A climate study endorsed
by 11 thousand scientists from
more than 150 countries have banded
together to warn of untold suffering,
untold human suffering if
climate change is not
addressed they're claiming the Earth
is in a climate emergency,
they wrote that the climate crisis is
accelerating faster
than most scientists expected.
The report draws on
40 years of
data. (Russian)
"William Ripple" from
Oregon State University,
one of the lead authors of this study,
ecology professor William Ripple.
As a solution, Ripple and
Wolf have proposed six different policy goals
that could help fix the issue.
Follow me.
It just started with a thought in my head and
a feeling about how scary climate change is.
And I need to do just one thing.
And that's the thing I decided to do.
Hi, my name is Bill Ripple and I'm
a scientist. In this climate emergency paper,
we lay out six steps, which are
solutions to the impacts of climate change.
Today we have with us Dr. Michael Mann.
Welcome, Dr. Mann. Thank you.
It's good to be with you.
I have some questions for you today.
What about the role of government and
the fossil fuel industry
in changing course? What do you think?
We do need to see energy companies shift
away from fossil fuels towards green energy,
renewable energy, but they won't do
that without government incentives.
They are things that we can do in
our everyday lives to try
to decrease
our own individual carbon footprint.
But unless we have economic incentives,
subsidies for renewable energy or a price on
carbon and for creating infrastructure,
we won't see the large-scale
shift in behavior
that our need away from
fossil fuels towards renewable energies.
In the current public
conversation about climate change,
we're hearing a lot about those things
now, which is encouraging.
We're starting to really see some progress.
We really are at
the stage where we have to do
everything we can to
avoid terrible consequences.
And so I think most people are
aware that carbon dioxide is,
it's critical to bring down emissions of that,
but the short-lived pollutants
are also critical.
We need to act on
carbon in the near term anyway,
or it will get out of control in the long-term.
But one of the great things
about dealing with
short-lived climate pollutants and
bringing those down is you
get the benefits very
quickly because they don't last
that long in the atmosphere.
And I think we have a little bit of
a growing realization
that it's important amongst
non-governmental organizations
and different governments around
the world that we do
need to target these other pollutants,
partially because we've waited
so long to deal with CO2,
that consequences are already
here and now. And as
you have eloquently
put it, it's a climate emergency.
Restoring and
protecting natural ecosystems might
not seem very intuitive
to mitigate climate change.
It comes down to the basics
of photosynthesis.
If you want to protect
peatland or protect a mangrove
in Bangladesh or India,
they would continue to absorb
the carbon dioxide that is
released through anthropogenic processes,
such as use of fossil fuels.
So it's very important to
not just conserve,
but also restore and
improve management
of all our natural ecosystems.
We estimated
that natural climate solutions
could provide one third of
the mitigation needed by the year 2030
to keep global
rise in temperatures
to two degrees centigrade.
Well, getting a third of the way,
I think is huge.
So nature can really work for us here. Thanks.
Hello, Genesis. Good to meet you. Hi, good to see you too.
We published the World Scientists'
Warning of a Climate Emergency.
And we asked that people
eat lower on the food chain.
How can changing our diets help
the planet in the climate crisis?
Yeah, so animal agriculture
isn't sustainable to the planet,
it's the meat and dairy industry
that's one of the main causes of climate change.
Now there's so many studies that are saying that
if half of the world went vegan,
we'd be able to restore
our native forests and reverse climate change.
So it's really important
to question where your food comes from.
I started Youth Climate Save,
which is a movement that
focuses on how animal
agriculture is harming the planet.
A bunch of youth are starting to become activists because they're realizing how important
our voices are and how powerful our voices are to reverse climate change.
It's the economic system
we bought into that is
driving the destructiveness we're
realizing today. Now, economists
believe that they've invented
a system that can grow forever.
So, consumption is a fundamental part
of the economic system that we now live in.
70% of the American economy
is based on consumption.
Now anybody knows that
endless growth is the creed of cancer cells.
Nothing can grow endlessly forever.
But we have elevated the economy
above the atmosphere that
gives us air to breathe,
that gives us weather,
climate, and the seasons.
Trees are taking carbon out of
the air and putting oxygen back in it.
Not a bad service.
But there's no sense that whatever
we do to nature,
who gives us life,
that we have a responsibility to care for it.
That ain't in our economic system.
The human population
will reach 8 billion people in 2023.
To put that number a little in perspective,
in 1800 the number of people was 1 billion.
And the global middle-class has
the greatest aggregate impact on
the planet in terms of ecological
drawdown and in terms of pollution,
garbage, and greenhouse gases.
And so it becomes very
evident that lowering our numbers
is a really important way to
lower the impact on the Earth system.
Wherever women are empowered,
economically, socially, legally.
And when girls and young women are
supported to go to school,
at least through secondary education,
what happens is that the number of
children women choose to have drops.
That gives me hope because I
feel that in our deepest heart,
we are in love with this planet and
when we understand what's going on,
there will be a shift.
Thank you Eileen.
That's very inspiring to me.
Ripple says he hopes
their paper raises awareness about
how dangerous climate change is
and encourages people to make a change.
It's going to be up to
humanity to decide what to do next.
They say there's now a moral obligation
on scientists to speak up.
We are at a social
tipping point that I think we're going
to see the policies start
to change more rapidly now.
The policymakers need
us scientists to take a stand.
So one of my goals in
publishing this paper is to set
an example to other scientists
to write simple papers,
suggest solutions, and to speak out.