by
giving you a sense of what this means
for you okay I’m not trying to get you
out there to go and recycle or whatever
I I’m trying to find a message for you
guys right now about what this means for
how you should organize the course of
your life and I’d like to take some cues
some clues from what’s happened in my
life so I used to be an academic and
work with a very limited set of people
and then I changed the career my career
and now I work with a whole bunch of
different people and my work there are
people with different skill sets people
that are lawyers and economists and
public policy people and then outside of
work I talk to journalists I talk to
politicians I talk to investors I talk
to activists a whole lot of different
people so working with different people
is a really important part of being
successful and in the changing world
that we’re going into it’s gonna be a
really important part free for you guys
and it’s gonna so it’s it’s two things
the first part is being flexible I had
to change from what I was doing in
physics to something else so a lot of
knowledge that I had as a physicist not
so useful to be today for me but a lot
but I still got to take the skills and
the ways of learning as a physicist and
I got to bring them into a new arena and
that was fun
the other thing is I had to learn to
communicate more I had to work with
people that were different from me I had
to write a lot more I had to get up and
give TED talks and hopefully you guys
will do a better job than that then then
I can and and so it’s really important
that you guys learn to find your voice
like who you are but it’s also really
important that you learn how to sing
with other people so good luck
[Applause]
you
[Music]
so when I was 27 I got my PhD in physics
and it was really fun I got to study how
the universe attacks I got to work with
other researchers and students and some
people to help us make it happen it’s
basically a small group of really smart
people and it was a real fun for me but
I could have stayed an academic I could
stayed at the university doing this kind
of thing but life changes on you and one
of the big changes that happened to me
was I got to learn a lot more about
climate change this is what that means
what you have here is a spiral showing
the ink the excess temperature on the
planet every month since 1850 and you
can see that it’s slowly increasing over
time here as getting faster and faster
and faster towards two degrees so now
we’re in 2017 we’re almost at 1.5 No why
does this happen this here is the carbon
cycle now you don’t need to understand
slide and in all its detail the basic
things you need to get away from this is
that there’s constantly carbon dioxide
moving in and out of the natural
environment and on the most important
ones to focus on the ones that we affect
over here on the right is fossil fuels
and cement production that’s cars and
transportation and heating your house
all that is burning fossil fuels that’s
putting extra co2 into the the
atmosphere so it’s changing the carbon
cycle and on the Left we’re changing the
landscapes around us so for agriculture
we’re changing landscapes we’re cutting
down rainforests things like that and
that’s creating more co2 or other
greenhouse gases and they’re all going
into the atmosphere so the balance that
was there before is changing now what
does it mean to put greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere well the way that
planetary scientists think about this is
in terms of energy balance okay
so you have all this energy coming from
the Sun and it shines it bounces off the
top of the atmosphere that’s why we look
like a blue planet from far away and
something that goes through and warms up
and some of that light bounces back up
into space okay all that light that’s
coming on to planet Earth has to be
balanced by energy coming off of planet
Earth otherwise we just explode
okay so what’s what’s going on over here
is we have both sunlight coming back off
or infrared radiation infrared is the
kind of radiation you get from hot
objects if you see an infrared camera
and movies you’ve seen the kind of
people moving around that there you’re
looking at the infrared coming off of
their bodies in this case infrared gets
bounced off the atmosphere it’s like a
blanket and when you pile up greenhouse
gases in this atmosphere the blanket
gets thicker now the way the blanket
works is you get warmer and warmer under
the blanket until you’re warm enough
that enough infrared is making it
through the atmosphere to balance out
the energy balance okay so that’s kind
of the science of this the atmosphere is
a blanket around the planet and when we
add greenhouse gases we make that
blanket more effective at keeping us
warm and maybe two one well just how
long are we talking about well we
measure co2 in parts-per-million now
that does that seems really small okay
right now we’re in about 400 parts per
million but co2 can have very big
effects on the on the planetary
temperature from what I told you about
before every time you double co2 you
increase the long-term temperature of
the planet by a few degrees in this
slide here
that’s quite colorful you get a sense of
where we could be going by 2100 so on
the top scenarios these are scenarios
where we have warming of 3 to 5 degrees
3 to 5 degrees increase in this room may
not seem like much but that’s the
difference between like an ice age and
no ice age okay those are big
differences for the planet now this
happens if we just keep emitting and we
get 2,000 parts per million
these scenarios on the bottom there’s
the good scenarios where we met we
managed to keep the temperature on the
planet in a reasonable place and
planetary scientists think that these
are the only ones where we have avoid
suffering where we avoid major problems
in the future in your lifetime now if
you look at this line this is not
talking about the total pile of co2 in
the atmosphere it’s talking about the
rate at which we’re adding stuff to the
atmosphere and you’ll see here the blue
lines by the time you’re in 2060 by the
time you guys are my age we need to be
taking co2 out of the atmosphere not
even adding anything else to it and if
you delay this kind of progress you’re
still adding to the pile you’re making
the blanket warm bigger you’re making
the planet warmer you’re creating more
droughts more storms more sea level rise
etc in the future now what causes all
these emissions is us so each one of us
has a role to play and what we emit and
what kind of things we consume and what
kind of technologies we use but really
one of the main drivers here is how many
of us there are right now we have about
seven and a half billion people on the
planet by the time we get this is these
are projections from the United Nations
is to come where population is going to
go by the time we get to the end of the
century we could be looking at sixteen
to seventeen billion people you’re not
even sure how we could feed that many
people but that certainly will be a lot
of people emitting greenhouse gases or
we could be on a low trajectory the
green one over here and then we’ll be
plateauing and around nine billion
people somewhere around 2060 again
around the time when you guys are my age
you could be seeing something that’s
never been seen before in human history
you could be see the end of growth and
nobody really knows what that means but
that’s gonna be pretty amazing
now all these humans on the on the
planet we’re also creating other kinds
of problems or we’re coming up against
other what they call planetary
boundaries okay so in Stockholm the
Stockholm resilience is two kind of made
a survey of some of the major things
that we’re pushing up against
so here you’ve seen biodiversity loss
right now is a big issue nitrogen cycle
and you see the climate crisis in the
middle getting bigger and a whole bunch
of other things okay these are all
challenges that you guys are going to be
having to deal with within your lifetime
now I think one of these the freshwater
reviews I found it kind of particularly
visually striking an example for you
guys today this is in was Becca Stan
these are these are fishing boats from a
town a port city on the Aral Sea the
Aral Sea was one of the four largest
freshwater lakes in the world but right
now this doesn’t look like a sea does it
this is the arrow Combe desert the Aral
Sea is shrunk because it’s not getting
enough fresh water in it anymore and
this used to be a fishing community and
now it’s dozens of kilometers away from
the borders of the Aral Sea but look
it’s not all doom and gloom we have a
lot of control over our future there’s
still a lot of things we can do those
scenarios we’re in charge of them are we
going for those yellow lines that go
crazy or we’re going for those blue
lines and there are solutions that exist
today so now I’m not doing physics I’m
working on energy policy and one of the
things I’m working on is to bring things
like these windmills and solar power
into the electricity makes faster and
faster so that we can clean up the power
of the power grid and not emit as much
fossil fuel for electricity we can also
combine that with with other
technologies and to make a functional
grid that works better for us and also
we can work on wasting less energy and
wasting is a big part of the problem
that we have to manage we can also take
this clean energy from wind and solar
and we can use it for things like
transportation that’s called
electrification we take things that we
used to do by burning fossil fuel we use
clean electricity to do it instead so
look over here this is a battery
electric bus okay this thing can go a
couple hundred miles
just on the electric charge in its
batteries so it’s clean and it’s quiet
and it’s not running on a diesel engine
and these are technologies that are that
are here today so there’s plenty of ways
for us to address the climate challenge
it’s not so much about personal virtue
it’s about working together to find
solutions for society but we also are
already seeing the effects of climate
change today okay this huge image here
and you see outlines some of the islands
underneath this is hurricane Irma this
happened this September this is a
picture from September 8th the winds in
the middle of this hurricane were a
hundred and eighty five miles an hour
now I’m sure you guys have put your hand
out the window in the car when you’re
going 3040 miles an hour it feels kind
of cool you do this up and down up and
down imagine winds if your car was going
a hundred and eighty five miles an hour
and that’s just the wind see people were
experiencing that’s a crazy hurricane
this is a category five hurricane and
the weird thing is a month later there
was another one Hurricane Maria and it
hit Puerto Rico and people in Puerto
Rico still don’t have water still don’t
have electricity in many parts of the
island they’re still reacting to this
hurricane now climate change didn’t make
these hurricanes happen hurricanes have
always happened the thing that climate
change does is it heats things up mean
when you heat up the ocean you’re
basically creating more fuel for the
hurricane it’s kind of like having more
fuel for a wildfire or more heat in the
ocean mix stronger work they mix a
meaner and so we’re starting to see
stronger and harder to deal with weather
events already and this is just the
beginning
so to recap here to add to it to deal
with climate change we’re gonna have to
really change our behavior we have to
change the way society organizes we have
to be on those blue curves where we’re
taking carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere by the time you’re my age so
we’re either gonna change the way we
live and the way organ societies
organize pretty radically in your
lifetime or nature is going to do it for
us so that’s a lot of implications for
you
so I wanted to finish this talk by
giving you a sense of what this means
for you okay I’m not trying to get you
out there to go and recycle or whatever
I I’m trying to find a message for you
guys right now about what this means for
how you should organize the course of
your life and I’d like to take some cues
some clues from what’s happened in my
life so I used to be an academic and
work with a very limited set of people
and then I changed the career my career
and now I work with a whole bunch of
different people and my work there are
people with different skill sets people
that are lawyers and economists and
public policy people and then outside of
work I talk to journalists I talk to
politicians I talk to investors I talk
to activists a whole lot of different
people so working with different people
is a really important part of being
successful and in the changing world
that we’re going into it’s gonna be a
really important part free for you guys
and it’s gonna so it’s it’s two things
the first part is being flexible I had
to change from what I was doing in
physics to something else so a lot of
knowledge that I had as a physicist not
so useful to be today for me but a lot
but I still got to take the skills and
the ways of learning as a physicist and
I got to bring them into a new arena and
that was fun
the other thing is I had to learn to
communicate more I had to work with
people that were different from me I had
to write a lot more I had to get up and
give TED talks and hopefully you guys
will do a better job than that then then
I can and and so it’s really important
that you guys learn to find your voice
like who you are but it’s also really
important that you learn how to sing
with other people so good luck
[Applause]
you
[Music]
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