 Good morning, John. This is an ice cube. You've heard of them. It's a little weird that we... God, it's a little weird that we call them cubes, even when they're not even close to being cube-shaped. When an ice cube reaches a temperature above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it becomes liquid water. But John, it's around 70 degrees in this room right now, and the ice cube is still ice. So what's going on? Well, I'm gonna put the ice cube down for a little bit and we'll cut back to it. Now I would like to introduce you to the scariest graph I have ever seen. It was published in a paper in 2016, actually by a friend of mine. It's a graph of sea level rise, but it is not the graph of sea level rise that we usually see. Those tend to look like this. They show how much scientists expect the sea level to have risen by a certain point in the future, and they invariably show pretty bad news. Like a full meter of sea level rise by 2100 would cost around $14 trillion a year. For comparison, all of the student loans outstanding in the U.S. right now about $1.5 trillion. But these graphs are showing you something called global mean sea level, or GMSL. That's where the sea level is going to be in 2100, and you can see various scenarios that the IPCC has put together. In blue, you've got RCP 2.6. That's like the best case scenario where everyone works really hard together very quickly to make sure that the total increase in temperature of the earth is no more than 2 degrees Celsius. In red, you've got RCP 8.5. That's basically the scenario in which we do nothing. And spoiler, we're closer to that one than we are to RCP 2.6. But the scariest graph I've ever seen, bring it back now, it's got a surprise for us. GMSL is the tiny little insignificant blip on the bottom in gray. That's global mean sea level. These big things, that's what they're calling SLRC, or sea level rise commitment. This is not a graph of where the sea level is going to be. It's a graph of what sea level rise we will have, like, signed up for. Because John, my ice cube, is still over here being an ice cube. It's been 70 degrees in here the whole time, but still ice. Sea level doesn't automatically zip to wherever it would be for any given global temperature. It takes time for ice to melt. It takes time for heat to move around. It takes, like, forever. Except, not forever. If we follow our worst case scenario to 2100, we will have that one meter sea level rise. But we will have signed up for six meters of sea level rise. Even today, with the temperature increase that we've already seen, we, in the long term, have already signed up for more than a meter of sea level rise. Now, admittedly, this is, like, long-term thinking, and no model is perfect. If we paused CO2 releases right now, it would be hundreds of years before we saw that full sea level rise. But we would see it. We would even see rise over a meter if we started to decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. There isn't a scenario, long term, that doesn't lead to more than a meter of sea level rise with current technology. But, John, we are humans, and we are very good at solving problems. We are just not good at solving problems that we aren't able to recognize. If we wait until 2100, when we're really going to start feeling the actual, like, serious sting of climate change, we will have signed up for much, much worse than that. So, John, I'll just leave you with this. The ice is dripping, but it's still ice. I'll see you on Tuesday. John, congrats on the launch of Life's Library. You got those first thousand people, and now it is open for folks to sign up. I just did it myself. What a wonderful value. And second, if you want to hear me ramble a bunch about how I feel like I think a little bit differently about climate change than a lot of people, and maybe a little bit more of a nuance to take, I made a big long video over on Hank's channel. It has a little bit of optimism in it, which you might need right now. Check out Life's Library at Life'sLibraryBookClub.com.