Carbon Dioxide LevelsThis is the image that started me in my interest in this issue. I saw it when I was a college student because I had a college professor named Roger Revelle who was the first person to have the idea to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. He saw where the story was going. After the first few years of data, he intuited what is meant, for what is yet to come. They designed the experiment in 1957. He hired Charles David Keeling who was very faithful and precise in making these measurements for decades. They started sending these weather balloons every day. They chose the middle of the Pacific because it was the area that was the most remote. He was a very hard nosed scientist. He really liked the hard data. It was a wonderful time for me, because, like a lot of young people, I came into contact with intellectual ferment, ideas that I'd never considered in my wildest dreams before.
He showed our class the result of these measurements after only a few years. It was startling to me. He was startled and he made it clear to our class what he felt the significance of it was. I soaked it up like a sponge. He drew the connection between the larger changes in our civilization and this pattern that was now visible in the atmosphere entire planet.
He projected into the future where this was headed unless we made some adjustments and it was as clear as day. After the first seven, eight, or nine years you can see the pattern was developing. But I had to question why does it go up and down once each year? He explained that if you look at the land mass of the earth, very little it is south of the equator. The vast majority of it is north of the equator. And most of the vegetation is north of the equator. When the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun as it is in our spring and summer, the leaves come out and they breathe in the carbon dioxide and the amount in the atmosphere goes down. When the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun as it is in our fall and winter, the leave fall down and exhale the carbon dioxide and the amount in the atmosphere goes up again. It's as if the entire earth once each year breathes in and out.
He started measuring carbon dioxide in 1958. By the middle sixties when he showed my class this image, it was already clear that it was going up. I respected him and learned from him so much I followed this.
Political JourneyWhen I went to the Congress in the middle 1970's I helped organize the first hearings on global warming, I asked my professor to be the lead off witness. I thought that would have such a big impact we'd be well on the way to solving this problem, but it didn't work out that way. I kept having hearings, and in 1984 I went to the Senate and really dug deeply into this issue with science round tables and the like. I wrote a book about it. I ran for president in 1988 partly try to gain some visibility for this issue. In 1992 went to the Whitehouse. We passed a version carbon tax and some other measures to try to address this. I went to Kyoto in 1997 to help get a treaty that is so controversial, in the US at least. In 2000 my opponent pledged to regulate the CO2 and that was not a pledge that was kept. The point of this is all this time you can see what I have seen all these years. It just keeps going up. It is relentless.
Effects of Global WarmingAnd now we're beginning to see the impact in the real world. This is Mount Kilimanjaro more than 30 years ago, and more recently. And a friend of mine just came back from Kilimanjaro with a picture he took a couple of months ago.
Another friend of mine Lonnie Thompson studies glaciers. Here's Lonnie with a sliver of a once mighty glacier. Within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.
This is happening in Glacier National Park. I climbed to the top of this in 1998 with one of my daughters. Within 15 years this will be the park formerly known as Glacier.
Here is what has been happening year by year to the Columbia Glacier. It just retreats more and more every year. And it is a shame because these glaciers are so beautiful. People who go up to see them, here is what they are seeing every day now.
In the Himalayas there is a particular problem because more than 40% of all the people in the world get their drinking water from rivers and spring systems that are fed more than half by the melt water coming off the glaciers. Within this next half century those 40% of the people on earth are going to face a very serious shortage because of this melting.
Italy, the Italian Alps same site today. An old postcard from the Switzerland: throughout the Alps we are seeing the same story.
It's also true in South America. This is Peru 15 years ago and the same glacier today.
This is Argentina 20 years ago, the same glacier today.
75 years ago in Patagonia on the tip of South America, this vast expanse of ice is now gone
Ice Cores: The 650,000 RecordThere is a message in this. It is worldwide. The ice has a story to tell and it is worldwide. My friend Lonnie Thompson digs cores in the ice. They dig down and they bring the core drills back up and they look at the ice and they study it. When the snow falls it traps little bubbles of atmosphere. They can go in and measure how much CO2 was in the atmosphere the year that snow fell. What's even more interesting I think is they can measure the different isotopes of oxygen and figure out the very precise thermometer and tell you what the temperature was the year that bubble was trapped in the snow as it fell.
When I was in Antarctica I saw cores like this and the guy looked at it. He said right here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act. I couldn't believe it but you can see the difference with the naked eye. Just a couple of years after that law was passed, it's very clearly distinguishable.
They can count back year by year the same way a forester reads tree rings. You can see each annual layer from the melting and refreezing. They can go back in a lot of these mountain glaciers a thousand years. They constructed a thermometer of the temperature. The blue is cold and the red is warm. I show this for a couple of reasons. Number one the so called skeptics will sometimes say "Oh, this whole thing is cyclical phenomenon. There was a medieval warming period after all." Well yeah there was. There it is right there. There are one there and two others. But compared to what is going on now, there is just no comparison. So if you look at a thousand years worth of temperature and compare it to a thousand years of CO2 you can see how closely they fit together. Now, a thousand years of CO2 data in the mountain glacier. That is one thing. But in Antarctica, they can go back 650,000 years. This incidentally is the first time anybody outside of a small group of scientists have seen this image. This is the present day era and that's the last ice age. Then it goes up. We're going back in time now 650,000 years. That's the period of warming between the last two ice ages back. That's the second and third ice age back.
CO2 Concentration Is Above 300 PPMNow an important point: In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above 300 parts per million. Now, as I said, they can also measure temperature. Here is what the temperature has been on our earth. One thing that kind of jumps out at you is. Let me put it this way. If my class mate from the sixth grade that talked about Africa and South America might have said, "Did they ever fit together?" Most ridiculous thing I ever heard. But they did of course. The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun inside. In the parts of the United States that contain the modern cities of Cleveland, Detroit, New York in the northern tier. This is the difference between a nice day and having a mile of ice above your head. Keep that in mind when you look at this fact. Carbon dioxide having never gone above 300 PPM, here is where CO2 is now. We give off where it has never been as far back as this record will measure. If you will bear with me I would like to emphasize this point. It's already right here. Look how far above the natural cycle this is, and we've done that. But ladies and gentleman, in less than 50 years it's going to continue to go up. When some of these children who are here are my age, here's where it's going to be in less than 50 years. You've heard of off the chart. Within less than 50 years it'll be here. There's not a single fact or day or number that's been used to make this up that is in any controversy. The so-called skeptics look at this and say, "So, that looks seems perfectly okay." On the temperature side: If this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warmer side be?
This is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue. If we allow that to happen, it is deeply unethical. I have such faith in our democratic system, our self-government, I actually thought and believed that the story would be compelling enough to cause a real sea change in the way Congress reacted to that. I thought they would be startled and they weren't.
ChildrenThe struggle, the victories that aren't really victories, the defeats that aren't really defeats can serve to magnify the significance of trivial . and exaggerate the seeming importance of massive setbacks.
It just turned my whole world around. How should I spend my time on this Earth? I really dug in, trying to learn about it much more deeply. I went to the South Pole, the North Pole, the Amazon...
The possibility of losing something that was precious to me... What we take for granted might not be here for our children. It turned my whole world upside down. It shook it until everything just fell out.
My way of being in the world. It just changed everything for me. How should I spend my time on this earth? I really dug in, trying to learn about it much more deeply. I went to Antarctica, to the South Pole, North Pole, the Amazon. I went to places where scientists could help me understand parts of the issue I didn't really understand in depth. The possibility of losing what was most precious to me, I gained the ability that I maybe I didn't have before, but when I felt it, I felt that we really could lose. What we take for granted might not be here for our children.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
