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 with another book dealing with how things had gone but my put off writing because i didn't want to depress people quite frankly things just 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 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 decade of lost opportunity so say well let's call it twenty fourteen that year we put into the atmosphere about forty get tons of carbon d an easy number decide but a 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  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 strider with forest and the strike is just a little bit smaller than to us forty eight states of the u s i so we need to sit out and plant an area of forest the size of new york state every year for fifty yeah and at the end of that fifty years we would have drawn out on average in any one year for get tons of carbon dioxide 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 absorb sunlight transform some of it into heat energy and we'd actually excel or write the heating of the earth even though we're drawing c o two out of the atmosphere so i guess my shorthand for thinking about those vast volumes of c o two even if it's fo 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 i to graze 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 it doesn't sound like a huge china 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 way that we experience in any given year you know through a year we'll have some really cold days will have some really hot guys but most days are in the middle very hot and 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 there's 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 all all talk a little bit about astrology just because you might 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 climate shift we've seen particularly in the strider is the onset of heat wives o ration and the frequency that we just haven't seen before the reason heat waves worry is so much in australia is because they are our number one killer you might natural killer i should say we you might  read about sharks eating people in australia i think eleven people written by sharks of new south wales as she lets that's terrible but it's small be compared with what happens in terms of hate wives in my city of melbourne which is been severely afflicted by hate wives  economic disadvantage just because they can't afford to get shelter in those very very hot conditions the heat wave problem is building to the point where last year it interrupted melbourne's greatest moment really  stadium it's quite a modern one to have is that has the championship seen and last year climate induced disaster struck we had a three day hate wife where temperatures were about forty two degrees celsius for three d consecutively that's up i don't know the exact calculations up above one hundred ten fahrenheit the temperature in the courts however picked it in the low to mid fifty's which is really in the danger zone and clearly broad built with climate change in mind even though the millions of dollars tied up in this stuff so that had to be suspended because the players were in danger of their lives are in danger of dying now i remember i got called up by the b b c you know they don't take notice of climate change in australia very 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 is trying to not been when you include the greenhouse gases that we've put into the atmosphere that becomes commonplace outcome so we were able to say that without the human impact on the climate system we wouldn't have had that hate wife it's the first time in a stride or at least where we've been able to tie a specific event to a be there to experience it but the word was that once 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 sort of smoke you were right in the firing line we would have lost many many more firefighters had the fire been slower because it was so fast the take the firemen to with i would hit it if they were  is suffering already about half of the great barrier reef is dated as a result of those factors plus lead to some beers other things but it's really that environment is really under str i want to talk about other parts of the world just to save time but you know i think wherever i travel i meet people now who understand climate change as a lived experience with a farmers in australia people in africa subsistence farmers in africa people in europe or people in the us people who got direct experience of how the climate has 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 another half to grey of temperature increase in the pipeline and that means you know that even if we turned off the lights now on or walked home in the rain and never used another never burn another drop of fossil fuel we'd still see temperatures rise to one and a half degrees germany it's one of the most beautiful habitat you liver say but the scientists 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 living into as it is to die which is very sad sad outcome rising sea levels i couldn't see a solution until recently to those sort of things and i should just add that you know with the meeting in paris that's happening in a few weeks time is going to get us off that worst case scenario emissions trajectory where we're  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 have got is really hard to see because a even if want to talk about one one small relatively small thing first but i think it's quite telling the international energy agency earlier in the year produced a report that really surprised me and it surprised me europe's done it but to think that it would happen at the global scale in twenty fourteen is amazing no one was expecting that decoupling to occur so worley two of the drivers i think that are responsible for that outcome first the incredible success of clean energy technologies in terms of penetrating the marketplace and secondly what i'll call for the moment energy efficiency will come back to well just to deal with the clean energy first you know i've watched year on year is is solar panels have been producing cheaper and cheaper electricity you know for the last thirty years they've dropped the a part of the wind energy company he just signed up power purchase agreements owed to agreement to deliver electricity in texas at a cost of a bat was somewhere for four point five cents a kilowatt hour it was like you know i mean that would have of the street and who's change a lot of clubs and who is putting solar panels on of 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 playing a hybrid or some smaller cab than what they had before all of that has added up to a massive energy efficiency guy and it's been huge in this fuels which is getting as you know helping contribute to that 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 agreement will start to take effect which is twenty twenty we're saying least a couple with might just buy us some time that we didn't think we had to get below two degrees but as i said where there's enough gas in wanted to talk about climate change and what he could do about it 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 a second he just said i just don't think that human humanities type of all 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 atmosphere per annum now when he set it up in two thousand and seven quite agreed to be a judge on the prize panel but i was very pessimistic that we'd get entries that would amount to anything i lighter we've had a live one thousand entries i've looked through them carefully evaluated them and i have become totally convinced that this approach this approached of drawing c o two out of the atmosphere is going to be an indispensable p future one of the things i found frustrating was that this wasn't being recognized anyway 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 and let me just explain the sort of geo engineering that people are considering at the moment one of the options and 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 that it's really quite cheap these days a few people who are probably living within twenty miles of us now who could individually fund geo engineering proposal out that would change the the climate of the earth it's not that expensive and it's probably more than one that could 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 ride the temperatures you can fix them the third thing we know about into 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 would apply that's what's happened in years without a summer in the past when the self is go 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 that depend upon sunlight as their power source and plants as the caption making these and the really really well understood your reafforestation growing plants and somehow storing the cabin particularly land based ecosystems to feed us and houses and clothes provide that 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 many good times in sky  and then put into the soil the old wood chemistry industries it used to be so you know so prolific in this country might make a comeback now before we had the petrochemical industries we got all of our you know plastics  and many of our other chemicals from the old chemical industry chemists knew how to tyke cellulose and various other plant products and make a lot of valuable products from them but maybe that will start doing that at skyland maybe that will get us some uncertainties the seaway that grows off the coast here in seattle can grow at the right of half a meter a die it grows thirty to sixty times faster than any land based plants and there was a great study done last year suggesting that if we could only  of the water column above it means that the c o two doesn't try to escape all the time so it's quite different from putting c o two into land by strokes where you know that they're it's pointed it wants to a sky but in the ocean that's not the case and eventually it would form a sol those sediments but this is all just thinking it's 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  electricity or transport fusion or fossil fuels to some extent the first that we need to think about is carbon negative concretes i don't know whether any of you have heard of these but the concrete industry globally  no one's going to go out and build a sydney harbor bridge or a will try 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 sick drop cap and trade system just on so there's a huge opportunity there that beaches use it as a substitute for beach sand because in a negative environment like that it'll start sequestering quite a lot of c o two other people think we can use it in playgrounds was a soil amendment this is yet others who think maybe we could use a painter not in the 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 generation and air transport then i think there's some real opportunities the other options get 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 a day was made out of atmospheric c o two you would need to double world plastic production to pull the giga ton of carbon out of the atmosphere that's about four get tons of c o two but it'll it'll 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 cups a day and sending the stuff off to south korea to get active i didn't 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 way that we know that the cat c o two in the atmosphere now will be driving ever 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 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 sol i try to do an assessment of what i thought a conservative 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 c emissions if we can achieve that it will be stunningly important because it will help us avoid that two degrees of warming but when i really ask myself honestly whether i've done a good job with that i 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 at it is to throw myself back a century so let me imagine i'm living in nineteen fifteen and i'm trying to imagine nine rather than living in twenty fifteen and trying to imagine twenty fifty and if you do that thought experiment it's a 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 europe that had been there for centuries but there wasn't a single communist country on those maps you know the war that was being forwarded my grandfather fought in the first world war the war that he fought was being fought with cavalry charges in nine hundred fifteen in pat there wasn't and then imagine one hundred fifty nuclear weapons jet aircraft half the world living under communism to someone living in nine hundred fifteen that would have read a science fiction that the changes were just too vast so when i think about twenty fifty i think about it in those terms but also with the knowledge that social technological and environmental change have all excel right of the century so when i did a conservative atmosphere you know where we're already pretty much at four hundred parts per million we know that we started the industrial revolution of two hundred ninety parts per million the scale of the challenge is massive but i have no doubt that the third way can deliver real outcomes you expect to be most affected and which parts different parts of the world you expect to be most affected well that's a really big question this trailer is going to be very severely affected where flat draw i continent and that's bad news i as well the more short and yeah there's 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 past deforestation is actually the rain forest and my question to you is where there are these scenarios all the way from the best to worst case scenarios is sume that we're not logging any more rain forest or or whether  the whole greed so how do you create these distributed grids what are the sources of energy what do you do with excess energy when you have it heavy you manage demand can you switch things off a very small periods of time across  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 in others and they're looking at that and one experiment that it's being done at hamburg is 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 opportunity and i think the german experience shows us we can do it it can be done but it is it's it's and it will be a not a chinese you know while that we use and supply electricity so possible is to is to treat our food crops that changed from being annual to perennials and somehow this was a tremendous carbon sink and i've only seen this in one place i was wondering if you'd heard about it what you thought about the them 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 premium grasses to store carbon is a sound 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 do 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 one 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 look i is a big issue and we should be alarmed about a global level and we know what the solution is to all part of the solution to the population issue you know we know that if we give women in developing countries access ahead 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 either by twenty fifty will have a population somewhere between right and ten billion now if we really get on top of this issue of bettering the laws 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 by twenty fifty my kids and your kids might be desperate for solutions to get c o two out of the air unless we've done that you diligence at least to see whether this is possible or what the downsides of it are we may deprive them of that opportunity so in the book i argue that we need to really investigate these and see is it feasible are they downsides to it what you know what how would we go about doing one of the costs what are the legal ramifications and issues unless we start doing that now we won't have that technology mature by two thousand and fifty if we really need it so i just think we need to do due diligence on it you know we've we've only talked about the scientific solutions to global warming there's also an economic reasonable but you know in terms of base a i'm very familiar with that approach 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 cool you know give people the money back through a tax transparent or why that people can see that they're getting it back i well but more of our societal question and less time when there's been quite a lot of focus on institutions such as university of washington and the gates