[APPLAUSE]
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Thanks, Ern.
Thanks for giving up lunch or whatever
you're giving up to be here.
I am just going to start by introducing you to this fellow.
The book is sort of arranged with 13 species
as their sort of focal point.
And this guy's at the end, so I'm
giving away the end of the book.
But it doesn't really have a surprise ending,
so I think I can do that.
So he's a Hawaiian crow or an alala.
And there used to be several species of Hawaiian crows,
which probably diverged from the crows you see around New York
probably several hundred thousand years ago.
So it's a case a bit like Darwin's finches
where a very small founder population arrived
on the Hawaiian archipelago.
We don't know how, because Hawaii is really quite, quite
distant from the mainland, thousands of miles.
And then they speciated, radiated out
so that they could occupy the different islands
and fill different ecological niches.
But the difference is that, actually,
most of the species of Hawaiian crows
went extinct before modern times.
And this one is also under very, very heavy threat.
And in the '80s, the state of Hawaii
realized that there were only very few left.
They took them into captivity to try to breed them.
Oh, thanks.
No, I'm good.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot.
And this particular bird is a male bird
by the name of Kinohi.
And he was born at this breeding center,
which is actually on Maui.
The bird is native to the big island,
but this breeding center's on Maui.
And he's a very odd duck, as they say.
He doesn't really think of himself as a crow.
We're not sure what he self identifies as.
One woman who takes care of him told me
that he once fell in love with a spoonbill.
So he refused to mate with any of the females.
At the Maui facility, there's maybe 50 females,
100 birds all together.
And he refused to mate with any of them.
But his genes are really important.
So they took him to the veterinary hospital
at the San Diego Zoo.
And there he came under the care of a very, very experienced
reproductive physiologist, who was really eager to get
a vial-- let's just put it this way-- of his genetic material
to take back to Maui with her.
So every spring, when it's breeding season on Maui,
she takes Kinohi on her lap and strokes him
in a way that male crows are supposed to find very, very
exciting, hoping that he's going to deliver so that she can take
a vial of his ejaculate back to Maui.
But at the time I visited, he had not yet delivered.
So she was still at it.
And crows are really smart, as you know.
And Kinohi can imitate human speech.
And he says, I know.
That's his phrase, which is really quite extraordinary.
And when I heard that, it sounds kind of demented.
He has this demented sound.
But it seemed to really encapsulate
a lot of the themes of the book.
On the one hand, the incredible lengths that people
are going to to try to save this species.
Meanwhile, though, all of the forces that
brought the Hawaiian crows to this point
are all still raging, and, in fact, are being increased.
Because Hawaii-- there's now avian malaria on Hawaii.
There didn't used to be mosquitoes.
Now there are mosquitoes with avian malaria.
And as the climate warms, these mosquitoes
are moving up the mountain slope.
So there used to be refuges for some
of the native birds on the tops of Hawaii's very
tall mountains.
And avian malaria is now moving up the mountain.
So birds on Hawaii are really, really in trouble.
So he is sort of the emblem, in a way, for the whole book.
And he's the animal that I end it with.
So I guess I'll sort of step back and say what is the book.
What is the sixth extinction?
The implication here, obviously, is
that there were five other extinction events.
And that is true.
These are what are called the big five,
the major mass extinctions of the last half billion years.
And what you're looking at is time is running from your left
to your right in millions of years.
So 600 million years ago to today.
And where you see those dips, you're
seeing the number of marine families.
This is from the marine fossil record.
And you're seeing the number of marine families on the y-axis.
And if you remember from intro bio,
a family is the level right above a genus.
So species, genus, family.
And if even one species made it through this extinction event,
then this species is considered a survivor.
So on the species level, the losses were much, much greater
than they are even on the family level.
And mass extinctions are just defined as moments in time
when the diversity of life suddenly and very radically
contracts.
One British paleontologist, Michael Benton,
whom I quote in the book, uses the metaphor
of the tree of life.
During a mass extinction, he's written,
vast swaths of the tree are cut short as
if attacked by a crazed, axe-wielding madman.
So the first, number one there, that
occurred about 440 million years ago
at the end of the Ordovician Period when most of life
was still in the sea.
So that was very devastating to marine organisms,
but not to terrestrial organisms because there just
were no terrestrial organisms.
And number five, that's the most famous, most popular,
if you will.
And that is the extinction event that
did in the dinosaurs and a lot of other groups
at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
And there's a pretty broad scientific consensus
that that was caused by an asteroid impact.
I don't have a photo I can show you,
but this is someone's best guess of what that looked like.
So to say we're in the middle or on the verge-- some people
would say we're on the verge, some people
would say we're already pretty deep
into-- the sixth extinction is obviously
a pretty serious claim.
And this claim arises from the fact
that we are changing the world very radically and very,
very fast, so not unlike an asteroid impact.
And in fact, I have heard scientists
say that right now, we are the asteroid.
So how are we doing this?
There are a lot of ways.
I'm just going to touch on a couple today.
We're changing the atmosphere.
You all know this.
It's really simple stuff.
We drive our cars.
We light our homes.
And all of this, we're doing with fossil fuels right now.
And there's 7.2 billion of us on the planet,
so it adds up pretty quickly.
And what we're doing when we are burning fossil fuels
is we're taking carbon that's been buried underground
over hundreds of millions of years
and we're shooting it back into the atmosphere very,
very quickly in a matter of centuries, quite possibly.
So we're basically running geological history backward
and at a very, very high speed.
And so if you were an alien and you came to earth,
you could actually easily conclude
that what we're doing, that the whole point
of modern industrialized society is actually
to effect this transfer as quickly as possible,
to see how much carbon we can get out of the ground
and how fast we can throw it back up into the air.
And if the aliens were measuring this process,
they'd say we're actually doing it as well as we possibly can.
We're increasing CO2 levels every year.
These are obviously our measurements of this process.
I'm sure you're all familiar with this graph.
This is the Keeling Curve, measuring CO2 concentrations
in the air, once again from Hawaii,
from the National Weather Services Observatory
on Mauna Loa.
And that jig-jag pattern, that seesaw pattern you see,
that's a seasonal signal.
Because when the trees and plants
of the northern hemisphere put out their leaves
for photosynthesis in the summer, global CO2 levels fall.
And when they drop their leaves in the winter,
then they rise again.
So that's quite a recent reading, 396 parts per million.
You may recently have read that CO2 levels hit
400 parts per million.
They did very briefly at the end of last winter.
They're going to again now, this winter.
And then they're going to keep rising
in that seesaw sort of way until they never
go below 400 parts per million.
Because obviously, we show no signs of ceasing to emit CO2.
And if we want to see how we're doing on a longer term way,
then we can look back at ice cores.
Probably many of you have seen this graph, too.
What you're looking at here-- once again,
we have parts per million of CO2 on the y-axis, time
on the x-axis, running once again from left
to right, so from 800,000 years ago to the present.
You're looking at actual bubbles of past atmospheres
that were extracted from an ice core taken on Antarctica.
And all that the Antarctic ice sheet is
is just layers of snow that were laid down year after year.
So we can actually see over time what
happened to the atmosphere.
And those jig-jag cycles that you see, those are ice ages.
So when CO2 levels are low, ice creeps down all the way
to the island of Manhattan, which
was glaciated in the last ice age.
And then it creeps back up again into the Arctic.
And you're looking at eight glacial cycles there.
You see where people emerged around 200,000 years ago.
And you can see that CO2 levels were never
above 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years
until very, very recently.
And now we're going up at what looks on a scale like this
to be a vertical line.
And if we want to go even further back,
we can tease out the composition of past atmospheres
by looking at things like the shells
of little tiny marine creatures that
fell to the bottom of the sea.
And those have big error bars.
But it seems pretty clear that to get CO2 levels that
are significantly higher than today's, you
have to go back to around the Miocene,
around 20 million years ago.
And at the rate we're going, we could reach those levels
by the middle of the century.
And if we keep on going, we could reach levels probably not
seen since the Eocene, around 50 million years ago,
by the end of this century.
So obviously, what's significant about this is on the one hand,
CO2 is just a greenhouse gas.
I'm not going to bore you with a global warming spiel
because you all know it.
But I am going to just show you this little video that NASA
has made.
It's just a re-creation of global temperatures
over the last 130 years or so.
And what you need to know to understand
it is that as the colors get warmer-- so more
orangey and more yellow-- the world is warming.
That signifies warmer temperatures.
So here we go.
So that stops in 2011.
So hopefully they'll update it soon,
because it's a very powerful visual representation.
And so what does that mean for living things,
for the creatures on this planet?
The polar bear has sort of become
the icon of species that are endangered by climate change.
Because the Arctic sea ice is disappearing very, very fast.
And without minimizing the problems
that the polar bears are facing, what
I write about it in the book, actually,
is that it's actually likely that climate change is going
to have an even more profound effect in the tropics.
And there are a couple reasons for this, one of which
is just that the tropics are where most things actually
live.
So in this slide, you're looking down from about 12,000 feet.
We're in the Andes in Peru.
You're looking down that ridge.
And I went there with a scientist
from Wake Forest who had laid out these tree plots.
And each plot was exactly two and a half acres.
And there were about 20 of them arrayed down this ridge so
that each one had a different elevation
and each one had a different average annual temperature.
And they had measured, tagged, and IDed
the species of every tree in these plots.
And so they had come up with, in this 20 two
and a half acre plots, roughly 50 acres,
over 1,000 species of trees.
So in the entire Canadian Royal Forest,
which stretches over a billion acres,
there are only about 20 species of tree.
So here we see in 50 acres, in an area
roughly the size of, I think, like Fort Tryon Park,
we're seeing 1,000 different species.
So that just shows you that the topics
are where most species are.
That pattern is repeated over most groups of organisms.
And one of the characteristics of tropical species
turns out to be that they have very narrow climatic ranges.
So one of the things this guy said to me was-- we're
going down this ridge.
He said, you're going to see like a leaf
on the path with an interesting shape.
Focus on that shape.
Watch as we go down the path.
You're only going to see that leaf for maybe 100
meters or so, because that's the whole range of the tree.
This is the only place where it lives.
And what they were looking at was
as the Andes warm-- and the Andes are warming
very quickly-- what are those trees doing?
They can't move, obviously, but they can seed themselves
at higher and higher elevations.
And that's what's happening.
You do see a lot of species on the move.
But you also see a lot of species
that are not on the move, that are just sitting there.
So as the climate changes, these communities
are going to clearly break down.
And new ones will presumably form.
And the question of what will happen
to all of the organisms that depend on what's there now,
all of the birds and all the insects and all the mammals,
is an open one.
It's very hard, obviously, to track insects.
They don't respond well to having these little tags nailed
into them.
But as the scientist, Miles Silman, pointed out to me,
we're going to find out.
We're in the process of finding out.
We are running this experiment.
We can only run it once, but we're running it.
And we're going to find out the answers to that.
So how else are we changing the world?
Well, another very big effect of carbon dioxide emissions
is the phenomenon known as ocean acidification.
I suspect everyone in this room is
pretty familiar with how that works.
But I'll just give you the basics.
And that is that the oceans have absorbed about a third
of the CO2 we put up so far.
That comes to about 150 billion metric tons every hour.
The oceans absorb another million metric tons of CO2.
And the net result is that the acidity of the oceans
has increased by 30%.
So when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid.
That's just pretty basic chemistry.
It's a weak acid.
You drink it when you drink a Coke, but it's an acid.
And we are changing the pH of the oceans very, very rapidly.
And what the effects of that are going to be
are also not that easy to anticipate.
Obviously, marine creatures only interact
with their outside world through the water.
But one thing that seems pretty clear
is it's going to impact anything that
has to build a shell or an external skeleton
out the mineral calcium carbonate.
It really affects the energetics of doing that.
And lots of things do that.
These are tiny little marine calcifiers
called coccolithophores.
You're seeing them under high magnification here.
Common shellfish like clams are calcifiers-- sea urchins,
starfish, coral reefs.
So lots and lots of marine organisms
depend on the process of calcification.
A couple of chapters in the book focus on marine organisms
and how they will be affected.
A lot of people trying to figure out
what the effects of ocean acidification are going to be.
And this is a really interesting sort of natural experiment
that I visited.
Now, you're underwater here.
We're in the Bay of Naples in this area
where there's a lot of volcanic activity, not too far,
actually, from Mount Vesuvius.
And it happens that there's CO2 bubbling out
of the bottom of the sea there and naturally acidifying
the water.
So I went out with a British marine scientist
named Jason Hall-Spencer who had gotten this idea that if we
looked at what happens near these volcanic vents,
we sort of have a window into the future of the oceans.
And what you're looking at here--
I went with a National Geographic photographer.
And he took this wonderful picture.
And what you're looking at here is we're away from the vents.
We're in a pretty ordinary Mediterranean community.
You see there's a sea urchin there.
There's all sorts of this stiff seaweed,
which is also calcified.
There's calcifying seaweed.
That smear of pink you see there--
that's a tiny little algae that also calcifies.
So you're seeing lots and lots of different creatures
there, different species there.
And now we're moving near the vents.
You see the CO2 bubbling out of the water.
And you see what it looks like, that sort of lunar landscape.
So this is when we get pretty close to the vents.
And in between, he looked at every sort
of possible pH between these two and came to the conclusion
that at the pH that oceans are likely to reach,
all of the oceans by around 2100,
if we continue to emit CO2 at our current rate,
that about a third of the species in the Mediterranean
dropped out at that pH.
They just can't keep up with it.
So another way we're changing the planet--
and this is just the last one I'm going to touch on today--
is by moving species around the world.
Everyone's familiar with this, the problem
of invasive species.
Oh, sorry-- I skipped over this.
Coral reefs are a huge concern.
Coral reefs are calcifiers.
This is just a quote from some British marine scientists
that it's likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem
in the modern era to become ecologically extinct.
Because corals turn out to be pretty sensitive--
many, many species, at least-- to these changes in ocean pH.
So back to our invaders.
This is an Asian carp.
He's much in the news.
Asian carp is actually several different species.
They're incredibly voracious.
They're filter feeders.
They just eat through everything in the water column,
have a terribly devastating effect on native fish.
There's just a study that came out
from the Army Corps of Engineers about what it would take
to keep Asian carp-- which are headed toward the Great Lakes--
what would it take to keep them out of the Great Lakes.
And the Army Corps of Engineers put a price tag of $18 billion
on that one.
These are zebra mussels.
I don't know if people read the story in yesterday's "Times."
They're invaders from Eastern Europe.
They're also voracious, voracious feeders,
have done incredible damage, do commercial damage,
stick to everything that they come in contact with.
And really, really have devastated native mollusk
populations.
And there was a piece yesterday about a scientist
who was trying to find a biological agent,
like a bacteria-- in this case, a bacteria-- that
could potentially fight zebra mussels.
So we all have-- if you have a backyard,
you doubtless have plants in it that are not native species.
Some people have pets that are not native species.
But most of our nonnative species
these days are being moved around unconsciously
and inadvertently.
And it's been estimated, for example,
that 10,000 species are being moved
every day around the world just in ballast water.
And this is another way that we're
sort of running geological history backward
and at a very high speed.
So what you're looking at here is the configuration
of the continents about 250 million years ago,
when they all crashed together and formed one super continent,
which has become known as Pangaea.
And then they drifted apart owing to plate tectonics.
And we got the world as we have it today.
So all of these things have been evolving separately.
The species in South America and Africa and India and Australia
have been evolving separately for tens of millions of years.
And when we bring them all together,
it has the effect of crashing those continents back together
again.
And you sometimes hear this phrase
that biologists use that we are creating the new Pangaea.
And oftentimes, this has no particular result
when you bring species together that have been long separated.
And sometimes it has sort of a not benign result, but not
very dramatic result.
They just sort of co-exist.
But every once in a while, you get really disastrous results.
And when you think about it, if you're
moving at least 10,000 species around the world every day,
you don't need a very high proportion
of those interactions to be disastrous
before you have quite a big problem.
So this is actually the species that I begin the book with.
So we've worked our way sort of from the end to the beginning.
It's a Panamanian golden frog.
It's a very beautiful animal, as you can see.
It was considered a lucky symbol in Panama.
It used to be printed on lottery tickets, which
is rather ironic.
Because the golden frog-- and really, all frogs in Panama--
started disappearing in the 1990s.
And scientists eventually figured out--
this is sometimes called the amphibian crisis.
And it truly is a crisis.
And scientists figured out that they
were being killed by a fungal disease that had probably,
almost certainly, been ferried around the world on frogs
by people moving animals around the world.
And one theory which has not been proved
is that it was moved around the world on these frogs called
African clawed frogs, which were used as early pregnancy tests.
Because if you inject a female African clawed frog
with the urine of a woman who's pregnant,
she will lay eggs within a couple hours.
So obstetricians actually used to have tanks these frogs
in their office.
And a lot of them were let go.
You now have naturalized populations
of African clawed frogs around the world.
So one theory is that the fungus moved on African clawed frogs.
And anyway, it was moving through Panama.
And it was this interesting moment
where people could actually watch it move.
They actually could see the frogs disappearing.
And then they realized, or they hypothesized
that it was moving east, sort of along the way
that the rivers move.
And they decided to try to get a population
of these particularly beautiful frogs and also
some other species native to central Panama out
of the rainforest and into some kind of protected facility.
And they didn't have any place to put them.
They went out and got the frogs, but they
didn't have any place to put them initially.
And so initially, the frogs literally
had to be put up at a hotel.
Then they built this facility.
This is the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center.
You might be able to see some little golden frogs
in those tanks.
And this is one of the few places
that the golden frogs exist anymore.
They're now extinct in the wild, like the alala.
There are some in zoos and there are
some at this conservation center.
So I'm going to wrap up at the beginning of the book.
You could, in some ways, say that this is a heartening
story.
Like the alala, it shows that people really
are concerned about other species--
to use the words of Rachel Carson,
that they care about what Carson called the problem of sharing
our earth with other creatures.
And in the course of reporting the book,
I did spend a lot of time with people who have really
devoted their lives to this problem.
A lot of them are scientists, like the woman
who was trying to get Kinohi to deliver.
But a lot of them were also ordinary people.
For example, at the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center,
I met volunteers who had come down from the States.
They'd paid their own way.
They were using their vacation days
to help out because they wanted to help out.
And obviously, even people who are not directly involved
in conservation give a lot of money to groups like the World
Wildlife Fund and the National Wildlife Federation,
Defenders of Wildlife-- the list goes on and on.
And I'd like to be able to end on that upbeat note,
that if more of us just got involved in efforts like this,
then that would be sufficient.
But I'm going to be frank with you
and say that's not really where I come out in the book.
One of the central points of the book--
really the central point of the book--
is that our involvement, our caring is not really the issue.
What's really the issue are the many ways
in which we are changing the planet.
And this is what makes us comparable in our impacts
to an asteroid.
And unfortunately, unless and until we really
confront that fact, the magnitude of the impacts
that we're having, then I'm afraid we're not really
fessing up to the problem.
So thanks a lot.
[APPLAUSE]
Howdy.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
You showed a graph earlier.
It was in animation where you showed the different parts
of the world becoming warm and cold and warm and cold.
And it ended with the north part of the globe being very warm.
Was that relative temperature?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: That is off of a median
that they choose, some year.
I can't remember exactly the year,
but yes, everything is temperature deviation
from this median.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
Hi.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Howdy.
AUDIENCE: So you talked about fossil fuel use.
That seems to be the big issue.
But there's also a lot happening in the world moving away
from fossil fuels.
So first of all, are there any other--
we do a lot of other stuff besides burn fuel.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah, and we burn a lot of fuel.
AUDIENCE: But is that sort of a hopeful thing, that we
are starting to use more green energy?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: It's a hopeful thing.
But in terms of actual numbers, we
can go back to-- we're using more renewable energy.
We're also using more fossil fuels.
If you just look at emissions trends,
they're not leveling out worldwide.
They have leveled out in the States.
But worldwide, they are actually tracking them, very high end.
There are these scenarios which people may or may not
be familiar with.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
had these scenarios, like this is
what the future's going to look like.
Here's low emissions future, here's a medium emissions
future, here's a high emissions future.
We are tracking the high emissions future.
So until that graph levels off-- on some level,
I don't want to say it doesn't matter
if we're using more renewable.
Obviously, it does.
It's taking away from what that trend line would look like.
But until we turn that around, we
haven't really gotten a handle on this problem.
So I do think it's very hopeful.
Obviously, look, if we could convert our economy
to not running on fossil fuels, that would be huge.
That would be making an impact.
That really would be.
But I don't see signs that we're really
on that kind of an actual transformative course yet.
How's that?
And I'm not alone.
It's not my pessimism.
I don't think anyone see signs of that at this point.
AUDIENCE: I know this was a short talk.
You've talked a lot about the carbon cycle.
But do you also talk in the book about nitrogen,
some of the things that agriculture is doing?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I do not get into the nitrogen cycle,
but I could have.
One of the kind of interesting things--
if you want to call it interesting.
I don't know what the right adjective is.
I could have chosen different ways in which we're
changing the world on a planetary scale.
And the nitrogen cycle could have been one of them.
We fix more nitrogen-- I don't know
if people remember their high school bio, once again.
But you need to fix nitrogen.
Plants can't use the nitrogen from the air
because it's bound together in N2.
So we need nitrogen-fixing bacteria to transform nitrogen
into a usable form.
And when people figured out-- early in this century,
a German chemist figured out how to take nitrogen from the air
and convert it to ammonia and fix nitrogen.
And that was the beginning of nitrogen fertilizer.
It's exactly a century ago, in fact.
We just celebrated a century of nitrogen fertilizer.
We now fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems
combined.
That has huge, huge impacts on living things.
It's why, for example, we have a dead zone every summer
in the Gulf of Mexico.
Because all that fertilizer comes down
the Mississippi River.
It fertilizes the Gulf.
You get these huge algae blooms.
The algae dies.
It drops to the bottom.
And you have deoxygenated water.
And dead zones are increasing worldwide.
And it's all a function of nitrogen fertilizer runoff.
So that would be a whole other way
that we could have this conversation.
AUDIENCE: Speaking of agriculture,
I read that even if we stopped using fossil fuels for power,
the agriculture that we used to produce meat
would still contribute more than half of the greenhouse gases.
But not carbon dioxide-- different ones.
Is that accurate?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I don't think so.
How's that?
Our cows and things like that are burping methane,
for example.
That's one way that agriculture just produces CO2
without actually burning fossil fuels.
But I think maybe what you're referring
to is studies have shown that meat production in general,
which is pretty fuel intensive and pretty crop intensive,
obviously.
And also has these other effects of methane emissions.
They are a major source of emissions.
So a lot of people, smart people,
have sort of advocated that we all
eat either a lot less meat or no meat.
And that that would have a significant impact
on emissions.
And I think it would.
It's not going to eliminate the problem,
but it would have an impact.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm wondering if you've encountered a lot of climate
change deniers or human impact deniers.
And if you have, what sort of arguments have swayed them?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, climate change denial
is such a weird sort of counterfactual world.
Here's a graph showing you what's
happening to CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
And if you know CO2's a greenhouse gas-- which we know.
We've known for 150 years-- and you
know you're increasing it very rapidly and very radically,
you'd say, OK, well, I kind of expect the world to warm up.
So we just have these ridiculous arguments,
like it's cold in New York this week.
So there can be no climate change.
It's impossible.
Much smarter people than I have spent a lot of time thinking,
how can you counter such ridiculous arguments
at this point?
And it's very hard.
I don't have the answer for that.
But in terms of other human impacts,
interestingly enough, you very rarely
hear people being ocean acidification deniers.
It's either too complicated or it's just irrefutable.
You increase CO2 levels in the air.
Very basic chemistry tells us you're
going to be increasing carbon dioxide levels in the oceans.
We can measure it.
We are measuring it.
The pH of the surface waters of the ocean is declining.
It's pretty irrefutable.
And once again, the list goes on.
We're obviously altering the nitrogen cycle.
It's not really possible to deny that.
So the weird way that we're sort of fixated on climate change,
yes or no, I think is a complete function
of a bunch of increasingly embattled information sources,
which have been funded by all the usual suspects.
All of that is true that you read.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thanks for coming to speak with us today.
That picture of the stark differences
in what the ocean looks like is almost enough to make someone
want to cry.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah, it should be.
AUDIENCE: And I think there are a lot of smart people
who realize that change is happening.
But it feels so impossible to make any change happen.
And I guess my first question to you would be,
what could change things?
But I guess, in thinking about my question to you,
it's more a question of do you think there's anything that'll
change this trajectory, and what would that be.
Because it feels almost like an insurmountable issue.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yes.
Yes, it does feel that way.
I think one of the reasons I'm glad to be here and then
talking to you folks at Google is because there are
very smart people at Google who are very aware of this problem
and know what it takes for transformative technologies
to enter our world and really change
the way we think about things and the way we do things.
And I think that that is one possibility.
And there is one possibility-- some gentleman said
before, there are renewable sources of energy out there
that are increasingly being deployed.
And that is true-- not in a transformative way
at this point.
But it seems to be not impossible
that that could happen if very smart engineers, like those
at Google, put their minds to it.
It seems to me that that is a possibility.
I am not an engineer, so I don't claim
to know what that's going to be.
But there are very, very, very big forces at work here.
There's 7.2 billion people on the planet.
A lot of people want to raise their standard of living, which
unfortunately right now tracks.
Global GDP and global carbon track each other.
And until and unless we uncouple those or decide to have a lower
GDP, we're in this cycle where emissions are just
going to keep going up.
Impacts are just going to keep increasing.
And I certainly don't claim to have
the answer of how we're going to break that connection
or if we're going to break that connection.
But it doesn't seem to me impossible that that
could happen.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious about-- besides
domesticated and invasive species, what kind
of animals or species are benefiting from human impact?
And is that change in scope or population count,
is that a big effect relative to the first-order effects
of human impact?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: That's a really good question.
And I don't have a great answer for that,
but it's a really interesting question.
For example, rats seem to do really well.
All of the species that we know benefit from human disturbance
seemed to do really well.
So rats have been taken around the world by people.
They are now on islands, like the Hawaiian islands
where they never were.
The Hawaiian islands had no mammals.
They're on really tiny distant islands
in the Alaskan peninsula, where people never
bothered to settle.
But they left rats behind.
So rats are everywhere.
And one of the guys that I went out
with in the book, a British geologist, sort of
speculated-- and it was tongue in cheek,
but only half tongue in cheek-- that rats
will inherit the earth, that that
will become a dominant group.
But I think it is a really interesting question
because clearly, yes.
Ecospace that's being emptied by other species
may or may not be being taken up by species
that benefit from human disturbance.
It's not clear that your total biomass is always
going to remain constant.
So I'm sure there are people doing interesting work on that.
But I can't give you any great statistics on it.
Clearly, also, domesticated animals
now make up a phenomenal proportion
of the world's biomass.
MALE SPEAKER: Well, if there are no more questions,
let's thank the speaker again.
[APPLAUSE]
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Thanks a lot.
Thank you.