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I am NOT an environmentalist I'm not
somebody who has lived in this world my
whole life I'm not somebody who's been
committed to the cause of climate change
even throughout my adult life I've
always lived in cities in fact I always
lived in New York City and always
understood myself to be you know like a
good liberal person concerned about the
future of the planet but I also felt
that my life was sort of being conducted
outside of nature and that in the future
many more lives would be conducted
outside of nature and so while I was
worried about the threat from climate
change I was worried about it in a kind
of trivial way until relatively recently
that changed about two or three years
ago when because of my existing interest
in the kind of near future I started
reading a lot of quite alarming
scientific papers about what was
possible with climate change and as a
journalist myself I watched as those
same reports and others like them were
covered in newspapers and magazines and
on television in ways that seemed to me
quite divergent from the real findings
of the research itself I thought they
were basically three big
misapprehensions that the public even
the kind of engaged public of which I
was a member had about climate change
the first was that we had been taught to
expect that climate change was very very
slow that it was something that would be
unfolding on a timescale of decades at
the fastest and probably more like
centuries and so we could imagine while
it might be a problem for our
grandchildren and their grandchildren
that we had a lot of time to address the
issue we had a lot of time to grow our
way out of the issue and invent
technological solutions to the problem
in fact more than half of all of the
fossil fuel emissions that we've put
into the atmosphere in all of human
history have been produced in the last
25 years
which means that we've now done more
damage to the climate since Al Gore
wrote his first book on global warming
then in all the millennia before since
the UN established the IPCC and in all
the millennia before this is not an old
phenomenon we're not dealing with the
legacy of the Industrial Revolution were
dealing with a damage that we're doing
every day right now in real time and
we're seeing that damage on our TV
screens finally in the last few years
with coverage of extreme weather natural
disasters I think our media culture is
just catching up to the fact that
climate change is here but people
haven't really begun to appreciate just
how much more will be coming how much
faster the problems will be accelerating
and how little time we have to deal with
the problem that was the first big
misapprehension I was trying to correct
the second is about the scope of the
problem I had always understood and I
take this as a proxy of most people like
me again who are engaged in the issue
but not deeply that climate change was
mostly an issue of Arctic ice and
sea-level and while those are really
important issues and could completely
transform the planet redrawing the map
it's also just one very small part of
the problem and it allowed us to believe
if we were just focused on sea-level
rise that if we lived off the coast we
would be safe in fact again with this
extreme weather with a wildfires with
the heat waves we're seeing we're just
now beginning to learn how much bigger
the problem is than sea level rise but
again it's just beginning there's an
enormous amount of really interesting
fascinating if horrifying research
that's come out over the last few years
about the impact of global warming on
agricultural yields they say that if we
end up where we'll be at the end of the
century without changing course our
grain yields could be half as bountiful
as they are today which means we could
have 50% more people on the planet and
half as much grain to give them on
economics so if we again stay on the
course that we're on by the end of the
century we'll have seen 600 trillion
dollars in damages from climate change
which is more than double all the wealth
that exists in the world today there's
horrifying research on the relationship
between climate and conflict so that
every half degree of warming you see
between 10 and 20 percent increase in
conflict which means again by the end of
the century if we don't change course we
could have more than twice as much war
as we have today and interestingly that
research on violence and conflict is not
just about interest
violence or intrastate violence it also
is at the level of the individual so
you'd see huge spikes in murder in
domestic assault in rape just about
every level at which violence can be
conducted between people goes up when
the temperature rises and we're looking
at a future that's going to be a lot
hotter which means we're looking at a
future that is likely to be much more
violent in every way and that is just a
sign that every aspect of our lives will
be touched by climate change I think
it's extremely important for us to
understand climate is not something
that's happening elsewhere at the
coastline or somewhere else it's not
happening to other people even if it may
be hitting other populations more
intensely than it's hitting the one that
you're in it will touch every life on
the planet and transform every aspect of
that life down to the decisions we make
with our child you know having children
and family where we live what kinds of
jobs are available how much economic
growth we can come to expect
it's a totalizing all-encompassing
system and everything we do over the
next century will be conducted in the
theatres of climate change so I feel
very strongly that this century that
we're walking into now is going to be
defined by this issue in the same way
that previous centuries were defined say
by modernity or by financial capitalism
we are entering into a new era in which
everything about the way that we live
will be scrambled by climate change and
it is certainly possible that by the end
of my life or the end of my daughter's
life we'll look back and think of the
21st century as a major setback in terms
of human well-being maybe one that
humanity will never be able to recover
from but whether we get there again it's
entirely up to us there is all this out
there to be worried about to be agitated
about and to be focused on at a
political level but whether we make that
happen will be our doing and so we
should all be affirmatively choosing to
avoid it and do everything we can to
make sure that we don't get there
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