 I'm a journalist who recently published a book about climate change, about how people are preparing to live with and perhaps make money off the world we're creating. And I take a lot of pictures when I go do reporting trips. It's a sort of way to cheat as a reporter. If you don't want to take lots of notes and you're lazy, you can just take a picture. And then you can look at that picture later and see what there was to see. So if ever you read anything I've written and it's well described, it's only because I took a photo. I'd like to share some of those photos today with you. I've traveled a lot for this book. I went to six years, 24 countries, a dozen states. I started reporting up in the Arctic near Barrow, Alaska, ended near Key West. So the book ended the country. And just made everyone I took a very long time, which meant lots of photos. I'm starting with this photo here because it's Greenland. And two things are important here. One is that the Arctic is where we're first seeing the effects of climate change. Not just talking about what could be, but the Arctic is warming at pace about twice as quickly as the rest of the world. And so if you go to the Arctic, you can see not just the physical impacts, but you can see what I found most interesting, which was how people are reacting to the physical impacts. And then in this particular photo, there's the man and the woman in the bottom right there. I find it interesting because that guy was using climate change as a pickup line. He was talking about how horrible it was and what a mess, but don't be worried. And he was putting his arm around her. It was the weirdest thing. It was some sort of climate change conference, a bunch of European diplomats, and I don't know who, and they'd flown extensively and with lots of carbon to a callowit. This is where the most productive glacier in the world is on the west coast of Greenland. They'd flown there and there in this very nice hotel, which is where this promenade is, looking at the Cavian glaciers. And he's somehow comforting her, but it's all just a ploy to get her in bed. So this is my way of saying that as I traveled the world, I saw people who saw a very different view of climate change than has been discussed. In Greenland, it's a mineral rush in the Arctic in general, and Greenland in particular, because they want their independence. There are 57,000 people in Greenland. They are right now part of Denmark, and they want to be free. And the issue is that they've always gotten a lot of money from Denmark to sustain their very nice villages. We're talking, here's a village that voted 100% in favor of independence and a recent referendum. The villages look like this. They're beautiful. They're prettier than those in Alaska or Canada in the Arctic. They have many more, you know, they've got plumbing in some places, you wouldn't imagine it, airstrips, schools, stadiums, all these amenities that you would never imagine that something that we only hear about because of its melting ice and the potential sea level rise from it. It has people who live somewhat well for how remote it is. And they'd like to keep this up. Denmark, you know, the Danes are very, very kind people. And they say, okay, Greenland, you can be free, but we won't give you your subsidy anymore. I think it amounts to about $27,000 per person per year. And Denmark or Greenland needs to find a way to get that back. And the way they think that is, is minerals. They think that the melting ice will help their, both their terrestrial mineral, terrestrial mining and offshore oil. This is the Black Angel Zinc Mine in Northwest Greenland. It has some of the highest grade zinc in the world. It was tapped out in the 70s, they thought. But in 2006, when zinc prices were high again, some miners went around to see if it was worth going in again. They found a couple things. One was that the fjord to go into the mine, here it is, was about a, had a six-week longer shipping season. More important, one of the geologists was on a hiking trip coming down from the old mine and found where a glacier had pulled back. And at the foot of the former glacier was a deposit of zinc just as big as the first. So they've reopened the mine. Between this and the melting of the sea ice that will help with oil exploration, Greenland hopes in, not immediately, but in the next 10 or 20 years to be free of Denmark. I did a road show, if you could call it that, and a place with no roads with the, all the leaders of the political parties. There are five. And four of which were pro-independence. And they went from village to village saying, this is why we're having this referendum. We're going to vote on half-stepped independence. And I think the country voted about, excuse me, about 79% in favor. Another place I traveled to was Israel. As is the case in Australia, Singapore, Spain, even California, places that are water stressed have developed means to deal with it. And water stressed not because of climate change necessarily, but historically. And these are now becoming exporters of this technology. Desalination is a major export in Israel. There's an entire water tech industry that has grown up around, well, basically, they, Israelis had to learn how to thrive in their own desert environment. Of course, being a people who, in many cases, did come from nicer, not nicer, but wetter parts of Europe and wetter areas. And they wanted to recreate that world. They did so through all sorts of techniques. Of course, we have drip irrigation. It's partly from Israel, but also desalination. This guy was one of two engineers who spread desalination through Israel and then eventually through the world. And here's the biggest plant at the time when I visited Ashkelon. Israel expects to get about 10% of its water, of its drinking water from desalination. It may have already done so at this point. Desalination is interesting. It is a good technology if you're getting the water. It has some major downsides, one of which being if you're using carbon-intensive energy to produce your water, it's sort of like a snake eating its own tail. And desalination creates quite a bit of carbon. So it's a, like many of these tech fixes, a very local fix and helps you. The other thing that came out of the desalination project in Israel actually came out of Russia when some of these engineers were, they were Russian-born and they had been sent to the gulags for being capitalists or for being Jewish or for other reasons. And one in particular was sent to a very dry part of Siberia, cold but dry. And the way they dealt with getting fresh water was that they would make a lagoon next to the ocean. They would let the saltwater come in. Then they dammed it off. And there are two ways to, of course, one way to get fresh water is just to freeze saltwater. Ice doesn't have any salt in it to speak of. So they would freeze the ocean in this lagoon. And then as the spring melt came, they would let out the hypersaline water out of the bottom of the lagoon and taste it as it went. When finally it was not too salty to drink, they would dam it off, let the rest of the ice melt and they'd have a pond of fresh water. This became one of the first desalination techniques brought to Israel, a vacuum. A vacuum is a nice way to freeze something when it's too hot to actually have freezing temperatures. Turns out to not be a very good way to do desalination at volume, but if you're looking to make snowmakers, which is the other recent Israeli export, some of the world's all-weather snowmakers, they've sold in the Alps. This is one in Austria. They've sold some in Switzerland. They tried to sell some in Sochi in Russia. They, as they joked to me, we found a way to sell snow to the Eskimos. These snowmakers work being a vacuum, they can work above freezing, which other snowmakers can't. So even as the ski areas can't even open when they should because it's not freezing when it used to be, they have a problem. I'll rush through. In California, I spent time with the for-profit firefighting company called Firebreak. They worked for the insurance industry. The logic of it was simple, they said. The fire season is growing. The private or the public firefighters are cash strapped where we have less spending on this. And therefore, private industry needs to step in and they will, of course, protect your home if you pay them enough money as an individual client, but they found that the insurers would be the best bet. So AIG and farmers were hiring these guys. They would dress up like real firefighters, sneak behind police lines, usually by having their lights flashing, and then spray down homes. Doesn't work very well, by the way. So equity issues aside, this guy was trying to figure out where one of the homes that belonged to AIG actually was as he's calling on his phone frantically, but cell phones don't work very well in an emergency. And in order to their maps, they were downloading. So the private solution was not actually as good as the public one in this case. They saved ponies. The person on the right here is a hedge fund manager from New York City. The one on the left is the son of one of the most feared warlords in South Sudan. And the prize here was farmland. After the so-called global food crisis, even before it in 2008, the hedge funds, big investment banks, sovereign wealth funds from various countries decided that they wanted to get into the food business. And there are lots of ways to do so, but one of which is to actually go get farmland. There's thought to be an area the size of France within Africa that has been sold or traded or leased to foreign investors, sheep or flying to Vietnam from the Gulf, getting fed and being flown back and slaughtered. You've got Arab farmers in Ethiopia and you've got hedge fund managers from the upper east side in South Sudan. The reason is the Nile, by the way, for those who wonder why Sudan. Sudan has a lot of water, at least South Sudan does, not in Sudan. Of course, some of the generals he partnered with were later part of the recent insurgency. There's been some fighting in South Sudan and the new air generals he was with. Some of these fighters, in fact, were involved. And lastly, dengue fever outbreak in Key West a few years ago may have brought about the first genetically modified mosquitoes being released in this country. It hasn't happened yet, but disease is one thing that's thought to be affected by climate change. Certain things will get worse. Certain things may get better. Allergies will probably get worse. Dengue fever is one of those things that could spread along with malaria. And there is a solution, they say. The private company has come up with a way to make what they call super sexy male mosquitoes. The males don't bite, only the females do. So if you can create a male mosquito with a sort of kill pill built within it genetically, it will fly in. If you release hundreds of thousands of them, they'll mate with the females if they're super sexy enough, as they said. And the offspring will die. They'd like to release these in South Florida. And of course, this is all for profit, everything I've mentioned here. And some of which seem like good solutions and some of which I have to wonder. I will say that for Key West, this makes a lot of sense because the alternative is spraying tourist cars with this spray. This is what they're doing now. Millions of dollars spent on helicopters that fly low over town and just blanket all the cars. So I'm not sure GM mosquitoes might be better. And for that, I think I'm done.