"Right now, we are facing our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change. We could face irreversible damage. We're running out of time because of one simple fact. Our world is getting hotter." Read & Watch: David Attenborough Presents: Climate Change The Facts 2019 BBC Documentary posted Sep 5 All Out Wildlife channelClimate Change - The Facts is a 2019 British documentary presented by Sir David Attenborough
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Transcripts are for readers, writers, and researchers. plus videos can disappear but the digital printed word lasts forever
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Transcript
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[Newscasters] We've had some hot days this summer, but nothing like what we're going to get into starting tomorrow. Today, the Mercury hit a scorching 35° C. Temperatures are set to rise even further this week and could even break the all-time record.
DA- Right now, we are facing our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change.
overlapping- For a long time, climate change was something that scientists were predicting that would happen in the future. But that's no longer the case. What we're doing right now is we're so rapidly changing the climate. For the first time in the world's history, people can see the impact of climate change. Greater storms, greater floods, greater heat waves, extreme sea level rise. All of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible.
DA-Scientists across the globe are in no doubt that at the current rate of warming, we risk a devastating future.
olpIt's difficult to see how the population of the world will actually feed itself. It's happening in your world. It's happening in my world. Time is running short. There's still time, but there isn't much time left.
DA- The science is now clear that urgent action is needed.
We are at a tipping point. We can change history right now.
DA- What happens now and in these next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years. What can be done to avert disaster and ensure the survival of our civilizations and the natural world upon which we depend.
Greta- It's our future and we can't just let it slip away from us.
DA- Standing here in the English countryside, it may not seem obvious, but we are facing a man-made disaster on a global scale. In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined. It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies. We're running out of time.
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"If we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies. We're running out of time."
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But there is still hope.
I believe that if we better understand the threat we face, the more likely it is that we can avoid such a catastrophic future.
Our climate is changing because of one simple fact. Our world is getting hotter.
A- We have temperature records going back over a hundred years. There are dips and troughs. There are some years that are not as warm as other years. But what we've seen is this steady and unremitting temperature trend. 20 of the warmest years on record have all occurred in the last 22 years.
DA- It's not just Met Office records that are showing this trend. Data from the US Climate Center, NOAA, the Japanese Met Office, and NASA all show the same sharp rise in temperatures.
When scientists first became concerned about these increasing temperatures, nobody could be sure exactly what was driving them. Four decades of research later, on land, at sea, and in the far reaches of our atmosphere, the evidence is now unequivocal.
A- What's striking is that warming trend cannot be explained by natural factors but is caused by human activities in particular by use of fossil fuels.
A- The problem is that everything we do, our entire economy from the moment you wake up in the morning and turn on the light or look at your cell phone to the moment you go to bed at night and even then because your cell phone is still drawing power at night. I mean, we're all using energy all the time and in the industrialized world that energy is almost entirely fossil fuels.
A- We burn fossil fuels, coal, gas, and oil to power our energy generation, to heat our homes, to drive our factories, to power our cars and our trains and travel around the world.
A- And when we burn fossil fuels, it produces carbon dioxide as a waste product.
JH- Carbon dioxide acts like a blanket. It absorbs the heat radiation from the Earth's surface and that keeps the surface warmer than it would be otherwise.
A- The problem is what we're doing now is we're adding extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So, we're increasing the thickness of this blanket.
JH- Before we started to burn coal, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. It's now over 400 parts per million. And the planet gets warmer and warmer.
DA- We have pumped so much carbon dioxide into our atmosphere that our world is now around 1° C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times. This warming is enough to bring about the raft of effects we call climate change.
olp- 1° CC global warming may not sound like much, but it's having a dramatic effect on our weather. You warm up the planet, well, of course, you're going to get more intense and more frequent heat waves. You're going to dry out the soils, so you're going to get worse drought. We've seen extreme heat in southern Africa, Japan, North America, in the UK as well. It is officially the hottest day of the year so far. The heat has been causing health problems.
A- Often the question is, did climate change cause a certain event? And you can never really answer that question, but what scientists do is to look at whether climate change made a certain event more or less likely or more or less intense.
A- Last year we had a heat wave that was actually the joint warmest on record alongside 1976. And we've been analyzing this here at the Met. What that showed us was that the chances of that heat wave had increased by about 30 times. So it's now about 30 times more likely that we had that heat wave than we would have had without climate change. [Today the mercury hit a scorching 35° C.] So it doesn't mean to say that every single weather event is due to climate change. But what climate change does mean is that with the baseline climate having changed then the frequency of the extreme temperatures is increasing and that has a substantial effect.
DA- In November last year when temperatures in Australia hit 42° even creatures specifically adapted to heat were unable to survive.
A-They're just everywhere. When we got here in the morning, that's the first time really we saw it. There were just dead bats as far as the I could see; there was a deafening sound of babies crying and just don't know where to start. So, we just started finding babies basically. Bubba, we have a little baby attached to his dead mom.
DA- Like all species, flying foxes have ways of dealing with the conditions of their environment. But it seems their usual cooling methods are no longer enough for the kind of temperatures Australia is now facing. Last year, temperature records were broken across the country.
A- Scientists have shown that it's simply inconceivable that you would see these temperatures without the fact of climate change.
A- We saved about 350 the rest are dead. So over over 11,000 died from that colony. And if you have two more events like we had and the species is gone.
DA- I've seen for myself that in addition to the many other threats they face, animals of all kinds are now struggling to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.
A- Think of the equator as climate change occurs. that kind of central part of the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable.
JH- If climate change is too fast, we're pushing them off the planet. In effect, we're causing extinction of species already, and that's irreversible.
DA- Scientists believe that 8% of species are now at threat of extinction solely due to climate change. This isn't just about losing wonders of nature. With the loss of even the smallest organisms, we destabilize and ultimately risk collapsing the world's ecosystems, the networks that support the whole of life on Earth. A- What's been happening in recent years, it's really showing us what 1° C really means, not just for wildlife, but for people, for their safety, for their livelihoods, and for their futures.
DA As temperatures rise, the threats we face multiply. Last year saw record-breaking wildfires take hold across the globe. [firefighters are working around the clock, has to be seen to be believed] A- Australia is seeing some of its worst fires in years. We've seen wildfires break out in Greece and even in the Arctic. Wildfire sweeping across some of the coldest countries on Earth. We've seen a tripling in the extent of wildfire in the western US and California.
DA- The fires that swept through California last year caused $24 billion worth of damage. 106 people lost their lives. We're not just talking about an inconvenience.
[Overlapping]- We're be talking about people's lives, their livelihoods, and their communities being damaged. For us, we need an ignition source. What a maybe lightning. And then you need the weather conditions that are conducive to that fire and that fire spreading. Do I go? You don't want to get trapped in here. Research has shown that the chances of having these very hot, dry conditions has increased as a result of climate change. Easy, easy. Oh my god. Keep going. Go. Keep going. Easy, easy, Dad. This is insane.
It was a dead end road, so we knew that it was our only option to drive forward. And all sides of the road just came completely engulfed in flames. The car is heating up. It's going to explode. You're all right. He's going, "Dad, dad, we're going to die. We're going to die." And I said, "No, we're going to be fine." You know? Oh, Jesus. God, help us. Okay. I stayed calm. Oh, I think being a father, you're trying to keep your son calm, too, at that point. Can you slip so we can see? We're good. We're good. We're good. We could hear trees literally exploding, falling all around us. Please God, help us. A large branch went right over the top of the car and the whole top of the roof was burning and we didn't realize it and there was a tree down. We can't get out. That was the moment when I really thought that we might die. Oh my god. Stop. Stop. Can't get up. You got to get out of here. I decided to put the car in reverse. I had to drive backwards through everything we had already passed through to the lake shore. 
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DA- But it's not just through extreme heat events that climate change is having an effect. It's changing our weather systems in other ways.
olp- This is a basic result of physics. With a degree Celsius of warming, there's more moisture evaporating off the oceans. When there's more moisture in the air, you're going to get more rainfall. You're going to get super storms and force flooding events. We are seeing the impacts of climate change now play out in real time. They're no longer subtle. You've had the worst rain in China in Japan. You've had a deluge in Kerala. The crisis deepens for hundreds of thousands in Kerala.
DA- Whilst they can't all be attributed to climate change, last year's extreme weather events meant that millions of people needed humanitarian aid.
a- Join the dots. It's happening. It's happening in your world. It's happening in my world. And let's be very clear about this. It is going to get much worse.
DA- Climate change goes far beyond the weather. Thousands of miles away and out of sight of most of us, another threat is building. Earth's ice, frozen for millennia, is melting.
A- Earth's temperature has risen by what most people would think is a small amount over the past century, about 1° centigrade, and that's too much for Earth's ice to withstand.
In the last year, we've had a global assessment of ice losses from Antarctica and from Greenland, and they tell us that things are worse than we'd expected. The Greenland ice sheet is melting. It's lost 4 trillion tons of ice and it's losing five times as much ice today as it was 25 years ago. If you go to the southern hemisphere in the past, most of the models predicted that Antarctica would grow. That's not the case.
Antarctica is losing three times as much ice today as it was 25 years ago. In Antarctica, really small changes in ocean temperature in particular melt a lot of ice. The ocean is only about half a degree centigrade warmer than it should be, but that's melting colossal amounts of ice from enormous glaciers. The water that melts from the ice sheets ends up in one place and that's the oceans and that's when it starts to affect people around the rest of the planet.
JH- Sea level has been stable for several thousand years. But if the ice sheets lose icebergs faster and faster to the ocean, then sea level goes up.
a- we know that sea level has already risen by about 20 cm in the last 100 years.
DA- Rising seas are displacing hundreds of thousands of people from already vulnerable coastal areas in the South Pacific, Indonesia, Bangladesh.
a- The impact on families is going to be something that I don't think we could ever prepare for. In the United States, Louisiana is on the front line of this climate crisis. It's losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet at about the rate of a football field every 45 minutes.
DA- The Isle de Jean Charles was once home to 400 people, but subsidance caused by oil and gas extraction and now rising seas means that in the last six decades, much of it has disappeared.
A Before this was all land, but due to sea level rise, slowly but surely it's washing away. What we're looking at right here is where I was born and raised in 1946. It's sad. Very, very sad to see what happened to my mom and dad's home and where they they raised us at. I wanted to finish my life as well over here.
a For the people of Isle de Jean Charles, they're running out of options.
And now what we see is just 10% of what used to be there. We have been working with the state to move an entire community. This is the first time the federal government of the United States has offered dollars for the relocation of folks due to climate change.
A When it comes to the relocation, this is the only place I ever known as home. I don't want to abandon it. I don't want to forget it.
a A lot of people say that this land that we're living on won't be here in 20 years from now. And that's kind of hard to, you know, like think about like where you grew up isn't going to be here anymore,
a The residents of Isle de Jean Charles have been labeled as the first climate refugees in the United States and that may be true but what we know for sure is that they won't be the last.
DA Sea levels are not only increased by melting ice. The world's oceans are expanding because they're getting warmer. Over 90% of the increased heat trapped in our atmosphere has been stored in the oceans. I've witnessed the devastating effect this is having.
In the last 3 years, repeated heat stress has caused a third of the world's corals to first bleach and then die.
DA In many ways, what's happening now across the world doesn't come as a surprise. Much of what we're now experiencing, scientists warned about over 30 years ago.
JH What we're seeing at the moment is exactly what we predicted. [What I'd like to do today is to start with Dr. James Hansen.] In the summer of 1988, I testified to Congress.
v Number one, the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements.
JH I said I was 99% confident that this was a real physical effect of the increasing carbon dioxide.
v The Earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation.
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Summer 1988 testimony- The troglodyte congress erupts soon as he speaks, Hansen tenses, then continues'
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A James Hansen was absolutely a pioneer in trying to reach the public and politicians. He played a major role, there's no doubt, in putting climate change on the international agenda.
W Bush- Those who think we're powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.
JH The short-term response was pretty good. [We are the Lord's creatures. the trustees of this planet.] The politicians were saying the right things that we should avoid dangerous human made changes to climate. It's just that the policies needed to achieve that were never adopted.
a's [Overlapping] There are many reasons we haven't acted on climate change. Science is definitely part of the story. The science is complicated. Economists had to look at well okay so what are the costs going to be? And then technologists had to work out well what actually can we do about it. And that's one of the reasons why it took a long time for governments really to put policies in place. However, there was also resistance. Let's be honest about this. There are incumbent industries that then they knew about climate change but they didn't really want anything to happen.
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[Net income grew 17% earnings rose to $10.9 billion.]
a The organizations that had the most to lose based on climate change were the fossil fuel companies. The most profitable industry possibly in the history of mankind making huge profits. They wanted to continue that 11.7 billion profit.
a Many of those industries, especially the oil and gas industry, the fossil fuel industry, they undertook a quite concerted campaign to confuse the science and confuse the message.
a This is industry funded and industry driven. Fossil fuel companies engage PR consultants who used exactly the same tactics that have been used by the tobacco companies. And there's ample documentation.
a's [Overlapping] The basic strategy is to cast doubt on the science. There are too many complexities around climate science. [We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record. It's a snowball and that's just from outside here. So it's very very cold out, very unseasonal. So here, Mr. President, catch this.]
a The cycle of denial has worked. And even today, the president of the United States says that it's not true. [All of this with the global warming and that a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry. Okay.]
In the UK, we have the Climate Change Act from 2008, which was the first law anywhere in the world to make a legally binding target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But what we've also seen here is a number of people in politics who have decided really to campaign against action on climate change.
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What we've also seen here is a number of people in politics who have decided really to campaign against action on climate change
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[There's plenty of evidence that warming will have bring benefits as well as maybe disadvantages.] The arguments have been, well, climate change is happening, but it may not be that serious. [What I'm concerned about is the extremely damaging and harmful policies ostensibly to try and deal with the problem of global warming.]
They say we should just adapt to it rather than try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And of course, that's very attractive to politicians because to decide not to do something is much more comfortable.
a I think that many of us were willing to hear that message because we too depend upon fossil fuels for our lifestyle. So, we're all implicated in this economic system, but it's not like we're all equally responsible, right?
a There's no doubt that that seeding of doubt has slowed the transition to a clean energy economy.
JH- We haven't entirely wasted the 30 years, but it would have been so easy to solve the problem if we had started gradually to make fossil fuels more expensive and developed the technologies to replace them. But we didn't do that. And now there are consequences.
DA Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise and the problem is getting harder to solve. The world's great forests play a vital role in determining the balance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide using it to build their leaves, stems, and roots. In this process of photosynthesis, they have sucked up and stored nearly a third of our emissions.
a The main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions. Forests are one of our ways out. They are like the lungs of the planet. They are big climate regulators at a global scale. [July 23rd, 1972] My work has always been about monitoring the land surface and forest. [Thrusting outward into space, we gain new perspective on ourselves.] Since 1972 till now, LANCAD has been tracking and taking pictures of the Earth's surface. [Circling the Earth, it offers an ideal means to monitor change.] And in 2008, the US government says it's open free of charge and accessible over the internet. Millions of images automatically. It's just this huge leap in capability. It was only then where we saw the whole planet. And when you see the whole, it was a bit of a revelation. 30.30
And yeah, the the alarm bells go off.
It usually starts with logging. rain forests are cleared and burned. They then replace it with soybeans, rubber pasture for cattle. But one of the big drivers is palm oil.
Palm oil is like a a magical fruit. We all have palm oil in our houses right now.
a is found in almost every good you can think about. It's in soaps. It's in shampoo. It's in chocolate. It's in bread. It's even in crisps. What we're doing accidentally and inadvertently is actually causing deforestation in other countries because our demand for this product.
a That means the natural system is not working. Habitats are disappearing. But also when these high carbon stock forests that are centuries old are cleared and burned, CO2 is added to the atmosphere. Those emissions go up and warm the planet.
When you look at our maps, our results are showing that it's a it's it's accelerating. It almost looks like a contagion, you know, it looks like a a disease across the planet. I mean the the ever-increasing pattern.
If we continue, this level of deforestation will take it all and our ability to mitigate climate change and turn the story around becomes really vanishingly small.
DA- Trees are now being cut down and burnt at such a rate that nearly a third of our carbon dioxide emissions are caused by deforestation.
A It sucks. I'm a pretty light-hearted, [laughter] optimistic guy, but just looking at these data, you're just looking at the stories, it's like you know, I'd like to see some evidence of of really strong strong kind of unified political response that was more than an aspiration on a kind of piece of paper, right? That would be cool.
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DA Looking ahead to the future, we know that if we continue releasing carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, temperatures will keep rising and the consequences will get progressively worse. But do we know how much worse?
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What will happen in the future if we don't act?
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a There are thousands of scientists around the world in almost every single country working to understand what will happen in the future if we don't act, we don't do more. So we use really powerful climate models which are numerical representations of the whole of the Earth system, the oceans, the land, the atmosphere and the ice on the planet. And then we drive it with increased carbon dioxide based on predictions of the future. And then we see what the model does. They predict that if we carry on as we are now where CO2 continues to increase, we would hit 1 1/2° global warming by between 2040 and 2050. We're on course to go through 1.5° in just a few decades time. And the models differ slightly as to exactly when.
[Blogger: We did it last year-]
And not long after that, we're on a trajectory to go through 2°.
DA Whilst we don't know exactly what a 2° warmer world will look like, there's growing evidence about the consequences of crossing this threshold.
a We know that with increased storms, increased floods, droughts and heat waves, production of food will be more problematic.
DA As we look further into the future, predicting how our climate system might behave becomes more complex.
a There's uncertainty in climate projection, not least because we don't know what our generation when we're older is going to be doing and what the future generations are going to be doing.
DA But based on our current trajectory, the various models predict that by the end of the century, our planet will be somewhere between 3 and 6° hotter.
a Even if we are looking at the bottom end of predictions, that's still really bad.
DA Over 600 million people live in coastal areas that are less than 10 m above sea level.
a Some models predict if we don't do anything to curb climate change, then we could be looking at 80 cm to a meter of sea level rise by the end of the century.
a So sea level is dangerous for us in the UK as indeed elsewhere. The main impacts of what might seem a gradual rise of sea level is the risk from storms, surges of sea that we've never seen before.
JH If we lose all our coastal cities, we've got a different planet and we've got a economic situation which is out of control.
DA While there's a lot we understand about what the future might hold, the big fear is that there may be other more extreme dangers lurking beyond those we already know about.
Scientists call these tipping points.
a A tipping point is where in a part of the climate system, just a little bit of extra warming could nudge it into a different state, an irreversible change.
DA At the moment, it is our ongoing emissions that are driving global temperatures up. But if we cross tipping points, that could spiral beyond our control.
a If we imagine a map of the world, it turns out that there are climate tipping points dotted all around it. Greenland and West Antarctica could be tipped into irreversible meltdown. There are major ecosystems that we could tip into an alternative state. for example, triggering a climate induced dieback of the rain-forest, turning it into a savanna.
a Once you've crossed a tipping point, that's it. You've triggered a catastrophic change. It's going to carry on getting even hotter because you've triggered something that you can't undo.
DA One of the potential tipping points scientists have identified involves a greenhouse gas locked underground.
a We know that there's large amounts of methane stored in the permafrost in the Arctic. And we're worried that as that perafrost starts to actually unfreeze, the methane trapped underneath will start to bubble up.
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A a few bubbles down in there. When we look down into the ice, we see white pockets of gas. We can see that there are bubbles in the surface layer and then there's a whole column of bubbles that stacks up. When this ice sheet melts, the gases are released into the atmosphere. And you can actually hear the gases coming out. Let's have a look.
These flares that we're doing demonstrate that the bubbles contain methane. It's a very potent greenhouse gas.
a Methane is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. So you can imagine a large amount of gas burping out of the permafrost actually causing the acceleration in the global warming that we see already happening.
a If you look out across the millions of lakes in the Arctic, you start to wonder just how much methane all of these lakes could release.
DA The future looks alarming indeed, but it's not without hope. There is still time if we act now with determination and urgency. What do governments, industries, nations, and we as individuals need to do to change our course?
At the 2015 United Nations Climate Summit in Paris, for the first time ever, nearly every country in the world came to an agreement. It set an objective to hold temperatures below 2° and try to limit warming to 1.5.
a If we want to try and keep the global climate to 1 1/2°, we have to half our carbon emissions by 2030 and then hit zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.
DA This poses a huge challenge as emissions must be cut from almost every part of the economy.
a It's actually not that complicated. We need to shift our energy system away from fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases and towards renewable energies that don't.
a Every country has got a different resource. In Norway, you've got an awful lot of hydro power. If you're in India or Morocco, there's lots and lots of sun. The problem was that renewables were much more expensive than fossil fuels.
a But what's happened recently is rapid falls in the price of renewable energy.
DA Solar power has led the way with this.
a Germany went first with many of the key technologies in solar and China really picked up the baton.
a There's tremendous technological innovation taking place around the world. Solar power is now the cheapest form of newly installed electricity in more than 60 countries.
Mann- We're seeing a huge growth in renewable energy despite entrenched fossil fuel interests. They've been unable to stop that transition. And we've got to do even more.
a In the UK, for a long time, we've been considering future energy sources. It used to be 10, 20 years ago that nuclear power offered a relatively cheap way through. And one really good advantage of nuclear is that it doesn't produce
emissions. But what's become clearer recently is that some technologies are performing better than others. And increasingly that's been about wind.
emissions. But what's become clearer recently is that some technologies are performing better than others. And increasingly that's been about wind.
DA Here in the UK, we are building some of the biggest offshore wind turbines in the world. The bigger the turbine, the more wind can be captured. Just one revolution of these blades can power a house for a day.
A With the increased capacity, wind resource is about to become as cheap and much cheaper in the future than fossil fuels.
DA So far, around 30% of the UK's electricity comes from renewable sources. If that is to continue to grow, we'll need to develop parallel systems to keep our energy reliable and store what we produce.
a The bit that comes next that means that we have to decarbonize industry and we're going to decarbonize the transport sector and that means using things like electric vehicles, battery powered vehicles, potentially even hydrogen powered vehicles.
a We know what we have to do. We really have to get on and do it.
a And this is the political decision, the brave decision that needs to be taken. Do we incur a small cost now and not insignificant cost? Let's be clear on it. or do we wait and see the need to adapt? And the economics is really clear on this that the costs of action are dwarfed by the costs of inaction.
DA If we take this path now, we could potentially buy ourselves time to crack some of the most challenging sources of emissions like aviation.
a One of the major barriers to obtaining electric flight is the the power that we can get from batteries today. But we are seeing strides being made and seeing a reduction in the weight of these batteries.
DA Recently the world's first fully electric plane made it across the channel.
a This was a single passenger 60 kW power jet. Now we're trying to retrofit a 20 ton aircraft and get it flying. We'll be replacing one of the engines with an electric motor driving a fan.
We're going to take these hybrid electric systems and test them in the air, test them in flight at different altitudes and different temperatures. And this is going to give us the key to understand how we might integrate these systems for future aircraft designs.
DA To limit warming to 1.5° as well as reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere, we need to find ways to reduce the vast amount that's already there.
a There's a great deal of interest in the kind of technologies that we might have that could actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now the first thing to say is we already have these technologies and they're called trees.
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trees
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a If we reforest and rewild vast areas of the world, then we can lock up huge amounts of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere.
a In the future there are other technologies that might work like direct air capture.
a This is one of the world's first carbon collectors. Air is sucked into the collector. Inside there is a filter unit that absorbs CO2. The CO2 sticks to the filter and then is dissolved in water and under high pressure. We pump it down to 1,800 m which is the same as the depth of the Grand Canyon. And there it enters the bedrock.
a This is a core taken from deep within the ground at the site where we injected our CO2. It's basalt. The water just flows through these pores and react with the rock. So the white that we see here is CO2 turned into stone. So it's not affecting our atmosphere.
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DA Technologies like this may be able to help us in the future. But to meet emission targets, action is needed now. Can what we do as individuals make a difference?
a So the average UK person has got a carbon footprint of roughly 13 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per person per year. And that's of everything that they buy and do traced right back down the supply chain; and we can pick a few things to start with that will make a really significant difference.
a We should be making our homes as energy efficient as possible. That can be as simple as getting your house insulated so you waste less energy which by the way will save you money.
a Everything that we buy, even if we can't see it, has a carbon footprint from smartphones to clothes to furniture.
a We have all become completely used to buying things produced using fossil fuels. A lot of the time we really don't know that.
a Take a washing machine mainly made out of metal and that starts off with a mine. An ore is going to be taken to a blast furnace to extract the metal. An enormous amount of fossil fuel is going to be used and then parts are turned into components. More emissions again. Lastly, it's shipped all over the world to arrive at your local shop. So, we need to think about buying less physical products. When we do so, buy higher qualities and then make it last.
a We've been such a wasteful world, especially in the more developed parts of the world.
a You actually can be far less wasteful and not affect the quality of your life at all.
a Food is about a quarter of our carbon footprint in the UK. If we take three steps, then we can cut that in half. First step, just to eat everything that we buy. In the UK, we waste an enormous proportion of our food. And second, avoid air freighted food which is about 100 times as impactful as putting it on a boat and suddenly it becomes a carbon disaster. Lastly, the most important thing to do is to reduce our meat and dairy consumption and especially beef and lamb.
a The problem is not traditional farming techniques. Problem is with intensive farming. It takes a lot of resources to rear an animal. And cows and sheep are especially high impact because they ruminate which means they burp up methane. And the science on this is absolutely clear-cut. Our studies have shown that if we take these three steps, we could knock perhaps even two tons off the average UK person's carbon footprint.
a These things really do matter. They only get you part of the way, but again, if we don't have them, we can we won't make the final target.
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Transcripts are for readers, writers, and researchers. plus Heating Planet Blog posts transcripts because videos can disappear but the digital printed word lasts forever
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52.30
DA- What happens next is up to us all. I truly believe that together we can bring about the transformative change that is needed.
[Overlapping] Where your influence really kicks in is the way that you push for the cultural change that we need to see and the political change that we need to see. People being able to make their voice heard really matters. You should not underestimate your own power or underestimate your own significance to change people's minds and change people's behavior.
Greta T- When I was younger, I had lots of plans of becoming different things. Everything from an actor to a scientist. But then my teachers in school told me about climate change. That was sort of an eye opener to me. The more I read about it, the more I understood how dangerous it was for everyone. I stopped going to school. I stopped talking because I was just so sad. And then that made me very concerned.
One day I decided that this was enough. I wasn't going to accept this anymore. My future and everyone else's future is at risk and nothing is being done. No one is doing anything. So then I have to do something.
[We need to fight. We need to What do we want? Justice. What do we want?] It is amazing that tens of thousands of children all around the world have done the same thing as I did. Saying that why should we go to school if there's no future? And why should we learn facts when the most important facts don't matter? But I've learned that you are never too small to make a difference.
And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. Change is coming whether you like it or not.
a Today was a day led by the children in dozens of protests across the country. [cheering]
G We still have time to turn everything around to to pull the emergency break and to take action, but that short period of time isn't going to last for long.
DA- There's a message for all of us in the voices of these young people. It is, after all, their generation who will inherit this dangerous legacy. We now stand at a unique point in our planet's history. One where we must all share responsibility both for our present well-being and for the future of life on Earth. Every one of us has the power to make changes and make them now. Our wonderful natural world and the lives of our children and grandchildren and all those who follow them depend upon us doing so.
57.10 CLOSING CREDITS
*****
The Nudges urged me to produce this transcript for the people of Earth, not because the nudges need it; they've seen it all, but part of my job here working for them is to produce documentation of global warming as it takes place and accelerates in the coming months They have no conception of weekends They do like electric planes.
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