 No, I'm I'm very glad to be able to address you and Obviously the Irish presidency of the EU is important. Of course, I understand that Ireland has of course More immediate concerns with the economic crisis clearly as other countries in Europe But nevertheless one should not forget about the future if you're struggling with the present That's very very important and often the solution for the current problems lies precisely in long-term thinking So we can address this a little bit late in the discussion I'm also aware that climate change is a big issue in Ireland right now at breakfast I picked up the Irish Times. She's a world-class newspaper and You will discover that sometimes I have an inclination for irony. I warn you from the beginning about this But they have a run a very good series on climatic change actually So it was about thinning of Arctic sea ice and the big drought in the United States last year which has a major impact on food production and The Kansas farmers still believe it has nothing to do with climate change So We I guess because if you ever been to Kansas But the the Kansas farmers, I'm sure still also believe that the world is flat. It's a very flat country Okay, so why two degrees matter and This two degrees of course is to be seen in in two respects here I Personally actually helped to create this target of two degrees which is now adopted by many nations And it came about actually in 1994 when I was advising Then German Environment Minister Angela Merkel who is somehow known now for other issues and When this sort of we called it at that time tolerable windows approach in the sense You do not try to predict the future. So if the economy develops in a certain way when you will have That type of emissions and when you will have a certain amount of global warming But you ask the other way around you say What is the maximum global warming we could digest without major social disruptions for example and After the long debate we said two degrees is Of course, it's not whether it's 2.1 or 1.9 or whatever or maybe even 2.3 but around two degrees we probably will see a qualitative change in climate impacts and I'll Elaborate a little bit on that so two degrees came into the world other people as well have asked for it so it became in a sense a fantastic success story for International target setting the question is of course, can we hold the two degrees line now that it is internationally accepted? And the other thing is what if not? so Currently the world is on a trajectory if you just Sum up the pledge is made after Copenhagen We are on a course towards a 3.5 to 4 degrees warming by the end of the century and by the way, this is not the end of the story as I will show you and Yeah, what does it mean and the World Bank asked us to do a little study in the beginning 40 degrees warming what does it mean in particular for poverty reduction for the subtropics and tropics and The answer is it would just fought all our efforts for poverty reduction really So the two degrees is on the one hand two degrees and it's four degrees two plus two No, what would it mean and we have a choice? clearly, so Now let me go back a little bit because I'm sure also in Ireland there has been this debate about Is global warming? happening at all our humans causing it and Wouldn't be the the the effects rather benign actually So this let me so El Gore, you know came up with this narrative an inconvenient truth won the peace Nobel Prize for it and I think an Oscar in Hollywood and so this was The big time of the climate debate now of course this Was Became targeted by many groups who have vested interests. I mean, let's not forget that still oil although Cheap oil will not exist Much longer Cheap oil you can have all types of expensive oil of course a shale oil and so but cheap oil will be gone in 20 or 30 Years from now, but still it's the biggest business on earth if you look at the fortune 500 Ranking of the 12 biggest companies in the world either produce oil or distribute oil or depend on oil directly So it's the biggest so of course if you have people who want about climate change This cannot be unnoticed and we have been all types of campaigns again. So we have now Replaced this what I call a cynical anti narrative and it goes Instead of talking about inconvenient truths. We people have started to talk about the convenient untruths Actually four of them First one is very snow global warming If yes, humankind has nothing to do with it if we accept that nevertheless Impacts of climate change will be marginal if not benign and force it's too late for mitigation so you can summarize it in Mainmade climate change is a hoax and nothing in the world can stop it and it's really true. That's what I Witness every day really so you have various Contradictory actually positions so people argue about it in the end. They say it's too late although it's not like non-existent so This is vindication for non-action. I quickly deal with that So, you know most of the things but something really interesting happened last year, you know the cock brothers in billionaires in In the United States who funded a study done by Berkeley scientists some of them I know well and including Sal Pelmutter noble Laureate in physics And this was about is global warming real at all. So we said we look at the data Do not leave it just the University of East Anglia or NASA and so we look at all the data And we use the best statistical evidence we can find there So, you know, I'm a theoretical physicist by training and our natural Errogance tells us what meteorologists are not up to the state of the science So moving the theoretical physicists then when we will see the real picture now, that's the real picture What came out of it now? Let me see. Yeah, but it works So this is the black line is the global mean temperature Evolution since 1750, you know, so we has been all types of fluctuations and it's going up like this now in blue and green and Red you have the sort of conventional meteorological observations and then Here the black one again So is the Berkeley earth project and you see it all converges on to one line No, so there's no difference whatsoever So Richard Muller who ran this project did a editorial for the New York Times Call me a converted skeptic This was of course ignored by the Koch brothers who funded the research But this is a very powerful message. So you can take this off And for example, my colleague Stefan Rammstof did this type of analysis here He took the global data series and removed the natural variability for example, El Nino events So people often argue that climate change has come to a stop since 1998 because in 1998 We have a had a sort of monster El Nino event. What happens in an El Nino year? the oceans Transmit heat to the atmosphere in a La Nina year in a cool year. The other thing happens. They're just to reverse So there was a massive release of heat from the oceans at the time and you have to appreciate that The oceans are a huge huge huge energy store. So the three Meters top ocean layer Contain as much heat as the entire atmosphere just the first three meters so if there are sort of Current circulation patterns and so on you can easily of course change the appearance of global warming But if you remove all the trends, you see this is what is going on with global warming I mean you have a clearly linear trend which is if you look deeply into the metalogorhythmic trend and that was predicted by Svente Arrhenius the Swedish Nobel laureates in chemistry by the way in 1896 already. So Arrhenius law is more or less vindicated all the time. So What a triumph of the hundred years we come back to Arrhenius So there is no anthropogenic interference of the climates and what is the reason for global warming and here I give you just one number if you look it up at James Powell's website who is an eminent geologist There have been about 14,000 peer-reviewed papers since 1991 On climate change the reasons for climate change and just 24 of them deny that humans are involved that is and you have to really Appreciate that. This is the ratio of 99.83 percent Versus 0.17 percent. This is a sort of Stalinistic outcome. If you would have an election in a Yeah Whatever country You would have So this is even too good to be true I would say as a scientist if you would have in a medical treatment of scientific evidence of that Preponderance I would not even believe it, but it is as it is really so clearly science speaks with one voice here and By the way, the Berkeley project did also this thing here But tried to use Arrhenius hundred years old formula the natural logarithm of CO2 concentration Removed the volcanic eruptions of course with our chest punctuation sir and When we included solar activity it didn't change anything. So we came up with this red line You see which fits perfectly well the development. So that's the scientific evidence here Let's keep that and then of course the third convenient untruth We don't have to worry about global warming So even four degrees is nice in particular for the Scottish for example or The Russians anyway And we did this report for the World Bank which created the Major planetary waves if you like and has actually had a deep influence on the Attitude towards climate change of the president of the World Bank and he keeps now Retirating that this is the biggest threat for human development in this century and So we had quotes from Mary Robinson's for example from El Gore from Bunky Moon from Kofi Annan Next turn and so on so it was a huge event and in particular it went viral in the social networks Which is a good thing? Because I think without a social movement in the end driven in particular by young people who will not be able to deal with it Crisis so so Bunky Moon more or less Said it is my hope but this report shocks us into action now here again You know if you're talking particular to economists that tell you the shock and all strategy never works So if you just tell people how Glue me the future reasons on where we'll just get Resistant against it. We'll not listen to you anymore, but this isn't true either I mean, of course you need to see the opportunities of doing something about climate change Yeah, if you are a business person Decarbonization also has to pay off clearly. Yeah, but on the other hand that the public opinion on climate change in in US Has completely changed after how we can send here So even when the taxi driver took me to the headquarter of the United Nations He told me oh, I had a house on the beach. It's not there anymore, right? It's gone and actually the garage of the United Nations were flooded during that event and 2000 luxury cars were destroyed. So what a blow to humanity BMWs Mercedes of all vehicles. Yeah, so even those people feel the heat now and And but I give you now a few figures and that is really very important and this looks complicated Well, it's the most important chart we have in the World Bank reporter and So bear with me for a minute here What we did is the following First of all, we took all available climate models We do not rely anymore on just one model would do so-called ensemble calculations We'll take all models developed in a different way and when use the averages in a smart way And here it more nests tells you will look in Towards the end of the century in a 40 degrees world. We looked for heat excursions or heat waves Maximum temperatures across the globe which have a so-called five sigma Characteristics and sigma is regarding is related to standard deviation for the statisticians So if you have a normal distribution Say like traffic accidents, whatever One Sigma event is something that happens only once in three Times to Sigma is already something 95% is excluded Five Sigma event happens under normal climate conditions once in a million years once in a million years And this is what you see now where you have the red color here our months where the five Sigma event happens in 80% of the Times actually so you could say in a conservative way The one in a million event happens in both red colored areas every second year And that is a complete seed change in environmental condition I'm this goes in particular for the tropics because if you go to a tropic country You know the temperature almost the same during the night Over on a seasons you have 27 28 29 degrees all year long more or less But if you add the four degrees on land It would be six or seven degrees and when you're completely outside the historical range of doing business of living of Dying and so on so it is a completely different world That means the old development schemes do not work anymore under these conditions and you see of course the countries who cause global warming United States Australia and so on they are In blue colors here, but means way it will not be pushed completely outside the historical range of variability So again climate change is very unfair This is a warning for the Indians in the Security Council the only Intervention negative intervention even challenging whether one should talk about security issues In the terms of climate change was the Indian ambassador, but this would be a lesson for him namely You see this is about the Indian summer monsoon and you if we run our model to see it fluctuates from your tier When you see episodes like this, but it completely collapses Now if in India that would happen for two or three years in a row It would be the end of Indian agriculture actually We had last year. It just that the fish Deficit of think 10% or something that was already quite devastating So the Indian summer monsoon is clearly one of the tipping elements in your system. I come to that now But before that I talked about the unfairness of physics in climate change And this is again something now sea level will rise For many factors one is simple simply thermal expansion of sea water This is a tiny effect, but summed up. It's a lot it can provide half a meter sea level rise by the end of the century But Eventually the big contributions will come from the ice sheets green and ice sheet Western Arctic ice sheet and so on Now what will be the distribution of sea level rise and this is now That is the inhomogeneous distribution of sea level rise The blue colors indicate these are the reasons where sea level may may even drop While the red ones is where sea level will accelerate. Why? It becomes from the big ice sheets say Greenland now Greenland has a nice shield about Two kilometers thick Now if it melts down and releases water It loses mass and that means it loses gravitational pull you know gravitation is based on the mass you have and It's different in humans in humans if you lose mass you become more attractive for the ice sheets it's the other way around and Generally speaking only and No, so what means the physics means that the ice Release as water from the big ice sheets will not go to the coastal waters around the ice sheets But we'll go to the tropics So again sea level rise will melt much be much bigger in Tuvalu in Nauru In Palau in Kiribati in the Maldives when on the northeast coast of the United States so that is a Counter-intuitive thing first about has a major bearing on development policy. Yeah, so on the Tipping elements, this is a chart I have Myself introduced a long time ago at a lecture at Oxford University About where are the elements in the earth system or something can go terribly wrong in a sense Collapse of the Amazon rainforest Meltdown of the ice sheets disruption of the monsoon and this has become a quite active field of research in the meantime because it would mean You have the insidious Climate impacts of course or like sea level rise, but you have some Subsets of the global machinery where you can have abrupt changes non-linear highly non-linear change and they are irreversible So once you have for example achieved Die back of the Amazon rainforest it would not be able to reconstitute Because the water in a tropical forest is cycled on on the spot mohler So 80 to 90 percent of the water is just recycled once it is gone. It's gone forever so we must avoid that and the big story behind two degrees is that below two degrees we assume that Most of these elements cannot be activated while if you go into the three four five degrees range They become highly likely. Yeah, so it's really a qualitative difference between Below and above two degrees So green and I should I have talked about it? and this is now so the second part of my talk and this is about People just declare environmental defeat now for many reasons clearly It's good for daily business. It's not good for long-term business But we say well we come to accept that Global warming is man-made and it might be a good idea to hold to two degrees line But it's too late for that and of course This is a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you fill a buster about that for every additional year It becomes less likely to hold that line if we if people with vested interest achieve another say decade of inaction When the two degrees line will be breached, of course, it will be too costly to do it in any way but currently Oh, yeah, and I should say of course a quick fix would be geoengineering You've certainly heard about that very there are two ways of geoengineering and I did a paper about this in proceedings of the US National Academy called the good the mad and Sensible and mad refers to mutually assured destruction. That is the strategic sort of arms race during the Cold War and I would rather turn it in mutually assured decarbonization So the good way of doing that, but there are two ways you could people propose If we are so deeply already in the climate quagmire You could just send rockets to the stratosphere and Allocate sulfur there and dim the sunlight No, but in in the United States is a bipartisan initiative actually Yeah, the Republicans and the Democrats cannot agree on anything except each year engineering It is a Completely nonsensical idea by the way, I mean it wouldn't work and how could you assume? But the world could agree upon where to put the the thermostat I mean India might like it a little bit warmer China a little bit cooler and so on. I mean if we cannot even agree on utterly sensible things like Solar in rural areas. How could we agree upon setting the global temperature? I mean it's ridiculous But there's a good way of doing geoengineering that would mean extraction of carbon from the atmosphere By planting trees for example, that's a completely sensible thing. So This is a picture everybody should have seen or should see and actually President Obama had looked at it and many of us this tells you the choice humanity has in the future and people Still tend to not take the climate issue seriously enough and I think science is not speaking with one voice, but this is Incapsulating and epitomizing all what science is to say so on the right-hand side We have the two fans of temperature development, so So this is 1900 2000 what's the temperature development now holding the two degrees line that would be the blue fan It is a fan Not just a line because all climate models are involved with different uncertainties talked about the forest of uncertainty before Here it's the Uncertainty fan, but you see clearly But there is an alternative and this alternative the red fan would be created by this type of global emissions It's so called the 8.5 scenario by the IPCC That means we would keep on emitting and would go up to hundred Gigatons of CO2 per year, which is possible. We have enough oil and coal and so on in the ground Although it will be expensive to destroy the planet, but we can achieve that So we would do it in the red way here and when we would get this fan here That's the median here So the best guess if you like and it means by 2100 it would be let me see So we'd have five degrees warming, but it would go on and by the year 2300 would be eight degrees warming. That's the The mean medium Expectation because the system has a lot of inertia eight degrees warming It means on land 10 to 12 degrees now at 10 to 12 degrees average annual temperature on Every land on earth. I mean this would render this planet in habitable and As the US comedian Colbert recently said I Don't want to spoil my grandchildren with a habitable planet so well taken You shouldn't spoil your grandchildren and What is the alternative the alternative and actually all of climate policy comes down to this Faint I'm looking to the department for what is it energy? environmental environment All comes down to this faint blue line here That is the scenario that would create that type of fan that means we would peak global emissions by 2020 very important global emissions When we would go down to zero completely decarbonized by 2070 Which is a long time Still the peaking is much more difficult to achieve and when we would have to go negative in carbon emissions that means it would be a net extraction of carbon from the atmosphere for example by planting trees in degraded land and when doing sequestration of the biomass so Probably that is without alternative But if you do a sober analysis, yes The two degrees target can still be held. It's technically feasible. It's economically feasible. It's socially feasible But you need a much enhanced political ambition for that Now another analysis just recently published in nature climate change Has looked at several factors that would impinge on the costs of holding the two degrees line and it's not actually Legislation things like that the overriding aspect that came out that reduces the cost is early action So every year you wait the economic cost eventually will rise deeply It's not up front investment on innovation and so on its timing time is really of the absence here So what could be done in Germany? I chaired Global Change Advisory Council of Germany advising the chancellor who did a major report two years ago called the Great Transformation and This is how the energy mix globally would have to change So I call this the dark rainbow and it has to be transformed into a fair rainbow and You can see the usual suspects of course are so solar wind and so on but in particular it means that the overall Energy consumption would have to peak fairly soon that means energy efficiency is part of the Calculation clearly if we just crowd out all types of Substitution of fossil by solar when there's no way to go But it can be done and actually the costs are comparable to the cost of just investing into the old system into the incumbent system But it's the interesting thing because people always do the following trick We just calculate the upfront investments you need for decarbonizing a society account And they say it is So on so many trillions In addition you have to bring but we do not calculate the cost you have to To bring up in order to maintain the comments the incumbent system also to invest into the replacement of old structures In the end it turns out that the difference is marginal actually, so we have clearly a choice In order to we can create a sustainable energy system and it as a side effect save the climate Or we can just go on with the incumbent system Replace it by some better machinery and rely on Qatar to provide the natural gas for the next two centuries the north field in Qatar actually holds enough natural gas in order to provide humanity With energy for the next 200 years But one should leave it in a crowd Okay, so now more or less my last remark here before I just refer quickly before the chairman pulls me off the panel is And I discussed it with with Mary Robinson at length this morning because you know If you are in charge if you have a political mandate, of course like Bunky moon You think of course of top of top-down strategy So if the world is listening to the science you draw certain conclusions a rational strategy 194 nations together They sort of come up with a wonderful climate agreement and when it will be implemented so it will trickle down But probably this system will not work Of course, we will work towards a climate agreement in 2015 the Irish presidency in the EU will Hopefully sound the alarm and we'll say this is still important and so on Europe will raise its 30 percent target 20 percent target of 30 percent and so on really eventually have I'm pretty sure But this is not enough and actually Kim the World Bank president said when we discussed this what we need is a social movement Really, it has to be driven by those people who are really affected the young generations Those people who will never have access to cheap fossil fuels. There are many of them in the world and so on so What I think is that the United Nations they provide just the frame of a big picture Way provide a narrative if you like so you could say The two degrees target. This is a wonderful animation Which you might appreciate But it's you know a very faint picture emerging. You have to bring in really NGOs business nations and so on in order to paint that picture and In the end it looks like that so I really believe in that this is not just a gimmick This really means that it is more or less a bottom-up thing in the end You must not sorry for the politicians in the rooms, but you must not leave the future of our children to the politicians alone We have to take responsibility ourselves so I'm Deeply optimistic about that and that is actually happening for example in Germany right now you know Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy overnight after Fukushima more or less and Still we are exporting a lot of energy to France for example who run about 50 nuclear power plants But they have so inefficient heatings that during the winter we have export our wind and solar energy to France and and Now we are at as I said before more than 20 percent renewable electricity and What happens in Germany is actually the following Also, we discussed it over lunch, but it is municipalities in particular who Community structures and so on citizens who buy the grits actually and provides their own cities and towns and villages with with energy so The people become the power producers actually and this is not a social romantic Narrative it is happening on the ground so in Berlin for example the German capital there will be now a Motion we call it the Fox begin what is a sort of direct democracy instrument That people will vote for that the city will buy back their energy Producing system from Wattenfell and it will be and the investments will come from the citizens actually so it will be a Million shareholders instead of a few so that's an interesting thing and that can happen everywhere on the planet And of course you have the five years plan and you have projects in So let me just Finish with two or three slides Because I was asked as chairman said to to brief the UN Security Council because This is the other Child everybody should be aware of this is the paleoclimatic evidence You know through ice cores and so on we can reconstruct in a perfect way almost one of the big triumphs of Science really we can reconstruct year by year over the last 700,000 years The temperature variation so even how much dust was in the atmosphere and so on how acidic the ocean was It's a fantastic archiver and this is the last hundred thousand years So if you just run it So that is how the global mean temperature vary it during the last ice age and then The 11,000 years of grace started called the hollow scene That is the time when human civilization became a major enterprise Because you see it's completely different It's completely different from what happened before the hollow scene and At one point in time actually We can now through genetic analysis reconstruct how many human Individuals homo sapiens lived at that time and at that point it was 15,000 early 15,000 individuals as opposed to seven billion now We are about to destroy this climate of grace now and go far beyond this range Now this was always appreciated by the Pentagon of all Institutions, so when this whole climate skeptics debate came up around Copenhagen The military people stayed completely cool If you are a general you have to invest a few billion and you have to take responsibility for 10,000 troops You don't look at the screwballs who purport that they know the science better than the experts You do a very sober analysis you have to invest into the right things for the Pentagon never thought that Regarding the climate analysis and Chuck Hagel will perhaps become the new Defense secretary. I know him a little bit. I had discussions with him on climate change already in 2005 he's a very open-minded person and The John Kerry is Is the head of State Department who is also somebody very knowledgeable of climate issue? so what I That was my bottom line and it's my last slide for the Human Security Council, but it looks very complicated But I told you very quickly through that You know this debate about of course everybody knows that If we have less rain in Semi-arid regions, we will have less food production No, so this will probably increase the food prices there and sea level rise is bad if you have a villa at the beach and And so on and malaria might spread into regions where it was never before but As I told you before if we If we leave with window of grace of climate grace it may have major implications for national and international security and There has been a lot of debate about this because in the 1990s some scholars said well You see it in Rwanda, for example This is a result of too many people packed in a very narrow environmental space So if you have slight fluctuations in harvest and so on it can create violence And then of course in particular the professional peace researchers who all come from military academies said oh no Environment has no impact whatsoever on national security This is bad institutions and so on and I think they are right actually so my prediction is and this is our projection that if the climate changes At a moderate level say one and a half degrees to degrees there will be actually more cooperation in the world if you have Transboundary river system for example Indian people haggled and struggle, but finally they come up with an agreement So there will be more cooperation The problem is what happens and I have sort of created a sort of cooperation index Where these? Oh, let me go back here You see This is eternal peace if the index is plus one and you have World War if it's minus one Now this is tongue-in-cheek in a sense But nevertheless you can come up with a lot of data and I'm saying present day if we have a slight additional warming We'll probably see more cooperation But then the system will collapse so if we go in a four degrees world If the tipping points will be transgressed if you have a collapse on smooth and systems and so on and we have nine Billion people by then There is no way of rational Rationally sharing the scarce resources anymore and this is a story you'll learn actually I did that for a for a book I'm writing I looked into The most conspicuous collective crisis you can think of namely sinking ships The Titanic the Lusitania and so on What you see what you hear from the people who survived these accidents is that as long as people felt By cooperation, there is enough lifeboats and rescue space People behave civilized so women and children first and so on once people realize There is not enough rescue space. So it struggled for survival and everybody is trembling down each other That is precisely what I fear could happen if we slip into a four or five degrees world and what would mean that this Index here would completely collapse. Sorry. I'm pushing the wrong button all the time So this index was dropped Here are the tipping points transgress then ultimately we might go into this age again 15,000 human beings We would roam the vast land in small groups and of course they would co collaborate So we would see a rise of this index again, but in a completely different world now This is not a prediction. Obviously. I'm sticking my neck out here clearly, but I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure From all my gut feeling that if we would slip into a four degrees of five degrees world We would see tremendous international tensions national tensions and something like global climate of violence in the end There is an alternative and I firmly do believe in whether that is again for the politicians among you I think that holding the two degrees line is the biggest peacekeeping and peacemaking project of all times really that means You know you hold the line I call it a Kantian mega project in the sense of the philosopher Immanuel Kant who wrote this famous essay on Eternal peace. I think the cooperation on Decarbonization compensation for adaptation and so on that is the biggest peace project in the world actually and So with this positive prospect and my talk. Thanks for your attention