ladies and gentlemen welcome sorry we're 6 minutes uh late but we've got the computers um switched around my name is arnna Mo and I am your moderator for this evening and my first task is to welcome professor John driver who is the vice president president academic of Simon Fraser University and the Provost who has agreed to actually open up the proceedings so please Professor driver thanks very much uh welcome to Simon Fraser University and specifically to our Vancouver campus which the Vancouver Su called the intellectual Heart of the City in a very kind uh piece about this campus so I probably don't have to remind all the intellectuals in the audience to turn off their cell phones before we uh go any further um it's it's a real pleasure to welcome uh a diverse uh audience uh of uh of SFU uh Community but also the broader Community to any of our public lectures but I'm uh particularly pleased to introduce uh the lecture series that we're starting tonight um really for two reasons firstly I think it's very important that universities support the generation and the transmission of knowledge about the critical issues of today and especially those issues where so much of the public debate is underpinned by ideology rather than by evidence uh whether or not climate change is occurring what might cause climate change what the impacts of climate change might be whether or not human behavior can or should be modified to mitigate the impact of climate change are all hotly debated topics um by many groups whose ability to engage in discussion about cause and effect and consequences is sometimes compromised by ideology and so I think it's the responsibility of universities to encourage debate and dialogue to examine the sociology of those debates critically uh and To Be A Champion for evidence-based understanding and decision making and I'm pleased that SFU is part of this uh public discourse and public process through activities such as this lecture series the second reason I'm very glad to be introducing this particular series of lectures uh is that I have some personal interest uh in it that that goes beyond simply my my general uh belief that University should uh engage the public very closely my own research field is archaeology uh and some of my own research has looked at evidence for environmental change in the past and at the impact of human uh populations uh on the environments uh in which they live uh I certainly share the opinion of our speakers uh who will be coming here over the next uh couple of months that the past provides information that's valuable to understanding the present whether this be understanding what would happen when a large earthquake hits our Coast uh or examining biod diversity in deep time um at the same time I suspect that many people in this room share my Fascination really for our ability to to Glimpse worlds that once existed on on our planet uh and the fascination of predicting what might what might happen in the future the speakers list in this series includes uh eminent uh researchers from a wide range of disciplines uh so I'd particularly like to thank the sponsors of the lecture series and the organiz uh the organizers of the uh of the series for building s such a varied set of lectures around this common theme of climatic and environmental change so thank you for coming I do hope you'll try to get to as many of these lectures as possible I think it's going to be a wonderful series I think it's going to make us think uh hard and long uh about environmental change about climate change and about the potential impact uh of of these changes uh on our own future so I'll now um turn the podium back to an mois to introduce this evening's speaker thanks very much Professor driver I think introduced the series um uh succinctly and eloquently we're very proud to there it goes so we have an issue um Houston here so I don't know what we have to do about that but um so I I wanted to just show you why I had that slide was just to show you who is coming um this is first of all uh I I do recognize some faces and um it's very nice to see people who' have come out this is kind of the third in a series of something something in you you um this one is I think the strangest because it really is trying to put together uh um pieces of a puzzle that aren't often put together for the public and that is trying to link paleoecology with what's happening now and we're going to start a long time ago 56 million years ago and our first Speaker they're the names of everybody there yes um is Dr Scott Wing who's been at the Smithsonian he tells me for almost 30 years now the smithonian is one of the preeminent natural history museums general science museums um institutions in the world um he is a head curator there he's been there for 30 years before that he was with the uh us geology um service for a little while he did both his both his degrees uh at Yale University um and he hails from the south and he was one of the early one of the first people to really start to recognize and start to study a very important uh phenomenon that I hadn't heard of before I met Scott and I you probably have but I hadn't um and that is a Glo a global warming period that occurred 56 million years ago and the title of his talk um I can't wait to see how he's going to do it global warming 56 million years ago and what it means for us so please join me in W welcoming uh Scott wing so the title is is ambitious um I'm going to start in the present and then I'm going to dive back and I hope take you with me into uh this period of time 56 million years ago and then uh we'll resurface at the end of the talk and release you back out into the present day I hope uh having been convinced that the past actually is important in understanding the present and the future so this is a a graph that's probably familiar to a lot of you showing uh increase Since U 1860 in carbon dioxide the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this part of the curve uh way back here is measured in ice cores um the part of the curve starting in 1958 I believe is measured directly from the atmosphere and uh it goes off into the future um showing various scenarios from uh an earlier ipcc report on what might happen to CO2 over the next 90 years or so and it also shows temperature records for the same time period and the temperature projections in red that correspond to these different uh scenarios for what might happen with CO2 production so when you you look at a graph like this you know if you're a simple-minded uh paleontologist like I am you think wow you know we're this is uh unprecedented in the last uh 150 years or so so if we wanted to understand what's coming down the pike a little bit better we probably should add some more history on the back of that so I'm just going to squeeze that record off to the side now and now we're now we're looking at more time uh we're going back 800,000 years and this record comes from Ice cores in Antarctica and it also shows the same two things it shows temperature and CO2 and you can see this very characteristic sort of seesaw pattern here those are glacial and interglacial Cycles over the last 800,000 years and you can also see that CO2 has been going up and down more or less uh tracking uh the changes in temperature and now we we start to get a little bit longer perspective on the changes that are likely to happen I've left this bar much wider than it should be I think it's about 100 times wider than it should be the 1850 to to 2100 period um and these are projections uh this is where we were in 2009 for temperature and for CO2 and these are the the projections from that range of projections the sort of three swooping lines that I had uh for CO2 for the year 2100 and Global temperature increase for the year 2100 so when you see this and you unfortunately you're still a simple-minded paleontologist you think oh well maybe we better add some more history onto the back of that graph so let's do that and now we're looking at the last uh 65 million years and there's no ice enough to carry a record of temperature or the composition of the atmosphere that goes back 65 million years so now the records instead of coming from Ice are coming from Mostly this very continuous records coming from a de deep SE cores uh cores like this from which are extracted tiny shells of marine organisms called foram nifra and the chemistry of their shells allows you to reconstruct the temperature of the bottom of the the ocean which is a pretty good proxy for the temperature of the planet and now we actually are far enough back so that we have some some temperatures and some probable CO2 levels you can see that we really don't know CO2 levels very well for these times we don't have any direct way to measure it um but if you need if you want to go um to conditions that are something like the conditions that we're that that our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren will experience in 90 years you have to go back about 35 million years so this is this is seriously uh Back to the Future or onward to the past or or something like that is that it's it is has been a very long time and it's really sobering to think about the rate of this change because I was uh you know on this graph I was born in the in the place to up here but uh you know I'm now sort of uh getting into the into the pine or myene and my great grandchildren will be living in the alosine or the eosine so there's there's there's in just a few human lifetimes we're going to to change conditions in the atmosphere uh to a state that hasn't been seen in 35 million years so let's let's go back here and examine this a little bit more this period of time and I'm going to focus in particularly on this little short blip here um but first I want to reassure you that're that I'm not talking about an earth that is so radically different from the present day Earth that you wouldn't recognize it so a lot of times um when I'm speaking with people about this uh distant period of global warming the first thing they say well you the continents move around so aren't all of your records sort of from from different places than than you might think and it's not that far back so North America you the globe looks moderately familiar um continents are are more or less in the same positions but there are some really significant differences between that time and and our own and um the biggest one is just that the climate state is entirely different so this is a a photograph taken on axel hiber island in the Canadian Arctic and this giant black thing here and these other ones back in here are stumps of dawn redwoods growing in that area and this is the current day vegetation of that part of the world um and this Forest has been studied really uh in great detail and it's thought to have had the productivity approximately of a forest uh in this part of the world today so the Canadian Arctic was obviously a very different place and this is just to emphasize that in the esene the poles were much much warmer than they are today and this sort of is a nice way of uh visualizing that U this gentleman is uh holding up a photograph of okoi swamp which is probably not a terrible analog for what uh it would have been like where he's standing right now uh say 50 million years ago the other big thing that's different between the eosine climate and the present day climate is that the Continental Interiors were warm in the winter so today uh we see Continental Interiors at Mid latitudes cool down very dramatically in the winter land doesn't have a lot of of um thermal inertia so loses heat to space and you get bitterly cold winterers but in the eosine uh you had giant palms and crocodiles and all sorts of things in Wyoming at a latitude of about 45 or 50° North and that's obviously not true today here's the companion trying to uh do the same thing that you saw in the previous photograph uh of me uh holding a picture of an alligator from Oki phoi in a in a wintry Wyoming landscape and uh suffering the but my fingers got really cold it was about minus 20 when this picture was taken it was in February and I swore I would never go back to Wyoming in the winter again I work there every summer uh I've worked there every summer for about 40 years but not in the winter for good reason um so now what we're so so the the we had this long period where we don't really even understand the background state of the earth's climate warm poles warm Continental Interiors in the winter they don't really make a lot of sense by modern standards and even just understanding that much about the climate history of U of the earth is is a significant thing there are things that we don't understand there processes that we' don't have a good handle on um even at this very broad level but I'm going to focus on this very short period of time it's called the paleocene eosine thermal maximum I'm going to call it petm because I'm from Washington and I like acronyms and uh the and it but it's called that for a very simple reason that it's at the end of the paleocene and beginning of the eosine and when I this is the next slide is I'm just going to blow this up so this is you know this is still tens of millions of years on the on the x-axis of the slide now I've blown it up so we're marked off in much finer increments with a 100,000 years between the numbers there and these are these are records from a deep sea core uh and they show the chemistry of um those 4am shells and what this is this white line is giving you is the ratio of light carbon to heavy carbon U so there are two stable isotopes of carbon carbon 12 and carbon 13 and most biology really prefers to work with carbon 12 carbon 12 is lighter it's more reactive so uh organisms tend to concentrate carbon 12 in their tissues and um what this is telling us is this event this this big Excursion here this shift in carbon isotope ratio uh is telling us that there's much more carbon 12 being released into the environment and Incorporated um by organisms into their shells over this period of time and this is a slide that's now a little bit out of date it's got 55.8 I apologize it should be 56 you have to be really careful about our our decimal places in the millions of years now didn't used to have to worry about that but we're getting better at telling time um and this red line is uh is temperature as assessed from the oxygen isotope chemistry so again two stable isotopes oxygen 18 and Oxygen 16 and the ratio between them is controlled by the temperature at which those little shells are are formed so um a lot of warming uh a big warming pulse coincident with a change in what kind of carbon is available to these to these organisms at the very same moment in Earth history that you see that that shift in the chemistry of carbon and that warming um you also see uh over many many cores in many parts of the of the ocean you see a dissolution of carbonate so what you're seeing seeing here is you're seeing pieces of core from one of those ocean drilling ships and you read these from uh the far end to the end that's close to you you can they're blue caps on on the ends on the up ends of every section of core you have to be really careful about that when you're when you're uh drilling one of these that you don't invert a piece of core so different colored caps um so older to younger and then start here again this would have been on top here so older to younger older to younger you were coming up through the last part of the paleocene we get to here and just when that chem those chemical changes occur there's um a bunch of red clay and it's red because there's iron in it and it's Clay because there's no carbonate being deposited at the bottom of the ocean so something is dissolving the Limestone or the chalk really um that should have been being deposited at the bottom of the ocean we can take that these four primary pieces of evidence global warming which turns out to be about 4 to 8 degrees Cel the dissolution of deep ocean Chalk in many many places now measured uh in in the deep ocean this carbon isotope ratio that changes by about about five parts per thousand and uh also the observation that this event lasts for about 200,000 years so it lasts for starts at 56 million and lasts uh for for about 200,000 years and the conclusion that you can reach from these pieces of evidence is that there was the release of a really huge amount of of carbon um and it's estimated to be somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 billion tons of carbon um that was released probably in a period of just a few Millennia that's actually something that we're still working on um trying to figure out exactly how long the onset of this event is but uh it appears to be several thousand years um at least and but probably not a lot more than that how much carbon is that uh it is about the size of the entire fossil fuel Reservoir so if you took all of the fossil fuels that we know of and you burned all of them that's about in the ballpark of how much carbon would be released by now I expect that you're wondering where the carbon came from you're thinking I know that there were no power plants 56 million years ago where did the carbon come from and that's that is embarrassingly it is the the of course it's the first and most obvious question that you would ask when you when you first detect an event like this and 20 years after it's being detected we still aren't 100% sure of the answer um but there are a lot of live hypotheses um and they include uh probably most uh the most favored at this point is that methane hydrates which are sort of iike compounds they're known uh to be preserved in many places on the o in the ocean floor today um these are the methane is actually released by microbes that are decaying organic matter in the ocean floor and because the temperature is low and the pressure is high they they don't escape to the surface the methane doesn't Cape to the surface it gets kind of Trapped In in a CA in an ice cage and ends up being sort of and just basically building up in the in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean you can actually light these on fire another possibility is that there could have been extensive wildfires there's actually not enough biomass in terrestrial vegetation to explain that amount of carbon so you have to assume that if it was all coming from Wildfire that the wildfires were also burning Pete deposits so this is a photograph of Indonesian Pete deposits Burning uh during an elino year uh it's also been proposed that the North Atlantic was in a very active phase of vulcanism off of uh off of Scandinavia at this time and that perhaps um there were volcanic intrusions into organic Rich uh sediments that uh basically cooked methane and CO2 out of those sediments and sent sent it into the atmosphere and it's also been suggested that permafrost was oxidizing uh and giving up very large amounts of carbon um all of these are uh sources are coming from the the carbon would be coming from uh organic matter that had been cycled through organisms and therefore it would have a lot of carbon 12 in it so this this is all of these are reasonable explanations and of course there's no reason why more than one of them might not have been involved so I've been mentioning this is a this is an event that's now been detected globally and this this actually may not include the very latest uh sections where the petm has been studied but there are lots of cores now where uh this is all the white circles are are Marine sections so places where it's been recorded what's going on in the ocean and the the uh red stars are terrestrial many fewer places where it's been studied uh on land uh or in sections that were deposited on land uh but that's really what I'm interested in and that's what we're going to focus on and we're going to go to a place called The Big Horn Basin in Wyoming here between the Big Horn Mountains and the main front of the Rockies and it looks like this and in there are the Big Horn mountains and 56 million years ago those mountains were being pushed up and the mountains on the other side were being pushed up and they were were being eroded away as they were being pushed up and they were depositing sediment in rivers that flowed down into this Basin and the Basin was subsiding so a very wonderful place to trap sediment and fossils uh at exactly this time and these giant red stripes that you see here are fossil soil horizons so the the river would come in would deposit some mud and then soils would start to form and then another flood and the soils would sort of grow up through the freshly deposited soil and that kept happening and happening and happening um and there's about a kilometer thick of rock that represents a couple million year period on either side and about 40 meters of it represents the petm so what do I do when I go out there something that that people sometimes ask me I wander around in the Badlands with a shovel uh for days and days and days and uh I was talking with with ar on the way here and and he was trying to find out what I had been doing for my career and I said well i' I've really only ever done one thing that was very interesting uh which is to find plant fossils during this paleos eosine thermal maximum and and uh and the way I did that was by just not stopping and and so I I I did it is true that I spent about 15 years years wandering around in these bad lands with a shovel looking for fossils of this period of time and not finding them but eventually in the I guess it was the 15th year I actually did find them and that was that was and and when I did find them I was with one other person who was had never been to the field before and had no idea what we were doing and it was his first day ever in the field and it was 4:00 in the afternoon and it was about a 100 degrees and and I had forgotten our lunches and left them in the car and he was out of water and and we were coming over this hill and I was just poking around with my shovel like that and out popped this fossil and the second I saw it I knew that we had finally found the fossils that I was looking for so of s of course I started to cry and and laugh and cry and and I was was digging and laughing and crying when it occurred to me that that I had somebody with me and I looked up and he was looking really horrified because he he had no idea where the car was he was out of water it was really hot and the guy he was with had just gone mad so anyway um that this is this represents a very large amount of activity much of my life um and and but but sometimes you find things uh and then you you dig a little bit bigger hole sometimes finding pieces of plants and if the hole has fossils in it you dig even bigger holes and sometimes even bigger holes than that this is my favorite hole in the ground because you can see it on Google Earth if you know exactly which year to look at there's a little there's a little dot there that you can see from space where we dug holes with with our shovels and picks uh and they're beautiful plant fossils that come out of those holes and so we uh we wrap them up with the latest in high-tech uh wrapping material um very valuable stuff and then create them and take them back to the museum and then I get to play with them all winter looking at them and and trying to figure out what they are and how many types there are and over a very long period of time I've been able to put together a record that doesn't just include the paleos thermal maximum but also includes about um 7 Mill ion years so with the paleos eosine thermal maximum right in the middle and a bunch of of them are sort of scattered around on this map so this this is just to give you a sense of what sampling is like across this period of time that that allows us to reconstruct the changes in in floras that happened during this time period and all I've done here is just stack up these these crosses so each cross represents one fossil Leaf site and there about 220 of them or something like that um Al together and uh they're placed along the time axis here just to give you a sense so there they're a lot between about 57 million and about 55 million years ago and that's that's quite intentional so that we can catch what's happening through the petm and now I'm going to blow that up and uh you'll see that that uh it looks a lot less good when you start ticking off time in in 100,000 year increments um but we still have a fair number of samples from within the petm and a good grouping before and a good grouping after so this gives us the opportunity to to document uh changes in in the composition of uh of the vegetation through that time period And this is uh a representation of that change um it's a kind of chart that that paleontologists love to look at and it's actually not that bad um so time is going left to right here older to younger and each of these green Lines Just represents the the stratagraph range of a or the temporal range of a plant species so it starts with a with a these dots represent places where it's actually been sampled and um sometimes you'll have a you'll have a species that that goes along and it just it quits and you don't see it anymore so it's either locally or globally extinct at that point um and you can divide the range these ranges up by kind of by eye really um into um a set of plants that species that look like they quite possibly went extinct um right either right at or right before the petm began we often don't pick up the last record of a species so it's not surprising that they don't all go right up to the to the bottom um another group of species that show up during the PM but they're actually not present before or afterwards so these are appear to be immigrants another group of species that show up after the event is over so those are those are immigrants but not petm immigrants they're actually eosine immigrants and then a whole bunch of species uh which I call local extrap so these are not extinctions per se ass assciated with the PTM but they it's very suspicious that they have nice records before and nice records after the event is over but we don't find them in any of the sites that we have um that were deposited during the petm itself so they it appears that their populations are wiped out and the color scheme here blue orange green purple you'll see in the next few slides because I'm just going to show you a few pictures to give you a sense of what these of what these plants look like um so here's some of the possible um extinguished uh plant species uh two things both in the Dogwood group the larger group of dogwoods so this is and this is actually kind of it gives us a sense knowing what they are or even knowing about what they are um helps us interpret these changes so these are these are examples of tax that go extinct of species that go extinct and they belong to a group of plants that uh today is pretty common in the temperate zone here's a a Rogues gallery of the the immigrants and many many of them are belong to the bean family this is a family that is often associated in the modern world with tropical dry climates and uh so here they are um showing up as immigrants during this period of of warm climate 56 million years ago and then these are plants that that come in afterwards the green code for for immigrants that come in after the the uh the PTM is over and they include uh this climbing Fern which is actually a Genus that's found today in temperate areas a member of the Linden family an alder and a member of the Hickory family so again temperate plants and uh the locally extrap taxa uh also appear to be mostly temperate plants so a member of the oak family Birch family a couple of kinds of sycamores katsura tree Dawn Redwood and Ginko all being examples of plants that are common before the event happens they're common after the event happens but they're nowhere to be seen in Wyoming at least during the petm itself so what does that imply about about plant ranges um I think what it the most reasonable interpretation of that and we don't we can't prove this yet because we don't have sites in other places that's something I'm uh preparing to spend another 15 years looking for somewhere else in the world um but I think what's going on is that when the when climate warms when Global Climate warms uh basically plants are pushing North on each of the continents um during the very warmest part of um of the event um they're probably moving around these high latitude land bridges which you know we these are poorly uh constrained we don't really know exactly how much uh land and and sea there is up here on these paleo Geographic reconstructions but some of the species that we find in the earliest part of the eosine after the event clearly are coming we have records of them earlier records of them in Europe or in Asia so we know that that plants are getting around uh the Arctic during the warmest part of this event and then of course at the end of the event it cools down again and the plants are moving south on on their respective continents so they once again get more isolation of the warm climate floras onto different land masses so this is kind of the the the take-home if you will about what happens to to floras in Wyoming uh during the onset you you get massive uh local or Regional extration of these temperate deciduous plants things like Dawn Redwood Birches sycamores Etc and very quickly in fact the the earliest uh samples we have in the PTM can are dominated by uh subtropical or or dry tropical plants uh especially those in the bean family and then 150,000 years later um the process is reversed you change you shift the the climate back towards um towards a somewhat cooler State um and you get local or Regional extration of those dry tropical guys who had come in at the beginning of the event and um The Return of most of the natives if you will um plus some InterContinental migrants who came across the high latitudes um and you get a minor amount of Extinction it's about 10% of the lineages that don't make it through it's actually not inconsiderable but 10 10% is as geologists uh track things is not not huge this is not a one of the major mass extinctions and just to give you a sense of what that might look like uh we we can start our 3 second tour of the petm this is the paleocene with the ginkos and um bald Cyprus trees and sort of scan across there went the petm uh with its beans and uh then here we are back in the eosine with swamp floras and relatively milder conditions again so what else happens during this event we have we have a you can see a really uh very substantial but transitory change in the Flora um what happens with other other uh parts of the biota well one thing that happens is that U there's a very drama IC uptick in the uh feeding frequency of insects on plants and uh in case you're wondering what you're looking at here you're looking at a couple of fossil leaves and this is a bug bite it's a fossil bug bite I have a colleague who studies his entire career is studying fossil bug bites and we love him for it he knows more about bug bites than any human other human on the planet and you can find you can do amazing things so so we had a student who um who tabulated uh the diversity and prevalence of bug bites on fossil leaves and uh this is this is like scar tissue basically if if um if the if something if a worm plowed through this Leaf after it was deposited it wouldn't have reacted because it would have been a dead leaf uh so the fact that there's Scar Tissue there lets you know that it was eaten by an insect while it was on the tree so we see this this nearly you know 30 40% increase maybe more than that in the frequency of bug bites and also in the diversity of bug bites during the PTM so insects were feeding more actively on plants and this has actually been it's been observed in Greenhouse experiments of living plants that if you put plants in a high CO2 environment they actually make less uh photosynthetic pigment or photosynthetic protein and their nutritive value is lower and herbivorous organisms have to kind of compensate by eating more so this this actually is kind of in accord with with some uh experimental um work that's been done on living plants higher up the food chain uh there are also big changes in in the mamalian fauna and uh other kinds of vertebrates that go along with this event so um the very first record of odd Toad ulet the horses and their relatives uh this Critter called hierra ethereum it shows up um right at the onset of the of the petm so do the earliest even Toad ulet the relatives of the ancestors are earliest relatives of pigs and sheep and deer and so to the earliest primates our own order so there's a there's these guys all show up in North America at the beginning of the PM we don't really know where they come from uh possibly from Asia but it's not it's not known yet but obviously the ranges of plants and animals are changing um there's another really curious thing uh which is that there's a dramatic change in body size so this is one of these little horses this is actually a big one um so here's a horse and oh that's in inches I'm sorry oh well uh yeah what what it's maybe maybe a meter not quite a meter no it's not a meter anyway uh I won't try to do the conversion in my head I apologize for my for my country's uh ignorance of of metric system um I used meters on this I see I didn't take that picture so um so so so all the horses are small but this is a Gra graph of of how big the horses are based on their teeth and the first ones show up here right at the be this is the beginning of the petm the first ones show up and they promptly start to shrink and they shrink by about 30% and then they get very small they're now when you get up into here that some of them are the size of Siamese cats I mean they're really tiny horses and then at the end of the event they increase in size by about 75% they get kind of go back to be actually they're a little bigger than they were when they came in and um so it appears to be rapid evolutionary change in body size um the best guess is this may also be related to uh to changes in the in the nutritive of of um the food that they're eating and it actually happens to a lot of other lineages a lot of the mamalian uh lines that go across this event uh have experienc a dwarfing during the event itself so what are the lessons um I I promised I would give you lessons from from the PM um well the the first and and most significant lesson is that that if um if anybody tells you that a big release of carbon into the atmosphere doesn't do anything we we we you can say yeah it's happened before and it does do something and what it does is it raises the temperature of the planet and it dissolves a lot of chalk in the ocean event eventually it dissolves a lot of chalk but it increases the it makes the ocean more acid which is why that chalk dissolves um another Factor um another lesson from this event is that there probably are self reinforcing Cycles within the Earth system that we're just beginning to understand but um increasingly the more we work on this event uh I told you that there are four different potential sources and it it's beginning to look more and more as if there's more than one of those sources involved so you can at this point imagine and I hope in the next few years we'll be able to test the idea that that some some Factor uh trips off release of of CO2 Andor methane into the atmosphere and warms it and that that warmed atmosphere then warms the ocean and it also results in rainfall on the continents that's more intermittent so that warm atmosphere is more active uh it's also hotter and rain falls and rains heavy vegetation grows but then you you go through longer periods of time where um it's dry and so the biomass can burn so intermittent rainfall um and a warmer ocean can lead to on the in the case of intermittent rainfall to more wildfires which produce CO2 which causes the atmosphere to warm or in the case of a warmer ocean leads to dissociation of these methane deposits in the ocean floor which generates methane which also warms the atmosphere so you get these Vicious Cycles of starting with one release and ending with others and if you're thinking of um what might happen in the future you should be a third possibility or third lesson really is that that rapid global warming obviously changes where plants and animals live and um also it changes how they interact and it even drives uh rapid evolution in body size in mammals finally and it's it's sort of the most obvious thing if you're working on this event but we sometimes forget to communicate it to people the effects last for 200,000 years so this is this is a it's a global shift which to a geologist looks like a transient change like a perturbation like a blip but to any sane human it's forever nobody worries about what's going to happen in 200,000 years it just isn't on to think about that we can't we have trouble thinking four years ahead in the US so this is this is slightly more than four years so that's so so that's your tour of of of deep time but now I want to to sort of um bring you back and maybe give you a little um more sense of of you know sort of not not what are the science lessons but what do it what does this mean what does it mean to me what what should it mean to you um I I once gave somebody who was visiting the museum a sort of song and dance on the on the PTM and my research and other people's research um and they said yeah but what you know why should I care about that and I said well you know thousands of years from now and they s they said you're trying to tell me that I should be worried about what happens in thousands of years I said yeah that's not very long and you know they sort of looked at me like the appropriately kooky museum curator and said well good luck with that you know and that that was the end of that conversation so so what what I'm now going to try to do is tell is persuade you not only that they're lessons from Deep time but that it actually should matter at some sort of gut level and to do that I want to just talk a little bit about this this idea or a concept called the anthropos scene and you might have seen that go by on a slide at the beginning um and so that's what the the rest of this is kind of directed at and it's not really a science talk anymore this is this is kind of more more on the touchy feely side so here's where we are now with the red line and this is this is uh energy production since 1850 plus human population growth since 1850 so you can see they they track pretty well and um of course there this is 2050 is out here some placees global population is supposed to level off at um you know actually I think this is kind of optimistic right I mean it's seven billion now and it's probably headed to more than more than 8 billion um and energy growth has gone with that uh historically um this is somebody calculated recently this this Pro this under the graph here the colored part probably represents about 200 million years worth of fossil fuel accumulation that's been burned in about 160 years um so this this is a huge thing this is not just a huge thing ecologically this is not just a huge thing culturally this is a huge thing geologically this is a huge thing in the history of the planet and um it's not going to go away so that's that's a lot of carbon that's been released um nothing not not nearly as much as during the PTM but people have started to to try to calculate um how long it takes to get all that carbon out and um this is a simulation of what happens if you have an instantaneous release of 5,000 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere um it it and a series of model runs that show how fast that comes out and it's marked off in in years up to here so 200 400 600 a thousand years and then in thousands of years uh going in this direction up to 10,000 years so there's a scale shift here um but the the the take-home Point here is that all these models which are which are you know they they're different from one another they all show that uh if you dump a very large amount of of carbon into the atmosphere it takes thousands of years or tens of thousands of years to come out so you know half of it maybe comes out roughly in the first Thousand Years um and then there's still 30 40% of it left 10,000 years later and it doesn't all come out for about a 100,000 years or maybe 150,000 years which is beginning to sound like the PM which which is good because it should sound like the PTM because that that would tell us that our our models are working right so the legacy of what we're doing now isn't just that it's important now it's that it's important for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years into the future that's the kind of thing that makes people think okay maybe the anthropos is something real and what about temperature so here's a a different model run different set of authors um different set of assumptions carbon emissions of seven billion tons a year well last year was about 10 billion tons so we're already past that consumption increase of 2% per year and you just burn up the whole fossil fuel Reservoir um and you get this steep rise in temperature and then this was one of the first this was just five years ago um one of the first simulations that actually ran out the S most of the simulations people do they they stop at 2100 because it's just like who's thinking you know even even the scientists weren't thinking about past 2100 I mean that's that was a hundred years away um but you know a thousand years later um the temperature elevation is still the same it just it these things this the Earth system has an enormous inertia in it and if the temperature stays high for thousands of years um then there effects on a lot of things that um that you that are sort of less expected so everyone's heard a little bit about sea level rise you know so sea level is going to go up uh we all know that it's projected to be something like a meter of sea level rise by 2100 uh so the the southern end of Manhattan might look more like this than like it does now with all these marshes here trying to keep the sea at Bay um this is this is one I always try to use when I'm showing it this in Washington this is this is uh this is plus 7 and a half meters of sea level um now admittedly this is this is this would be a projection for the year 5000 okay so you know 3,000 years from now I'm sure the Jeff the Jefferson Memorial will not be there and uh and there'll be even more traffic than this on the on the 14th Street bridge but um but you know just just to give you a sense of that I mean we're we're talking about major changes to coastlines and these are the kinds of changes that happen uh when the temperature stays high for a long time so this is this is losing the Greenland ice cap but that's what you expect if you hold on to CO2 levels um something like what we have now or maybe uh a bit higher than what we have now for um a few thousand years and that's what's going to happen if we put it in it doesn't come out very fast um so other signs that we live in the anthropos you know I've talked a lot about climate I've talked now a little bit about sea level but there are actually lots of things that that tell us we're at a demarcation um there's one of them is the is the the chemistry of the ocean so here's here here this is this is CO2 in the atmosphere this is this is pH of the ocean um it's going down at uh just as temperature is going up up so we're changing ocean chemistry um this one is even in some ways more profound it's less biological uh here here's the history of the planet in billions of years and here's the number of mineral species uh so Rising slowly uh then kind of getting a little bit of a a pickup as as we get life on the planet and then uh oxygen producing life so photosynthesis is invented and the number of minerals jumps up that's like two and a half billion years ago and then and oh the next rise it's now we're doing that we're we're increasing the number of mineral species on the planet uh producing all sorts of new minerals um we're altering the nitrogen cycle so this is this is uh this is the amount of uh fertilizer that's been produced since uh 1900 about and uh this is um this is how we feed ourselves there wouldn't be 7 billion people on this planet if uh we weren't making synthetic nitrogen from the atmosphere and the energy in in fossil fuels if you you could feel around on your own body probably something like 50% of your proteins contain nitrogen that was fixed through the habbos process so you you are 50% syn human synthesis um or at least your proteins are uh and of course that's that's led to a huge increase in in the biomass of terrestrial vertebrates here we are these are these are wild vertebrates This Is Us 32% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass and these are the animals that we eat 65% and we all know that we're also uh generating a lot of extinctions these are the big five mass extinctions from the paleontological record of the last 540 million years and here are some Extinction uh percentages very rough estimates um I don't vouch for these numbers exactly but um we're not yet at levels uh that compete with with geological extinctions but there's certainly a significant pulse of Extinction here and the things that aren't going extinct we're mixing around so we're we're sort of homogenizing um the fauna and Flora of the planet these are just some places with um substantial uh numbers of invasive species New Zealand you know a lot of these places on this list they're we're starting to sort of U see significant proportions of of um the fauna or Flora are composed of species that are that are introduced okay so and of course then they're really obvious things like you can see what we're doing from space um how does this help I mean a lot of people look at this and they they think this is this is kind of depressing um and and you know there there is definitely a depressing aspect to it there's a there's a sadness sadness that's associated with the loss of species um with the loss of of of things that we love with the loss of habitat um but I think it's actually necessary to confront this and to realize that we have started the anthropos scene that the things that we think are untrammeled nature are already tramel by us that the things that that there's no there's no ecosystem on this planet that hasn't had the human fingerprint on it some way or another um and that many of the things that we think are are beautiful and natural are already they're already they've already been modified by our ancestors they may not be in ways that are obvious to us so um in the introduction uh we were told about the sort of fruitless political debate and I think this this is uh my um this is my uh Cartoon representation with with Al Gore being represented by a conservative cartoonist as a religious figure repent reuse recycle listy burn um and a bunch of Raving environmentalists like me uh praising the the globe and you know think that thinking that natural ecosystems are more important than people um and then uh from the other side of the spectrum that the evil industrialists are are really um at fault here I have some sympathy to this point of view but but I I think this is this is actually the problem is that that um people want to assign blame and they want to um they see this as a as a two opposing sides that can't possibly meet and I think that what the anthropos scene perspective does is it is it helps us recognize that with 7 billion people on the planet and a thousands of years tens of thousands of years long history already of modifying the planet that it's really it's kind of too late to think about putting anything back the way it was so there there's there's a a one side that you can sort of think of that you know we need to make we need to restore natural ecosystems and I think that's an unattainable goal um it's been unattainable for a long time things don't stay the same on this planet and we are making them change really fast uh and there's no way to avoid that um on the the other side there's a kind of fear response or um I'm making money or whatever the whatever the cause for that just says don't bother me with this I I deny that there's any change happening and so you if if on one side you have people who want to do the impossible which is put it back the way it was and on the other side you have people who don't want to admit that there's anything going on at all because it's either not convenient or it's so scary that they can't recognize what's happening then you a real problem and what I like about the anthropos scene perspective is it says things have changed things have always changed there's a lot of change that we don't like and we need to actually recognize how this system works we need to we need to acknowledge that it has a lot of inertia that the things that we do now will Echo forward into the future for thousands or tens of thousands of years we're living on a planet that is now kind of like our spaceship in that sort of early 70s analogy we're living on a planet over which we have some control we can't make it do anything but we can make it do some things and we need to let go of a a kind of innocent um and and unrealistic desire to return to a PR environment that's not influenced by us and we also need to kick people in the rear if they if they say that nothing's happening it's it's time to kind of put those two things together in a synthesis um that leads us to to make reasonable plans based on the science that we do understand of how things are changing for how we want them to be instead of um um um continuing a really unproductive fight about nothing's happening I want it the way it was I don't think either of those is going to happen this is a this is a um an example maybe of of a happy kind of future it's a long leaf pine forest in southern Georgia um that's been it's it's a absolutely lovely Forest it's moderately diverse for where it is and it's been managed very carefully for um something like a hundred years with prescribed Burns so it's a very human landscape the Forester who manages this is a gardener on a very large scale um but he's creating a habitat that has a fair Fairly High species diversity so I think there is a route forward um if we're willing to take it so that's where I'm going to stop and I'm happy to answer questions thank you Scott I think that was um brilliant introduction to uh the series and a brilliant talk in its own right you touched on a lot of the topics that are going to be coming up the next six weeks in terms of fire biotic movements uh the human fingerprint which is very important I think that's a perspective that I think will come up um a couple of times and that great slide of how many uh domestic animals there which will be in I think will figure prominently in our final talk so as you know we now have 45 minutes for discussion and so we do have a mic and this is being recorded and we did get a little bit of extra money from the University to try to put together 10 15 minutes highlights did you know that now you know you have to sign a waiver um that we that we're hoping we can signed that we that we're hoping we can put together that we can send out to the schools so that this has a bit of a um a bit of a legacy so um we won't film you guys but just so you know to to use the mic in case we want to capture some of your answers if that makes any sense so please any comments or questions the floor is open I'll just repeat the question okay great who who's going first Joan is that are you you uh thanks that was a very interesting talk uh Dr Wing I'm just wondering you mentioned the various possible things that might have contribute to the um I guess we can call it a carbon burp uh that started the uh pm and I'm wondering you did talk about the methyl hydrates in the ocean floor what what is is is there a conceivable scenario that could lead to those melting today you know is is the increase in in uh ocean temperature likely or possibly going to lead to um such a release in the present day so so the question was whether the methyl hydrates are there methyl hydrates now and is it possible that they could give us a new carbon burp um there there definitely are methane hydrates in the in the ocean floor today so they're deposits and they've actually been discussed as potential mining targets for energy companies so you know we may not have to wait for them to dissociate we might we might go get them before that happens um it is the the latest modeling I've seen on this suggests that it would actually be pretty difficult to release them today the ocean is much colder than it was uh at the time of the paleos eosine thermal maximum and the stability of those deposits is a function both of pressure and and temperature so colder temperatures they're more stable and it's it may be diff difficult to heat the bottom of the ocean enough to um to cause a methane release from that Source a very large one at least um but there are other methane uh reservoirs in permafrost um and on land that could be much more vulnerable than than the deep sea um methane hydrates thanks did you want to ask a question um I'm just wondering with the rate that temperatures and climate was changing in the past tens of thousands of years ago and how plants and animals were able to adapt and relocate during those changes how can that compare to the rate that we are creating the rate of change that we are creating today how can nature keep up with that in the way that it naturally selects and adapts right so you probably all heard that so can nature keep up with the rate of change today given what you know about how it changed before well that's this this question of rates is is obviously a really critical one and um that's one of the reasons why we're we're working hard to try to understand how long the onset of this of this petm event was if it was if it happened in um a couple of thousand years or three or 4 thousand years um that's still really fast although probably 10 times slower than the rate at which humans are changing things um but it's fast enough that you might expect it to be difficult for for plant species or even animal species to to disperse long distances so in that case it it actually might have more um it might be more parallel to what we're doing than we had thought there was a time maybe 10 years ago when a lot of people thought that the onset might have been more like 20,000 years in which case it's really so much slower that um that the processes uh by which the fauna and Flora could adjust to the new climate would be very different um so exactly how parallel this is we don't know yet we don't know how fast the onset was um there was a paper that came out last fall that suggested it took 13 years I think that that paper is almost certainly wrong but it did get published so um uh the but I I mean I think the best answer to the question is that this this is probably a best case scenario so some Extinction a lot of range change and a huge amount of local extrap of populations is a best case scenario uh and I so I think it's it's almost certainly going to be worse than that um it's interesting I've seen a fair amount of work recently on on um on evolutionary change in response to very rapid climate change and I think that's one one area where we may be surprised that that when you have really high selection for um for variance in a population that Evolution can proceed pretty rapidly and it it may be that the rate of evolutionary changes can be more like the rate of of ecological adjustment than I think most people kind of would have thought but I still think it's it's almost certainly going to be much worse than the petm so I think that if I can just put in my two sensor I that's an area of active research to that question about how fast how fast can it go given if how fast can a population change I should I should have that's that's where some of the smart money is actually okay I hope this is a coherent question thank you I'm dropping things I hope it's a coherent answer so in the sort of as like a piggyback question on the previous question um in the face of this rapid climate change and this possibly just as rapid Evolution will there be a principled way we can go about conservation efforts for species that might possibly go extinct or might possibly able to adapt to such um rapid climate change um is there a coherent way to plan to conserve as much as we can in the face of Rapid climate change is that is that a good idea yeah well I think I think it's a great idea uh I I yeah I I I am this realism thing I I have trouble with realism myself you know is I I I I feel bad when I say yeah there's we're going to lose a bunch of stuff um but but actually Arna is the one who introduced me to the this idea of um of prioritizing you know you at least as one factor in uh prior prioritizing effort for conservation you should think about the evolutionary distinctiveness of of of the species that might you might lose you should also think about their ecological role and and a lot of other things um so I yeah I think that this is all part of it's all part of running a planet is is is doing the science that then informs the policy and I I have a huge amount of faith in the ability of societies not so much in the ability of individuals but the inid the ability of society is to in to entrain new customs and new new um kind of moral standards and to to put those in effect I mean we that happens all the time and you see you see amazing changes in in Social Moors over relatively brief spans of years years and so I think if if we can do that on you know gay marriage or slavery or you know name your your topic um it seems like it should be possible to do it and that's actually kind of why I want to pull back on the Doom and Gloom scenarios because I think what happens when you when you emphasize the the loss you know the which which is real you know when you emphasize that you just bum people out you know you make them so sad or so scared that they they either say I can't deal with this or they say I don't believe you and that's the last thing you want them to do you want to pull them in and say you know we're adults right this is this is not not you know non-productive behavior is a bad idea we can't afford it we need to we need to develop new custom so I would say that that's the science of the future in a lot of ways is is figuring out how to have a strategy so can I make one make one comment on that because that's a just before I go on sorry this is really close to my heart but one of the issues with that question is that there is this can we just get it back to where it was camp and I think that when you made that distinction it's really important because there are a lot of people who really fight against strateg it's called strategic conservation planning they're like no we need to save everything everywhere yeah and they mean it and you're so I think you're you're you're giving us a different story that I think is really important it's a good question I'm just wondering what brought the carbon dioxide down and what ended the petm so the question is what ended the petm um it's it it's probably a combination of factors um and it looks as if um that it it looks as if photosynthesis the first thing that probably Cuts in so you you need what basically what happens is plants come to the rescue and pull um quite a lot of that carbon out of the atmosphere and um that the reason we think that's the case is because the the CH the the um carbon isotope ratio changes out ahead of apparently other things so it looks as if the draw down is is um mostly whatever is doing the draw down prefers carbon 12 quite a bit to carbon 13 so it that would make sense if it were if it were plants um but that's not all of it and um the reason that there's such a long tail on the isotope curve and the reason there's such a long tail on the models of the future there's such a a long period where there's a residuum of you know maybe it's 10% maybe it's 30% of the original uh CO2 release that sort of hangs in the atmospheres because the rest of it gets taken out by weathering and that's a much slower process and that's what it ultimately when it all gets back to equilibrium um it's been used up in weathering reactions in soils and goes out in water to the ocean and gets you get deposition of carbonate and there's actually evidence at the end of the petm that there's a big increase in carbonate productivity in the ocean or carbonate preservation in the ocean so it looks as if that's also a part of the part of the picture but it but that's um there's there's a longer period there over here so and hi Scott um in relation to that what uh would you mind commenting or speculating on the effect of the fact that we are currently in an inter glacial and have experienced recent glaciations and the perhaps if we have an equivalent different analog in the geologic time scale in deep time maybe besides the petm if there there was not ice so the question is G how do we use the petm as an and an analog given that we're in an interglacial it's a very particular time the holos scene so could you the first thing is for former students are not allowed to ask questions they're too hard we planted her um the uh so that's a very good point um uh that we are you know we're probably a lot of people think were basically canceling the next glaciation the next glacial Max so is is that is that possible oh yeah yeah yeah in fact the the guy who did does the who did the the carbon models Dave Archer at University of Chicago he he would argue it was it was always the you may have heard that the um the ice ages the recent ice ages are um their sort of pace is set by changes in the orbital configuration of of the earth and um the next glaciation was kind of a little bit weak anyway and uh the addition of this much CO2 to the atmosphere is is it's it looks like it really could cancel it out essentially so so we might we might skip um a a glacial um and I think that because we're in we were we're in a GL we still we still have ice caps in Antarctica and on Greenland their feedbacks between ice and the albo of the earth so you know as you melt ice you expose darker excuse me you expose darker surfaces and uh the um the result is that you uh warm the planet more and so that's a feedback that wasn't present at the time of the PM there was there were no ice caps as far as we know anywhere and the result is that that um it's quite possible the change will happen even faster now than it would have then because there's the Isel Beto feedback um so I think that there's oh thanks um it it would it would I would guess that on average this means that that the pace of change is likely to be faster now than it was then yet I mean the forcing is faster because we're faster but also um the I I albo feedback um there was something I was oh um there's a a cool book um called Deep future written by a guy named Kurt Stager who's a um a Paleo ecologist and in in it He suggests that that fossil fuel deposits are incredibly valuable as climate manipulation tools and that if we were really thoughtful we'd be hanging on to all to our fossil fuels uh to make sure that we can also skip the next glacial after this sort of you know this is really valuable stuff if you need to if you need to uh to to Halt a a glacial epic you just you just light off a bunch of Co seams and you're good to go for another 20,000 years so can we just say this that so your point is slightly count counterintuitive in that because we're an interglacial yeah the L the current warming may be the current forcing may be even worse not better because of albo it's because yeah I mean even though we're in interglacial there's still ice caps which is the I guess the point there were no ice caps at the time of the PM um if I may uh just to uh take uh I'm sure at the at the start of your talk uh the data was on the graph but to relate it now to what you're talking about um what was the CO2 concentration level uh just before the petm just to get in comparison to where we are now or where we were 100 years ago we we don't know what the what oh I'm sorry yes go ahead sorry so the question is what was the CO2 level just before the petm on onset yes where did we start from and before some sense of comparison with where we are now I I thought I'd left those slides at the end of my presentation I was hoping somebody would ask that question but I I this the file was big so I took them out um we don't know very well what the what the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was before for and there's there's a lot of argument about it we're actually working right now on um on trying to um develop a new record of CO2 so I said there wasn't any ice um and there are four or five different methods of trying to reconstruct CO2 for times before ice and uh everybody who has a method thinks everybody else's method is terrible so it's at that point of you know where we really we really disag there's a lot of disagreement um the method that I am working with and but which I'm have not a great deal of confidence in um uses um the it uses the pores on leaves so we have fossil leaves and um as you probably know um there are these pores all over the surface of the leaf that allow CO2 in but they also allow water vapor out so most plants have to kind of tune how many pores they make so that they get the best cost benefit so they they get the most CO2 in which is how they make their food and they lose the least water um so they don't have to worry so much about drying out if CO2 is higher you would expect them to find a balance with fewer pores if CO2 is lower they need more pores um because they just need it to get the enough CO2 in to make their food so we use and they're fossils that preserve the the cuticle the waxy covering of leaves and you can count this number of stamata on the cuticle and I really wish i' had brought um actually I did bring I brought a show and tell um so this this is a uh this is a bag a baggie of um 56.1 million year old uh Ginko Leaf cuticle and you're welcome to come up and look at it afterwards but it looks like a bunch of pieces of brown wax paper or something in the bag um and so so those are those preserve pretty well and you can count the stata and um you need to you need a reference set from the modern so you you look at modern genos and you um develop a relationship between the amount of CO2 and the atmosphere over the last couple couple hundred years when it's increased quite a bit and you say okay so with each 10 parts per million increase in CO2 you get this many fewer stamata or pores on the leaf and then you take that to the 56 million years ago and if you do that the answer is that um right before the PM the um the the partial the the CO2 in the atmosphere went from about um 380 or 400 parts per million to maybe about um 800 parts per million but that's before the PTM starts and then if you um and that's associated with a warming a slower warming and then that suggests that it so it about doubles and a doubling of CO2 at that point appears to be associated with about a 4° Cel increase in global temperature and at the petm it it basically goes up another 4 to 8 degrees celsus so it might double or more than slightly more than double again is what we would guess so it might it might start off at something like what it is right now go up to about 800 and then go up to maybe 1600 or 2,000 parts per million which is at the very high end of what you know that's what happens if you burn up every all the fossil fuels um it ends up in that territory so it actually could be that the the levels are very are very comparable the the question then is how come the climate the background climate was so different from today's if the CO2 level is similar to now and you know one possibility is if you hold the CO2 at 400 maybe you know amazing things that we don't really understand fully would happen happen if you held it that way for a 100,000 years thank you now we have this question here um how would uh um climate change and um the polar ice caps melting change um Aquatic Life so did everyone hear that so if if we're doing these projections what's going to happen in the sea or in water uh that's another one of those hard questions that I don't know the answer to I don't I obviously if if the climate gets warmer then the surface ocean also warms up um and uh for some organisms even more important is this change in in PH so that you make the ocean more acidic and it dissolves if you're an organism that makes shells um out of calcium carbonate it's much harder to make the shells and at some point it gets so hard you can't make your shell anymore but um this is an area that's been I know I don't follow it really closely but it's been uh a very active area of research in the last 10 10 years or so and it turns out that different kinds of marine organisms respond very differently to this change in PH so some of them are extremely sensitive and others are uh don't seem to be that much affected by it so I I think it's um it's it's likely to lead to really major changes in marine ecosystems just as it does in in the ones on land but um I I know less about that and that's an area where we get um there's a lot of active research on how quickly organisms can adapt so how quickly can Evolution happen because of this we're seeing these differences yeah I don't have a question I thought I did okay I I'll ask it somewhat a silly question um if President Obama gave you on10th of the defense budget in the State of the Union next year to um do something sensible with plants and with carbon how would you spend the money so because we don't round num I like this question by the way I want everybody to hear this question so the Smith sonian Scott wi gets on10th of the defense budget which is I don't know a lot of money right and says do something with plants to save the planet what would you do sorry do something sensible do something s yeah that's that's that's actually that's actually easier than doing something with plants to save the planet um I would I would uh I would tell him I would make him money on a uh $35 a ton carbon tax and give it all back if I could have you know a tiny percent of the carbon tax I think I think we we have to I mean the first and most important thing that we need to do and and I am now not speaking as a uh as a employee of of uh anybody in particular I'm expressing my personal opinion um and I want to make that perfectly clear uh to anyone who might ever hear this um but I think I think we need I think we need a system of some sort where um that fully accounts for the cost of of burning fossil fuels and part of the cost of burning fossil fuels are the effects that they will have once they're in the atmosphere and so um just like a lot of things it makes sense to um put a tax on it or do some sort of cap and trade or whatever the most effective political mechanism is but the you know there's a huge problem there's a huge political problem there in that it it has to be done worldwide you know you can't this is not something you can't solve this problem in one country um you can only solve it with pretty high participation from countries around the world so the question wasn't how would you raise money it was how would you spend it um I would spend it on spend it on I would spend it on lobbying for the for for raising the money once you got that carbon tax what would you do with the money well I don't I don't actually really care too much what's done with the money I mean I would love to have it you know fund research which that's that would be a very appropriate use for it but um but I think just having a carbon tax or having a price for carbon um would mean that people would want to use less of they would want to use less fossil fuel because it would be more expensive to do so and I think that would be a really that would have a pretty powerful effect if it could be done globally so can I ask just to followup um could we plant enough plants to pull carbon out of the atmosphere I don't think so okay it I mean it it doesn't um I don't think you can incre it it you can keep things from getting worse as fast right so you can you can you can lose ground less rapidly by by planting by by retaining the Forest that we have and perhaps by increasing Forest but the the problem is that the that the terrestrial biosphere doesn't have enough carbon in it so that it it could really um substantially counteract for over a very long period of time the amount of carbon that we could potentially put in the atmosphere there just isn't the capacity to put yeah it doesn't have the capacity um how would Aquatic and semiaquatic um reptiles do um in the future because um like so the question is how would reptiles especially the ones that live in water do are reptiles different from mammals and other animals with respect to carb wow I don't I really don't know the answer to that question you've completely stumped me I can't even make anything up for you he's a Bist remember yeah right I heard on TV that over time if the road heats up um many of the reptiles would grow slightly bigger in size because amount of so this I do you have do you have a so so the observation and I think it goes back to the dinosaurs is that when it's warmer do reptiles get bigger right can you answer that or should we open up to the floor does anyone I actually know a little bit about that so there there was one of the slides that was on for the um the warmup was a slide of of a snake vertebra and you may have but Titan you know about titanoboa so titanoboa is a um a large snake from Colombia from the paleos so just before the petm and uh it is um it has vertebrae like this and um it's reconstructed as having been something like 13 M long or 14 MERS long it's it's a very big snake and uh it's it was the people who described it said that that one reason it's very large is that it's was very warm and that there's a correlation between body size and reptiles and temperature and I have I I think that's true I I also think there are probably a lot of other factors that that affect the body size of organisms and including snakes so I I guess it's it's a possibility you know on a warmer Planet especially if um it has a lot of food services yeah yeah if it has PL to eat it's productivity and nobody eats it before there's a question here at the back up there yeah please yeah you you mentioned that the glacial Cycles uh during the PTO scene have been driven by the Earth's orbit in various ways um but I wonder if you step back from that and you look at a much larger time frame your your 50 million year time frame do we have any idea why the pine has on average been so much colder than the paleocene and the eosine what what's the difference right so just to so the general Trend we have this is a general cooling Trend over the last 40 million years is that right and so do we know why even more do we know why the before we came along the Earth was slowly getting cooler the the the short answer is most people think that carbon dioxide has a lot to do with it so even on on 100 million year time scales there appears to be a correlation between really warm times in Earth history and times when by various ways the CO2 levels are con are reconstructed to have been High um and there are a number of lines of evidence that several of the major sort of Nick points where Global temperature drops in the last uh 45 50 million years are associated with decreases in in uh in CO2 in the atmosphere so um there it's not the only thing that's happening but um but yeah that's all right but uh but it it appears that it appears that CO2 sorry can you repeat that do we know what drove those Co so right so if CO2 is is causing also causing these long-term fluctuations do we know what's causing the fluctuations in CO2 um they are uh Sometimes some of them are related to um the rate at which carbon's being buried um so they're there're large scale tectonic you know plate tectonics continents moving around um what's being subducted um whether mountain ranges are being uplifted on a long time scale is really important because if you uplift the Himalayan uh uplift a huge mountain range like that you increase weathering rates over a very large area and that actually sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere if you subduct in a trend like the trench you know off the coast um of North America off the West Coast if you subduct a carbonate Rich rocks so you've if you've had a shallow sea there for millions and millions of years and you start subducting that carbonate Rich rocket it blows CO2 out of the volcanoes so things factors like that geological factors um have a have a huge influence on really long-term um changes in in how much CO2 is in the atmosphere so we have a question right at the back here one or two more y um so your point about uh the fact that climates change over the long sweep of time is is well taken and but I'm I'm going to be kind of I don't know human Centric here for a minute and I'm I'm wondering over the last uh you know over the long sweep of time climates have changed but humans haven't really been here over the long sweep of time either and human civilization in particular has only thrived and and human agriculture has only thrived in this last 10,000 years uh mainly due to this incredible climate stability that we've all been loving so much so I'm just wondering if the the the take-home that you're you're putting forward here is that it's time for us to kiss that climate stability to goodbye or if uh what what your uh what what is it you're you're suggesting that we have to anticipate now so so I if I if I can just if I can just paraphrase that again um the point is that we've our civilization um has developed in a period of relative stability in the climate and is there a projection that that stability will will what did you say can we kiss that stability goodbye yeah so I I there's it's pretty clear that the last five to 8,000 years has been relatively stable by by P toine standards um and that that's been probably a pretty good thing for the development of civilization so and so I agree with you on that um I think that it would be silly to lose any more of that stability than we have to lose um I also am not very worried about the survival of the human species I think if you're on your if you're you know at s billion and going up fast that it probably I you know I'm I'm actually a pretty big believer in technology and I think it creates all these problems and that we're not very smart about anticipating the problems that it will create before they come along so I think there's a problem with with that but I also think that that we have learned a lot about how to buffer ourselves in a very powerful way from from changes so I don't I think uh human misery is a big problem and and uh distribution of income is a huge problem and people who don't have resources suffer mightily when other people probably won't suffer so much from the kinds of disruptions that are anticipated so I think you know the burden Falls really unevenly and that creates its own problems but um I I worry about uh following a kind of apocalyptic line here because I actually don't think it's very realistic to to you know to talk about you know people sometimes say well I guess we're we're screwed I mean the human race is going to go extinct because of our own climate change and I actually I I don't think there's really any um scientific justification for for that kind of really fearful um picture I I but I completely take your point and agree with you that that um the instability that we're likely to cause is going to be a really bad thing for a lot of people any last yes sir yeah I was wondering if you don't thinkable you don't think it's conceivable to uh have enough plants that will extract enough carbon to affect the inertia of this this problem do you think a technological solution might be possible like a a GE engineering solution is that is there a technological fix to this yeah so this gets into geoengineering which is a really um appropriately Hot Topic um I wasn't even thinking about that pun when I made it um so well we're we're already geoengineering we just don't know it or we haven't admitted it to ourselves that that's what we're doing um so I I don't think it's it's something that we that we should not contemplate but I think it's it's really the the real problems with geoengineering are a I don't think we know enough um I think I think that it's kind of like you know if someone says um you uh you're at risk of a heart attack and um you could take this drug and that drug has these side effects and then you'll need to take these other drugs to counteract the side effects of the first drug or you could eat a healthy diet and exercise you know sort of and you know a lot of people I think choose the the first path of you know oh well we'll you know plug that hole and then have to plug the hole that gets you but um so so I think uh you know to me the most sensible thing is to emit less carbon and to try to draw that down as fast as we can and if you can find because then you then you basically stem a big you know chunk of that problem the climate change problem and the and the ocean acidification problem you stem it at The Source um and you know that's going to work and you and it probably isn't going to have a lot of side effects because you're you're basically U going returning to sort of known territory if you will um so I think that is really the the safest and shest thing to do um but um you know if if we can't get the social political thing together I think it's conceivable people will have to think about that I I don't I mean I we just don't know I certainly don't know enough about the consequences to be able to to say whether that's a a good idea I I to me it makes much more sense to to work on the on the the cause instead of trying to put patches which may create their own problems but it would have been nice to some of the some of the um paleolog data gave us an insight about what we could do but but the inertia is such that we don't well technologically I don't yeah it's an analog yeah I think that that's yeah okay so it is 102 and I think um we should probably stop there uh I want to draw people's attention before I thank Scott um draw everyone's attention to what's coming up so uh Bruce archbald will be um next week talking about global biodiversity uh and climate and what fossil insects as opposed to what fossil plants can tell us about how things have moved around um and what lessons we can draw I'd like to I'm not going to go through all of them but the the question about this stability climate stability and and human civilization um Anthony barnowski uh who is the final speaker um in this series I am sure will be talking about that because he's very interested in that inter intersection between stability and um human culture and apocalypse and so I think we should keep in mind what Scott said about whether we should have an apocalyptic view or not and bring that up on the final evening um Scott is in the middle of putting together uh a brand that completely revamping the SM Smithsonian institute's um history of the world exhibit which happens once in a generation so this has been consuming him and some of these ideas that he's given to you are going to be in that exhibit and maybe some of the ideas that you gave to him May somehow make its way into this fairly I it's a 10-year project to completely change how the Smithsonian presents how the world the world history um to the seven how many people go through there every year 8 million last year 8 million people a year so this is a serious responsibility so we're very happy that he could come give us an Aug talk please join me in thanking him for very thoughtful presentation
