 Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to the global situation space. My name is Naomi Oreskes. I'm a professor of the history of science and technology at Harvard University. And I'm here today to present this collaboration between WEF and a group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. And before I plunge in, I want to shout out my colleague Harry Hawkins. All of the technical brilliance you see today is the responsibility of him and his team at Carnegie Mellon. So we're here today to talk about climate change. We all know about climate change. We've all heard the facts and figures. We all know about the 1.5-degree threshold. But sometimes climate change can feel very abstract. And sometimes it's hard to communicate to people why climate change really matters to them. What the Carnegie Mellon group have done is to take large quantities of global data, satellite data, data from the US Geological Survey and NASA, and to make it, first of all, visual and hopefully meaningful. So I want to start today by talking about temperature. We all know that global warming means that the Earth warms. That means it gets hotter. But what does that mean for us as people and businesses and industries? So this is a picture of a normal June or July day in North America. And we're just going to wait a moment to see, you know, so this is North America. There's some warm spots in July, but it's mostly not too hot. Now we're going to show you the temperature anomaly from the same period in early July. And some of you will know this is the period when there were devastating wildfires in the Pacific Northwest that killed over 250 people in the region of Portland, Oregon. And you can see a massive temperature anomaly, some parts of North America that exceeded 44 degrees Celsius. That's a kind of temperature that would have been unheard of 30 or 40 years ago. We think of the Pacific Northwest as being damp and cool, and it isn't any longer. And this is causing many consequences, many harmful consequences. And one of them is hurricanes. So one of the reasons climate change matters so much is that when the world warms, it doesn't just heat up gradually around the world equally. It heats up differently in different areas. And those temperature differentials drive big weather. They drive tropical storms, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, which then lead and turn to flooding. So this is a satellite imagery of Hurricane Maria. And some of you know this was one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit North America. Over here in the Northwest, we see the Dominican Republic and Haiti, just to give you a sense of the scale. And one of the things we know that the scientific evidence has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt is that hurricanes are getting bigger. This is just a huge swap of the Caribbean Ocean. And they are also getting stronger. We're seeing record-breaking high winds, record-breaking precipitation, and this is, I'll get a little geeky here, record-breaking low pressures in the eye of the hurricane, which is an objective measure of how strong the hurricane is. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, as you know, it devastated the community. So how do we communicate that devastation? Well, there are many different ways. Obviously personal stories are very important. But one way to think about it is what this did to infrastructure. One of the reasons that climate change is so bad is that it damages the critical infrastructure that we need to deal with it. It damages the infrastructure that makes us resilient. So this is a satellite image of lights at night in Puerto Rico, and that reflects infrastructure. It reflects where people have and are using electricity. So this is before Hurricane Maria, and in the next slide we'll show you after. And you can see this is four months after the hurricane and major parts of the island are still without electricity four months later. In fact, two years later, major parts of the island have still not been restored to the pre-hurricane effects. And so you can think about this in terms of the loss of infrastructure, the effects on businesses, the effects on people's lives, and the inability of people to just go about their daily lives because they don't have a basic necessity of life, which is electricity and also in many cases running water. Next slide, Harry. Again, to make it personal and visceral, one of the reasons hurricanes are so bad is not just the damaging winds, but often most of the worst damages caused by flooding, which destroys people's homes, kills people. So here you can see a before and after picture. Here's a community in Puerto Rico before the hurricane, and here you see the entire community, all that's left is the rooftops of the buildings. And imagine what that would have been like to have been there as the water was rising and you had to climb on your roof, hoping that someone might come and rescue you. Next slide, Harry. But of course it's not just poor countries that suffer from climate change, it's rich countries too. One of the things I think a lot about in climate change is that we talk a lot about the environmental injustices of climate change, and they're very real and they're very important, but I sometimes worry that when we talk too much about how this will hurt poor countries, the people in rich countries think, oh, I don't have to worry about it, but that's not true. And we've seen in the last couple of years how climate change is affecting the rich and industrialized countries as well as the poorer countries of the world. So some of you will remember the devastating floods that happened in Europe in July of 2021, which affected large swatches of central and northern Europe. So we're gonna zoom in on some information that shows some of the regions of Germany and the Netherlands that were affected. So as water levels rose, nearly 5,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes in Rormond, sorry if I mispronounced that, in the Netherlands near the border of Germany. And these colors show regions in which people had to evacuate or take precautionary measures in order to avoid the flooding in one of the richest, most industrialized places on the planet. So even those of us who are very wealthy are not immune from the negative impacts of climate change. And here's just another example. There's Bonn on the right-hand side and you can see major areas of Germany affected. 47 people died in the North Rhine Westphalia during this period and billions of dollars of damage to roads, bridges, houses, hospitals, et cetera. Okay, so we're gonna zoom out and here come down to an area just east of Luxembourg, villages and towns, such as Cordell and the Trier-Sarburg area found themselves completely cut off by flooded rivers. And if you just think about that for a moment, imagine you live in Germany or Luxembourg or the Netherlands. You're a wealthy country. You have emergency services to help, but now those services can't get to you because your town is cut off by flooding. And in some cases, it was many days before people were able to get help. All right, so now we're going to, oh, here's one more picture again just to make it real, to make it down to earth. So much of this is satellite imagery, so we're bringing satellite imagery down to earth. Here's a before picture. You can see a beautiful agricultural field, some beautiful older homes. And then in the next slide, we see what happens after flooding. And it's not, so you see, it's not just the field is destroyed, but the flooding led to landslides. And imagine, imagine if you were in that building. So one of the things that's frightening about climate change and hard to get your head around is the way it creates these extremes of weather. And they're both extremes of heat and cold, extremes of flooding and drought. So in some parts of the world, we're now having to worry much more about flooding. In other areas, of course, we have to worry about heat waves and drought. Africa is of course one of the regions of the world that already suffers from heat and drought. And now we're seeing that that's being exacerbated by climate change. So this is a picture that shows seasonal rainfall accumulation in March to May, so spring of 2022. And you can see in the eastern, in the Horn of Africa and East Africa, a large swath of East Africa, which the precipitation was less than half of normal precipitation, less than half. And so in an area that already has to work and manage with in very hot and dry conditions as the norm, now we're seeing those conditions becoming dramatically drier. If we go to the next slide, we see again to make it real, to make it visceral. Just imagine living in an area where a lake is dried out, your cattle are starving because there's nothing for them to feed on because you're now experiencing weeks, months, or in some cases, even years of sustained prolonged extreme drought. And then there's fires. Fires are terrifying. We're all afraid of fire and rightly so. Fire destroys properties, it destroys lives, it destroys biodiversity. It undoes conservation work. And some of the most devastating fires we've seen in the world in recent years have taken place in Australia. And the point here, of course, is to point out these effects are all around the globe. In North Africa, sorry, in North America, in Europe, in Australia, also of course in Asia, which we won't talk about today. Now, one of the things that sometimes climate skeptics will say, well, there've always been wildfires. And that's true. I lived in Australia for several years. Wildfires are part of life, but they've become dramatically worse, more frequent, more intense, and they do more damage, they kill more people, and they destroy more biodiversity. So as some of you know, the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season was the most intense and catastrophic fire season on record in Australia. So Australia had never seen fires of this scope, scale, and magnitude. And so these are satellite images. These are fires at night. And so what you see is that during this bushfire season, essentially all of Australia, where there was anything to burn, it burned. And to me, this picture is especially shocking because if you know Australia, if you've spent time there, the coastal regions are the cooler, moisture areas, that's where virtually all Australians live. And so all of the areas that were populated were burning. And areas that we might not, when we think of the interiors being extremely hot and dry, but the worst wildfires were actually in the moisture areas where there was more vegetation to burn. So you might think that if you lived in Sydney, you didn't really have to worry about wildfires, and we saw that that wasn't true. Next slide. Fires are bad in so many ways, and one of the reasons they're bad is because of the smoke. So this is an image from space of the smoke plumes that were created by the fires around Sydney and across eastern Australia. So you can see Canberra up there in the sort of center of the picture, Wongong in the far north. And so you can see that this thick, heavy smoke plume covered a large swath of populated Australia, lingered for days to weeks, and caused many hospital admissions of people who were suffering respiratory illness from smoke inhalation. And if you know anything about, say, household fires, most people who die on fires don't actually die from the flames. They die from smoke inhalation. They suffocate. And I actually happened to be in Sydney right around this time. The smoke was so thick that you could smell it in the airplane when we landed at Sydney Airport before they had even opened the doors and windows. And just to leave you then with one more image, so many of you may be saw this iconic image. It was published on the front page of the New York Times. And I just, I love this picture because it just encapsulates, you know, they always say a picture is worth a thousand words and this one surely is. It encapsulates the way in which the fires affected infrastructure, affected people, and affected wildlife. No one is spared in fires like this, whether you're rich or poor, human or kangaroo. About 19 million hectares of land was burned, 12.6 million hectares of which were forests and woodlands, and more than 1,700 species of plants, animals, and ecological communities were officially listed as threatened as a result of this one incident. And this is particularly heartbreaking to me because I have a lot of scientist friends in Australia who have spent decades working on conservation, protecting endangered species of kangaroos, wallabies, wombats. The unique and absolutely incredible wildlife of Australia and over a million individual animals were killed and decades of work, decades of great work by conservationists and scientists were wiped out in a few days. So that's a sad note, but I'm gonna now get happy and introduce an amazing person, one of my heroes, the next former president, oh, sorry, the next former vice president, the former vice president of the United States, Mr. Al Gore. Oh, well thank you very much. Thank you, I'm so wired up here, I don't know. Anyway, thank you very much, Naomi, and I'm supposed to speak only for three minutes, and so I'll be very quick and very brief. I want to say I'm here because of my longstanding respect for Naomi Oreskes and in my first movie and 18 years ago, Naomi's research played a very key role and was spotlighted in the movie, and we've been friends and allies ever since then, and I want to acknowledge one of my former staff members, Himanshu Gupta, who is also working with you here, and I love a good slideshow on climate. And you know, the computer scientists sometimes marvel at the human brain, and I heard one of them a long time ago say, if you analyze the human brain and computer terms, you could say that we have a low bit rate, but very high resolution. When AT&T back in the years when it was the only phone company in the US did research on how many numbers to use for the signaling and connection system, they decided seven numbers was the most we could keep in our memory, then they added four after that. But an infant can recognize faces and there are many other examples of how high resolution enables us to absorb vast amounts of information very, very quickly. And so, as you said, a picture is worth 1,000 words and a good contextualized story told in slides and pictures and maps can really convey a tremendous amount of information. When I started giving, just to make a point about the progress or the progress is the wrong word, the rapid worsening of the climate crisis. When I was giving slideshows back 30 years ago, 20 years ago, I would illustrate the various issues that many of which you've seen here by saying, oh, well, here's an example of this from 15 years ago. Here's one from 10 years ago. Here's one from 12 years ago. Now I say, here's one from yesterday. Here's one from two days ago. Here's one from last week. And some of these same slides I have used in the past myself. And if we had them instantly available there online, we could show you images of flooding in Germany. For example, we saw that field devastated from two days ago. And similarly, these things are happening all over the world. Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation, as I've said on previous occasions. And so, using the best techniques for trying to convey the meaning of the crisis that we're facing is really an important task. And I congratulate you, Naomi, on this new dimension of your work. It's really extremely important. I wanna mention a related project that I'll be talking about in another forum in the next hour. ClimateTrace, climatetrace.org, uses artificial intelligence to enhance images that show the 352 million largest point source emission sites for greenhouse gas pollution everywhere in the world. I'll announce in another hour that we are adding another data contributing organization to our network, which will also show every renewable energy project in the world with the metadata on the owner, the operator, the electricity output, and every project under development tracking it as it goes toward completion. We're now having large companies and smaller companies use this data to swap out suppliers in their supply chains and networks in order to get lower emissions associated with the same quality of goods and services. So, and it's all free, it's available online. You go to it right now, climatetrace.org and we update it regularly. So, what's this all about? Just briefly before I conclude, just to give the basics, we're putting 162 million tons of man-made global warming pollution into the sky today as we do every day. It lingers there on average. Each molecule on average stays about 100 years and so it mounts up and the accumulated amount today traps as much extra heat in the earth system as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding on the earth every 24 hours, every day, every year and it continues to increase. Now, here's the good news. If we comply with the latest mandate or document from the conference of the parties that was held just last month and transitioned away from fossil fuels, climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, that's what it is and they have used their power and wealth to capture the COP process. They've used it to capture many university research agendas, they have used it to, they're way better at capturing politicians than capturing emissions and they have used their capture of politicians to write the policies. One of the former heads of the European Commission, Claude Junker, said years ago, he said, we all know what to do, we just don't know how to get reelected when we do it and the reason it's hard to get reelected when we do it is because the fossil fuel polluters use a portion of their wealth from digging up dead things from the earth and burning them in ways that destroy the future of humanity. They use some of their wealth to confuse people. Just last week, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest lobby organization for fossil fuel companies in the US announced a brand new $100 million advertising campaign with the objective of convincing people that it's impossible to shift away from fossil fuels and to slow down and block the transition that's necessary. I get a little exercised about this because I've watched it for a long time and it's driven by pure greed, pure greed. And yet we have the ability to stop it. And here's the good news, if we get to true net zero, if we rapidly deploy the alternatives to fossil fuels, which are now cheaper in almost the entire world and don't cause the co-pollution that kills nine million people from lung diseases every year, if we deploy electric vehicles, solar wind, batteries, green hydrogen and the rest and we get to true net zero, temperatures on the earth will stop going up almost immediately. The lag is as little as three to five years. Metaphorically, it's like flipping a switch. That switch is hard to flip because it requires all of us in every country to use our political agency to speak up and demand with sufficient numbers and passion that our political leaders stop bowing down to the fossil fuel polluters and when they say jump they say, how high, yes sir, and instead care for the future of humanity. Here's the other good news. If we stay at true net zero, 50% of all of the human cause greenhouse gas pollution will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as 25 to 30 years. We can solve this and we have the means to solve it. All we have to do is to marshal the political will to make the policy changes that are necessary. And so I'll conclude by just reminding all of us that political will is itself a renewable resource. Thank you very much and congratulations Naomi. Great to see you here. Excuse me for running. Okay, well thank you so much. That was great. We have a little bit of time for questions. Unfortunately the vice president has to leave so I have to do my best to answer your questions. Yeah. Yeah. Can you give us a sense of how much El Nino and El Nino? Yeah, the El Nino and La Nina cycle doesn't disguise the long-term trends and the long run the long-term trend emerges. What it does is adds a kind of complication. So if you've looked at any of the charts or graphs that you can see about climate change, we know that the temperature doesn't go up like this. It goes up like this and then maybe it seems to stay stable for a little bit, goes up again. And the way I like to think about it, I'll get slightly geeky here. Imagine you have two mathematical functions. One is a straight line. You learned about that probably in school. And the other is a sine curve that goes like this. If you impose a straight line, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all this equipment, give me a second here. Okay, if you impose a sine curve, a straight line on a sine curve, what you'll get, see now I need a blackboard, but you're gonna get something that looks like this. It's gonna go up for a while, so it'll look a little flat. Go up, look a little flat. Go up, look a little fat. And of course, the climate deniers have exploited that by taking the flat areas and say, oh, look, there's no global warming. And we say, no, this is arithmetic, right? Add a flat curve and a sine curve and that's what you get. So the La Nina, the cooler periods may add to those flat periods. And then the El Nino period add to the heater periods. And that's what we saw this past year. So that's one of the reasons why 2023 was so shockingly hot. It was the combination of accelerated global warming from burning fossil fuels and deforestation combined with the El Nino. So one thing that will probably happen, it's not 100% clear, but probably next year will not as hot as this year was. And we know the skeptics will try to exploit that. And they'll say, oh, look, 2023 was just an anomaly. Don't worry about it, it's all fine. It is not all fine. Did you have a question? That the US has passed the IRAs, that's what it's called. Yeah, the so-called inflation. And the other countries who've done amazing things too that you might be optimistic about. But is there hope there? Well, there's always hope. As long as we're living and breathing, as long as Al Gore is still doing his thing, there's always hope. And I love being around him because, frankly, this is a very difficult space to work in. And I didn't mention this earlier, but I also work on disinformation. I've written several books now about fossil fuel industry disinformation. It's very difficult. They're powerful, they're well-organized, they're smart. And as Vice President Gore said, they are greedy and honestly, they're evil. They do not care who they hurt. And we have so much evidence that that's true. It's all about short-term profits. So that's depressing. But the upside is the political will, which is there in many places. So the Inflation Reduction Act is a mixed bag. There's a lot that's good in it. It's definitely a step in the right direction. It's super important that the United States has passed a major climate bill for the first time in history. So I think President Biden and Democrats in Congress get a lot of credit for that. On the other hand, no Republican supported it, which means that if we get a Republican president, it will almost certainly be undone. No Republican has had the courage to step out and say this is real and we need to think about what solutions look like since John McCain, since the death of John McCain. And the very fact that it had to be called the Inflation Reduction Act shows how much the skeptics and deniers have poisoned the well of public debate in America. We can't call it what it is, which is the Stop Climate Disruption Act. That's what we should call it, Stop Climate Damage Act. Instead, we have to call it the Inflation Reduction Act. And I understand that that was real politic, but it's very, very sad that that's it. And then the other really bad thing about the RRA is the so-called 45Q tax credit for carbon storage. That's a long complicated story. Happy to talk to anyone about that afterwards, but most of that is actually a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry. And if people want to know more about why that is, I can be happy to talk about that offline. Yeah. What makes you optimistic? What makes me optimistic? I get that question all the time. I kind of am moving towards Roy Scranton. I don't know if you know his work. He wrote this book called Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. He fought in Iraq. He's an amazing guy. And he says, well, maybe we should really talk about constructive pessimism, or pessimism that mobilizes us to fight against the darkness. So I'm influenced by that way of thinking, but I don't want to make it sound like I don't have hope. Of course I do. So I think, as I just said, the Inflation Reduction Act is a really important step in the right direction. The key now in American politics is to try to build on that, and particularly, I think, to build on the state and local level, because we're seeing a lot of good things happening on the state level. Cities give me hope, because if you think about climate change, it's driven by fossil fuel use, which is tied to economic activity. Most of the economic activity we're talking about takes place in cities. And cities have been progressive forces forever. And so I see a lot of hope in the actions of cities and mayors. And then, of course, the cliche thing to say, but it's true, is my students. I mean, young people are all on this issue. They all get it. They all care about it. And they all want to know what they can do to be part of the solution, because they understand that this is their future. Yeah. Do we have a mic here? Oh, we're out of time? Can I take one more question? Or we have another? OK, one last question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a great question. Like, do we need to actually show people the stark reality of how bad this could be? I think the answer is absolutely both-handed. I wrote a book called The Collapse of Western Civilization that attempted to do exactly that. And the book was a bestseller in France, proving the stereotype that French people like stories with bad endings. But I got a lot of fan mail from people saying to me, OK, that was a great book. Love did powerful. Write the companion book of how we fix this. And honestly, I've been struggling with that for years, because it's very hard to figure out what the companion book would be that doesn't seem glib, naive, or misleading. And so I'm still working on that. My goal is a box set. Anyway, thank you all so much for coming. I'm getting the signals we're out of time. But it's been a pleasure having you here today.