[PBS Bumper]
[Intro]
You know what’s fun?
Puppies.
Waterslides.
Puppies on waterslides.
You know what isn’t fun?
Thinking about the climate change induced end of the world.
And being told it’s your fault.
And that the problem is so massive it’ll take all of humanity working together to avoid
the collapse of basically everything we hold dear.
But watch the news about climate change…
It’s the opposite of fun.If you ever find yourself feeling like this, do what I do:
Look inside yourself, and talk to your inner climate conscience…
…my climate conscience looks like Al Gore.
Hey Joe… climate change trouble again?
Yeah.
I’m getting a little tired of hearing bad news all the time.
It’s kind of hopeless, and frankly depressing.
There has to be another way…
Yeah, well there’s a lot of hope.
Don’t despair.
Despair is just another form of denial.
Can be paralyzing.
We do actually have solutions to the climate crisis now, we just have to implement them.
I just feel like we’ve been talking about this for a long time, since you still had
brown hair!
In 2006, when your first movie came out in 2006, CO2 levels were at 382 ppm… now they’re
at like 410 ppm!
I feel like CO2 levels just keep going up and up, tell me there’s something else going
on there.
There is something else going on.
For the past three years in a row global CO2 emissions have stabilized.
Emissions in the US have been going down, in Europe they’ve been going down, in China
they’ve been going down.
India just announced that in only 13 years, 100% of all their new cars and trucks are
going to be electric vehicles.
That’s more than what we’re doing!
We need to make a lot more progress more quickly, but we’re beginning to turn the corner.
See?
I never hear about that!
But then I heard something else the other day.
Greenhouse gases we’ve already released trapped 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs-worth
of extra heat in the atmosphere, every single day.
2016 was the hottest year ever!
16 of the hottest years on record happened in the past 17 years!!
The streets melted in India a couple years ag…
Sorry, got a little worked up there.
Let’s try this again.
Deep breaths…
Enough about A-bombs.
I keep hearing how renewables like wind and solar can turn this around, but I never hear
about it actually happening… it’s always “someday”…
Well it’s actually here, now.
And the good news is, the cost of electricity from solar is coming down incredibly fast.
It’s almost the way computer chips came down in cost, cell phones, flat screen TVs.
There was a contract signed just 2 weeks ago in Arizona, for electricity from solar panels
at a price that is less than half the price from producing electricity from fossil fuels.
Last year, almost three-quarters of all the new electricity generation here in the US
came from solar and wind, and virtually none of it came from coal.
But in countries like Chile, where they get a lot of sunshine up on the high plateaus,
they have just blown the lid off, they are developing and building solar farms so fast,
they are really setting records every single month now.
That’s another thing I never hear about!
But then I think about how the ocean is soaking up more than 90% of extra heat from global
warming, and how all that extra heat made Typhoon Haiyan the most powerful storm of
all time
4 million people in the Philippines homeless!
And now we have RAIN BOMBS!
Rivers in the atmosphere with 15 times as much water as the Mississippi!
And rising sea levels!
Miami is flooding in broad daylight now!
UGH!
Did it again.
Keep it together, Hanson!
I’m back.
Al?
Don’t leave me Al!
I nee…
Sorry, I had to get a cup of coffee.
So there’s like a million things I would rather do than sit around and feel anxious.
Just feels like it’s getting to be too much.
It can feel that way sometimes.
But put your mind on the hope that’s out there.
We’re gonna solve this, we’re gonna solve it.
We’ve gotta solve it in time, but we’ve got to start it now and pick up the momentum.
We’ve gotta be realistic about the risks of climate change and make sure people understand
that, but sometimes the more you warn people about something, for some of them, the less
they want to pay attention.
They want to actually turn away from it, rather than take a good hard look at it.
Yeah, it’s true, but we have the ability to rise above those limitations.
We’ve done it in the past.
All the struggles that humanity has confronted, some people were tempted to despair, and get
paralyzed by fear, but we have to fight through that, keep our eyes on the prize, stay focused
on the long term goal, and we’ll get there.
You know what, I actually feel better.
Thank you climate conscience Al Gore.
And you know what we say…
Stay Curious.