Complete movie is in next post
Something momentous has happened. While we have been going about our daily 0:11 lives, the world turned. 0:18 Climate change is no longer a distant fear. It has now become a clear and 0:23 current threat. Things that used to happen in geological 0:29 time spans are now unraveling in our lifetimes. 0:35 We are the pivot generation. Before us, normality, after us, 0:43 potential chaos. It falls to us to apply the brakes that 0:49 will prevent climate change becoming a runaway juggernaut that no one can stop. 0:57 The future of human civilization will be what we make it. 1:03 Global warming is a road map for what is happening to the planet and what we can 1:09 do to stop it. 1:32 [Music] 1:46 Which of us hasn't thought at some point, what difference can I make? What 1:52 difference does just one country make to a truly global problem? I've spent over 1:57 20 years as a journalist reporting on climate change and I think that we have lost sight of the big picture. 2:08 Instead of debating who should do what, what we really need to do is look at 2:13 what is unfolding around the planet and see what it will mean for us. 2:24 Because climate change is here now and things happening a long way away are 2:30 already reshaping our lives.
2:38 Greenland six times the size of Germany. 2:45 Its vast 3 km thick ice sheet is so heavy it has literally flattened 2:52 mountains. It is now a matter of when and not if 2:58 much of it melts. And when it does, everything changes. 3:10 Greenland is much greener than you expect. A thousand years ago, the name was a lie concocted to encourage more 3:17 Viking settlers. But it has become more and more true with each passing year. 3:29 Ellen Frederickson has lived all her life in southern Greenland. 40 years ago, isolated farming settlements were 3:36 all connected to each other for 7 months of the year by sea ice. 3:42 From where to where is frozen? All the way from there. Yes. All the way. All the way. 3:48 Till you get down to that side. Some years we can do that back in past. 3:54 But the fjord hasn't frozen over at all for seven of the last 8 years. And when 3:59 it should be 0° and snowing, it's 9° and raining. 4:07 Ellen is a teacher in the small settlement of Casiarsuk. just 12 pupils in the school. The settlement is only a 4:15 hundred years old, but the rate of warming in the Arctic is so fast, Ellen 4:20 is doubtful about the next 100 years. The weather started to change extremely 4:27 in 2006. We had no rain in 3 months where all the 4:34 grass began to die. In some places the harvest reduced up to 80%. 4:44 Some people are saying that when the climate is getting warmer it will be 4:49 better for farmers. The winter will be shorter but we don't experience that. 4:56 It's more like that the weather is getting more and more extreme uh drought 5:01 and in the 3 years there were not so much snow. 5:08 Farm life in South Greenland is very special and our culture is very 5:14 different from the rest of Greenland. I'm thinking of how it will go when my 5:21 school students when they are adults because farming here is a family 5:27 business where they take over. If it gets more extreme then we have a lot of 5:33 challenge to continue our farming life. 5:40 [Music]
5:53 Greenland's ice sheet is the accumulation of many millions of years of snowfall. 6:01 [Music] 6:07 Now though that process is in reverse. The ice is retreating. Rain, sun, and 6:13 warm seas are driving it back. 6:18 As the climate warms, the snow cover on the ice sheet is retreating to higher elevations. It's also being melted off 6:26 earlier in the season and not returning until later of the season. Professor Jason Box has spent much of his career 6:33 trying to find out why the Greenland ice sheet is melting five times faster than 6:38 20 years ago. The Greenland ice sheet is an interesting relic of the last ice age. 6:44 And here today, Greenland is quite fragile as we go into the 21st century 6:49 of warming. [Music]
Jason's work shows that melting is now 6:56 significantly faster than has been forecast by the world's climate scientists. His fieldwork on the 7:02 disintegrating glaciers offers detail that computer models can't catch. 7:12 I've been working all around the Greenland periphery in recent years and there has been in some areas 1,000 ft of 7:20 thinning. At our ice monitoring sites, we get a lowering of 2 3 4 m per year. 7:28 But on the neighboring tidewater glacier areas that are moving much faster, that's why we don't put our equipment 7:34 there. You get annual thinning of 10, even 20 meters. 7
:42 This is dark, dirty, and for boating. 7:47 Yeah, it's the color of concrete. And this is the bare ice. So up higher on 7:53 the ice sheet, you get the the bright snow, but as climate warms, the snow 7:58 line is creeping upward. And do you have an emotional reaction to that or just a scientific one? 8:04 Uh, usually I try to stay objective about it, but sometimes it hits me. 8:12
Dark ice glaciers like touching down on another planet. They're dark because the 8:18 falling snow has captured carbon pollution from around the world. 8:24 White ice would normally reflect back 70% of the sun's radiation. Dark ice 8:30 glaciers now absorb 70% of that heat, further accelerating the rate of 8:36 melting. It really does feel very otherworldly, 8:41 doesn't it? Welcome to the moon. Yeah, 8:48 most of the darkness you see is actually biological. At this location, the average melt is 8:54 more than 6 and 1/2 mters every single year. Yeah, this automatic 9:01 weather station is recording a lot of meteorological variables. Wind speed, 9:07 direction, temperature.
9:18 It's not just sun. Intense rainy thunderstorms are melting the ice, too. 9:24 Rain works its way down through the ice, fracturing the glaciers, lubricating and 9:30 accelerating their passage out to sea. The rate at which they now flow has 9:35 doubled in recent years. And there's more.
9:47 Warmer seas are melting the mouths of glaciers from underneath, causing them 9:52 to calve ever faster. The churn in the water or jacuzzi effect as the ice 9:58 breaks off further raises the temperatures of the water. If the Greenland ice sheet passes its tipping 10:05 point, the moment of irreversible decline, it would ultimately add 7 m to 10:11 the levels of the world's oceans. 10:18 [Music]
I wanted to show you this mountain over 10:25 here. It's effectively erupting out of the ice as as the ice is melting 10:30 downward and it's just getting taller taller as the ice around it's melting. So, the landscape is literally changing 10:37 year on year. I mean, are there times when you don't recognize it? Well, especially over here, the ice is 10:44 retreating so quickly on land, we realize we're going to have to reposition all of this equipment in the 10:50 next 10 years or so. We're losing this dead ice here next to this Tidewater 10:55 glacier. When you say dead ice, do you mean ice was effectively kind of one foot in the 11:01 grave? Yeah, some have called it zombie ice.
Well, we can see in the last 20 years of 11:07 satellite pictures that this area is kind of doomed. 11:12 I call it a disaster in slow motion. 11:26 [Music]
11:32 Wow. 11:39 This is one of about 200 tidewater glaciers from the Greenland ice sheet that are draining about 500 11:47 billion tons of ice per year. This one here is moving about 2 1/2 km per year. 11:55 They doubled in speed between the years 2000 2005. And the cause of that turns 12:02 out ocean warming warm currents were destabilizing these glaciers making them 12:07 thin and then lose stability from the bed and then they they just disintegrate. 12:13 [Music] Ocean warming is one of the key concerns 12:19 in addition to the atmospheric warming. So there's this strange competition for which produces more ice loss. Is it 12:26 ocean warming or atmospheric warming? But the point is that the glaciers are getting buffeted from all sides. 12:33 Does that suggest to you that the officially agreed scientific figure between 50 cm and a meter of sea level 12:39 rise by the end of the century is if anything a very conservative figure? Absolutely. It's conservative. the 12:46 physical expressions for the effects of rain, the effects of dark ice, the 12:51 effects of forced ocean convection at the tidewater glacier fronts, they're they're simply lacking in today's 12:58 models. Basically, it's a 1 in20 chance of high 13:05 impact sea level rise. 2 m by the end of century. One in 20 chance, 5% chance, 13:11 right? And a useful analogy is if you're standing by a a busy road and there's a 13:17 one in 20 chance that you'll get run over by a car if you cross that road, do you cross the road? Of course not. It's 13:24 low probability, but it's high impact. 13:30 If that was to happen by the end of the century, that's the homes of 630 million 13:37 people around the globe that would be lost. That's unimaginable. And it's not just coastal areas. It's 13:44 the inland economic and and physical uh ripple effects of of forced relocation 13:52 of people that will destabilize uh political systems and economies. [Music]
14:03 This is nothing less than a credible warning from the future, a signal about 14:08 how the unraveling of human civilization could begin. But it is a warning, one of many 14:16 possible scenarios. What actually happens is still in our 14:21 gift to them. 14:33 If climate change meant only that the oceans would rise as Greenland melts, 14:38 perhaps we could adapt. But it has another nasty surprise in store.
The 14:44 Gulf Stream system has for 3 million years made Western Europe temperate and 14:49 its seasons largely predictable. But Greenland's melting ice sheet has thrown 14:55 a spanner into the conveyor belt of the ocean's currents. 15:04 Normally warm, salty water at the equator moves north, cools down, then falls from the surface and returns to 15:11 the equator. But now, billions of tons of fresh water 15:18 pouring off the Greenland glacier is slowing that cycle down to potentially 15:23 disastrous effect. 15:30 [Music]
15:46 These overturning circulations, they fundamentally set Earth's climate. They fundamentally set where we should grow 15:52 food, where we should have cities. Disrupting these overturning circulations changes our Earth's climate 15:59 at a profound scale. It resets where we do stuff. It means re-engineering where 16:06 we live, where we find our water, where we grow our food. This is not something you can do in a 16:12 hurry. 16:20 All that fresh water pouring off Greenland into the circulating salt water has an impact not unlike throwing 16:27 sand into a finely oiled machine. That amount of fresh water from 16:33 Greenland is just remarkable. What happens when that flows into the ocean is it it dilutes the water there. Losing 16:40 salt means it loses density. Losing density means the overturning slows down and eventually shuts down. So, it's a 16:46 real threat to the North Atlantic overturning circulation. The consequences for Europe and North 16:52 America would be chaotic. If we slow it down, if we shut it down, it it's such a fundamental part of the 16:59 climate system. You disrupt it. You disrupt the storm tracks. change the weather patterns and you change the way 17:05 the oceans interact with the climate system in really in profound and costly ways. 17:12 This term a new normal I really I find it really difficult because there is no new normal. The pace of change is like 17:18 that. It's not like this. And actually the pace of change is only going to get worse.
17:25 Things won't just stay this bad. There will be no new normal as the ocean circulations slow down. The only 17:32 certainty will be a permanent state of flux. 17:42 What we're doing at the moment is a sledgehammer like clubbing of the planet. The chances of overturning circulation collapses in the next decade 17:48 or two, that's a big debate. It's like we're talking about 20% chance. Some scientists say 100%, some will say 7%. 17:56 Those numbers when you think about relocating cities shouldn't matter. These are circulations that control our 18:03 earth's climate and that we need to have remain stable. Otherwise, we're going to start doing a lot to support life on 18:10 Earth. [Music]
18:20 Life on Earth above water will be thrown into turmoil as ocean circulations decline. But underwater, it will be a 18:28 little like turning off the oxygen pump in an aquarium. 18:37 Stagnation leading to ecosystem collapse. More heat bringing more 18:42 energy, more storms, and more hurricanes. 18:50 I can get through a day fine looking at these scientific diagrams because I nerd 18:56 out on them. But I get home at night and I see the kids and they're going to have kids and I'm deeply saddened by what I'm 19:03 seeing. This is a great planet. I won't be around to see my projections and how they play out, but bloody hell, 19:09 everybody else will be.
19:23 The Atlantic's overturning circulation is now at its weakest in more than a thousand years. And as it gets weaker, 19:30 it could eventually reach a critical threshold where it will shut down, as if grinding to a halt under its own weight. 19:39 This is not science fiction. It has happened in the past. 19:45 Scientists think of this moment as another planetary tipping point, a point of no return, after which all weather 19:54 systems in the North Atlantic will be totally transformed and chaotic. 20:08 We are against the clock. Only we don't know how much time is left before that tipping point or even if the clock has 20:16 already stopped. 20:23 [Music] 20:29 [Music]
One immediate consequence of more heat 20:36 in the oceans is more violent tropical cyclones. These natural disasters are no 20:43 longer natural. Now they are partly man-made and made many more times likely 20:49 by increased temperature and moisture in the atmosphere. Temperature we've put 20:55 there. The results are felt acutely on the continent of Africa. Feeding the 1.2 21:01 billion people in the subsaharan region in the next 30 years will be one of 21:07 humankind's stiffest challenges.
21:13 Severe weather warning remains in place for cyclone Friday over the weekend. That's when we're expecting torn rains, 21:20 heavy flash flooding and left tens of thousands displaced in 21:27 Malawi. Some villages were completely wiped out. 21:32 So, it's a disaster of untold proportion. 21:40 [Music] 21:49 Malawi is one of the African continent's smaller countries. 20 million people 21:55 live in an area smaller than New Mexico. Most are barely able to feed themselves 22:00 in the good years. And now climate change has made those years further apart. 22:10 The crisis is accelerating here. Drought periods extending, storm damage 22:15 intensifying. Often one part is baking while at the same time another is being swept away. 22:25 [Music] In the past 5 years, we have experienced a lot of floods induced by all the 22:33 cyclones or tropical storms. And this year, we have already experienced another cyclone. When do we have time to 22:41 recover from that? our economy is already worse and those are issues that 22:47 we are experiencing as a nation. In February and March of 2023, Cyclone 22:53 Freddy hit East Africa as a category 3 cyclone. 2 weeks later, it hit again as a 23:00 category 5. Then it was further upgraded to very intense. That's how climate 23:07 scientists say off the scale. The energy in this one storm, Freddy in Africa, was the equivalent of 23:13 an entire hurricane season in the North Atlantic. 23:28 In Malawi's second city, Blantar, weeks and weeks of rain resulted in a mudslide 23:34 into the heavily populated valley below. Anyone? 23:40 [Music] 24:01 [Applause] [Music] 24:09 [Music] 24:18 again. [Music]
24:51 It was around 1:00 a.m. where we heard a sound 24:57 just like a truck, just like a train or earthquake, something like that. And then I woke up my family and we started 25:04 going higher, running away from the house. But then I started hearing cries from 25:11 the people inside their houses. 25:18 We couldn't reach them because it was dark. There were flashes of water. They were gushing. We couldn't see what is 25:24 happening. And the mud and the water was actually hot. 25:30 [Music] [untranslated dialogue]
26:44 Timothy's was one of hundreds of deaths in a cyclone made more violent by climate change. If warming is not 26:52 reduced, by the end of the century, 3.4 million people a year could die as a 26:58 direct result of climate events. 27:08 It was just a bang and within 5 minutes the muds were down, the rocks were down and everything. And within 5 minutes 27:14 everything was done. But all happened so quickly there was no chance to escape. No 5 minutes. Just 5 minutes. But you 27:22 can see even the the rocks that are here, they are so huge you can't even move them. So if a house or an individual is trapped underneath, there 27:29 is limited support. And are many people still missing? 27:35 Yes, we have over 500 people who because of the time that has passed, it's been 27:40 declared that they just dead. As we are walking, we might be actually maybe walking over some houses or and people 27:47 who are missing are still down there. So it is a mass grave. 27:57 [Music]
28:06 A second disaster looms. When the rains come again, all of this ground could 28:11 loosen and become another mudslide. 28:18 Cyclone behavior is changing. The number making landfall and penetrating further 28:24 inland is on the rise and the amount of rain that they can hold will also 28:30 increase in a warming atmosphere. You're a landlocked country. Uh why 28:36 would you expect a cyclone out in the Indian Ocean to have the impact that it 28:41 did hundreds of miles in land? Well, if you look at the trend over the past 3, 28:46 five years, Malawi has been experiencing cyclones and you can see that the severity of each one is getting worse as 28:53 the years are going by. So going forward, we should expect more frequent and more devastating cyclones hitting us 29:00 despite the fact that we're a landlocked country. 29:08 Foreign speech. Foreign speech. Foreign speech. 29:14 [Music] 29:27 [Music] 29:42 [Music]
Almost 700,000 Malawians lost their 29:48 homes in Cyclone Freddy. As they waited on rooftops for the 29:54 waters to recede, some were preyed upon by crocodiles. 30:00 [Music] And when the waters did go down, the crops and livestock of 2 million farmers 30:08 had been wiped out. 30:15 [Music] 30:30 Lake Chilwa flooded so much its shores have moved 800 m. Thousands of hectares 30:38 of farmland gone. Cyclone Freddy was not an isolated 30:43 event. Cyclone Gome and Cyclone Anna struck the year before. Like being hit 30:50 again and again before you've recovered from the last knockout blow. 31:15 That is what climate change is.
That is what climate change has been, induced 31:20 by all these greenhouse gas emissions. Children are not supposed to go to 31:26 school in an environment that is not safe. We had the schools closed for 31:33 almost a term. People lost their property. people lost their homes. Even 31:38 when we talk about the mental health of the young people, of the people that have been affected by this, that is the 31:45 issue that we are going through with this climate change. 31:51
Whether it's due to rising seas, storm devastation, or unlivable heat, by 2070, 31:58 scientists' worst case projection is that almost 1 fifth of the planet will be uninhabitable. 32:05 the homes of three billion people. 32:12 The developed world is no longer immune to events occurring great distances away. Supply chains, energy and grocery 32:19 bills, housing markets, whole economies get buffeted by the shock waves 32:24 emanating from conflict and natural disaster on the other side of the world.
32:31 How this will not be the most unmanageable period of human history is 32:37 unclear.
32:53 Indigenous peoples are quicker to feel the effects of climate change than most. North of the Arctic Circle, a number of 33:00 different communities live pastoral lives in sympathy with the cycle of the seasons. 33:07 But now warming is melting sea ice, which disrupts local weather systems. 33:12 The result is this nomadic society on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia have had 33:18 to watch thousands of their reindeer starve to death in recent years. 33:23 [Music] 33:32 The Sami people of northern Scandinavia are looking at a similar fate as climate 33:38 impacts hugely on the reindeer's ability to forage and feed. We are a people with four different 33:45 nations. So you have the north of Norway, you have the north of Sweden, you have the north of Finland and the 33:50 Coli Peninsula in Russia. So that is what we call Sapi or the Sami land. And 33:56 within there, in most places, we do conduct reindeer herding. 34:02 Climate change has created a lot of uncertainty. We are used to having harsh winters, but what we're seeing today is 34:08 that there's no regularity. So, every winter might be completely different. 34:15 What we're seeing is that we have warmer periods during autumn with rain, with heavy rainfall that goes over to a 34:21 colder period with snow. And this has this creates layers of ice on the lyken. 34:26 And the reindeer feeds predominantly on lyken during winter time. 34:32 Reindeer can smell lychen under 80 cm of snow. But when you have icing on it, it 34:37 doesn't create the same kind of smell. And even if they were to smell it, if they dig down, they can't claw through 34:43 the ice. It takes them too much effort, too much energy that they have to save during winter. So then they will venture 34:50 off to try to find better grazings or they will starve to death. 34:57 Across the Arctic, reindeer and caribou populations have fallen by 2 and a half 35:02 million in the last 20 years, half the world's population. 35:08 There are many reasons, but chief among them is the loss of foraging due to 35:13 climate change. with what's going on with the climate. 35:18 It it has really taken a real good toll on it. It is looking dark, but I I still 35:24 have to have hope. You still have to think that the future will be better and it will be better for future 35:30 generations. My roots go so deep in this landscape. 35:36 It goes so deep. We have been here for forever. 35:43 [Music]
35:52 We could think of indigenous peoples as uniquely vulnerable or we could think of 35:57 them as early warning signals. The indigenous communities of the Arctic 36:02 are canaries in the coal mine. whole civilizations on the brink of losing 36:07 their way of life, their culture and their livelihoods due to climate change. 36:15 Today it's them. Tomorrow it will be us. 36:21 [Music]
36:37 We are surrounded by tipping points, planet changers, points of no return 36:42 that we could cross at any time in the next 10 years. like the one hidden 36:48 underground in the Arctic. A trapped and long dormant deposit of carbon twice as 36:55 much as is already in the atmosphere. Under our feet, out of sight and mind, 37:02 we are unaware that the more we warm the planet, the more we are rousing it to 37:08 deadly effect. [Music] Perafrost is permanently frozen soil. 37:15 And this permanently frozen soil contains a massive amount of carbon. 37:20 Approximately 12% of the land area of our planet is perafrost soils. 37:26
Perafrost is icelike petey soils. In its frozen state, it lies dormant and 37:32 harmless. But global warming is thawing it, poking a sleeping bear of carbon and 37:38 methane. a vast belt around the top of the world of potential warming gases so 37:45 huge it's calculated in thousands of billions of tons and the more of it that 37:50 is released the more warming it will do the more that will be released 37:55 so going from here to the east we would go to Finland then we would get to Russia Siberia Canada Alaska Greenland 38:03 and come around to Norway and then we'd be right back here. it's that entire landscape the soil the 38:09 Pete under our feet is frozen in perafrost. Yeah. Now in the mountains here we have perafrost but it's a different type of 38:15 soil. The petelands are primarily in these areas where you see these messers 38:20 in the valley down here. [Music]
38:28 Keith Larson is an ecologist. He's devoted the last decade to understanding 38:33 how climate change is altering the vast wilderness of the subarctic. 38:39 We're 200 km north in the Arctic Circle, close to a village called Obisco, where there's been a scientific research 38:44 station since 1913. So, kind of almost spanning most of the modern climate change. 38:51 Scientists here have accumulated over a century's worth of data that sheds light 38:56 on how fast the perafrost is releasing carbon dioxide and methane. The ground 39:02 is now sinking where the ice is thawing. 39:08 We're actually in a perafrost mire where the soil below our ground is pete, but 39:13 some of that Pete is permanently frozen or it used to be permanently frozen. And I'm elevated right here. And that's 39:20 because not only is there permafrost deep down in that pete soil, but there's 39:26 ice. And that ice essentially lifts the soil. Okay. So where you're standing, the ice is 39:31 melting as well as the permafrost fine. If we go back in time, everything was elevated here. Then gradually as we 39:39 warmed our planet, it became this cotton grass type habitat. It's quite spongy. 39:44 You can hear it squelch under you as well. Yeah, exactly. 39:50 The release of gases to the atmosphere is now so pronounced you can see it with 39:56 the naked eye.
This is a thaw pond. The permafrost is quite visual here because 40:01 you know right now what we're seeing are these bubbles coming up right now. And even when we don't disturb it every once in a while you just get this little burp 40:08 of gases coming up. Releasing the locked up gases from just 40:13 the top 3 m of permafrost would be the equivalent of burning every forest on 40:19 the planet three times over.
40:25 It's not a matter of if. It is already thawing. And the bad news is that when 40:30 this perafrost thaws, some of that carbon winds up in the atmosphere as either carbon dioxide or even worse as 40:37 methane, which is about 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide. 40:43 And so how deep does the perafrost go here, Keith? Here it's tens of meters thick. But if 40:49 you go to the east, for example, to into Siberia, some of that perafrost is as much as 1,400 m thick.
We are 40:56 experiencing climate change in real time here like many places of the world. 41:04 When I first came here in 2013, I was surprised that it that it would rain in 41:10 October, November, December. But in the last two years, it's not only raining in 41:15 October, November, December, but January, February, March, April, and May. So, we're now getting rain every 41:21 month of the year. But this is the Arctic. This is supposed to be a place with cold winters. The cold winters have 41:27 disappeared. Jessica Gilman Ernakovich is an 41:34 environmental scientist who studies the rate of thawing of the perafrost, taking 41:39 core samples across the landscape year after year allows her to measure how 41:44 fast it is releasing warming gases.
A lot of the time when we're thinking about perafrost in the global climate um 41:52 we we are talking about perafrost that's been around for hundreds of years to thousands of years um to sometimes even 41:58 millions of years. Core samples from just a meter underfoot 42:05 reveal how each year a little more of the perafrost turns from an inert frozen 42:10 mass to a living and breathing organic soil. 42:17 [Music] Ah, okay. That's beautiful. 42:23 Each core sample is like a thermometer reading of the soil, charting from year 42:28 to year how much the ice is melting. Okay. So, I I kind of suspected this was 42:33 this is true. Um, but we had this frozen active layer still here. Mhm. 42:39 So, from here to here, we've lost in about 20 years.
So in 60 years this much 42:45 has thawed and has released Lord alone knows how much carbon in this 42:50 area across this entire landscape. This entire landscape, this entire 42:56 region and really the globe. 43:01
Just like the Greenland ice sheet melt, much of what Jessica is monitoring on the Swedish tundra isn't yet included in 43:08 the official scientific account of our climate's change. Maybe we'll just pop. And once again, it is also moving faster 43:16 than the official forecast. All right, so here's a 10 to 15. I would 43:22 say the fact that the public debate is so far behind scientific knowledge is one of the hardest things for me to 43:27 understand as a scientist and as a as a human being. also trying to live on this planet. It can be frustrating that we 43:34 aren't moving forward with our knowledge. We're kind of sweeping something 43:40 fairly significant under the rug by not accounting for these perafrost habitats. We may actually be completely 43:47 offsetting everything that we say we're doing simply by not taking a proper account. 43:55 Every tiny fraction of a degree of increased warming does more to poke the sleeping perafrost bear.
The good news 44:03 is that scientists think that stopping those emissions would over time stop the thaw. The bad news is the only fix is to 44:12 stop emissions. [Music] 44:23 [Music] And this is why it's not just the big emitters that matter. Small countries 44:30 are important, too. Every ton of carbon unlocks even more carbon and even more 44:36 warming. All the small countries that might think 44:41 that their contribution is insignificant account for a third of all the world's 44:47 emissions.
I've been reporting on global warming 44:54 for over 20 years. You'd think that I would have heard all of this, but I'm alarmed by what I've learned recently. 45:01 Everything is now moving so much faster than forecast, accelerating and intensifying at a rate that will make 45:08 climate breakdown the story of the rest of our lives. The next 200 years will 45:16 see Earth transformed beyond recognition. How much is still in our 45:22 hands?
I have also heard and seen something 45:28 else that's important. The depth of the love that we feel for the natural world and even more so for 45:36 our children. We now know exactly what this crisis 45:42 will do to their futures. 45:48
We are surrounded though by messages that tell us we can continue business as usual. What these scientists, what the 45:56 planet itself is telling us is we can't. We have to stop ignoring what is coming 46:03 and then be the heroes we want our children to see. Their 46:09 future will be what we choose to make it. And the only time left to make that 46:15 choice is now. 46:31
In episode two, as the world changes, how will we change with it? What should 46:38 we be doing now to stay ahead of the climate change that is coming? Will it 46:43 be rings of concrete and steel or mud and grass? How do we choose the places 46:49 we are not going to defend? How do we defend what we hold dear? the developing 46:55 country that the developed west has many tricks to learn from and managing the 47:01 landscape to manage the threats of fire and flood. Adapting to a new kind of 47:06 life on Earth in program two of three.
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