 at our stage we have a we will follow up on what to expect when our world gets hotter and hotter and I want you all to welcome Hanno a big applause please yeah Hanno will talk about climate breakdown the reality is bleak and without further ado please enjoy the talk and I hand over to Hanno hello yeah I I wanted to start with a bit of motivation because like you may have seen me before talking on CCC events and it's usually either about AC security or about general issues with science so you may wonder why I see now talking about climate change and I actually was kind of a climate activist for a long time and I also wrote for some time for a climate for a news publication which was specifically on climate change but I kind of dropped out of the topic which was due to frustration due to other things kind of worked better for me but then there came 2018 and several things happened like I mean you all know we had an extremely dry summer then I noticed suddenly the Hamba forest was in the news every day which is like there's a protest camp from people who want to stop the coal mine and like it's been there for I think five years already at that point but then suddenly it was mainstream news like nobody had like basically there was not much attention for it before and now it yeah and then of course Krita Thunberg started her school strike and there was the Fridays for Future movement and there were new groups like Extinction Rebellion I actually went to a talk from Extinction Rebellion in spring which was very extreme and very emotional and very impressive and so and yeah like a mixture of these things made me think yeah what's my role in this like it it brought the topic back on the table and yeah one thing I did is I submitted this talk here yeah so where are we so this is a graph of well CO2 emissions as you can see it's usually growing it goes till 2017 it grew in more in 2018 you can also see like there's this point in time like for a short time the world really started to get serious to do something about it well or no I mean that was the economic crisis so it wasn't really intentional to but that was kind of the economic crisis was the only point there where you can really see that there was a bit of a drop in emissions but otherwise emissions just go up we have now roughly one degree warming and increasingly we can see the effects we had a big heatwave in India in May and June what you see on the left is like this is a water reservoir how it's usually and on the right it's all dried out I think it's not so good to see but like on the screen it looks very extreme of course we had another heatwave in Europe we had in Germany we had the highest temperatures ever measured and it was beyond 42 degrees and like historically usually the temperatures in Germany never were beyond 40 degrees we have wildfires in the Arctic which like which were at a scale that has not been seen before since this is measured or observed we have melting in Greenland which is much faster than what the science predicted in the past yeah so what is politics doing about this in 2015 there was the Paris Agreement and like many people cheered the environmentalists were happy now the world is finally doing something about it and so this was kind of a worldwide agreement which was the result of a very long process of climate conferences what does the Paris Agreement say basically says all nations agree to at least three degrees of more global heating that may not be what you heard about it but I would say that this is more accurate than what you probably heard about it so where's that discrepancy so what this agreement actually says is nations agreed to limit the global warming to well below two degrees Celsius and also it says that the nations agreed to pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees but there's a problem with this and this is they just declare that they want to do this but they don't have a plan how to do it so this Paris Agreement they have something which is called nationally determined contributions the idea is basically the nations that come together they say okay we volunteer to reduce our emissions by that amount we do this to counter climate change and if you add that up there have been multiple studies you end up with something like three degrees there are also some studies that said more 3.4 degrees so we have like a big gap here where the nation say okay we want to limit it by at least two degrees or even less but in reality what they agreed upon will lead us to three degrees or more that is if they commit to these these voluntary agreements which unfortunately they usually don't like I mean if you're from Germany you probably know Germany has climate goals which by now it's already clear for 2020 these goals will be breached by a large amount and I mean that was part of these agreed contributions to do something about this so I thought I make this a bit in a table because these degree numbers they often come up and to get a bit of an idea like that's always when we talk about this these degrees of warming it's always like compared to what was before we had interest realization so right now we're around one degree in the talk before you heard one point one that's minor details it's around one degree the ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement is one point five degree the kind of minimum goal is two degree what they actually agreed upon is probably three degrees and if you take the current policy it's three to four or maybe even more of course there's things in politics that are kind of inverse we know we have a US president who doesn't believe in global warming he often has a very insightful contributions on Twitter like here record low temperatures and massive amounts of snow where the hell is global warming also this is a quote from the deputy prime minister of Australia they had a meeting with people from from small island states that are very much threatened by sea level rise so many of these island states will disappear in the future and he said yeah I also get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sort of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resource sector so that you know they will continue to survive like how dare they want to survive but there's also positive things like Canada agreed to declare a climate emergency on the 17th of June well sounds good right what does that mean so on the 18th of June one day later Canada approved the trans mountain oil pipeline the picture you're seeing here is oil mining not sure if you knew that this is actually a thing but there's something it's called tar sands which is kind of oil in non liquid form and with the very energy intensive process you can turn it into liquid oil which is Canada is doing a lot and they kind of have a problem that they cannot transport enough away to make it economically viable so that's why they want to build this pipeline and this pipeline has kind of a long story there was originally a company who wanted to build it but then the company stepped down and now the government wants to build it itself so that's how climate emergency looks in Canada I I mean there are currently a lot of initiatives for example in Berlin where people want cities to declare a climate emergency I hope that's not there how they want to go about this these are of course some extremes but keep in mind that like even countries that commit to more ambitious goals for example Germany usually you can sum it up that almost nothing meaningful happens like certainly nothing happens that would be in line with limiting climate change to a level that is somehow acceptable so what does the science tell us so in climate science the IPCC which is a worldwide network of scientists and they are kind of the mainstream of climate science they summarize other results from climate science and they write reports every few years there's a general report the last was 2014 and then there are occasionally special reports on specific topics and one of these more recent reports was the special report on 1.5 degree that was after the Paris agreement and the question they asked in this report is basically what's the difference between 1.5 degree warming and 2 degree warming and yeah and the report had two major messages one was there is a substantial difference so it's not just a number that's nice they are really massive differences in the outcomes and also the other message was like 1.5 degree that is still doable under somewhat optimistic assumptions if the world immediately starts to transform to a low carbon economy we're just not working out so well so what did they say for example here's a very nice picture of a coral reef some of them look like this and in the future probably all of them will look like this so the estimate was that if we have 1.5 degree warming then 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs will die and if we have 2 degree warming then 99 percent so basically all of them will die then there were estimates on whether we will have an ice free Arctic in the summer and the estimate was that with 1.5 degree this will happen in 10 percent of all years and with two degrees this will happen every summer we will have a bit more sea level rise there will also be many more people affected by extreme heatwaves and these other things like where you can I mean when there's sea level rise then people have to relocate so you will have refugees when there are heatwaves at some point people just cannot live somewhere anymore so these are the things that have a lot of potential for conflicts for migration movements these are the things that will make it really hard to keep up working civilization and remember that right now we're on track to 2 to 4 degrees which is much more plausible than having 2 degree or 1.5 degree and they also had a rough estimate what would be needed for 1.5 degree that would mean that the world would have to reduce the emissions by about 50 percent to 2030 in the report it says 45 percent but based on 2010 I'm not entirely sure why they made this very specific year but that would be roughly 50 percent from now and the world needs to be carbon neutral by 2050 which means no more carbon emissions or if there are carbon emissions we would have to compensate with other things but there's also a question is like is the IPCC really telling us the full story here and the following I'm going to say I really don't want to get this as a criticism of the IPCC because like these are scientists that work under enormous pressure like if you know like you're it's a committee that like politics has told them yeah we want to know the science and then the politicians tell them yeah but we don't believe in that right I mean stupid scientists so I think they work on the very difficult conditions and it's very understandable why these things happen that but a lot of scientists are worried that the IPCC is really much too conservative in its predictions and so for example you can see graphs like this where this the black line here is the estimate from the IPCC report from 2007 on Arctic sea level ice and the blue range is what they assume that's probably the the margin of error so we believe it will be inside this blue area and the red line is what actually happened and this was already outdated at the point where they published it which is kind of another problem like these IPCC reports are often based on science that's already maybe five years old when it gets into the IPCC report and to enhance this a bit I have added two more dots like 2012 was until now the lowest point of Arctic sea level ice in 2018 which is the last measure we have because 2019 hasn't isn't finished yet and in 2013 there was a study where they they looked at at various of these issues and previous studies that had compared that had looked at historic predictions from the IPCC and they came to the conclusion that available evidence suggests that scientists have in fact been conservative in their projections of the impact of climate change we suggest therefore that scientists are by its not towards alarm alarmism but rather the reverse towards caution is estimates where we define caution is airing on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions so what they're saying here is yeah so there's definitely a tendency that the scientists tend to make it sound less dramatic than it really is if you want to know more about this in detail there's this little booklet and you can download it for free online which explains many of these issues where where the IPCC has underpredicted things and why this happened and like they also quote a lot of scientists who are working within the IPCC but who are kind of frustrated that they see that their results are not fully represented there that's worth a read there's also this thing that like climate scientists are telling us that we need to act fast and then we kind of can still make it but they've been saying similar things for a long time like you could hear very similar messages 10 years ago 15 years ago that we need to act really fast and then we can still keep it below two degrees or so what's going on here the science didn't get more optimistic so quite the contrary so how's that possible and one explanation here is so-called negative emissions so by now all the scenarios from the IPCC that limit warming to two degrees to 1.5 degrees and most that limited to two degrees assume that we will have negative emissions in the future where we get the carbon dioxide out of the air and do something with it how can we get negative emissions one way is to plant trees which is good we should do that but like there was a study in the news two or three weeks ago where they had very optimistic prediction on what we could reach with trees and it was kind of painted as yeah this is the easy way out we can continue like we do we can fly and drive our cars and plant a few trees and everything's fine the study they had a major flaw in not in the study itself but in the way they presented it in a press release where they kind of estimated twice as much potential as there really was in the study and yeah so but in general like planting trees is good but it has limits like trees need space we don't have unlimited space and also it kind of competes with other uses of land we we need to grow food and we will have more humans in the future and we will have problems with food production due to climate change so we may also need more land for food so there it's not an easy way out so when we talk about negative emissions we have to talk about this thing called carbon capture and storage the idea here is we take CO2 either we take it directly from maybe a power plant or we get it out of the air and store it underground so there was a kind of bigger discussion about this in Germany during the last wave of new coal power plant constructions so what you often heard there was something like yeah okay we know that this bad with these coal power plants they produce a lot of carbon dioxide but it's not really problem because later we're gonna put the CCS technology on those plants and then it's not a problem anymore Wattenfall had a very big press conference where they announced they have the first carbon neutral power plant carbon neutral coal power plant that never happened one reason was there was resistance so in the areas where they wanted to store the carbon dioxide underground there was a lot of controversy but also similar projects in other countries where there was no resistance also failed and the simple reason is it's too costly like it costs a lot of money you reduce the already low efficiency of your coal power plant even more if you want to add this CCS technology and right now there are only a handful of CCS projects operating worldwide so and most of them are actually for something which is called enhanced oil recovery which means you pump carbon dioxide in an oil field so you can get a bit more oil out of it as you can guess that's not a good idea for the climate because then you have more oil and you will probably burn it but then you can make it economically viable so yeah so but what I think what the story from Germany tells you that if you talk about things like carbon capture and storage there's always kind of this risk that people will use this as an excuse they say yeah we can have carbon free coal power plants which didn't happen but it was still used as an excuse but we were talking about negative emissions and not about coal power plants with fewer emissions so one idea here is that you could use bioenergy and CCS like for example you burn trees and then you capture the carbon and store it underground because the trees when they grow up they store carbon and if you then store it that would effectively be negative emissions that obviously comes with all the problems that you usually have have with bioenergy it needs space if you have monocultures maybe pesticides there is sometimes land sometimes forests are cut down to plant palm oil trees to use them for energy so and the bioenergy itself can be a source of emissions for example if you cut down the rainforest for palm oil trees then cutting down the rainforest will create emissions so this is problematic and also we will already have problems with food security and bioenergy can increase that problem because we will have more competition for land so that is kind of why by now the scientists are also very skeptical and say we should maybe use as little as possible from this bioenergy and CCS another idea that is gaining a bit of traction is so-called direct air capture which is just you build a machine that takes CO2 out of the air and stores it underground this is less problematic from a land use perspective because this like using trees or plants to suck income dioxide that needs a lot of space this is the space is not the problem here but obviously these machines will require energy which will be mostly electric energy because like it doesn't make sense to power them with coal or something it needs to be clean energy I know if it makes no sense and there was a study where they looked at like yeah how does this play out with the IPCC scenarios and they they calculated that this could use up to 300 extra joules per year if you look at the IPCC 1.5 degree scenarios to compare that the world electricity generation is currently 75 extra joule so we would kind of have to increase the world electricity production four-fold and then make it green and use that to capture carbon dioxide from the air which sounds like it sounds really like science fiction so yeah so one criticism of the IPCC is that their optimistic scenarios rely on technology that largely doesn't really exist or only in small plants but it doesn't exist at a reasonable scale and it's very questionable if it's plausible to scale it up in a way that it can match these negative emissions that they think we should have and even if the technology works like how do you make that work in a political and economical way you can think about it like I mean sucking out carbon dioxide out of the air that doesn't make any money where's the business model here and I mean of course yeah I know the idea here is at some point we will have a worldwide carbon market and they will get paid but you can also have questions here about how plausible that is but probably the biggest criticism of the IPCC is around so-called feedback loops so and also so-called tipping points so many scientists think that the IPCC has not sufficiently considered these effects and a feedback loop is when global warming causes more global warming and one example is the so-called albedo effect where here you see an image of ice and water and you can see the ice is bright and the water is dark so bright things reflect sunlight and dark things don't so if the ice is gone then more sunlight will warm up the water and we will have more warming otherwise some of the sunlight would be reflected back into space and would not warm up the earth yeah that's what I just said and there are plenty of these feedback loops in the talk before I heard they're right 60 identified some of them are like the melting permafrost is releasing methane methane is also a greenhouse gas and a much more effect much more potent greenhouse gas at least on the short term then if peatbox die that's a tough more in German if you don't know the word if forests burn like the if they regrow it's kind of fine if they regrow at the same speed but if they burn down faster than they can regrow we have also increased warming and also if more water evaporates that water evaporated water itself is also acting as a greenhouse gas and there are many more of these and the kind of horror scenario is if you think that it could you could run into a situation where there are all these effects where the warming is creating more warming and that is creating even more warming and then you may have a situation where all these effects accelerate each other and you have something which is called a runaway climate change where you end up in a situation where it doesn't really matter what humanity does at this point it just keeps getting warmer and there was a study I think last year where a group of scientists kind of try to give an overview of this issue and summarize the most important this graph is from the study so and you can also see that there are the yellow ones are the ones where they are already at risk of of reaching that tipping point or they already have for example for the west Antarctic ice sheet currently the assumption seems to be that there's no way to save that it will just melt and there's nothing we can do about it and that could lead to a situation where these other effects that only started a higher temperature also get started and we run to a situation where it cannot be controlled anymore and the scary message from that study is that they say they cannot really say when this will happen because there are so many uncertainties but it could already happen if in a two degree warming scenario yeah after we talked about the science let's talk about the media because I think it's quite obvious that large parts of the population are not really aware of the scale and the risks of the climate crisis like I mean they know that there's something happening with climate change and probably that has to do with CO2 emissions but I don't read about runaway climate change in the news I'm not sure about you and a problem that has been identified is so-called false balance and what does that mean I have a nice comic here so here's a guy from television and he is interviewing an astrophysicist or the solar system and then he wants to balance that opinion with someone from the flat earth society now that's of course ridiculous but that's also what you often have when it's about climate change so you will often have a situation where media asks the climate scientists and then they ask someone who thinks that climate change is not happening and there was a study recently that tried to quantify that and they made a list of a list of prominent climate scientists and a list of prominent so-called contrarians so people who deny the science of climate change I have also not read a lot of this in the media because the media was busy calculating Kreator Thunberg's carbon emissions but overall the so-called contrarians had 49% more media visibility it was mostly in the US so not sure how much this can be transmitted to Germany and even in mainstream sources like the New York Times it was roughly equal and there were a few questions about the methodology there are some people said okay maybe they are just more climate scientists than these contrarians but even still like this looks really disastrous and this is I mean this debate about false balance has been going on for many years and like in 2011 the BBC had a big discussion about it and said they want to cover this in a more reasonable way where they don't try to balance scientific facts with some crackpots but yeah but also like I mean climate denial in the media is only one problem you often have this thing that it's simply ignored like I see there's an article about airport expansion like I don't know in Berlin you airport okay especially but like and then there's not a single word about climate or emissions or anything or there was Charles Koch who was a oil industry guy and who funded a lot of climate denial groups and the Washington he died I think yesterday and the Washington Post had a portray on him and they didn't mention that he was like a big funder of climate denial yeah there are a few positive tendencies where you feel some people in the media get it so the Guardian they published a new policy real estate they want to avoid terms like climate change and global warming because they feel these are terms that sound too harmless that tend to play down things and want instead to use more terms like climate crisis or global heating not sure if you have noticed I also tried to do this for my talk there's an initiative right now which is called covering climate now where several media publications commit to to make a week where they focus on climate topics before the action day at 20th of September there are some larger publications in there the Guardian CBS the nation and there's currently no major publication from Germany in there they're like clean energy wire and this reporter and but nothing none of the big media publication support this yet in Germany okay so what needs to happen obviously we need to stop burning fossil fuels so we need to get rid of things like this this is Jan Schwalde it's not that far from here it's like the open-cast mine where they mine lignite like it which is a very bad form of coal like even worse than normal coal and in the back there is this big Jan Schwalde power plant I don't have a lot of positive messages in this talk but I have one for you building renewable energy is probably much easier than people thought and this is like one of my favorite graphs on renewable energy so this is from a guy called Auker Högster if you feel like with all this climate doom you want to have some positive messages in your social media feed you should follow this guy so the black line is photovoltaic installations worldwide like how they happen for real all the colored lines are what the international energy agency predicted for solar installations so they kind of every time they make a new report like they recognize there's more solar than they predicted in their last report but then they predict okay it's going down a bit and then maybe up a bit like they don't seem to recognize that there's maybe a systemic problem with their prediction here and like it gets worse like the latest one they go down even more and yeah so this looks like an exponential growth which usually is bad but for photovoltaics that's like really good although I mean not to get put two positive that's all still growing in very low numbers but I mean that's really a message that also needs to get through more that renewable energy has been growing in a way that nobody predicted and like there's a way to fix things here so yeah we should change the electricity sector it's important it's one of the really huge chunks of carbon emissions but also that's kind of the easy part even though I know there are problems with storage and solar is only during the day and the wind doesn't always but I think these are solvable problems there are some sectors that are much harder this is a cement plant in Berlin do you know how cement is made yeah that's true so I have a little formula for you with some chemistry so you take something which is basically limestone and which is chemically mostly calcium carbonate and then you burn it and this turns it into calcium oxide and co2 so you see there's co2 here and the crucial part here is this is co2 that does not come from energy like there's no coal here there's no fossil fuels that comes from the chemistry of turning this limestone into cement and this is five percent of all the carbon dioxide emissions and the overall emissions are even higher because we need energy to do that and to burn it and like we have no idea how to change that there are a few experimental technologies to make cement in different ways but that's kind of basic research there's nothing that we can roll out now so that's the hard stuff you talk about when you want to go to carbon neutrality and there are other hard sectors for example airplanes I mean okay they now talk about sin fuels where you kind of turn electricity into oil you can do that it's very expensive not very efficient there's steel which is similar to the cement it's also a chemical process that releases carbon dioxide you can also do that with electricity but it's also very expensive and very inefficient and there's fertilizers if you put out fertilizers they will release nitrogen dioxide which is also a greenhouse gas so yeah and then there's this topic of geoengineering so at some point you come up with the question can we do something to counteract this warming from the greenhouse effect one thing there is which is under the umbrella term solar radiation management which is doing things that we reflect more sunlight there are ideas that are relatively sound relatively harmless like painting your roofs in white but I also the effects are not that big there are things that are more dangerous like putting aerosols into the atmosphere and some sound a bit more like science fiction like you have some flying objects that have big mirrors and put them all around the earth there was also a study about this a few days ago yeah this is not very widely discussed yet and for example the IPCC very explicitly says they don't consider solar radiation management right now and under normal circumstances you would say like pulling chemicals into the atmosphere and we're not really sure what that's gonna do it's probably dangerous they're probably negative side effects sounds really crazy but you're kind of wonder if we end up in a situation where we're it's either this or the planet is largely uninhabitable we may need to have that discussion but there's also the thing like is the discussion itself already dangerous because like there were already politicians who said yeah we can put a few aerosols into the atmosphere that solves the problem and so it's similar to the debate with carbon capture and storage where people may think this is an easy way out although it's kind of not really what we want to do like we should really focus on reducing carbon emissions as much as possible but maybe we should start having a discussion how we can even reasonably discuss about geoengineering and and what would be the political framework to discuss something like that and yeah then there's a term that comes up often from activists where they say yeah what do we want to climate justice and and this is often a bit of an abstract term and I want to kind of ground this a bit with the very specific example so right now we heard all the news that in Brazil and in also in Bolivia there's a lot of rainforest burning and this is I mean this is a disaster and there's also a big risk that it will put the Amazon rainforest over one of these tipping points which may then introduce further warming but like here's a news article that was it's not a current article but it was from spring but where headline says Brazil puts economy over the rainforests how dare they so like you may wonder like if we're from a rich country and doing this and we complain about poor countries putting the economy over ecology which we also do all the time there's a problem here and how about this which countries could pay poor countries to protect the rainforest who knows who this guy is really not almost no okay you're all too young I think this guy is at least partly responsible for what's going on in Brazil right now his name is still Gnebel he was a ministry of development in Germany he's from the free Democratic Party you can see that with the yellow on the side in 2007 the Rafael Correa who was back then the president of Ecuador they had a nice oil field which was unfortunately in a national park in the rainforest and the president said yeah we're willing to not get that oil out will protect the rainforest but only if the world is willing to compensate us for the losses here and only half of the losses like we calculate how much money we would make selling this oil and if you pay us half of that we will leave the oil in the ground forever we will save a lot of carbon emissions rainforest will be fine there were a few countries willing to support it the biggest contributions were from France and Spain and for quite a while it looked like Germany would support it too like there were even politicians in the conservative party who were very positive about this but Germany pulled out of the project and the guy I showed you the picture Dirk Gnebel he was responsible for that because he said he doesn't like this approach he prefers market-based mechanisms so if you hear that again from members of that party maybe remember them of this story so the Yasuni ITT initiative failed in 2013 and now they are drilling oil there so I think the rich country sent a message there and that was like we're not willing to pay for the rainforest and that's kind of a tragedy so how did this all go so wrong I think a big thing here is we really need to recognize the big failure here like nothing that has been done until now had any meaningful impact in slowing this down or stopping this and there's a failure in climate policy diplomacy and also in the environmental movement and I think like a lot of also NGOs need to ask themselves some very tough questions and I'm quite amazed that many of these more traditional NGOs how silent they are right now like this is a big topic now and extinction rebellion and Fridays for future are getting all the attention and you don't hear much from them and I feel they need to have a very tough discussion and like there was a comment in a German newspaper a few days ago where they said basically extinction rebellion should try to become like the BND which I found completely ridiculous but yeah we should recognize that the actions that would be required to do anything meaningful here are not even part of the political discourse like cutting down carbon emissions by half which would mean cutting them down even more in a rich country till 2030 like try to ask the people from the Green Party if they have a plan for this like I don't think they have one extinction rebellion has this demand to tell the truth I think that's a good idea kind of obvious yeah yeah and I also think that part of the problem here is that in the past there was also often a tendency to give a hopeful message we have so many solutions we're doing so many nice things here we have all these nice projects really which but it kind of didn't recognize the overall failure and this I think was particularly true for the climate conferences and the climate treaties like both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Protocol basically they didn't do anything meaningful but the environmental movement was cheering for them as we're at CCC camp here I thought I should talk a bit maybe what can tech people do I feel this is coming up quite a bit like I mean I hadn't expected that there are so many climate talks here and we have kind of almost a climate village there but if you have good answers to this I would like to hear them because it often sounds like okay yeah our like our computers need electricity should be green it's probably not the things that make a big impact I have a few proposals what you should not do building some libertarian utopia technology that's based on wasting a lot of electricity as much as possible all the time is probably not a good idea yeah you I think you know what I'm talking about if you can find a way to kill but Bitcoin like that would have an impact your hackers think about that really um yeah what's the tech industry doing what do you think this is any guess yeah roughly like that no no so I call this the Google division for accelerated climate chaos this is Google's department for services for the oil industry I mean don't you see it like here's an oil rig in gray yeah okay there's also solar cells but if you scroll down it says yeah as they're computing demands grow oil and gas companies like Schlumberger, Total, Anadarko and others rely on Google Cloud to scale workloads such as seismic interpretation regression analysis and classification and so on and so on I mean that's if you want to ask it's kind of like a made-up example for greenwashing right yeah don't be evil and I just picked Google because this web page was so ridiculous but there was a very well researched article on Gizmodo recently where like all the big cloud companies have departments that offer specific services to the oil industry and they make a lot of deals with yeah lots of money involved they're also like yeah you can use machine learning to find more oil and drill more efficiently yeah that was mostly it I wanted to ask you if you want to join some protests and because I have some suggestions for you there's a there's a protest against the international car fair in Frankfurt at the 14th of September then of course there's the global climate strike with Fridays for Future and many others supporting them 20th of September and there will be more actions in the week following it and Extinction Rebellion will have worldwide actions on 7th of October so yeah support these organizations and thank you thank you Hanno so we have for some time for questions and I already see someone lined up at the microphone can I ask you to please speak loud and clear and yeah so please check check check okay this message is very bleak and I am no devastated very emotional so this is like a general message it is okay to feel these emotions it is okay if I reconnect our brains with our hearts because when I first learned about this I wanted to cry and to cry it is okay but it also can give us energy to do meaningful projects the large-scale engineering projects 50 years ago we went to the moon so now if we apply our engineering resources I believe we can reverse climate change this will require a lot of changes on the United Nations on the government levels and to thank you very much for this presentation thank you okay yeah I guess that was not a question thank you for that all right next question please this is actually a question first of all thanks a lot for the talk really really good really nice to have these resources without trying to be too vague or to airy-fairy if you could click your fingers and change one thing or a few what would that be or more political terms if there were theoretical extreme actions that could be taken what should they be I guess the I mean the thing that has the biggest impact is stopping coal that would be the first step right thanks first of all thank you very much I really really liked your talk and I had an idea what maybe hackers also could do and because I was really happy to come here and meet all these hackers because I'm a completely dummy I even cannot do calculations and mad love or something three weeks ago we were sitting together with scientists for future in Bremen and we were talking about that only 10 to 15 percent of the Germans know what Fridays for future is and what they demand so this is unbelievable because everyone from of us knows us knows it and so we have to somehow break out of these social media bubbles and I don't know how it works exactly but I had the idea that maybe hackers could help us to place climate content in other bubbles to raise awareness which doesn't change the world but it would support us the scientists because the scientists are complete dummies with about communication and internet and stuff I don't know if it helps but this was my idea yeah I'm not entirely sure if the hackers are the best group to do public relations also sorry but maybe maybe we can have a discussion and then no okay like I mean we had this we had a discussion about defasements and denial of service yesterday but I'm very skeptical that this is something that will have a big impact but I'm happy to have a discussion about this afterwards thanks thanks for mentioning false balance and the media in the role do you see any way to interfere at that point that false balance I mean one of the things is that I was working as a journalist in this area and right now I'm mostly not I'm mostly doing it stuff so I mean yeah you can try to be it become a journalist or try to influence the media like that and I mean what is the what is the mechanism that drives this false balance why do they still do that I mean I okay so I mean there's this general tendency that journalists want to be balanced which sounds kind of reasonable unless you go to things where we talk about facts right we also don't balance that like did the moon landing happening but so I think there's there's not this recognition that this is not a matter of opinion that we're talking about facts here but there's also like I mean this is kind of a politicized issue and you feel like okay now we did the Green Party friendly article now we need the other party friendly article which is prone things like that is I have the suspicion that it's because they want to create a debate that is emotionally enraging yeah I mean that's also I mean that's also what we see with the with that the right wing movement has much more representation in the hacking the media I mean isn't that a way that is worth I mean I'm not a psychologist but I mean it's facts are difficult like they are boring they're not nice stories there I don't have all the answer on the on the back of the comment about that we went to the moon pretty much in the past and a 400 years all major advances major projects happened because of competitions between countries more or less all the way from colonization to going to the moon to even building the internet do you feel that we could ever get to a place like this again where actually we can start competing with something to go somewhere or actually our connectedness today which also makes worse impossible makes impossible for us to actually put down our iPhones and build something okay so with the competition between countries you have this kind of this problem that if you do something to reduce emissions it's it's an advantage for the whole world so there's not a big incentive for a single country to do more than the others which is kind of this strategy of the commons like I'm not an economist but so I feel it's I mean of course there is competition about solar energy there is competition about electric cars although I would prefer less cars but so I think this competition can help in some areas but for the overall issue it feels the incentives are not aligned with that because there's no incentive for one country to be the climate leader alright next question please you don't have to answer but what do you think will happen yeah no I I mean okay I but like I feel there will be a point where it's so obvious that we have a problem that we will discuss this in a different way the problem is just it will probably at a point where our options are limited and we may have a debate about geoengineering or whatever thanks please for instance one example if so the level would rise by three meters just tomorrow everybody would know that we have a problem so in my opinion when do we know that we really have a problem and this comes to the masses and everybody sees oh something is really going wrong so we need to do something I think this is the first thing when we will start acting I mean I don't think this is a one point in time issue and I think we are already seeing that I mean there's definitely a connection between we had this crazy summer last year and then the topic came and then the Humber Forest was in the news and then the Green Party grew and so there is already something happening where you clearly see a connection between events unfolding and more people caring about the topic it's not enough yet we know that but and but I don't know where the critical point will be where we can have really a discussion about doing something seriously okay so okay we have one more questions for one more question from the audience please thank you for your talk and also the other one thanks I was wondering I'm thinking a lot right now about also the media coverage that you mentioned and I'm from Austria and in the last months I had this feeling that it was not and not a downplaying of the effects but like more a hysteria so there is like climate crisis everywhere and it's like catastrophic scenarios everywhere but it's in a kind of science fiction way sometimes so it's maybe even overdone and also I cannot recall any more where but I read that also the also the crisis version of what is happening like in the story to tell that it's all going to shit is not having any effect because it makes the masses too helpless because it's too big and so this is what I'm thinking right now about also in what I do how how there would be a way to communicate not with downplaying but also not with this extreme hysteria but telling how bad it is yeah without shocking people so much that they just keep doing what they're doing because there is no point in something like that and I was wondering if you have a comment on that or maybe like a third way between us so I mean one problem is that the hysteria and the what sounds like science fiction is often what we can read out of the science so I don't think it's legit to say this is hysteria when this is the prediction from the science we have also I feel like I mean extinction rebellion does this very extreme with these shocking messages and like they are growing like crazy like in Berlin I I get kind of a newsletter from them there where they they do something every day and so I mean we we kind of enter in an area which is psychology and there are also some debates whether which kind of messaging works although I have a lot of doubts about psychology as a science that's a different topic but my feeling is that these shocking messages and this really like staying within the science but telling the science how bad it is is looks to me like it's working at least it's working better than what we did before so you would say that like everything that is going out as long as it stays as much as the current facts as possible is it should be a good thing right yeah I think that's it I mean there are occasionally situations where there was for example an article by a journalist called David Wallace Wells which was in the New Yorker and it was criticized a lot because it was based on a scenario that is has some assumptions that are not very realistic so there are occasionally situations where people overdo things and people are going like it's maybe still within the science but it's not very realistic and I think it's reasonable to have that discussion but also this is not very often and what we see much more often is the downplaying so thank you okay so thank you for your questions I want you to give Hanno a big round of applause again please thank you