Climate Change Science and Energy Solutions Explained

[00:00:02]good morning welcome to this morning's lecture I'm Brian Kurtz from the math department and I'd like to welcome you to our third and final stem lecture for the semester stem as you may know stands for science technology engineering and mathematics now pleased to introduce to you our speaker Rick Knight who has a degree in chemistry from UIC and studied chemical engineering at IIT Rick had a 40-year career in energy technology at the gas Technology Institute and now serves as a research coordinator for the citizens climate education corporation Rick will speak for about 45 minutes and there should be some time at the end for Q&A so let's give a round of applause for mr. Rick you know what say thanks Bryan hi can you hear me okay out there all right good well as Brian said my background is in chemistry but most of the work I did over 40 years was in engineering mostly process engineering at a company called the gas Technology Institute which is a contract R&D lab that develops energy and environmental technologies for federal state and private industrial clients so when I retired in 2016 I was also involved in volunteer work with the nonprofit called the citizens climate Lobby and its sister organizations citizens climate Education Corp which aims to inform the public and policymakers and the science of climate change and offer policy solutions so now in retirement this is my full-time occupation and as as Brian said I'll be starting shortly as a research coordinator with CCE so enough about me what is this about is it about climate change or is it about global warming global warming or climate change who knows the difference anybody get an idea what the difference is between these two these two things well global warming is a physical phenomenon related to the Earth's energy balance climate change denotes the consequences of disrupting that balance so the relationship looks something like this this leads to this over the four billion years since before we showed up changes in climate were driven by very slow natural cycles in the modern era that scientists call the Anthropocene and particularly in the last century both of these are dominated by human activities and let me explain how I mentioned the planets energy balance so what is that all of the energy that warms the earth comes from the Sun mostly as visible light that passes right through the atmosphere about half of that sunlight is reflected back to space by the surface and by clouds but the part that doesn't get reflected back one's the surface and like all warm objects that gives off infrared radiation that depends entirely on its temperature some of that radiation makes it back through the atmosphere into space taking heat away from the earth this creates an equilibrium energy in equals energy out that's the Earth's energy balance the temperature of the surface controls how much heat radiation goes back into space to balance the incoming sun's energy and settle down to a steady average temperature but that's not the whole story some of the gases in the air trap infrared radiation according to basic chemistry that is not in dispute most of the atmosphere consists of gases that do not absorb that energy but there are some that do these gases are called greenhouse gases so why did Al Gore inventing house gasses in the first place well that's silly of course no one invented them they just are so how does it work let's zoom in on the atoms and the molecules to find out let's pretend we have a really powerful microscope here's what makes up most of our atmosphere nitrogen oxygen and a bit of argon and I'm showing them in proportion to their molecular size which has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect our global warming but anyway those gases make up 98% of the air they are not greenhouse gasses which means what well when a warm surface gives off infrared radiation it comes out in little packets called photons and if an infrared photon runs into a nitrogen molecule nothing happens it doesn't interact with it and it continues going out into space same thing with oxygen and the same thing with Aragon but there are also these greenhouse gases water carbon dioxide and methane and there are a few others together they comprise most of the other 2% so that's what's in the air now if an infrared photon collides with a greenhouse molecule like water its radiant energy is converted to kinetic energy in the form of molecular motion specifically vibrational motion modes like stretching and bending same thing happens with carbon dioxide and the same thing with methane the photon is annihilated but its energy is conserved in the form of kinetic energy so what does that do in the atmosphere populated with trillions upon trillions of molecules here's a crude two-dimensional snapshot with nitrogen oxygen argon and water molecules in about their right proportion and they would actually be in a lot of motion but for simplicity I have them stationary here so again if we shoot an infrared photon through it and it doesn't encounter any greenhouse molecules it just passes right through but let's take out one of those nitrogen's and replace it with a co2 now if your photon starts its journey and smacks into the co2 molecule it's radiant energy is stored in the molecule as kinetic energy and with all those other molecules around they do get some of that energy through collision rotational translational and vibrational kinetic energy and what is temperature it's the average kinetic energy of a collection of molecules so the more of those greenhouse molecules that are mixed into the mix the greater the probability that a photon will hit one of them and transfer its energy raising the temperature so that's how it works okay so back to the energy balance because of the greenhouse effect those few molecules trap heat in the lower atmosphere where we live this raises the temperature until the surface emits enough additional heat radiation to restore the balance energy in once again equals energy out and we're lucky it exists because it makes the difference between the earth being a frozen ball of ice and the beautiful place it is today full of life having just the right amount of greenhouse gases makes this possible but if somehow more of these gases are added they absorb more of the infrared radiation coming off the earth and the temperature goes up accordingly causing more infrared to restore the balance of course weather fluctuates from place to place and day to day but over time those variations averaged out with greenhouse gases increasing though more heat is trapped every year on top of those natural variations now nature also has ways to take back greenhouse gases these are called sinks the main sinks for co2 are plants oceans and rocks now plants take co2 out of the air to grow secondly co2 dissolves in water so the oceans draw some of it from the air and third minerals in the earth also take up co2 but this takes thousands of years to make those carbonate rocks naturally so what about methane and water vapor I mentioned those well methane is a potent greenhouse gas but it breaks down in a few decades and water vapor only lasts a few days before it comes out as precipitation and I'll have more to say about those later but understand that co2 is the one with the real staying power those plants oceans and rocks act like a sort of planetary air conditioner when co2 goes up so that life forms can slowly adapt however if it's added too fast the air conditioner can't keep up imagine it's a blistering hot day and someone opens all the windows and doors you can set the thermostat as low as you like but the air-conditioner will never catch up so that's the scientific basis let's see what has actually happened this is the Keeling curve Charles David Keeling was a geochemist who perfected a way to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back in 1958 he worked diligently for more than 40 years to document the climbing co2 level the first warnings about its effect came back in 1964 around there because scientists already knew for a long time that co2 was a greenhouse gas and that it was building up from burning fossil fuels we've continued doing that and this is the result just like the energy balance predicts this is actually the heat content in the ocean which is most of that excess heat the heat buildup measured for the planet at least through 2014 in this case has increased and here's how it lines up with the Keeling curve now taken by itself these two curves would just be circumstantial evidence it wouldn't prove the connection with greenhouse gases but the science I just showed you provides the theoretical basis to explain the data so why does that matter it matters because actions have consequences let's talk about ice warming at the poles is happening faster than in the temperate zone where we live which is predicted by climate models this has cascading impacts on climate all around the world up at the North Pole we have Arctic sea ice now sea ice floats so it doesn't directly affect sea level but its loss has a profound effect on weather through the loss of albedo what's albedo that's simply the reflection of sunlight if you remember that energy balance this creates a feedback that I'll explain further here's how it works Arctic ice is really good at reflecting sunlight it reflects most of it but open water on the other hand only reflects about 10% and retains 90% so most of the sun's heat stays in the water reflects from the ice so when the sea ice melts because of warmer air temperatures it exposes more of the dark water which retains more heat and that retained heat tends to melt more of the ice that's the feedback loop that can become self reinforcing let's watch a video from NASA that shows what's already happened up around the North Pole we start in 1984 when they first started getting these satellite pictures this bar graph at the at the lower right I don't know if some of you may not be able to see it but it shows the age of the ice which is also important the surface area and the age so this is surface area and square kilometers in the age which means four years or more is the oldest ice so watch the year up here at the upper-left okay all of these were taken in September when the ice is at its lowest point and you can see that even in years when the ice extent is the oldest ice is starting to shrink and and it's getting a little more pronounced when you get up into the 2000s and then we get into the years when the total ice extent was so low that we almost had open water at the North Pole and that's definitely not supposed to happen so here we are 2012 2013 2014 and last year 2016 the ice cover has shrunk by almost half and most of it down here is less than two years old so let's get back to this slide some scientists proposed that this Arctic warming is also affecting the jet streams what our jet streams their high-altitude rivers of air that control a lot of our weather and the rapid polar warming juiced-up by the loss of albedo appears to render them weak and wavy creating so-called blocking patterns that result in sharper extremes of weather down here in the mid latitude so you can have temperatures in Chicago that are warmer than that are cooler than temperatures up in northern Alaska even on the Arctic Ocean you might have even seen that if you looked in the last couple days so there's that but let's get away from sea ice now and talk about land ice unlike the floating ice sheets there are massive polar ice sheets on land areas like Greenland and Antarctica they contain a vast amount of Earth's fresh water if that stuff melts and runs into the sea that added water creates all kinds of disruptions not the least of which is sea level rise which is thoroughly documented about half of it is from thermal expansion as the water warms and the other half from melting ice sheets and glaciers so who knows how much sea level has risen in the last century anybody want to guess a number anybody okay I'll take a wild guess here's a chart that shows it since 1917 it's been about seven inches it doesn't sound like much seven inches but it's already having effects on saltwater intrusion and flooding in coastal cities like Miami these few inches can also make a big difference when it comes to storm surge which we saw in New York and New Jersey when they got hit with superstorm sandy and it flooded the subways and speaking of storms let's look at how global warming affects weather higher temperatures lead to more evaporation which together with changes in polar ice affect the patterns that govern our weather and the expectation more energy for storms warmer oceans strengthen expand and prolong hurricanes making them wetter and more destructive and this supercharging of storms leads to more frequent and prolonged flooding in the last few years we've seen dozens of multibillion-dollar floods just in the u.s. not to mention around the world at the same time higher temperatures on land areas lead to record-breaking droughts like the California drought that dragged on for six years until last winter and that together with blistering heat waves increases wildfire risk but at the same time these changes in the jet stream plus higher humidity in the atmosphere can send massive snowstorms down in the winter which may be counterintuitive how can global warming increase snowstorms but the evidence is growing to support it now while there's no real debate among scientists about the cause of global warming there is debate about to what extent it contributes to specific events that's why a new sub discipline of climatology has arisen which is called attribution science and in one 2011 paper it was defined this way attribution is defined as the process of evaluating relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with an assignment of statistical confidence so I highlighted what I think are the key words here relative contributions multiple causal factors statistical confidence stressing again that for an individual event global warming is always one of multiple causal factors and it's very important to recognize the inverse of this statement which is that no individual weather event ever has a single cost that's the correct answer to the question of whether global warming caused the specific event it's a meaningless question in that way so in plain language weather events are born from many factors of which global warming is one did it make it more likely did it make it more severe and if so how much that's what attribution science tries the answer so I'll just give you one recent example here's an analysis of the 2015 alaska fire season which was one of the worst in its history in terms of acres burned the metric they uses build up index or Bui over here which is a measure of fuel availability and flammability in which Canadians use as a measure of wildfire risk now this research team modeled the Bui conditions in Alaska using data back to 1979 and some projections up to 2045 and they concluded that they could attribute between 34 and 60 percent of current Alaskan wildfire risk to global warming of course a fire cannot be caused by climate change has to be ignited somehow and that in fact that would be a rather meaningless question did it cause a wildfire the meaningful question is how much did it contribute to the risk of wildfire so I've thrown a lot of stuff at you in the last 15 minutes now what about the future where are we going from here and of course it depends on what we do here's some scenarios calculated by the IPCC the International Panel on Climate Change the co2 concentrations are shown here on the left and here's about where we're at a little above 400 this RCP 2.6 is the low emission scenario it assumes emissions peak in just a few more years and the high emission scenario here assumes emissions peak assumes emissions rise per the current trend and there are other scenarios in between so depending on what we do the future will be somewhere in this wedge so that's what happens with co2 concentration depending on how we bathe as a people what about sea level here's a forecast of sea level rise in meters assuming business as usual from some Australian scientists this shows the rise in meters above the 1990 level and the magenta line here indicates the expected range of rise from well characterized model elements like thermal expansion and melting of glaciers which amounts to about twenty to sixty centimeters one to two feet the red line shows their best estimate of what they call nonlinear Ice Sheet disintegration the modeling of which is still under development which raises this up to 80 centimeters but make note of this dry little observation larger values cannot be excluded because we still don't have a good way to model how ice sheets behave when they just break down from from collapse and some tap scientists notably dr. Jim Hansen at Columbia argued there's potential for sea level to rise by several meters that would flood coastal areas that are home to hundreds of millions of people in major cities around the world forcing them to migrate somewhere who knows where they might end up so I'm going to pause here and if there's any questions I can take one or two questions about climate science before going on to energy anybody got any questions fellow up front here might say again how long okay the question is how long would it take to reverse the damage that we've already done paper had just read a couple days ago said we need to do it about in the next 30 years but actually there's so much inertia in the system that it would probably take a century before we get back down to where we started so it's it's a little bit unclear except that we've got to start right away and we're not really anything else okay I'll move on talk about energy so we all know about greenhouse gases or ghgs and that they're responsible for global warming and what are the sources of these these bad actors their fossil fuels agriculture and land use changes the fossil fuels we all know produce co2 when burned along with a little methane agriculture emissions are mostly methane from cow burps and manure and nitrous oxide another one I didn't mention before from both manure and from fertilizer and finally land use refers to the clearing of forests for farmland which releases all kinds of greenhouse gas where are these really separate things no because they're all enabled by the low price of fossil energy fossil fuels it's obvious agriculture large-scale factory farming is possible only because human labour has been replaced by machines that run on diesel fuel in our meat rich and junk food diets and I'm as guilty as anyone they're made possible because processing transportation and packaging of this stuff is so inexpensive because of the low cost of fossil energy land-use change may be a more subtle connection but it comes right down to the same argument about how big plantation farming is only profitable if the downstream costs of getting products to market are so low so its fossil fuels and it's a lot it's a lot of emissions don't take my word for it let's see some numbers who can tell me or guess how long it takes the United States to admit this amount of greenhouse gases anybody want to take a guess an hour less than a day one second in the time it takes me to say this sentence America will have emitted over 1200 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and 90% of it is from burning fossil fuels so let's break that down a bit further here's how much of it comes from power generation about 30 percent about another quarter from transportation mostly cars industry emits about a fifth about half as much again from buildings and about 9% from agriculture so fossil fuels are sprinkled across all of these sectors 90% is still from energy now not all energy is from fossil fuels but most still is let's take a look at how energy use has grown around the world in less than 200 years it went up more than 1,800 percent that's 18 times isn't that just because there are more people partly but not entirely energy use per capita went up 400% and even more than that in wealthy nations like the u.s. now if you look at these wedges you can see how fossil energy really dominates and it compares with non-fossil sources like biofuels and and nuclear power it's mostly fossil and I'll get back to those in a minute but first it's also useful to break down how we use fossil energy there are mainly three ways we use it to heat things to move things around and to make electricity which is also used to heat things and move them around and light things up and show slides and stem lectures this one is done mostly with gas this one is mostly oil and this one is mostly coal at least on a worldwide basis there's some overlap heat pumps heat with electricity and electric cars drive around there's natural gas used for power generation but for the most part this is the big picture and it helps us organize ways to replace fossil energy that is to decarbonize our energy system there are lots of decarbonisation options let's start with electricity the fastest-growing energy type here's a list of ways to decarbonize we can replace fossil energy with renewables like solar and wind and hydropower and various kinds of ocean power they use the motion of waves or geothermal power coming from under the ground or sustainable bio power or we can advance new safer kinds of nuclear power or there is also carbon capture and sequestration which would actually take that's - co2 away from fossil fuels or from biomass which would actually remove some co2 from the atmosphere to solve the intermittency problem with wind and solar we need lots of energy storage batteries molten salt even liquid air and all of these need to be integrated with the power grid which is no small task now all of these will need to contribute especially if the demand for electric cars and electric heat pumps takes off so let's look at how to decarbonize heating this ranges from residential and commercial building heating to industrial heating of all kinds here are some of the options this is the sector where efficiency can really be improved especially in buildings with insulation lighting building design a solar heat is mostly for hot water which can be greatly expanded electrification here will be required to harvest the renewable power from that first column and and biogas here is a way to replace natural gas with renewable methane from biomass and similarly power to gas something that you may have never heard of it's a way to actually use renewable electricity to convert co2 and water to renewable methane or even renewable gasoline so that's an overview of options for heat now let's look at the third sector motion here are some broad categories of transportation options electrification which is electric vehicles ten years ago these didn't exist but now there are dozens you can buy anybody here drive an electric car or a plug-in okay well the options are there and there's also hydrogen starting to show up in fuel cell vehicles although it needs to be made from renewable electricity to be really a decarbonisation now there's also cars that run on natural gas and if you can replace the gas in the pipeline with some of these renewable types of methane you can make those more sustainable and there are advanced biofuels and not talking about the ethanol from corn but advanced biofuels with low carbon footprint that can be used in existing cars while this electrification takes place and also in trucks ships and planes so under each one of these bullets there are there are hundreds of innovations waiting in the wings the question still is are they enough to get the job done could we really manage this without tanking the economy as some people claim one group studying this question is called the deep decarbonisation pathways project whose goal was to see if it is technically feasible to cut emissions 80% by 2050 with existing technologies they produced a very detailed report in 2014 and besides technical feasibility they also looked at the impact of decarbonisation and the economy they considered four different pathways a high renewables pathway high nuclear high CCS which again is carbon capture and storage in a mixed pathway which is a balanced blend of all these so what did that studies show for the electric power sector shown here they're mixed pathways scenario looks like this the scale on the left is terawatt-hours and this is the energy mix that we had in 2015 so projected ahead to 2050 based on this mixed pathway even though the total power demand just about doubles fossil fuel generation could fall by 90% and to replace this all of these others can grow to meet the demand and so what is what does this team predict for a cost to the economy 0.8 plus or minus 1% of GDP which is statistically zero and this is very important it did not take into account cost savings from avoided climate change impacts if you also factor that in it's clear we should be able to transform our energy system without any big new breakthroughs and without putting a drag on the economy so what I just showed you is how technically we can reduce greenhouse emissions by as much as 80 percent in a few decades but even that may not be enough to stop the global heat buildup we're experiencing fortunately there are ways to actually remove co2 from the air starting with the use of carbon sinks that Nature has already given us sometimes called Carbon Farming which sounds really tree huggy but actually makes economic sense for farmers this array of methods includes well known practices like planting cover crops and no-till planting also large-scale composting to supplement synthetic fertilizer agroforestry where crops and trees are cultivated together and livestock rotation which can greatly boost carbon uptake in pasture lands in 2015 the French Agriculture Minister testified that these practices if widely adopted could sequester as much as four billion tons of co2 which would amount to almost 2 ppm of atmospheric co2 each year so while we're far from that worldwide goal clear the potential is huge okay do we have time for a few questions on the energy topic I don't see my host anywhere think he left Mia what time we got right now any questions on the energy topic gentleman over here okay the question is are there filters that can remove carbon from the atmosphere currently there are people working on this there actually is a private company I think out of out of Massachusetts that claims they can do this it's extremely expensive to do because you have to move a lot of air through some very big absorbers and take that co2 out of the atmosphere and then put it somewhere so it's it's technically possible but as I showed that the most straightforward ways this through using what nature has given us any other questions on energy livestock rotation is boy I wish I was more of an expert on this one I they instead of putting the cattle in feedlots where they just stay there and they feed him the corn they move them around on pasture land from place to place and and and you know the cattle leaves their droppings everywhere and they trample the grass in such a way that they actually put a lot of carbon in the soil so there's been some pretty big scale projects I think mostly in Africa to show that this this method stores a lot of carbon in the soil anything else lady up here [Music] yeah the question is solar shingles which Tesla actually sells right now to generate electricity you put you put these shingles on your roof in place of a normal roof and it generates power and the question is do I think those will get anywhere right now that's a that's a replacement for a very expensive type of roof but you can if you have a big enough roof you can't actually generate all the power that you need for that house with solar shingles so there are a lot of innovations like that that are good for very wealthy people who really want to reduce their carbon footprint but to expand that to the general population it's going to take something else a little more but that's a very good question and it is commercially available so next house that you buy you you can put a solar roof on there and let me know how it works out another question over here yes sir has anyone taken a definitive a real careful look at the attribution issues are you feeling with like the Milankovitch cycles yes okay what portion of this is is astronomical the a portion of it is is terrestrial one of my old colleagues from the guess technology institute bill rush the question is about the Milankovitch cycles which is is the astronomical cycle that has been pretty much agreed on as the source of our ice ages and those Milankovitch cycles are anywhere between twenty to forty thousand years so if it was only the Milankovitch cycle was affecting our climate we would be in a very very slow cooling period right now because we we kind of peaked about 10,000 years ago and it would be something on the order of 0.1 or 0.2 degrees C per century where we're about 50 times faster than that right now in the wrong direction so the Milankovitch cycles don't seem to be a major factor in the current global warming let me how much time have we gotten now Brian I would go another 5 10 minutes of lecture okay I better get moving that okay as I said before actions have consequences and ecosystems are the glue that holds our world together like bones muscles nerves blood vessels everything that binds together the living world and here are some of the ways climate change is impacting ecosystems habitat loss for all kinds of creatures fish insects birds people loss of biodiversity weakens the resistance of species to disease and stress pests and pathogens from bark beetles to the Zika virus they're expanding their range because of changing temperatures besides weather extremes the loss of beneficial species along with the spread of harmful ones threatens our food supply and I haven't even talked about ocean acidification about 30% of that co2 is going into the oceans changing its pH balance and this is already starting to affect species at the bottom of the food chain that use calcium in the oceans to build protective shells all of these things upset the natural bounds of ecosystem services that people depend on to survive all of us to some extent but some more than others which raises the question who gets hurt if we do nothing well look at this map the reddest areas are the areas where people will be hurt the most not necessarily where climate changes the most but where people are least able to cope with its impacts depending on their wealth resources mobility education and so on take a look at where most of those red areas are the places with the currently the weakest governance and the greatest potential for conflict and the displacement of people that always comes from that conflict in today's world no ocean is wide enough to keep us from those problems especially when we look at who've done it sure everyone contributes but if you look at the total amount of greenhouse gas emitted we're pretty darn red just a little behind China and a bit ahead of India and Brazil but if you look at the emissions per person we're pretty close to the top only Australia and a few of these tiny Gulf states are brighter red China and India are not even close so when you combine total emissions and emissions per person it speaks to our responsibility to solve this problem we pride ourselves on our generosity and global leadership and I don't know about you but I want us to be the good guys I want us to lead the way in solving climate change so how to solve it remember when I showed this slide here's the key fact all of the sources of greenhouse gases are enabled by the low price of fossil energy you might be thinking what do you mean low have you passed a gas station lately it's three dollars a gallon the point is that those costs though they may seem high compared to yesterday they don't include the indirect costs or what economists call externalities it's simple math those costs from all the impacts I showed you which are growing every year have to be paid but they are paid through our taxes our insurance our health costs even our national security costs which are higher when people anywhere in the world are subjected to climatic risks and as long as the price of fossil fuels doesn't include the full cost someone somewhere will burn them so the solution is to put a price on carbon and recycle the money back into the economy in such a way that it incentivizes market adoption of the innovations we already have values behaviors that reduce greenhouse gas emissions by businesses and consumers but protects most American households from having to shoulder the burden of the transition and finally shields domestic industry from competitive pressures that would otherwise lure them overseas and as for how to put a price on carbon there are two general methods cap-and-trade works by putting a cap or limit on the emissions coming out of each smokestack auctioning co2 permits and then creating a market to trade them it requires the government to decide what kind of emitters get kept power plants steel mills how big they have to be to require a cap and then how big each cap should be then the emitters who are over there cap can buy permits from those that are below theirs and these permits are then traded on Wall Street where the price is hashed out the government gets money from auctioning the permits and caps are tightened up every few years a carbon tax on the other hand is imposed on the fuel not on the emissions okay the fossil fuel company pays the money into a fund the carbon price per ton goes up every year at a legislated rate the advantage as you can see is greater simplicity no need to figure out caps for tens of thousands of of emitters every fossil fuel seller pays the same carbon price and it doesn't involve Wall Street at all but then in either case there's still the question of what happens to the money the government collects so one answer that my organization favors is called the carbon fee and dividend I'm not going to delve deep into the in the stem lecture but just give you a quick overview in a nutshell fossil fuels are subjected to a fee based on their carbon content as soon as they enter the economy the fee is raised by a fixed amount every year the money goes into a special fund called the carbon fund and all the money is then recycled back into the economy as a monthly carbon dividend equal to all residents each adult gets the same amount you me Bill Gates and the guy who cleans the bathroom children get a half share and for the final piece to shield businesses from unfair foreign competition there's an adjustment on carbon intensive goods to level the playing field and here's how that works these goods like steel paper and cement use a lot of energy to make so imports from countries that don't have carbon pricing would hurt companies or tempt them to move so first we impose a border Carbon adjustment right here it's proportional to the emissions they they were responsible for and the second step when our products are exported we give them a rebate for the carbon fee associated with their manufacture so that's a quickie version of the carbon fee and dividend and you can learn more on our website okay so let me summarize all the things I threw at you in in this lecture global warming is a physical phenomenon caused by the rapid buildup of greenhouse gases that's profoundly changing the global climate in other words it's real this build-up is entirely a result of human activity mainly the combustion of fossil fuels in other words it's us there are no alternative explanations the current warming rate is about 50 times faster than any natural cycle and because our civilization has grown up during a long period of climatic stability we are exceedingly vulnerable to sea-level rise weather extremes never seen before and massive ecosystem disruptions of which we already see the first symptoms in other words it's serious but we humans have something previous life-forms did not have great big brains and all we need to do is use those brains we know how to fix it if we can just put those brains to work and work with each other in other words there are solutions there are many ways of meeting all our future needs with little or no greenhouse gas emissions if we can just overcome our desire to pretend the problem doesn't exist both scientists and economists tell us that carbon pricing is a necessary step so there you have it that's the end of my lecture any questions for Rick time for questions well you gotta have some gentlemen from with all this the question is with all this information how are there people that don't believe in climate change in global warming if I could really answer that question we'd be in much better shape well you know that kind of departs from science and technology but from what I've read there there was there's a group at Yale University that studies studies this and they say that the biggest dis disconnect between reality and what people perceive is they think scientists don't agree actually it's close to 100 percent then there's number 97% that's been thrown around a lot it's pretty close 97% of active climate scientists all agree and the mechanisms and and what's going on but most people think it's about 50/50 so that's due to a small group of very active people who are having a lot of money and spend a lot of time going on cable news writing op-eds in the newspaper to to cast doubt on people's mind in fact if you've never come across a book and there's also a film called merchants of doubt that will really tell you a lot about why how this is working you know how how this group of people is casting doubt on climate science for reasons that are both ideological and financial the way you have opposed the situation the technical and economic roads are available but it's really a political issue isn't it yeah we have to get our society to do as a whole decide that this is yeah as bill says it's it's a political question how do we get our society as a whole to to move forward and there there has been a shift in recent years probably because of all these crazy weather events that we've been seeing towards taking it more seriously the problem is that for most people when they walk out their front door everything looks pretty much the same you know it goes up a couple degrees sometimes there's a hot day you stay in run your air conditioner it doesn't affect us in a way that we feel the urgency as we do for things that are more immediate this is where policymakers should be taking the lead not waiting for people to force them to do it if they don't do it it's it's because our political system is driven by by money and by people in the media that that have their own interests at heart so it's it's kind of a big question but it's a good one any other questions for Rick in the back there a young lady so I've read so I've read once that if the demand don't be produced by like or to the half that can effectively reduce the global warming by itself is that true where I couldn't quite make us yeah you couldn't hear you that well so I've read once that if the demand on beef dropped to the half that can effectively reduce the global warming like by like that by itself can it can it be true if the demand on beef oh if the demand of beef we're to fall by half yeah beef is a very carbon intensive kind of food but I I don't know what the numbers are but I suspect it would probably be in the 10% range perhaps you know it's it's not a major I mean it's one of the many many things that need to change in order to reduce the carbon output and it's a very very good one and it's easy to do I've cut my hamburgers down from two a day to one not nearly that much but yeah it's it's a it's a great point cool it works hi what do you know the Paris agreement and how is our separation from it as an ancient kind of affected yeah mobile attack on it okay the question is about the Paris agreement that's an agreement that was made actually started two years ago and finalized last year where 197 countries all agreed to move towards certain targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and now the current administration has said that they are withdrawing from the Paris agreement we actually are not out of the Paris agreement because it takes two years even to begin the process of withdrawing and it would take three years to completely withdraw so we're still in the Paris agreement but those targets are really not binding they're just promises so it's kind of a nebulous thing whether how it's going to impact the worldwide efforts right now we are the only country that has said that we're not going to abide by the Paris agreement political change needs to happen in order to change that and I'm not just talking about the partisan political change we all should be going to our members of Congress and telling them that we want them to take action I want to mention that there's a caucus in the House of Representatives called the climate solutions caucus that has 60 members 30 from each party so that means there's 30 Republicans in the house people don't know about this that have made a commitment to work on climate change so don't be misled by the hyper partisanship that you see out of the media there are people that do want to change this and we need to get engaged with our members of Congress another question all right now apparently my question to you is that wouldn't you say that another problem would be that religion plays a big pole in this debate because you have people in this country who are indoctrinated you know to not believe in cert let's say science or like like put this way like it like mostly like in the South are like people who are I kind of see more in the more religious parts of the country would you agree that because of people who use religion as the excuse to like not believe and not say just not just climate science but also other Sciences would you say that religion is part of the problem yeah well of course there are those who claim their religious beliefs don't allow them to accept climate science accept the fact that man could affect the climate but interestingly among evangelicals there's a big split here there are actually many evangelical Christians who who adopt the stewardship principle that we are responsible for creation and maintaining it so it's it's a little bit hard to fathom what makes anybody think that they should reject science other than just the general mistrust of scientists I think in among some communities but I think the the leaders of those religious organizations can change that if they make up their minds to do that hi I had a quick question earlier you were talking about that plus or minus one point one percent can you further explain that you're not saying that it would take the government would pay zero dollars but could you just further explain that please about the cost of the economy dealing with energy yeah yeah what what you know what that means is that if you if you look at how much capital will have to be taken out of service and how much new capital has to be brought online and perform of all these wind farms and so on and jobs that the net cost of the economy will be essentially zero it has it's not really a government issue it's it's kind of a macroeconomic issue but the the message there is that we can do this without creating a depression or a recession or costing jobs of course jobs will be lost in mining sectors and in oil and gas but at the same time many jobs will be created in more labor intensive renewable energy type of businesses so it's really the kind of transition that we've always had in all kinds of technologies but because the entities that currently control the energy sector are so powerful they've been successful in resisting it so I don't know if that answers your question but at trying let's give a round of applause for Rick thank you thank you