Translator: Alicia Dean Reviewer: Maddalena Bruno
Studio reporter: Watch out Fanny, there is a huge wave behind you!
(Laughter)
Ok wait.
Your cameraman must have had a bit of trouble
the wave was bigger than expected.
Fanny, are you still there?
Fanny: I was expecting a shower this morning!
Sr: There it is! It's bracing, Fanny!
F: I was expecting a shower and it really wakes you up!
(Applause)
Hello, I do not know this girl, I don't know who she is.
I think that after that
I'm good for bloopers until the end of my life.
It was not so long ago, after all.
It was last February, in St. Malo,
it was an outside broadcast on the spring tides.
And that day, I have to admit
I felt ridiculous.
So completely ridiculous.
You see, strangely,
I didn't feel ridiculous facing the camera.
Rather, that day, I felt ridiculous facing Nature,
facing the power of the elements and the strength of the water.
I already knew it, but that day,
I believe that I truly experienced it
and I paid the price because it really hurts.
In front of the Nature, we are nothing.
We humans are ridiculous!
And yet we must admit and realize
that we have become a force which influences this planet.
Life on Earth,
it is only made possible through fundamental mechanisms
which are generally very fragile and subtile.
And one of those mechanisms is called the greenhouse effect.
Okay, now I'm going to shatter a misconception about the subject.
Despite all the bad things that one can say about it,
the greenhouse effect is beneficial.
Yes, I swear to you, the greenhouse effect is beneficial.
It is not only beneficial,
the greenhouse effect is essential to life.
If there wasn't a greenhouse effect on the planet,
the mean global temperature would be between
-16°C and -18°C.
So there would be places on Earth
where one could no longer live because of the cold.
The greenhouse effect is essential to life.
Everything starts with the sun, obviously.
The sun emits energy and as the Earth is not totally black,
it absorbs a portion, that's true,
but the rest is emitted as infrared radiation,
returned to sender, back into space.
And that's where the greenhouse mechanism comes into play.
It traps this heat
so the Earth is not completely cold.
And for the greenhouse effect to happen,
there have to be tiny molecules in suspension.
That's the gas, the greenhouse gas.
We're going to take a little quiz.
Do you know what's the main greenhouse gas found in the atmosphere?
You have four choices.
Vote by a show of hands, that's simpler.
First choice: methane.
Does anyone out there think it's methane?
Not many people, mustn't be that.
Second choice:
water vapor, why not?
Why not water vapor?
There is also CO², the famous carbon dioxide, the CO².
Ah, maybe CO².
And the option D is "The option D".
(Laughter)
It is for people who don't want to answer or for climate sceptics.
I don't know if there are any of them here.
Against all expectation, the right answer is B, water vapor.
There was a big trap.
The primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is natural.
It's water vapor.
If there was no water vapor on the planet,
there wouldn't be anything much at all:
no weather and let alone climate.
There would be no clouds, no rain, no snow,
no typhoons, no cyclones, no storms,
there would be nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
Life is only possible on the planet
through the greenhouse mechanism.
But it is a mechanism which is subject to variation.
20,000 years ago, we were in an ice age
and the landscape that we have today
is nothing like the landscape as it was then.
For example: you could easily walk to England, because at that time
the North Sea and the English Channel were covered by ice.
The ice even extended to the South of France.
There was ice as far as Marseille.
I have a great example to show you.
It's a cave.
This cave is really brilliant.
It's awesome.
This cave could have become as famous as Lascaux.
Only it's a bit difficult to get to because you have to go underwater
in the rocky inlets of Marseille.
And when you reach this cave, this cavity,
you see that people painted on the walls
the world which was theirs a very long time ago,
thousands of years ago.
And on the wall they didn't paint bisons, they painted penguins.
Yes, at that time, there were penguins in Marseille.
No, it's not a joke.
It only took an average rise in global temperature of 5 tiny degrees
for all this ice to melt,
for the level of the oceans to rise by 120 meters
and for all middle latitude zones to become cultivatable.
You all know that when we turn up our thermostats 2 or 3 degrees,
the effect is not negligible.
2°C, 3°C even 1°C, changes everything, absolutely everything.
5 degrees, 5 little degrees, are what separates us from an ice age.
Of course there are cycles, the climate is changing all the time.
Glacial and interglacial periods, melting and freezing,
sometimes heating, sometimes cooling.
It's changing all the time.
The climate has always changed throughout the ages.
It's a function of astronomic parameters.
The Earth is not always situated at the same place on it's axis,
and necessarily from time to time, it's a little further from the sun
and this is what determines the climate cycles.
The climate hasn't waited for man in order to change.
Only it has taken time,
these changes take thousands of years.
So we have a big problem, a really big problem.
Over several decades, since the Industrial Revolution actually,
the climate machine has accelerated
at the mind-blowing rate of 1/10th of a degree per decade.
Remember, we gained 5 degrees in 20,000 yeas
and here we have gained nearly one degree in a century.
The scale is changing.
And sea level has already risen by 19 centimeters.
There are for sure discussions about the question.
Man is responsible, mend of discussion.
So by our industrial activities,
we release all sorts of things into the atmosphere
and here I come back to our greenhouse mechanism.
There is already a lot of natural water vapor.
With our industrial activities we add a little more of it,
but that's not really what influences the climate.
It's other gases like CO², carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is very nasty, very, very perverse
because in fact it remains in the atmosphere for a long time.
It has a very strong warming power and above all a strong inertia.
What we produce today, we will still find in several decades time.
What we produce today will still be in the atmosphere in 2050.
That is really the problem.
This is a very, very pretty image from NASA.
It's very beautiful.
If you didn't know what it was, you would find it almost artistic.
But actually no.
What you see in red is pollution.
NASA has modeled the carbon cycle,
with the different sources of emissions, the United States, Europe, Asia,
and all of that is going to revolve in the atmosphere for dozens of years,
a real pressure cooker effect, and it's the same for lots of other gases.
It is the same for nitrous oxide,
methane obviously, and flourine, there's plenty of that.
We release lots of things into the atmosphere.
A true pressure cooker effect.
Incidentally, this image, this metaphor,
is not bad, it's rather eloquent.
You need to keep it in mind,
you can imagine the Sun as the flame,
the pressure cooker is our Earth,
it's the atmosphere, this big pressure cooker is all of that,
and more what is inside, the gas.
It's gas that is going to boost, amplify, and activate the warming.
And the Earth gets warmer and warmer.
We don't seem to want to turn off the gas.
It's not in our plans, apparently.
In any case, it's not what we're doing
when we tap into our fossil fuels reserves,
or even worse, when we drill
for new oil and gas fields.
We don't really seem to want to turn off the gas,
and the Earth goes on getting warmer.
But this heat is not exactly going where we think.
There's another misconception around the issue, too.
All this heat, is not stored in the atmosphere,
but in the oceans.
Yes, in the oceans.
These are the true radiators of the world.
90% of that heat will get stored there.
It's the oceans that really drive the climate machine.
You have to remember that 70% of the Earth's surface is water.
Multiply that by 4000 m of avarege depth
and that creates an absolutely enormous heat tank.
The starting point for violent weather events
is the heat contained in the oceans.
And here's where I put my weather forecaster's hat on
to tell you that beasts like Haiyan in the Philippines or
Katrina, Sandy, etc. in the United States, all drew their energy
from the heat contained in the oceans.
It happens at the level of the equator.
The temperature must exceed a critical threshold of 26°C on average
to a depth of 50 meters and there, that's where those monsters arise.
The more the oceans warm up,
necessarily,
the more we can expect
a resurgence of these violent phenomena.
There are also heat waves, which testify to this rapid climate change.
We have to underline, that to be meaningful,
climate data has to be analyzed over at least 30 years.
And that's the point, when you look back,
the global average temperature curve is climbing.
If we look at the last ten hottest years
since weather records began,
those ten hottest years all took place in the 21st century, without exception.
A real balloon effect, with two notable examples
which are very recent, 2014 and 2015.
A few months ago, records were broken all over the world.
A spectacular and unusually early heatwave in Spain.
It was the same in France too, last June,
and in Egypt, Israel, and Pakistan.
There was a fatal heatwave in India, while on the other side of the planet,
California is fast becoming completely aris,
with fires breaking out everywhere at this very moment.
So what happens when these heatwaves take hold?
There are droughts,
a threat to agriculture,
a direct threat to people,
a threat to geopolitical stability,
and ultimately a threat to peace.
And we are not all exposed in the same way
to the climate changes that are occurring.
I'm thinking for example, about those small, low-lying Pacific islands
which are in the front line as the waters rise.
Over there, at this moment, those little countries
are not hatching a future change plan,
but quite clearly, an evacuation plan.
In all events, those little islands are doomed to disappear.
There is an image that personally I find really terrifying.
I find it absolutely horrible.
Also, it's an image which could, become common in the future.
It's the biggest fence in the world.
It was built in stone and barbed wire by the Indians
to prevent inhabitants of Bangladesh from migrating North,
because they are fleeing their coast which is constantly being hit by typhoons.
There is a saying by Paul Valery that I really love
and it strikes a chord with me.
Paul Valery, the great poet, said,
"Man quite often knows what he is doing,
but he never knows what he does causes".
In other words, Man believes he can control everything
but he is often unaware of the consequences of what he does.
And yet, it's time to take action.
It's time to act to make a positive impact on nature.
2°C is our target.
Or rather, it is the threshold that must not be crossed.
2°C is our challenge,
and above all, that's what's at stake at COP21, the major climate conference
that France is getting ready to host
quite soon now,
in a few weeks time.
It starts at Le Bourget in Paris on November 30th.
Of course, the negotiations are the business of our heads of state,
it's the business of our leaders, but it's our problem too, all of us
each one of us, all of you in this room.
We must be convinced and climate-aware.
There's no time left.
Not more than 2° by the end of the century.
That's exactly what will give us time to adapt
what will allow us to avoid
the most serious climate effects.
And especially, it will give us a certain level of control
over the climate situation.
Facing the Nature, we are nothing, we are absolutely ridiculous.
And yet, paradoxically, we are capable of upsetting the fundamental balances
that enable life on this planet.
Facing the Nature, we are nothing, we are ridiculous,
and yet, our scope for action is immense.
That's what I want to tell you, it's good news.
It's excellent news.
This climate crisis is an amazing opportunity,
a chance to to give meaning to progress once more.
What will our world, our society, or our planet look like
in a few decades time?
Well, it's really just a question of becoming conscious
and making choices.
(Applause)