every aspect of our lives will be
touched by climate change climate is not
something that's happening elsewhere
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
and transform every aspect of that life
down to the decisions we make with our
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
theater of climate change we have been
taught to expect that climate change was
very very slow that it was something
that would be unfolding on a timescale
of decades 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
since the UN established the IPCC and
all the millennia before this is not an
old phenomenon we're not dealing with
the legacy of the industrial revolution
we're dealing with the damage that we're
doing every day 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 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 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 if we
again stay on the course that we're on
by the
the century will 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 ten and twenty percent increase
in conflict we're now at about 1 or 1.1
degrees of Celsius warming above the
pre-industrial average the UN projects
that on the course were on now by the
end of the century at a little north of
4 degrees of warming and at that point
there'll be parts of the world that
could be hit with six climate driven
natural disasters at once the UN
believes we could be dealing with as
many as 1 billion climate refugees we've
already left the world that we all grew
up on the planet is now hotter than at
any point in all of human history we are
responsible for this climate that we are
walking into and just how bad it gets
will always be up to us every tick
upward of temperature makes all of these
impacts from agricultural yields to
conflict to public health issues to sea
level rise makes each of those worse and
how far along the path to say 4.3
degrees we get will be determined by
what we do the future of humanity is
literally in our hands and by that I
mean not just the people who live on the
planet over the next century but
literally the people who are taking
action now today we are writing the
climate future of the next decade now
and we are facing the possibility
although it's vanishingly thin of human
extinction at our own hands and if we
avoid that which I hope and trust that
we will it will be entirely because we
have made affirmative choices to avoid
it that story in addition to being
horrifying distressing and dispiriting
is also I think again empowering in that
it reminds us that we are completely in
control of our own fate and so as
horrible as it sounds to contemplate
these futures they are only at the
moment hypothetical and whether we get
them and make them real will be our
doing if we get there we will have been
responsible for that suffering and if we
avoid them we will be responsible for
that alternative outcome
you