I have no doubt that the fundamental
source of all our problems,
particularly our governmental problems,
is population growth.
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I love the years of living dangerously
because they tackled one of the main
myths about climate change head-on.
One of the main myths is that climate change
is a distant issue. It's distant in space;
it's only about the polar bear, and not about us,
and it's distant in time;
it's only about future generations, not about us.
This is a myth that isn't just among
people who don't think climate change is real.
Even many people who do view it as
"Oh it's just you know we'll
deal with it in the future."
The years of living dangerously said,
"No. We are dealing with
it right now whether you like it or not
and let us show you the faces of the
people around the world who are dealing with it."
So we're not talking like we were 50 years ago, 40 years ago.
Oh, like this will be a problem.
It is a problem.
All the systems we have in place:
agriculture, urban environment.
Everything we've set up
has all been predicated on
this very, very stable climate, which
we're now starting to tinker with,
you know, fiddle with the dials in an uncontrolled way.
The science is looking
at the impact of that on the climate,
the impact on humans, the impact on sea level,
the impact on precipitation.
It's gonna be the impact on food production.
It's gonna be the impact of
where people live, right?
There is a pretty serious impact.
There's gonna be an impact on biodiversity
which, in my opinion has been
bigger than sea level rise, right.
The decay of species.
Unfortunately, it's not the people who are
causing the problems that will be
most affected, so, you know,
American has the highest
commuters per capita.
But it's the people in the developing
natures- regions that will be affected most.
So poor old [Curabeth] is already having
saltwater intrusion, inundation, and sea level rise.
And they're not putting any greenhouse
gas emissions into the atmosphere.
You can imagine that if you're on a
low line pacific island,
well actually a small amount of sea level
makes a massive difference to your livelihood.
Ah, combine that with, you know,
a high tide or a storm surge
and then, you know, we get
regions of the world that are very vulnerable
to these kind of combined events.
We are very, very vulnerable as a species
to relatively small changes in sea level.
There are countries like Bangladesh,
the Netherlands, and all the Atolls
in the South Pacific,
which would be absolutely devastated
from a sea level rise of more than a meter.
Millions and millions of people
are set to be displaced with our
low-end projections of sea level rise.
If we start tracking at higher ends
because of these rapid melting of the land ice
over the Greenland and Antarctic regions,
you could have, you know, even more
rapid displacement of populations.
The sea-level rise around about a meter
it's suggested would displace potentially
up to two hundred million people.
It's very clear that if you push
slowly on the climate,
a lot of the things that we have built
hit sudden thresholds.
Either the city is hiding behind the levy
and the water stays just below
the levy during the storm,
or just above.
And that little change
can make a huge difference to whether
your city is livable or not the next few weeks.
I think in the tropics, there's where
you're going to see the first real impacts
on people, because the people are living right downstream
below the glaciers, and there are
large numbers of people living downstream.
So, what's happening to those glaciers
becomes extremely important.
What glaciers do is
they act as sponges basically.
So, in the winter they hold that
snow that falls,
and then they release that snow
in the dry time of the year,
which is typically the summer.
So what glaciers do is they tend to even out
the annual precipitation that falls,
and essentially allow areas to carry on
to have agriculture, for example, in the summer
when otherwise there'd be areas
that are very, very dry.
If you go to a country like Peru,
seventy percent of the tropical glaciers
on Earth are in Peru, in the Andes of Peru.
Here you have a country of thirty-four million people.
Over fifty percent live in the desert
on the West coast of Peru, depending on rivers that originate
in the glaciers up in the Andes.
Seventy-six percent of their electricity
comes from hydropower,
the water coming from those glaciers.
If you're working in Tibet, there are
forty-six thousand glaciers there.
And you take a river like the Indus river,
it flows through China, through Pakistan,
and through India, all are
nuclear power countries.
All depend on that river for its water supplies.
So these are places, geopolitical hotspots
in the future.
I think perhaps the biggest impact is on agriculture, because the-
if you think of the prairies that
stretch East of the Rockies,
those huge areas are fed by
the rivers that flow from the Rockies.
So you can imagine that if we're trying
to feed a global population, and there are
crops like wheat, for example,
which don't have a high tolerance to
certain high thresholds, then we could be in serious trouble.
Those that don't have access
to things like air conditioning
or good public health infrastructure.
You know, if you get a heat wave
in those sorts of areas
people get sick, or the elderly
generally get really sick after a heat wave.
If they don't have the public infrastructure
to cope with that more people will
unfortunately, be killed.
So when you look at health,
and you look at morbidity and mortality rates,
they increase substantially during heat wave events,
and, in fact, Europe in 2003 there was
somewhere around about
thirty thousand to fifty thousand
excess deaths
due to the heat wave.
Some of my research is in East Africa.
We are seeing climate change impacts
in those places, and they're scary.
You see what happens to people
when the distributions of malaria carrying
mosquitoes expands. It kills them.
It's not an academic issue for me.
This is a deeply ethically based issue.
Climate change in the really short term
is expensive, but not hugely so.
And as the climate change gets bigger,
as we look farther into the future,
the price goes up. The damages go up.
Very crudely, each degree of warming
costs more than the previous degree.
The first degree was almost in the noise
of what we were used to; it's not very expensive.
But we've used that one.
And the second degree will cost
a little more. It's moving outside
of your experience, it's starting to stress things,
and we've committed to that one very broadly.
The third degree costs more than the second.
And by the fourth, and the fifth,
now, sea level rise is going to get huge.
We have real problems with crops,
which may be bumping up against
biochemical limits and the ability to
feed ourselves gets a little bit worrisome.
And so, by the time you start running
to the third, the fourth, the fifth degree,
the cost of damages, the dangers,
go way up. But we're arguing now
about the third degree, because we've basically-
We've warmed almost all of the first one,
and we really have committed
to the second one.
There are consequences in terms
of human life for this.
There are consequences in terms
of extinction rates for this.
There are consequences in terms of ecosystem services.
Every single day that goes by
that we don't begin to address these
problems, the problem gets worse,
more expensive, more immediate,
and in some parts of the world has a toll in
in terms of people dying.
And for me this is
just, like, fundamental. We don't have time
to muck about with this.
This is not an ivory tower argument.
This is one where the consequences are real.
We have to really try and wake people up
to realize that this is happening,
it's very, very serious, but we
can solve it. But we have to do so
not because, you know, it's gonna cut the economy,
but because it's the planet
we live on, and it's the people
that we love that are going to be affect-
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