been i think this must be my third visit to the seattle town hall and every time i come i have this fantastic sense that this is a really unique institution i do a lot of public speaking around the world on climate change to different groups but this one here is really special it's got a vibe about it it's got deep roots into the community and i really get the sense here that when we come together to discuss big issues like like climate change we're starting to build the kind of the social machinery we need to really get china so i'm just delighted that you've all bribed the weather which i understand is going to take a turn for the worst a bit lighter and come out tonight to talk about climate change what i'd like to do this evening is just lay out to you the basic thesis or basic idea behind the book that i've just published called atmosphere of hope ten years ago i wrote a book called the weather my case that really tried to alert people to the danger of  the climate problem as it was then i thought at some stage i might follow up with it with another book dealing with how things had gone but i put off writing because i didn't want to depress people quite frankly things were like really come through a massive decade of lost opportunity in terms of emissions so there wasn't a lot to be too rosy about but in the last eighteen months i would guess i think things have really started to change around that great social machine that we started building here probably be earlier than two thousand and seven but at least my gauge went off it was when i came here in two thousand and seven and felt the energy of people here is really starting to gain traction it takes a long time to change society and doing what we have done in a decade i think has been pretty spectacular but before i go on to those reasons for hope i really think i need to outline to you where we are in terms of climate change at the end of that  of lost opportunity so say well let's call it twenty fourteen that year we put into the atmosphere about forty gigatons of carbon dioxide it's an easy number to cyber very difficult one to comprehend and the only way i have really of gaining an understanding of what that forty gigatons means is to do a bit of a thought experiment and think ok what would we need to do by way of tree planting for example to draw just one tenth of that volume of c o two out of the atmosphere because you know trees are they build themselves by drawing c o two out of the atmosphere so we can understand it's pretty simple process to understand so if we wanted to drop just forget tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere what we'd need to do is to plant an area around about the size of a stride year with forest and the stride is just a little bit smaller than going to us forty eight states of the u so we'd need to set out and plant an area of forest the size of new york state every year for fifty years reforesting astride yeah and at the end of that fifty years we would have drawn out on average in any one year for get tonnes of ca but of course if we did that we would change the way the planet works as strider is a continent of bright surfaces we've got lots of deserts and salt lakes and grasslands when sunlight hits those bright surfaces it's reflected back into space and the planet so when we're dealing with those big volumes we are changing the function of the planet and we haven't just released forty gigatons in twenty fourteen we have been releasing somewhere between thirty and forty good tons of c o two for well over a decade now we've just heard in fact in last week or so that the cumulative impact of that release of greenhouse gases is to rise global temperature by about one degree celsius above the pre industrial average it's about one point out degrees fahrenheit so what does that mean will be before the industrial revolution the average surface temperature of the earth was about fourteen degrees now it's about fifteen degrees doesn't sound like a huge change but it has had a massive impact in terms of the extremes extreme weather events particularly and it's perhaps the best way to understand why that's happened is to think about the weather we experience in any given year or rain and imagine what happens to the hot weather and you get a lot bigger area fall in under the very hot end of the bell curve you get some of that even sticking out beyond where the bell curve was before so that your record breaking hot weather still some cold ice but far fewer of them the impacts of that shift in terms of the extremes is really driving some very very unfavorable changes to our environment and i'll talk a little bit about the strategy just because you may be less familiar with what's happening in my country than than in yours but i think it's just telling that this is a global signature that we're now seeing one of the most disturbing aspects of the current who in my city of melbourne which is been severely afflicted by hate wives one particularly well studied one in two thousand and nine killed four hundred people in addition to those who would have died naturally over just a four day period and melbourne when he is writing opens on that's all that people are interested in they're incredibly proud of it we built this enormous great stadium it's quite a modern one to have house that has the championship scene and last year climate induced disaster struck we had a three day hate wife where temperatures were about forty two degrees celsius for three days consecutively that's up i don't know the exact calculations up above one hundred ten fahrenheit the temperature in the courts however peaked it in the 't you know this is a big big sporting event you can imagine what the the contracts involving distribution rights and broadcasting rights and sponsorship rights and things of that there's hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in this stuff so that had to be suspended because  in danger of their lives are in danger of dying now i remember i got called up by the bay base who you know they don't take notice of climate change in australia very often for in london but they did win the tennis was disturbed you know it was suspended had done the incredibly painstaking work of gathering all the data doing some simulations in a computer models to see what they get and what they did was basically did two lots of computer runs one where they included every fact known to affect the climate in southern australia except the human emitted greenhouse gases and the second run may include the greenhouse gases so the twelve thousand runs without the human impact only one run in twelve thousand produced the sort of conditions that we actually saw on the ground in melbourne during a strike in auckland when you include the greenhouse gases that we've put into the atmosphere that becomes a commonplace outcome so we were able to say that without the human impact on the climate change is an influence but might not be the whole story we know now that things are getting so extreme and using that methodology we can say that we were responsible of course those hate waves they don't to many other you saw the smoke on the horizon from that bushfire it was too light to leave your home and try to seek refuge somewhere else the fire was so intense and so fast moving that once you saw the smoke you were right in the firing line a land of drought and flooding rains is no doubt about it but in queensland in the last few years we've seen the most incredible events in two thousand and twelve eighty percent of queensland was declared a flood disaster eighty percent of the state numbers in twenty thirteen fourteen eighty percent of queensland was declared drought stricken so i mean when used to having droughts and floods but not like that i mean nothing we just haven't seen that sort of dated as a result of those factors plus lead to some periods other things but it's really that environment is really under strace i want to talk about other parts of the world just to time but you know i think wherever i travel changed i don't need to show graphs anymore with people know what so that one degree has been bad enough but the bad news for us is that the greenhouse gases a kind of slow acting and the amount of tell us that it simply cannot survive one degree of warming so if you want to see the barrier reef go and see it now because in thirty years time once that one and a half degrees of warming that's going to be caused by the existing greenhouse gases becomes a reality the barrier reef just isn't going to be a living entity as it is to die which is very sad sad outcome rising sea levels food security issues ocean acidification is a whole series of things we need to worry about on the gloomy and dark side and one of the reasons i didn't write a book on climate change because i couldn't see a solution until recently to those sort of things and i should just add that you know with get a sort of halfway towards the two degree mark in oregon kind of been two point seven three degrees is some disagreement about the precise figures but it'll be somewhere in that in that right in that range so it's a step forward but it's not going to get us to a solution in fact the solution with the current tools we've got is really hard to say because a even if you we can assure really rapid action on part of the whole global community to deal with this issue the administration has cost us cost us very dearly so what's changed that gives me i just want to talk about one one small relatively small thing first but i think it's quite telling  international energy agency earlier in the year produced a report that really surprised me and it surprised me because the international energy agency is hardly some screaming radical grain organization you know it has its own co so the report i produced was quite astonishing what it said to the bottom line of the report was basically that in twenty fourteen the global economy grew at a time when of the drivers i think that are responsible for that outcome first the incredible success of clean energy technologies in terms of penetrating the  call for the moment energy efficiency will come back to that just to deal with the clean energy the first you know i've watched year on year is as solar panels have been producing cheaper and cheaper electricity you know they're putting little three d printers on the blades that run all the way up and back and just keep that blade in absolutely top condition so again maintenance costs are down if you putting it to a bunch offshore that counts a lot the least magnets you need to do the better enormous chinese so that's part of that decoupling i think of but the other part that i would argue is at least as important as what i called energy efficiency and what i mean by that is that you know for the last twenty years i've been kind of grumbling going down to the landlord and said we put some solar panels on the roof and is a great thing you do that and you look around the rest of the street and who's changing a light globes and who is putting solar panels or it didn't look like a lot of people to me so i said it did a big grumpily you know but you realise that there actually is billions of people around the world doing that sort of stuff you know this billions of people calling up their local council millions anyway so you could we have a pipeline we know people going into or to buy the new car and buying a hybrid or some smaller cab than what they had before all of that ago so all of those efficiency gains means that we're just we're using less and less fossil fuels which is getting as you know helping contribute to that decoupling that i mentioned and i think we deserve a pat on the back it's not like this where everyone gets together who has been doing this sort of stuff we need to recognise we've had a massive success as it is kind of tedious as it is doing all of those small things that sane to not add up to anything that actually added up to a huge  he has a house and wanted to talk about climate change and what he could do about it and i back then i was pretty optimistic we're going to get a good outcome at copenhagen and we'd be able to get on top of this problem richard didn't believe that for  he just said i just don't think that human humanity's capable of doing what needs to be done to avoid the problem he said what i'd like to do is to set up a prize a prize for technologies that have the capacity to draw enough c o two out of the year to make a difference to our climate future so we ended up calling it the virgin earth challenge prize it's a twenty five million pound prize and it's for technologies that have the could potentially to dr lighter we've had a live one thousand entries i've looked through them i've carefully evaluated them and i have become totally convinced that this approach this approach to of drawing c o two out of the atmosphere is going to be an indispensable our future one of the things i found frustrating was that this wasn't being recognized anywhere that we didn't even have a name for this basket of technologies before you know some of the approaches people would refer to as g engineering others to agricultural practices and so forth but there wasn't a name so when i wrote my book i thought all aucoin and i'm for the so called it the third why the reason i called it the third way is that the first and most vital why is reducing emissions we all recognise that that's what we go to the second why however is geo engineering but geo engineering in really damaging wise and i can see that the second why would be used if we dally much longer and let me just explain the sort of geo engineering that people are considering at the moment one of the options probably the cheapest and most widely five it option is to inject some sort of self advice to chemicals into the stratosphere which is you know twelve kilometers or so above their head up where the the jet liners fly if you do that you have an instant effect cooling the planet we know that because a l really quite cheap this is a few people who are probably living within twenty miles of us now who could individually fund geo engineering proposed about that that would change the the climate of the earth it's not that expensive and it's probably more than one  do it so we know it's cheap we know it's instantly effective right really does lower the temperature straightaway so if you're facing some dire problems right the temperatures you can fix them the third thing we know about the the into the stratosphere you will affect the south asian monsoon is one point four billion people who depend upon that monsoon for a living we know we can that the productivity of crops will decline it's what's happened in years without a summer in the past when the self is going up naturally and we know that underneath that solve the problem of climate change will just keep festering away the c o two keep increasing the oceans willesee defy the very basis of life itself will be agencies worldwide working on geo engineering solutions the government of china alone has four major institutes for my research groups working on these geo engineering solutions china's l particularly land based ecosystems to feed us and houses and clothes provide a clean water and fresh air and everything else so there are limits to the amount i think we can do on land when we're dealing with a problem that is of many times in plastics and many of our other chemicals from the old chemical industry chemists new had a tyke cellulose and various other plant products and make a lot of valuable products from them maybe that will start doing that it's guile maybe that will get us some  uncertainties this is a way that grows off the coast here in seattle that can grow at the right of half a meter a die it grows thirty to sixty times faster than any land by splats and there was a great study done last year suggesting that about four and a half times the size of australia so you know we have about five hundred square kilometers a say wait farms of china when these mixed you know aquaculture and say we farming we don't know how they work but to go from that to even one percent of the world's ocean is desktop at the moment but but it's possible i want to just go now to the chemical based technologies which are which are the second great silo really of of third way approaches   the first that we need to think about is cabin negative concrete i don't know whether any of you have heard of these but the concrete industry globally is responsible for about five percent of current emissions of greenhouse reducing c o two it's manufacturers climates cheaper stronger and more durable than conventional concretes so why are we all rushing out to use cabin negative concrete well tragically or perhaps not s to center out of cabinet of concrete at the moment because it doesn't have a track record you know but there are things we could do to try to foster that that industry if we had a sectoral cap and trade system just on the concrete sector that would encourage the manufacture of carbon negative concrete scene low risk environments where we could learn about its behavior over time and start giving it that track record that it needs to start replacing portland cement bice concretes so there's a huge opportunity there that start but there are people who are thinking well what are we going to stuff up on the scale and use it to replenish beaches use it as a substitute for beach sand because in an active environment like that it'll start sequestering quite a lot of c o two other people think we can use it there's a lot of options there and i think the grain or that we can make air energy sector the more prospect of these opportunities look he don't want to be burning fossil fuels to capture c o two but if we can green up the electricity generation and transport then i think there's some real opportunities the other options get they kind of much more prospect of but i do want to just cover off on them i've held in my hand a little  from the atmosphere this capture making isn't that a very well known we can incorporate the c o two into products it all takes energy of course but those plastics are solidified atmospheric c o two there are a great why of getting c o two out of the atmosphere and storing it if every bit of plastic we created that day was made out of atmospheric c o two you would need to double world plastic production to pull the gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere that's about four get tons of c o two but it'll you know contribute i think over time just in the last two months we've heard about another thing testy right through the manufacture of carbon fibers from atmospheric c o two now here in seattle you've got to know about carbon fiber in uses them in a dreamliner you know is the skin of the aircraft some estimates maybe a tenth the cost that's a massive breakthrough because once carbon fibers get cheap enough does start competing head on with elam in human steel and they're both really energy and carbon intensive whole life could be possible but they have done it and you know i guess if the arctic starts melting and lots of me think i was in the atmosphere will be drinking one hundred cups a day and sending the stuff off to south korea to get active i didn't have to look have some sort of solution but i just bring it up because it's kind of it tells you where the very beginning of an industry here and think about think about it this is why that we know that the cat c o two in the atmosphere now will be driving more disastrous climate change through to twenty fifty and beyond we know that right it what that means we know what the problem is that children will be trying to solving twenty fifty right we know the third way technologies at least some of them have the only way forward to deal with this but we know also that there's long development pathways for these industries wind and solar teaches that you know it's going to be thirty years before we're it's ngaio with the most prospective of assessment i should say of what i thought third way technologies might be doing in terms of c o two reductions by twenty fifty and i came up with a figure that was around about forty percent of current emissions if we can achieve that it will be stunningly important because it help us avoid that two degrees of warming but when i really asked myself honestly whether i'd done a good job with that idea i began to doubt it because i thought i don't know what twenty fifty thousand to be like i really don't the only way i can begin to come out of it is to throw myself back a century so let me imagine i'm living in one nine hundred fifteen and i'm trying to imagine one hundred fifty rather than living in twenty fifteen and trying to imagine twenty fifty and if you do that thought experiment it's very interesting because in my city of melbourne in one thousand fifteen horse drawn power was the power on the streets there may have been a few very early motor vehicles but horse drawn power was doing most of the work the maps that people would have looked at to understand the world in school in nineteen fifteen were sort of color coded maps that were of countries that were color coded according to the empires of europe that had been there for centuries there wasn't a single communist country on those  jet aircraft half the world living under communism to someone living in one thousand fifteen that would have read a science fiction right the changes were just too vast so when i think about twenty fifty i think about it the noise terms but also with the knowledge that social technological and environmental change have all excel right of this century so when i did a conservative estimate of what might be happening in twenty fifteen i have to admit to myself i think it is really well and truly of the economy and we know that you know if we want to reduce atmospheric c o two by just one part per million that's eighteen gigatons we've got to take out of the atmosphere you know where we're already pretty much at four hundred parts per million we which parts different parts of the world you expect to be most affected well that's a really big question this trial is going to be very severely affected where flat draw i continent and that's bad news i think short and yeah these various best to worst case scenarios the prime variable seems to be how much continued c o two we are putting into the atmosphere what i'm really not hearing enough is also the effect of continued and know i think your point out many of these tech new technologies their way will depend on energy and when i look at the world and say well you know if we had lots of cheap energy on a global scale say something like nuclear fusion impact on production or whatever you're doing with the energy bit but saves you from spikes in demand what's happening with electric vehicles how do they work in and there's a lot of detail in that work and i'll just give you a few examples  what happened what would happen to germany if every transport vehicle in the country was electrified how much extra demand would that to the system turns out is not very much it's only about twenty percent additional demand but he getting these massive storage opportunity coming off the back of that all of the smart grid stuff turning things on and off that's already a reality there's enough wind and solar in germany now that they have what  so you know there's always some power in the system coming from those sources because a very widely distributed and see the sunny or windy somewhere across the range at times when there's a lot of electricity in the system this is very interesting things happen happening some companies are taking up that very cheap electricity and using it to experiment with ways of getting c o two out of the atmosphere headed we turn c o two into products as i said you need energy to do that but the university of hamburg and same and others are now looking at that now one experiment that that's being done at hamburg is a taking a week solution of c o two in water putting an electric current through it and seeing what you get and you get some very very interesting things so i think when we think about this transition it's not just cost but also you can get some really great cabin benefits so i don't know about the i guess genetic modification of annual into perennials but i know that the general principle of using one you didn't mention population growth at all in your talk how big a factor do you think it will be in the future c o two levels etc show do you think and you think it's worth approaching as a separate item itself i think in this country we're looking at we've just been told by the pew research organization a couple months ago we should be looking at by by  two thousand and sixty five in fifty years a hundred ten million population increase in this country which is our whole population essentially west of the mississippi river should we be alarmed yeah enough to do something about it but i is a big issue and we should be alarmed about a global level and we know what the solution is to go part of the solution to the population issue you know we know that if we give women in developing countries access i think an average birthright of seven point seven it's now down around four because things have improved in ethiopia so we know how to solve the problem we need to focus on doing that but that is only part of the population problem you know that the projections for twenty fifty we'll have a population somewhere between right and ten billion now if we really get on top of this issue of bettering the lives of women in developing countries it'll be closer to white if we let it go it'll be close to detain so that's part of it but a big part of that growth too in poor countries you know we've we've only talked about the scientific solutions to global warming there's also an economic solution back in washington state we have i don't know if you're familiar with or i seventy two initiative which w a revenue neutral carbon tax off of the first day to do it in british columbia is ready do we have successfully do you believe that and soon that some point the world or at least some enough countries in the world will realize to attach a cost equal to the because i met gordon campbell as he was considering that and we had a discussion about it and the way they did it was so smart it was called you know give people money back through a tax break washington state initiative is exactly modeled on that same yeah well i think if you can do i do think that it's very smart to give people credit check and let them see it in the mile that's what they getting back for these you know what just as long as it's transparent why the people can see that they're getting it back thank you for being with us i believe the levy foundation juneau alaska the question about perennials some of the best work is being done by the land institute it's a line of kansas and our family foundation has funded them for many years let me ask you the same question i asked chris field climate change some nurse name for three weeks ago humanity has limited resources of capital expert labor land how should we allocate we humanity or resources among medication some of the approaches i've talked about tonight neda a sectoral tappan price to work so cap a negative concretes is a great example of that so you impose the price an industry will start doing you know doing things where we've got a product that already exists you know we know that we can do that these cabin taxes that you're talking about here you know if it particularly for the liquid fuels for the transport fuels which is what it does in basically seem to be very very effective you know that's that's a mitigation yeah sure this is sorry i'm talking about mitigation as i go so there are things that we know we can do that don't take a lot of capital resources to do they just happen once you put the price in place in the market starts working i think when it comes to or more you know and focus it on some of these solutions because at the early stage of development you know capital risk is really strained and you need that government support and you know we know that from looking at the building of say the wind industry and many of the other industries at the early stage that's where we do need to spend some of their capital and i'm a strong proponent of doing that there's a light a phase in that development cycle where you need something like a clean energy finance corporation it's different to a grain bank but it's processes and even in agricultural processes so it's a role for that and that's pretty easy because it's off budget what's a bit of money that you just got sitting out there as a loan basis in australia we've got a ten billion dollars fund that does that not really recommend you have a look at that if you're interested in  some of the details about how that works adaptation is the area that's going to cost us it really is particularly in terms of sea level rise i mean how do we manage that that is that is an issue where we will actually be spending a lot of money or burning a lot of capital and it's probably to give people water so it's just flooding shallow fields and in winter letting the stuff freeze and then it melts through the spring and provides the water that you need to unify you know human intellect is an astonishing thing sometimes costs beating but then you get someone who comes along with things like truly and does it in a different way but i'm sorry i kind of sort as eloquently as i would like to but i think it's a very complex and interesting issue and one we need to think more about