in reducing global warming by just
choosing something different to eat for
lunch tomorrow would you do it over the
last year I’ve worked with the team on
the largest rainforest conservation
climate mitigation project in the world
this was on some land out in Indonesia
and I wanted to talk to you a couple of
things I learned in that process and
really talk about two things quick
update on climate change or global
warming and second how rainforests play
a critical role in the solution but i
also want to talk about how an
individual one person even you can
really make a difference by the choices
you make and what you eat so let’s let’s
do the quick update on climate change
some of the top scientists around the
world have told us and shown us over the
past 10 years issues been highlighted
that what we’re doing is putting a lot
of extra carbon dioxide co2 and
greenhouse gases into the air and this
extra co2 is forming a thermal
insulation blanket around the planet and
warming it up faster than our natural
systems can actually manage it we didn’t
have this problem before but when we’ve
started using a lot of fossil fuels coal
oil and gas and burning him over the
last hundred years 150 years roughly
we’ve added a lot of co2 and also not
only from coal which makes up about
sixty three percent of the emissions
that are in the air but from deforesting
the forest and burning the trees to
clear them for agriculture or cattle and
that’s somewhere between twenty twenty
and twenty-five and thirty percent of
the emissions in the in the air of a
year these numbers move around but
that’s roughly what’s happening so how
much carbon dioxide’s in the air and why
is that really important this is an
analysis that shows a roughly half a
million years of every year how much
carbon dioxide is in the air and the
data comes from ice core samples that
were taken out of glaciers where every
year the annual snowfall traps air in
that layer you can go back and look at
it and do isotope analysis to figure out
exactly what the
concentrations of co2 or and what you
see is a rough band between 180 parts
per million at the low and 282 300 parts
per million it’s a trace gas at the high
and about every hundred twenty-five
years there’s roughly an ice age and so
the low co2 is correlated to the bottom
of this cycle and the high co2 amounts
correlate to the top end of the cycle
now when it’s really cold at the bottom
of the cycle the temperature the average
temperature in the earth is about eight
degrees Celsius lower than it is right
now the seas are about 350 feet lower
because of all the surface ice that
exists and if you’re standing about here
there’s about a mile thick of ice above
your head but look at the graph and see
what’s happened in the last hundred
years we’ve put in another roughly 120
parts per million in the last hundred
years through this extra missions and
that’s some that’s a lot if you look
over a shorter time period say 1,700
years and you just look at temperature
after a gradual cooling period in the
last hundred years we’ve had this rapid
increase in the temperature of the
planet and it’s up about a one and a
half degrees Fahrenheit which is halfway
to the warmest it ever was in that prior
graph and there’s still more co2 being
pumped into the air so we’re starting to
see this relationship between co2
concentrations and temperature if you
look at observational data which is a
little more accurate than the methods
that were done for the last two graphs
you’ll see a pretty tighter are much
tighter correlation between co2
concentrations and the temperature you
start to see roughly the concentration
last week Noah released some data
showing that 2016 was the warmest
hottest year on record since they
started collecting data now this graph
shows average temperature comparisons
around the world for last year alone and
everywhere it’s red it was warmer and
everywhere it’s blue it was colder you
see there are a couple of cold spots but
they’re actually a lot of red spots and
this is happening all over the planet
and it rates for me it raises a couple
of questions like
we’re still putting a lot more co2 in
the air how hot is it going to get and
the modeling that’s going on now at the
IPCC and other Institute’s is really
focused on trying to figure out the
predictability of how hot it will get
and what do we need to do and can we
adapt to this because it may get warmer
but what does that really mean for us
now and one of the things we’re starting
to notice is there are a lot more
extreme weather events which is defined
as if you look at this graph this is
another analysis of just 2016 the purple
and blue dots are high precipitation at
the extremes those are floods the brown
or the tan dots are actually droughts
low precipitation that’s in comparison
to what the average was for 30-year
period or ending around nineteen ninety
now droughts and floods and volatile
weather not very good for us in fact
that the two and a half million known
species need a much more stable weather
pattern to survive on this planet it’s
highly disruptive to have such extremes
let’s go back to what we could possibly
do about this so as we said we know how
the extra co2 is gotten into the air
pretty accurately mostly Cola Ling gas
some burning of forests but we really
have two problems I think everyone
agrees we’ve got to reduce our emissions
but we really got to figure out a way to
get the extra co2 back out of the air no
one really talks about that a lot and
when you do there’s some scientists who
proposed things like what are called
large geo global projects where you’re
either trying to manage the amount of
energy coming into the Sun and reduce it
so it doesn’t get as hot or you’re
putting large amounts of chemicals into
the Seas or into the air to to manage
the natural cycles that reduce co2
because if we don’t do anything that co2
is going to be in the air for thousands
of years there’s nowhere else for to go
so this is where forests come into play
farce are beautiful they do when you
don’t not cutting them down they do a
lot of things first of all forest take
co2 out of the air in large scale and
they create large banks of what are
called negative emissions or climate
sinks or carbon sinks
these forests and maybe from your
biology class you remember that through
photosynthesis the actual chlorophyll in
the plant’s leaves and the tree’s leaves
take the energy from the Sun convert it
into sugars for food and the trees grow
and store vast amounts of carbon in the
wood and the tree’s roots in the soil
and that is something that we need I
think to allow to happen because if you
look back say 10,000 years before humans
started degrading the forest and cutting
them down there were about 18 billion
acres of forests on the world about half
of those were in the tropics where it
was very wet very hot things grow very
rapidly and in the last 10,000 years
we’ve either degraded which is basically
cut down a lot of them or deforested
eighty percent of the forest on the
planet in fact right now there’s only
around one and a half billion acres of
rainforest left on the planet that’s
that’s the size of an area a little
smaller than Australia every year three
to five percent getting smaller getting
smaller so one of the most destructive
things that’s happening in the
rainforest is the production the
large-scale production of a product
called palm oil now palm oil it’s an
edible vegetable oil it grows very fast
in the tropics it’s the largest
vegetable oil product in the world in
the last 20 years it’s been a product
that you can find in almost forty to
fifty percent of the of the commercial
grocery stores around the world
primarily in Asia and in the US and
Europe you find it in cooking oils you
find it in cookies cakes biscuits
because it’s a semi solid at room
temperature you can use it in other
products to like soaps and shampoos and
cosmetics so we have this use of palm
oil and one of the interesting things
about Paul moles they’re only really two
countries where eighty-five percent of
the palm oil gets grown Indonesia and
Malaysia and for the past 20 years
they’ve been cutting down vast areas of
rain forests and burning them to allow
for palm oil production these are space
shots of the smoke in 2015 that covered
most of Singapore in that whole area
from just far as being cut down it was
during the post El Nino season two so
this was pretty intense the monsoons
come in
and put out a lot of the fires but it’s
a repeating pattern that’s happened year
after year one of the problems here is
there there’s not just one big company
or two big companies doing this in the
forests there are about 150,000 small
farmers spread out over a vast area who
individually cut down small acreage and
then sell their fruits they cut down the
forest they burn the trees clear the
land plant the seeds and then within
three years the plants start growing
they look like this is their small palm
tree plants then within three years I
start harvesting fruit this is what the
fruit looks like that goes to a mill
gets processed and turned into palm oil
so this is the forest before untouched
and a couple years later palm well it’s
a homogenous monoculture lots of snakes
lots of rats but not a lot of other
biodiversity so it creates a problem
where does this biodiversity actually go
because rain forests contain fifty
percent of the biodiversity on the
planet in the areas in Indonesia
Malaysia there’s hundreds of endangered
species and critically endangered
species like orangutang pangolins
hundreds of bird species are being lost
the orangutan kind of special to me
genetically one of our closest cousins
which is great but there are only about
60,000 left in the world and they’re all
in these two countries that’s down
eighty percent from a hundred years ago
and in the next ten years is projected
to thirty percent of the habitats they
live in is going to disappear due to
this process so it’s a pretty tough
problem one of the things you can do and
this is where you come in as an
individual you have to learn it will
take about two minutes for you to learn
how do you identify when there’s Paul
molé and the products you eat it comes
under several names sometimes it’s very
easy it just says palm oil other times
its palm kernel oil because you can
actually take a slightly different type
of oil out of the kernel of the fruit or
palm vegetable oil sometimes it’s
abbreviated in acronyms sometimes it
just says vegetable oil but it’s really
palm well you have to dig deeper and
find out once you learn that you can
look on the ingredients for boxes and
figure out hey is what i’m eating
actually palm oil or not and then what
do you do you have a choice
I call it the just gasps choice you can
either eat it or not eat it but there
are a lot of companies both in the
supply chain and in the consumer goods
area that are very aware of this problem
and have gone out and made no
deforestation pledges which is terrific
they’re aware of this and they’re
starting to work on it but it’s one of
these critical you know easier said than
done situations where because of the
confusion in the supply chain because of
a very difficult challenge of tracing
who actually sold what fruit from what
field from what processing plant through
what processor to a thing it’s extremely
different difficult and these companies
need I would say more than just a little
encouragement to keep on the fight to
try and trace us back and solve this
problem and the way you can do that
because we have great tools and we have
language is text and email you’d be
remarkably impressed how powerful an
individual can be by just texting and
asking a company a question about their
products companies are extremely
extremely sensitive to consumer input in
fact they spend billions of dollars
trying to get you to buy something and
when you stop buying it they want to
know why but if you can get ahead of
them and tell them we don’t like what
you’re doing or we want you to come up
with a substitute use a domestic use
something else but this or prove to us
that you’re actually doing it in a way
that’s sustainable that really helps and
you have that capability every one of
you does so we’re down to a system where
you can either make a choice and do
something about it or continue the
system we’ve set out I actually think
this is one of the more powerful things
because not only by putting pressure on
the companies that do this you can
reduce global warming you can save
biodiversity you can actually get
something else good d thank you for listening