 So I'm Richard Alley, I'm Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences and I'm an associate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at the Pennsylvania State University and University Park. I'm trained as a geologist and also as a material scientist and metallurgical engineer, minor in those, and I work on the great ice sheets and I look at the history of them from ice cores to understand past climate, I look at how they flow and whether they'll flow and fall in the ocean and raise sea level and I look at what they do to landscapes. Right, so I try to use things that work and so I have had fun explaining Milankovitch cycles with me. This is the globe and here's the North Pole and don't ask where the South Pole is and then let's do some things there. But anything that works, right, there is nothing really in climate science that is difficult except maybe the quantum mechanics that underlies the radiative transfer. But there's nothing that's difficult but there's lots of steps and the steps all the way from CO2 as a greenhouse gas to how much we're putting up to all the way to economics and ethics and so on and anything that makes it easier, anything that's engaging enough that people will sit through another step I think is valuable because it's not hard, it's just a big long engaging story. So I had a true wonderful experience making Earth the Operator's Manual. The opportunity to work with Jeff Hainstiles and Erna Kouganow, I mean, did the original cosmos with Girl Sagan. So you know these are people that know what they're doing our first rate and science aficionados, people who understand science and put science out in a good light but come from a storytelling and a history background and so this is something that I think is really valuable. We started the filming in New Zealand and, you know, they dropped me down a crevasse, they sent me bungee jumping and we had this long discussion. Is it right to ask the talent? I'm not talent but in the words of television, I'm the talent. Is it right to ask the talent to jump off a bridge? And we were round and round and round and finally we did the obvious thing which is you get it in the can, which no one has a can for their film anymore but nonetheless you get it in the can and you make up your mind later because right now we're at the bungee jump place and the moment we were done with it we're all, yes that was what we wanted, this was way cool. So we got, we're down there filming on New Year's Eve and we're way in the back of a thermal area at Rota Rua, at Hell's Gate and the people up front locked it up and went off to enjoy New Year's Eve and we couldn't get out because we weren't locked in behind this gate. We're out New Year's Day getting shown around a geothermal plant and I believe the people who were showing us around had maybe been a little bit in their cups the evening before so we had to keep the noise down a little. So I've been very fortunate. I have not been in serious trouble anywhere doing research. We go to places that are potentially scary, high and cold and far and what have you but we've worked really hard on trying to be safe and the people that do ICE generally include a lot of folks who are, came at it as outdoorsmen, outdoors persons, men and women and you get, if you get in trouble there's somebody there that usually knows. There's a fascinating history that a lot of the great glaciologists, their first paper was a description of some conquest of some peak or something out of mountaineering and then you they turn into these brilliant scientists but they're brilliant scientists that love where they're going and what they're doing. I have no idea how I got into science except that I had parents who promoted my interest and I loved collecting rocks I loved going caving and going to national parks and so geology was an obvious major for me. When I got to Ohio State as an undergrad I was looking for a summer job because I needed money and there were two jobs open one was cleaning fossils with a dental pick and the other one was working with the glaciologist and I started working with the glaciologist in Willens, late grade Ian Willens, the summer after my freshman year. I tried a couple of times to get out of it and it never worked so I've been at it for a long time. Much of my work has addressed abrupt climate change or temping points or something like that. It's if you work through the whole scholarship of climate change the sort of economic models say don't worry too much and they sort of say don't worry too much because there's these very strong economic assumptions. Economic growth goes on and it won't stop for anything and your grandchildren are going to be incredibly wealthier than you are and wealth gives you the power to solve all problems. So we now faced with the question of what do we do about climate change have a choice do we invest in heading off the problems of climate change or do we have a party enjoy consume or do we invest in growing the economy and let our grandchildren worry about the problems of climate change and the economists always come up with an answer that says you do invest some now in heading off climate change but not too much because essentially that is giving money to your incredibly wealthy grandchildren by solving their problems. Now this is a really important thing because even if you assume that the economy can grow forever even if you assume that wealth solves all problems and investments now will allow your grandchildren and their grandchildren to solve the problems we still are not in a position which is optimal for making us wealthiest we still would be better off economically across all the scholarship if we did something about this now okay our policies are not optimal to make us wealthiest but suppose the climate change is fast or suppose a rapid a slower climate change causes something else to change fast like the Brazilian rainforest goes boo or the ice sheet collapses or something and those are the sort of tipping points it's very clear that if you push slowly on the climate a lot of the things that we have built hit sudden thresholds either the city is hiding behind the levy and the water stays just below the levy during the storm or just above and that little change can make a huge difference to whether your city is livable or not the next few weeks and so we know those are out there we're also worried about things in the physical system and in particular the one I worry about is whether the West End Arctic ice sheet will fall in the ocean and there's been a paper a good colleague of mine very good scientists that said we may have already committed to more than three meters of sea level rise from west Antarctica if we haven't we're pretty close to it and the scholarship strong on that well it's it's frustrating right because there shouldn't be a serious role for politics in climate science in my opinion the science is science and it was right the first time I ever testified to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate was 12 years ago and it was chaired by a Republican who was about to introduce a bill that was going to put a price on changing the climate through carbon emissions and I personally think that he was just a little bit unhappy with me because I was not scarier about the threats I was being very careful and measured and this is that long ago and so so the idea that somehow your your politics that you're on this side or that side means that you do or don't believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas there is a little bit of that now but it's a very very recent thing and it's the thing that I think that I hope can disappear again so the difference between climate change and global warming I use the terms I use both terms climate can change for lots of reasons we humans are certainly the biggest one now but nature certainly has mattered nature will matter global warming is sort of shorthand for us raising CO2 and some other changes that that cause warming but it's it's a nice convenient shorthand but it occasionally confuses people who haven't thought really deeply because they think well everywhere has to warm and in fact it is possible while you're warming that it does something like that and some places may see a little bit of cooling for a while on the way so I use both terms and you try to pick the one that is is most suited for the topic you're you're hitting right now there are people who are trying to make a big deal about which term you use and I'm afraid I think that's a little bit on the silliness side so how one responds to misconceptions about climate change I think depends a lot on the setting and it depends a lot on the person there's no scheme for communications that reaches everyone what reaches me and what reaches a senator and different senators will be different and I am going to listen more easily to some voices than the others I try very hard to listen to all but we all have knobs in our head somewhere that we can't get past there are people that I'm a professor I have initials after my name if I wanted to put them there and there's some people who say wow you must know what you're talking about that I will listen to you and there are other people say oh come on doesn't that prove that you don't know anything about the real world and so I won't listen to you and so it's very clear that communication to everyone requires a lot of us and it requires a lot of different voices one thing we learned from earthy operators manual we had a summative evaluation we had people who ask viewers what reached you what didn't reach you and people that I reached it's fine but people that I didn't reach listen very carefully to a rear admiral in his dress whites is a very different voice telling the same story climate change in the really short term is expensive but not hugely so and as the climate change gets bigger as we look farther into the future the price goes up the damages go up very crudely each degree of warming costs more than the previous degree the first degree was almost in the noise of what we were used to it it's not very expensive but we've used that one and the second degree will cost a little more it's moving outside of your experience it's starting to stress things and we've committed to that one very broadly the third degree costs more than the second and by the fourth and the fifth now sea level rise is going to get huge we have real problems with crops which may be bumping up against biochemical limits and the ability to feed ourselves gets a little bit worrisome and so by the time you start running to the third the fourth the fifth degree the costs of damages the dangers go way up but we're arguing now about the third degree because we've basically we've warmed almost all of the first one and we really have committed to the second one communicating this is absolutely essential I think that the maybe the most powerful thing is that using the science will make us better off this is not just about doing right it is not just about doing the ethical thing it is not just about buying insurance against disasters it's also about how do we end up do we end up healthy wealthy and wise or do we end up poor and in trouble there's a fantastic good news story here and that's not one that we always hear but we are the first generation in the history of humanity that can say we know how to build an energy system that will power everyone essentially forever and we have we burned through the trees where we had trees until there were no trees left and we burned them way faster than they grew back we burned through the whales so we could light the evening with whale oil lamps until the oceans were depleted of whales we've been hunter-gatherers of energy while we've been farmers of food and we now know for the first time how to solve that and we know how to get off of the treadmill how to get off of the problem and build a system that will work and we know from the scholarship of global warming of climate change the whole thing that embarking on this path makes us better off and that story is not well told but as a communicated probably the toughest situation i was ever in i once did a debate on the reality of global warming with a prominent skeptic and i was young and naive and i went in and laid out the science and the other person said things that we do not accept as being their mainstream science and said about 30 of them in a five minute opening statement and one i know what to do with two i know what to do with 30 now we're just going to sit there and argue until it ends and this problem that we don't in a public forum a debate is a horrible thing because it's so easy to cause rank confusion that if one does what's sometimes called a gish gallop you put out 30 things that are wrong the audience now is just going to hear arguments and this will prove to their minds somehow that there are two sides and that they're hearing an argument from the two sides maybe the biggest mistake in all of the public communications on this is this idea that somehow there's scientists and there's people who aren't worried about climate change and that that's both sides and the science is the middle and we know that maybe because science has real uncertainties things may be a little better than we scientists think so it may be on the don't worry side and it may be a little on the the worry more side we simply don't see any way that changing the climate a lot with co2 in a hurry is going to turn the world into the garden of Eden and we do see ways that you can cause horrible problems and so the uncertainties are the science a little better a little worse a lot worse and what are we doing we're having this argument between the science and don't worry and saying look we heard both sides no absolutely unequivocally not if you wanted a scientist to argue against someone it probably should be an environmentalist because there's a bigger difference than those two or you could have the don't worry argue with the environmentalist and the science is the middle it's not one side we scientists do know where our funding comes from we try to do research which is um responding to the that is the tires of our funding agencies and if the government says we as the federal government would like to know about acts we try to do the research to tell them just in terms of total money if one were to compare the biggest corporations tend to be fossil fuel things often they they're not poor um our impression as scientists is that if we were were really really interested in money there would probably be other ways to do it um the structure of science think for a minute about newton and einstein suppose that einstein had stood up and said i have worked very hard and i have discovered that newton got everything right and i have nothing to add would anyone ever know who einstein was and scientists at some level have to have a little bit of ego the job description is very clear it is learn what nobody else knows and if you you look at that and say all i want to do is cheer for other people you're probably not going into that field and if you go in that field there's a little bit of ego to learn what nobody else knows and we've all got it however well we tamp it down and the idea that we wouldn't want to be einstein if we could overturn global warming if we could prove that ceo toe was not a greenhouse gas if we could prove that we can burn all we want and not worry about it how exciting would that be how wonderful how many prizes how many people would invite me out to give talks if i could prove that you didn't have to worry about this is there any possibility the tens of thousands of scientists there isn't one of them that's got the ego to do that it's absurd it's absolutely unequivocally absurd we're people and we've got it in us the way people do and the fact that nature pushes us to the reality that co2 is a greenhouse gas it's real there's nothing we can do about it global warming from our co2 is physics we put up 40 000 pounds of co2 per person per year in the us 20 tons in brown numbers and the physics behind that causing warming are the same physics that the air force used to put sensors on heat-seeking missiles and in some really fundamental sense if you deny the global warming effect of our co2 you are claiming the air force doesn't know what to put on their heat-seeking missiles it's absurd there's history here in that i i ended up giving a talk at one point old dominion had um i forget the name of it but they had all of their freshmen take a class and i went down and taught this class for one day and it was in the um basketball stadium and they were really gung-ho about no you can't have this serif type you just gotta be sand serif and they liked this one they thought this was pretty cool that the students would would see it and enjoy it and if you're you're talking to them and they're in the basketball stadium right what do you do with that so denis darby had invited me down and i got it and then i just stuck with it because it was in the interest is an unexpected one right and and so that's i've always stayed with it because it is unexpected and gives people a different look it's very easy to read um as odd as it is actually at least it's a lot of passions from people i know in fact apparently there is a thing out there somewhere on twitter or facebook or something that is a flowchart about the use of comic satans ms with your name in the middle i've seen that yeah we'll flash up a shot of that okay so but it was a piece of history that somebody had said you can't use the fonts you're using you have to get huge type and when you get huge type in these blocky things it's it doesn't look nice and so this one would be a nice one and i just stuck with it then