Transcriber: Amanda Zhu Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
I love science.
But I have to admit
you can get pretty obsessive over science sometimes.
I used to work in former East Germany
right after the wall, the Berlin Wall, came down,
and I was on a quest
to find the signature of the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave
in my carbon cycle data in the Southern Ocean.
It's very windy in the Southern Ocean,
and there is this wave
that circles around Antarctica endlessly.
And here I am
looking for the wave in my carbon data
when I spot an anomaly.
We know, because we're putting all that CO2 in the atmosphere,
that the Southern Ocean CO2 should also be going up,
but this is not what it does -
there is an anomaly.
So I storm into my neighbor's office,
and I say, "Oh, I’m so excited!
I’m so excited! I made a discovery.
There is an anomaly.
The Southern Ocean is not taking up CO2 the way it should."
What he says: "But what does it mean?"
"The end of the world is coming faster than we thought,"
and I storm out.
(Laughter)
I am not proud of myself.
(Laughter)
Every year
when the global temperature of the year is announced in December
and we have yet another warming record,
I go, "Yes!"
And every year
when the Australian Weather Service
adds a color contour to their weather maps
because the temperature is getting so hot that the highway is melting,
I go, "Wow!"
And when parts of US, of Texas, the oil state,
get an astronomical 26 inches of rain
in one day during a hurricane,
in part because of the atmosphere, the warm atmosphere,
holding more water vapor,
do I think about the rivers overflowing their banks?
Do I think about the houses flooded in their paths?
No, I think about the evidence,
I think about the signal and the predictions coming true,
and I think this is what climate change looks like.
But yet you will not hear me tonight
trying to convince you climate change is a serious issue
and we might want to do something about it.
I have given up.
I am here to talk about the science.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I have to confess - confession -
that every few years I have my own doubts.
Every few years I think, "Dear, dear!
What if we are wrong?
What if we have missed something?"
And then my heart beats a little faster,
and I get very anxious.
I lock myself in my office,
I pull out all of the data,
and I look at the map:
where is the warming?
Europe, America, Africa, Asia, Australia,
the land station,
the ocean observation,
the satellite data -
snow and ice are melting,
tropical species are moving polewards and up the mountain,
the Arctic is melting right in front of our eyes,
coastal waves are rising,
the water cycle is speeding up so much the salinity of the ocean is changing.
"But why?" I ask myself.
Do we understand the processes?
Yes -
physics of greenhouse gas is well known.
Is the warming unprecedented?
Yes -
faster than anywhere in the recent temperature reconstructions.
Has the hypothesis been tested?
Do the numbers match?
Yes.
Take the 20 most sophisticated models around the world,
and they can only reproduce the observations
when they consider the increase in greenhouse gases from human activities;
not only this
but all of the warming trend is caused by human activities,
not the little wiggles -
and yes, we will still have cold spells occasionally -
but the trend, all of it.
And then I ask myself the killer question:
"Is there any other reasonable explanation?" -
please, people, do come up with another reasonable explanation.
(Laughter)
And yes, we monitor the sun, and it is not getting brighter.
(Laughter)
And yes, there are natural cycles,
and this is not what they look like.
This looks like climate change
driven by increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activity -
voila!
And then I can relax.
(Laughter)
But I am not always this anxious.
There are also perks from being a scientist.
When I discovered my anomaly,
I had a moment of fame,
or maybe infamy, I should say.
So the future Prime Minister then
summons me in his office to explain myself.
So I go to Westminster with a colleague of mine,
me with a printout of my anomaly
and he with a piece of ice in a thermos -
pure 100,000-year-old ice
extracted from the depth of Antarctica
by my colleague Rambo of the British Antarctic Survey.
I could not believe it.
Everyone was mesmerized by this piece of ice.
It pops like Rice Krispies.
(Laughter)
This is what old ice does.
It pops -
little pops of old air that Rambo measures in his laboratory.
And this is how we know how much CO2 was in the air then
and how unusual our atmosphere has become today.
It was magical, the ice bit.
So, as soon as we get out, I ask Rambo,
"What happens to this ice now?"
And he goes, "Uh, it's going to melt,"
(Laughter)
with the "Are you really a scientist?" look on his face.
(Laughter)
"What? When?"
I grab the thermos and run.
Norwich - I don't know if you know where Norwich is.
Norwich - that is Nor-wich,
but we don't actually say the w -
Norwich.
(Laughter)
Literature, full of exceptions;
physics, predictable.
(Laughter)
So, Norwich, East Anglia,
the end of the road.
(Laughter)
I call my husband,
"Meet you home at five.
Get all the kids together.
(Laughter)
Don't ask any questions.
(Laughter)
Buy orange juice. Buy gin and tonic."
(Laughter)
Longest train ride ever.
I do not want to open this thermos.
But by the time I reach Ipswich, I cannot resist any more.
I have a little peek.
Ipswich - did you hear?
Ips-wich - wich -
(Laughter)
just to be different from Norwich.
(Laughter)
So eventually, finally, I get home,
pull my much-cherished atlas of the world's ocean,
open the Antarctica page,
put my finger on Dome C,
and say, "Children, this is priceless."
I open the thermos, and there it is, cracking away.
We all lean forward, all five of us, forehead to forehead,
and we breathe in pure 100,000-year-old air -
(Inhales)
and then we break the ice into ice cubes and drink the best gin and tonic ever.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Orange juice for the children.
(Laughter)
Where was I? Warwick, Warwick.
So I hear there should be a few students from Warwick University here tonight.
(Audience) Whoo!
Huh? Huh?
So Warwick.
That is an interesting one, Warwick.
(Laughter)
Why not War-wick?
Or ...
Orick?
(Laughter)
Ork, ork, ork,
(Laughter)
like the emperor penguin from Antarctica.
It's nice to work in a university.
I don't know if you have noticed,
but every scientist competes to be the greatest.
Physicists boast of gravitational waves;
biologists, of gene manipulation;
engineers, sending Tesla into orbit.
I hear a lot "Technology will save us."
Who is that, Technology?
Who do you trust to save us?
Take me, for example.
You can trust me, I hope,
but would you trust me to save you?
(Laughter)
And the engineers - between you and I -
(Laughter)
shall we trust the engineers to save us?
(Laughs)
Why is it, I wonder,
now we have beautiful electric cars,
almost as cheap as petrol cars,
way smarter -
they make no noise,
they pollute very little,
they almost drive themselves -
why is it that emissions from transport worldwide
is one of the biggest sources of emissions
and in this country they are going up?
It is because it is not the engineers who will save us.
Technology will not save us when it comes to climate change;
technology is already there!
We are just not smart enough to see it and not smart enough to use it.
Take Wi-Fi.
I completely missed it.
Here I am, working in former East Germany.
There is this guy there, the head of the IT department.
I don't know about you, but I don't ever speak to IT people.
(Laughter)
IT people,
they have all the data but no name -
all called IT.helpdesk.
(Laughter)
But the head of the IT department, I have to talk to him.
I have to talk to him once a year because we are born on the same day.
(Laughter)
They know these things, IT people; they have all the data.
So on D-day, every year, unconsciously, we look for each other.
One year I see him in the distance.
We approach.
I go, "Congratulations, Bertram. Congratulations, Corinne" -
this is what they say in East Germany.
(Whispering) I think it’s congratulations for us still being alive.
(Laughter)
"So what's up since last year?" I go.
"Fabulous progress.
Wi-Fi is in our institute," he says.
"Wi-Fi - you can read email in the corridor."
"Wi-Fi? OK. See you next year."
Typical IT conversation.
I totally missed it.
It took me years to realize what Wi-Fi was going to do for us -
connecting individuals with the rest of the planet everywhere.
I did not see it
even when it was right there in front of my eyes.
People ask me all the time,
What do I do to solve climate change? How do I solve climate change?
Me, personally.
I know that for the warming of the planet to stop,
our emissions need to go down to zero,
not a little bit here and there
but zero,
across all of the sectors of the economy,
through all of the activities that you and I do every day.
That means a complete transformation of the way we use energy
to move away entirely from fossil fuel.
And still, people, I have given up.
I will not try to convince you that climate change is serious.
I have given up
because you need to reach your own conclusions.
You need to decide for yourself.
We do not teach gravity at school by showing a number on a piece of paper.
We take the apple,
we climb up the tree,
and we let it fall -
and here is gravity.
You are completely free.
I will not confront you,
I will not make you feel guilty,
but I will not stay still and do nothing about climate change.
This is what I do.
I am the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave
going around in circles endlessly.
I nudge you,
I repeat myself,
I show my anomaly,
I show my temperature data,
I speak your language, "Ork, ork."
(Laughter)
And every time I do this,
I explain why it is
that I have reached my own conclusions about climate change,
and then I walk away.
And before I walk away, though,
I will ask you to do one thing,
a little homework.
It's not in the exam.
(Laughter)
I know people that secretly - many of you -
already act on climate change, secretly.
I think it would be very good
if we could raise the voice of environmental problems
one notch.
So therefore, I would like to ask you
to consider not only to do what you do secretly
but to broadcast it a little bit -
not boast, no, no, no - broadcast.
For example, you could say,
"I recycle this plastic bottle because I do not like to waste,
also because I have seen Blue Planet II
and I cried when the turtle meets the plastic bag."
You could say,
"I cycle to work because it is good for me and good for the planet."
For example, you could say,
"I eat meat-free today because it is good for me
and good for the planet and good for the animal."
And this is when your entire circle of influence
made and combined with all the leaders and laggards among us
starts moving in one direction.
This is when it becomes so normal
to deal with climate change in our everyday life
that our understanding of what is possible and what not
changes entirely.
This may not seem like very much,
yet I am quite convinced that before I die,
we will recycle everything.
I am quite convinced that before I die,
we will no longer eat animals.
I am quite convinced that before I die,
we will breathe pure air in the heart of our cities,
and before I die,
I will see the end of this nonsense
of environmental destruction which we are doing today.
And this will not be thanks to technology or science or IT;
it will be thanks to you,
and you,
and I will have nothing to do with it.
I have a mountain of data sitting on my shoulders,
and yet I feel so powerless.
I will not save anybody.
I rely completely on you -
completely.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)