Sea Level Rise Can No Longer Be Stopped, What Next? - with John Englander

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Buy property 10 ft. above current sea level, wait 50 years, profit with your beachfront property

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/schnorgal 📅︎︎ Aug 12 2019 🗫︎ replies

What is next is countries living on the ocean's edge all need to become civilized and technologically advanced like the Netherlands. Or their land bordering the sea will cease to exist, and they will have to move. Their choice. Stop relying on someone else to save you.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/jphamlore 📅︎︎ Aug 12 2019 🗫︎ replies

This video is a few months old but worth your time to watch.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/solar-cabin 📅︎︎ Aug 12 2019 🗫︎ replies

"Sea Level Rise Can No Longer Be Stopped, What Next?"

Land stilts?

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/momalloyd 📅︎︎ Aug 12 2019 🗫︎ replies
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[MUSIC PLAYING] I get to do a lot of neat venues, but I don't think I've ever been in a room quite as fantastic as the theatre at the Royal Institution. And I have many friends and colleagues in the audience, although forgive me, I can't quite see in these lights very well. But I've been excited about this possibility since Sean and I met in October. We met over at IMechE, the mechanical engineers institute. And the more I thought about it, the fact of being in this room which 160 years ago is where John Tyndall explained the radiation-- or the radiative-- the heat properties of the greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, which in effect led us to the problem. And others talked about it-- Svante Arrhenius, a Swede, and Joseph Fourier. But right here in this room, following on his predecessor with Michael Faraday, John Tyndall really got into the heart of what became the climate change crisis. And so to be here 160 years later is wonderful. In doing research for this, I came across another interesting fact, which is that there was not much attention to it back then because people weren't concerned about climate change. But there was another thing going on in London-- that was the time of The Big Stink. I don't know if you know about that. But the London sewer system was put in to deal with the reality that the Thames had become the city's sewer. And whether it be human waste, or rotting animals, or garbage, it all wound up in the Thames. And it had been talked about for years, but finally parliament-- I think it was 1859-- I think it was the same year as Tyndall's talk-- decided that they need to put in a sewage system. And sir Joseph Bazalgette was in charge of the project, and it took him about eight years. But the interesting thing, and the relevance to this, is for years, people had complained about the problem. But until people started dying of cholera and it just became to the point where the city stank so bad that it really couldn't function. And despite London's pride about being the cultural, and science capital, and financial capital, here you had this tremendous sewer. And so finally, after decades of putting off and procrastinating saying, oh, it'll be very difficult, it'll be very expensive, and we can't afford this, they were backs against the wall and they did it. And the same kind of thing happened with sprinkler systems after deaths from fires. And the same thing happened with the Thames barrier if you want to bring it forward-- we'll talk about that in a minute. But the storm of 1953 which, overnight, killed 1836 people in the Netherlands, and 307 in England, and 24 in Belgium. That led to the Thames barrier. So we tend to make big changes and expensive projects when tragedy has happened, when a lot of people have died, and that's understandable. But I hope you join me in thinking about that, with this one, climate change in general and sea level rise in particular, we really can't wait for the tragedy to fully unfold to begin to deal with it, and therein lies a particular challenge for all of us. And some of you may have capacities in one way or another-- either connections or what you do, or would like to find out more about our International Sea Level Institute, which I'm going to tell you in about in a few minutes-- ways that we can help expand the audience. So I start with an image of Antarctica. We're going to come back to that in a few minutes. That's kind of the scene of the crime, or where the crime will happen, if you will, of where sea level is going to really take place. But this evening, I want to narrow my focus. This isn't about climate change broadly, it's not about greenhouse gas emissions broadly, although I want to start there. I want to talk about how flooding from sea level rise is different but related to the other forms of flooding from storms that we think about, and heavy rainfall floods which runoff downhill and can multiply. And then the tidal effects which are happening more and more-- the high tides, or King Tides they're sometimes called. But sea level is kind of the drip filling the bucket. It's the less dramatic, non-sudden event that will raise all the water levels. And what I'm going to frame for you tonight is that for really all of human civilization, it hasn't changed much, and that's why we get fooled. And then we'll talk about scenarios, what can happen, different projections and possibilities, talk about impacts. We want to think locally what's happened to my house, and my city, and my country. But of course, it's a global challenge and we have to think about it from both a transportation, supply chain, national security and humanitarian concepts. And then certainly the most important question probably is, what's the path forward? I mean, first of all, I should say you're brave people to come out tonight. It shows you have an inquiring, scientific mind to even want to come and learn about this. I dare say that if we did a survey of a hundred of your friends, or a hundred people at random in London, or certainly in the United States, that most would not come. They're either not interested, or they don't want to know, or they don't want to get bummed out. That's true. So again, I really do applaud that-- and it's no surprise, of course, that the audience for the Royal Institution which has been doing this for 220 years-- taking science to the public. Again, while there are lots of places-- we have the Smithsonian in the United States, and I know there's other institutions around the world. But globally, there's no place that's more reputed as the place to explain science in plain language to a very wide audience of interested persons. So thank you again. And again, it was here John Tyndall-- that's a sketch-- the same Faraday desk. I mean, it's really quite remarkable to be in the same room where he explained that as Michael Faraday had about magnetism, and magnetism was probably a lot more interesting. When we look at the atmosphere-- I mean, Tyndall didn't have the benefit of a space satellite photograph, or from a spacecraft, or the International Space Station. But it's really quite remarkable that the earth, which we know is large-- it's 8,000 miles diameter, roughly, 25,000 circumference-- but the atmosphere is that arc of a line. It's about 10 miles at most, 60,000 feet, depending on how you define what the outer edge is. In comparison to the size of the Earth, it's hard to even see it. I mean, on the typical globe, it's about the thickness of the plastic coating on the outside of the globe. And that's what's been changing, and it's been changing since-- we know since burning fossil fuels, but it became an issue about 170 years ago, yet we're still struggling to understand it. Now this video-- and I'm not too sure how we're going to start this-- but this is going to show carbon emissions starting in the year 1751. It's done by a group called The Carbon Project, and it's going to show how emissions have increased around the world-- showing a colour scale there. Blue is kind of the lowest and then it gets up to red. And in one minute-- it's quite remarkable-- it's going to show us how CO2 emissions really encircled the globe and started right here in London. So let's figure out how to make this work. If you look at the lower left there, it's 176-- or 1770, and we're at 4 million metric tonnes. You can barely see a blue tinge over Southern England. Can you all see that in this light-- I hope? Great. And now it's getting more to the yellow and it's spreading into Europe, and the United States is coming alive a little bit-- the Eastern United States. We're up to year 1890-- the year 1900 and we're up to almost a billion metric tonnes a year of carbon dioxide. Now the world's really starting to light up across Europe. Asia is starting to come into the picture. We're up to now the 1980s. And that's all with the same measurement system-- the best they can go back and recreate. This was done by a combination of some nonprofits, but Oak Ridge Laboratories in the US, one of the research centres. Quite remarkable as a graphic depiction of how, in 250 years more or less, emissions of carbon dioxide, which John Tyndall, again, put the quantities to in terms of its heat trapping effects. The world's warmer. You've probably seen different depictions. I like this one-- it's pretty simple. It says that over 100 years-- this is done by NASA-- if we look at the heat averaged over five years-- this was 2011 to '15. So a five year period compared to the prior century, how has the temperature signature of the world changed to their best ability to recreate it. And we can talk about how we do that. But the blue would be cooler. There's no place that's blue. There's some places that have a tinge of blue, but they're right off of Greenland and Antarctica because of all the meltwater which is cooling the ocean there, so that's why we're kind of neutral for the century in temperature change. But of course, the yellow, orange, and red is the warming, and most of the heat goes to the Arctic. And you've probably seen pictures of this, but I think it's a very nice depiction which kind of lays the groundwork for what's happening in the Arctic, and the melting sea ice, and the glaciers on Greenland. Climate change, if we just take a simple Venn diagram here, if we think of that as the green in the middle, from my perspective-- and this is not absolute, across the board-- but I think we should separate it into three categories. The energy part, which is the black circle-- how to reduce the greenhouse gases, and I'm going to talk about that. And again, that ties back into Tyndall's work. That's certainly important. And there's lots of people working on how do we reduce our emissions, how do we slow the warming? And this is very appropriate and absolutely critical. And then we also have to worry about the effects-- the water, the weather changes, the warming temperature, the extreme heat, in fact, in places, the ecological impacts, disease changes, food supply. What's happening in a world that's getting warmer, where the oceans are evaporating more, putting more moisture in the air. We'll talk about those effects. So that's the orange circle. And then the blue rising sea level, where I've specialised, is part of the orange, if you will. It's a special effect, but it's important because it changes the shoreline, and it changes real estate, and it has the most direct economic effect, and it's a way to get people engaged who might not care about the other two circles. I use it that way and I certainly recommend it for you to consider. When people are even sceptical or don't think we can get off carbon, and then we talk about the flooding that's happened as I'm going to show you, that starts to get their attention regardless of their political persuasion. I'm going to come back to this graph a few times and I'm going to tell you how to get this graph. In fact, it's really simple-- it's slides@johnenglander.net. Just send an email-- you'll get instructions to download it. You're welcome to use this, but let me talk you through it. And again, I'm going to show it a few times tonight-- you don't have to get it all now. The top line in green is carbon dioxide, the red line is global average temperature, and the blue line is sea level, so really easy to remember. Green for greenhouse, red for heat, and blue for water, and it's 400,000 years from left to right. If we follow the red line, that's four ice age cycles. Now for those scientists, bear with me. We're still in an ice age technically in geoscience because there's polar ice caps. But in the normal use of the term, the ice ages are the peak periods, or glacial maximums, and so I use it that way. More important to me is to communicate to a wider audience than to follow scientific protocol, because we've got to communicate better. And so if we think of the last ice age cycle as 22,000 years ago, which was just the peak of what is the continuing [LAUGHS] ice age cycle that's been going on for a few million years, we see an interesting pattern. It's pretty evenly spaced-- it's something called them Milankovitch cycle. It has to do with the tilt, and wobble, and elliptical shape of the earth around the sun, but I just say it's kind of like a super summer in winter, and for the same reason that summer and winter are different temperatures. Distance the amount of heat we absorb. We don't have to get any more complicated than that. That's what the ice age has been and we've had it for about three or four million years. I'm showing you 400,000 years here because I can show you a little more detail, but this graph could go 10 times to the left. So we have the ice age cycles, and we're at the warm spot. And that's five degrees Celsius warmer than the cold point, and that's the average ice age difference, global. Carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas at the top, goes from 180 to 280 parts per million approximately-- easy numbers to remember. You'll notice I really avoid technical numbers that you have to memorise. Now the problem is the carbon dioxide, as you'll see in the little red circle at the upper right, is at 410 parts per million. You've probably heard about that-- our concern about where the greenhouse gases are going, particularly carbon dioxide because that's liberated from fossil fuels. And you'll notice the green and red lines go together. There's two different physics principles involved. I'm going to try and give you a couple of simple physics principles here. When the oceans warm, they release carbon dioxide just like a bottle of soda or a mineral water that's got bubbles in it. And if you heat one and leave another one cold, the hotter one will release the gas quicker. Warm liquids release dissolved gases, so that's why when the earth has gone through a warming cycle by the ice age cycles, it releases carbon dioxide. But now because of the work of John Tyndall and others, we're in a new era. We're putting more carbon dioxide in the air in the atmosphere, and that's trapping heat as his experiments proved. And then of course, if the red goes up and gets warmer, the ice sheets are going to melt, and we're going to look at that in a moment. That's why sea level changes. So that's why those three things peak together-- those three lines. And there's a-- they're fairly regular period because of the tilt, the wobble, and the elliptical shape of the orbit around the sun. There'll be time for questions. Ice cores-- that's how we get the carbon dioxide percentages and actually temperature, surprisingly. The ice cores from Greenland go back 140,000 years. The ice cores from Antarctica go back 800,000 years. They correlate-- that's how we know they're good science. About two dozen countries and agencies doing that these days-- decoding past CO2 and temperature from those ice core samples. The bright little white dots there between the person's fingers are air samples. And we can tell temperature because of the relative molecular weight of oxygen 16 and 18 two isotopes. Not to get technical, but there's sound, simple science that's behind our ability to decode these ice cores into temperature and carbon dioxide. So the other takeaway from this chart to keep in mind is that it's about 100,000 years between cycles because of those different orbital variations that line between 95 and 120,000. That's why the ice ages have happened for millions of years. It's also interesting to note that there's about an 80,000 year downstroke and about a 20,000 year up stroke. Is that-- easy to see, right? They're not-- it's not 50/50. And we've just come out of the 20,000 year warming period. The reason we thought sea level was stable was-- it's like going up to a marina or a harbour at high tide and having your sandwich, and leaving 20 minutes later and saying, what are they talking about-- the water going up and down? During that slack water, the water level stayed high 20 minutes. Well, the 5,000 years of human civilization-- recorded history-- happened at the turning point when sea level by its natural course had finished rising 390 feet-- 120 metres-- as it had done for millions of years. And left to its own devices, the world would have probably gotten us back into a cooling cycle. But the 7 and 1/2 billion of us-- headed to 10 billion-- changed the atmospheric chemistry and physics. And so we're now in a warming period, whereas by nature, it's pretty clear to me, and I think to most of you probably, that almost certainly we would have been entering the slow period toward the next ice age. Well, we don't have to worry about that anymore. We're not going to have another ice age in the foreseeable future, so you can put the winter clothes away. I will try and get you to laugh a couple of times, by the way. [LAUGHING] And I should have said that up front, this is a pretty dark subject in some ways. But again, you obviously have inquiring scientific minds, and you want to help get the word out, and I appreciate that. But I will suggest to you, and most sincerely, it's like going to the doctor and getting some bad news. And we've all either done that or had friends or family who've been in that position, and you'd really need to keep your sense of humour to deal with challenges and to move forward, not only for ourselves and our sanity, but for the next generation, and those to come. So I really feel strongly that you can't just depress people. And there are some things in this world which are not too fun to think of. We all know many of them-- getting older is one of them. It's not fun, but what are the other alternatives [LAUGHS] as they say? So I will endeavour to get you to lighten up once or twice just to think about things with a bit of humour so that we can plot our path forward. As sea level goes up and down almost 400 feet-- about 120 metres. And again, I just use rough numbers. There's no need at our level of science-- it's not like Professor Waters here who actually goes to the Arctic and measures things, and gets it down to the three decimal points, which is exactly what a scientist needs to do. But to communicate science, we don't need to do that. In fact, we get lost in the detail and so I recommend against it. But carbon dioxide broke out of the 180 to 280 parts per million, and it's now at 410. And there's a lag time for the warming to happen, and for the ice to melt, and for the sea to rise. It's not going to happen instantly-- it's going to take decades or centuries. It's started and we're going to look at that. What's pretty interesting and disconcerting is if you divide the numbers in sea level by the temperature change, if that makes sense, the 360 feet, let's call it, of sea level rise by the five degrees Celsius of temperature, we're into something like 20 metres per degree Celsius. We've already warmed a degree. Does that make sense? So in other words, with each of those cycles, temperature global average changes 5 degrees Celsius and sea level changes about 120 metres. So just dividing 100 by 5-- I mean, to keep it really simple-- that's about 20 metres of sea level adjustment. Now it may not stay at the same ratio as we get warmer and warmer, but there's some other problems as the Arctic melts and changes weather patterns. You all know the shape of Florida. Many of you have probably been to Florida. I happen to live in Florida. I travel a lot, but that's home at the moment. And very distinctive shape, of course, and probably known around the world. Anybody could pick out Florida. Nice place to go in the winter. If we go back 20,000 years ago when the ice sheets covered North America and Europe, Florida was twice the size because sea level was down 390 feet. And if we go back to 120,000 years ago-- the last warm spot, more technically called the Eemian-- Florida was half the size. Pretty striking. I mean, we could do that with Vietnam, or in fact, we could do it with Great Britain, we could do it with anyplace in the world. But Florida being fairly flat and a peninsula like that really reflects it quickly. That happened because of the ice ages. And I don't know if you saw the four part scientific series, Ice Age-- [LAUGHING] --Part 2, The Meltdown. How many saw that? Well, behind Manny, Diego, Sid, and Scott-- my daughter was six at the time this came out. I've Watched this 40 or 50 times-- I have this pretty well memorised. It's entertaining, pretty good science actually. There's two miles of ice behind the critters-- creatures. And as that 10,000 feet of ice melted, sea level rose 400 feet. Does that make sense? You can teach that to anybody. That's about all they need to know in terms of the geophysics proof of sea level and the ice age, because nobody disputes we've had ice ages. It was documented in this series, so of course. If we look since the last ice age, as depicted in that movie, and sea level-- and this is a cleaned up diagram from a scientific chart that many of you are quite familiar with-- the post-glacial era over the last 20,000, 22,000 years. Again, to make it really simple to communicate-- and this is in the slide pack I'll give you if you just write to slides@johnenglander.net. You can do it later, you can do it now, whatever. You'll get a link to download a dozen or so slides with all the graphics. So there's two important takeaways-- or three actually. One is sea level did not rise smoothly. It's not a straight line or even a curved line. It's not going to be a smooth line or a curved line-- we need to get over that. Two is there's three inflexion points there. Those red arrows-- in science, we call them inflexion points. They're changes of slope. It was going like this and then it went like this. And if you're at one of those points in time and you look to the recent past and say, well, what's happening here because I want to predict out in the future where it's going to go, you're going to get bad information. It'd be like driving your car by looking in the view mirror. What's behind you doesn't tell you what's ahead of you. Now in engineering, and insurance, and other professions, we often say that if we look back 10 years or 100 years, we can kind of get a sense of what's going to happen in the future. In science, that's called a stationary environment-- that all else hasn't changed as the environment in which to look at this. But that's not the case here. We're five degrees warmer than at the cold spot of the ice age and we're at one degree warmer than we should be at the warm cycle, and so things are changing. So what happened over the last century, or even 30 years, is not going to tell us what's going to happen in the next 30 years. I'm sorry, I should have backed up there. And the other big takeaway, of course, is sea level got to the present level about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. That's pretty much recorded human civilization. If you think about the Christian era-- 2000 years-- and you go back to the Chinese and Jewish calendars, and Mayan calendars-- Old Testament days, you get back 5,000 years. But 20,000 years ago is not that long ago for the ice age, but the important thing is that our recorded human history, 5,000, 6,000, 8,000 years-- certainly no more than 10,000 recorded human history-- sea level has been pretty stable for most of that time. No wonder we have trouble believing it's going to change. It's not like earthquakes or avalanches that we've seen. So this perspective of four ice age cycles is very useful. If we look at actual sea level in the last-- in the 20th century. And again, round figures. This goes back to 1850, I think-- yes. This pretty much gets us back to the tide gauge record, which is how water levels were kept in various stations around the world-- looking at tide gauges. And pretty good picture, and some of them got pretty sophisticated. The little red line at the top here is when the satellite era started. 1992 was the first-- I think it was Topex, the first satellite that could measure sea surface height down to millimetres. It's amazing the technology that we were able to do with that kind of equipment. And gave us a little better definition. And you can see though it's a pretty straight line, although it's starting to curve upward. It's the early stage of exponential growth, and I'll come back to that here in just a second. This is a little more detail. This looks at just the satellite record since 1993, as I said. And as you I think can follow here-- that's just showing some of the satellites-- but it was 1.5 millimetres a year, then the last-- since 1998, it's been 3.2 millimetres a year. And now in the era since 2011, it's five millimetres a year. The average is 3.31. It depends upon your measurement span once you get the average. But here's the thing that should get our attention-- 1.5 [LAUGHS] to 3.2 to 5? That's doubling. We have real trouble understanding doubling or exponential growth. In fact, a quote that I love-- there is a late professor, Albert Allen Bartlett from Harvard said, "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." Now maybe that's an overstatement, but let me just run an example by you, because exponential growth is really surprising. I think you know the thing about starting with a penny and doubling it every day for a month, or a grain of rice on a checkerboard and you run out of rice in the world but the last square, or the 64 square. But here's an interesting one-- you know this football stadium I'm sure. If you start with a drop of water in the centre infield and double it every minute-- so the second minute, there's two drops, and then four drops, and then eight-- how long for the stadium to be filled with water? Think about it for just a moment. I'm going to tell you the answer. I'm going to have a bet with each of you for a beer afterwards. [INAUDIBLE] Pardon? [INAUDIBLE] hour? One hour? Not bad-- 47 minutes. [INAUDIBLE] What's a drop? There is a-- good question-- fair enough. There is a definition-- we can look it up. I've done the estimate-- on the back of the envelope it pencils out, but fair question. It may be 49 minutes, it may be 44 minutes, and it depends upon the size of the stadium too, which is the other question-- which stadium? It's not necessarily this one. But doubling does that. Talk about football scores or something? OK. So what causes sea level rise? Here's another interesting thing. I've talked to about 300 audiences in six years since my book came out, and I estimate maybe 10,000 people. So you're another 300, I guess, tonight-- something like that, which a great audience. Most people associate sea level rise with melting icebergs for obvious reasons. I'm not going to embarrass anybody here, but how many here would have answered that question affirmatively? See, I don't want-- a few. OK, honest people. Most people assume that's the case. Now icebergs are giant ice cubes. And you can run this experiment at home-- we don't even need to do it here on the Faraday desk. But we all know that ice cubes stick out of the water about 10% it's said-- actually, it's just between 9% and 10%. They're a miniature iceberg. And so you can mark the level of liquid or fill the glass and get ice to the top and just let it melt. The water level won't change. The reason is a very peculiar property of water. It's that just before water freezes, it expands slightly. People say, how could that be? But it's one of the miracle properties, and life on Earth would not be what it was if that property didn't exist. The simple way I explain it-- again, trying to find really common language-- is the water molecules are really squishy and they get very tight with each other. But when you get into the ice and the hexagonal, or what looks like a cubic structure, that crystalline structure is less dense because of just what you'd visualise there. And that makes sense and you could explain that to anybody. So if ice is 9%, call it 10%-- round up-- less dense than water, that's why it floats. It's not Archimedes' principle really, it's because the ice itself is less dense. Sorry, I actually had slide there-- I forgot. But what's happening in the Arctic as we go from bright white sea ice to dark blue, almost black, it'd be like taking a white roofed house and painting it dark. Your heating bill will change. It absorbs more heat, and that's what's happening. And again, we're fortunate to have Peter and Pia here this evening who are experts at this. That's been their life's work. The melting of the Arctic is what's changing weather patterns. The melting of the Arctic does not affect sea level directly, it's part of an equation, if we'll call it that. But the point I want to make about the melting of the Arctic is that this graphic shows in red how the Arctic sea ice has declined in area. The 13 squiggly lines behind it-- these things-- we're trying to calculate by algorithms in the 200 years what would happen to the Arctic sea ice. And that's the British, the Americans, various centres. 13 different models. Now look at what's happened with the red decline of the sea ice compared to the 13 models. The sea ice has disappeared-- melted-- much faster than all of the models. Science is honest and it keeps learning and tries to get better, but the fact is that our models of the world are not perfect, and there are factors that were not able to quantify yet. And while some people think we may be exaggerating about climate change and sea level rise, the fact is this is pretty good proof-- and I'll show you another one in a few minutes-- that the scientific community, if anything, is understating climate risk. It's our methodology, because nobody wants to say, well, it could be a 1 to a 5, so I'll tell you it's going to be a 3, and then it winds up being a 2, and they say aha-- you're wrong! You said it was going to be a 3 and it was only a 2. So science always errs on the side of saying what they know for certain, not what could happen. And that is the nature of science. In this case, because of the uncertainties about climate change and the glaciers which we're trying to get to, it works against us. So sea level rise comes from the melting of the ice on land. We think of it as "glass-iers" or "glay-shers" in America. And as ice-- as the glacier gets to the water's edge and breaks off into an iceberg, that's like adding another ice cube to the glass. That definitely raised the level of liquid, and the meltwater does to. And-- right to the top-- there we go. And that's why sea level rises. New icebergs, meltwater from land, and as the oceans warm, thermal expansion. Like roads can buckle in the summertime heat or keys don't go into lock in the cold winter temperatures. Substances change dimensions ever so slightly. But to put it in perspective, in the last century we've had a degree Celsius of temperature rise and ocean warming, and the oceans rose by thermal expansion about four inches-- about 8 or 10 centimetres. About half of sea level rise in the last century has come from thermal expansion-- from heating the oceans. And that will continue and it may accelerate a bit, but it's small stuff compared to the glaciers, so that's what we want to focus on. And in fact, just to put it right up there in front of you, the problem is two places, and it's only two places. It's Greenland and Antarctica. There's 24 feet of sea level locked up in Greenland and 186 feet in Antarctica-- that's 210. All of the glaciers from the Alps to Alaska and so on make up another two or three feet-- a metre. So if we're going to get worried about the rate of sea level rise-- not what's happening in the Arctic in general, but where sea level rise is going to come from of substance, it's only those two places. Everything else is just noise or a distraction. I'm sorry, I guess I'm one behind you. That's not-- oh, I see what happened. And the Arctic Ocean up there at the top left there-- there we go-- circled in yellow-- the Arctic Ocean is peculiar because it's the floating sea ice, and very important in terms of the planet's weather but, again, doesn't affect sea level. So on most maps, it's shown as blue as if it had all melted. Now it's on its way to doing that, unfortunately. But on some maps, you'll see Greenland and the Arctic Ocean all white, so it's kind of confusing. Greenland is surprisingly big. In fact, we're running a fact finding expedition for our major donors to the Sea Level Institute, and I'll talk about that at the end. But I've been there six times, and I've been there with the US Coast Guard, and the Air Force, and different groups in science and also philanthropists. But it's hard to describe Greenland's size. The only way I can think to do it is, it's bigger than the Eastern United States. It's 1600 miles north-south, and 1,000 east-west. It's only got 56,000 inhabitants, so it's the least densely inhabited country in the world. It's the biggest island in the world. It's got a lot of interesting, exceptional characteristics. But it's about 80% covered by ice and the ice is about two miles thick still. If you go up on the ice sheet-- and we will do that this summer, and some of you have been there I know-- the relatively flat table-like top of Greenland-- and Antarctica is not too dissimilar, although a little more mountainous-- it's melting visibly. You can see the sheen of the melt there, and the water is kind of aggregating into different little rivulets, and then they kind of work their way deeper into channels. And then they get-- and they find a weak spot basically, and the water then it goes vertical in what's either called chimneys or moulins. There is now about 1,000 of these moulins in Greenland, and the water gets down beneath the glacier and lubricates the glacier. So whereas we had two miles of ice moving along at a mile or two per year, then the water gets underneath there and now they're doubling, tripling, and quadrupling speed. So as the glaciers move faster, they're going to break off into icebergs which is going to add to the level and, of course, the meltwater. In fact, I was stunned when I was in Greenland last April just coming out of the winter season, and just doing a little tour of Ilulissat, the town that most of us visit when we go there where the big glacier Jakobshavn is. And they said, well, the power plants been shut down, and I thought, how could the power plant be shut down, because it used to be diesel operated. And I said, so what are you using, and they said, well, hydro-power? I said, you're using water power to power Greenland? Yeah. So it occurred to me-- year round, they have enough meltwater that they can generate electricity in the winter time in Greenland. It is astounding. I mean, that was a jaw dropper for me that they had a reliable enough source, so they decommissioned the power plant. Just put in some turbines. If you follow the glaciers-- this is helicopter view-- you can kind of-- woops-- you can see that it's a winding river of ice. I want to distinguish the flat ice sheet from the glacier, which is these rivers of ice. There's hundreds of them in Greenland-- this is one of the bigger ones. And then when the water gets near the-- when the glacier gets near the ocean, it breaks off into more icebergs, and that makes sense. So we have an ice sheet, we have glaciers that are these rivers tens of miles long, and then an iceberg is a floating ice cube, but a big one. Antarctica-- Antarctica is seven times more ice than Greenland. It's a little different geologically. It's more mountainous, it's more solid, although there are some parts that still go below the surface-- we'll look at that here. In fact, in Antarctica which-- this is a colourised photo showing velocities of ice movement. So most of you have never been to Antarctica. How many have been to Antarctica? I bet there's been a few in this room. I know you have. OK, maybe a dozen or so. But let's decode Antarctica because it's really confusing-- it's bright white and it kind of all looks like a blob. There's four parts of Antarctica that I would suggest to you you should think about. East Antarctica is the big part-- that's this. And it's pretty solid land with ice on top of it. It also tends to be the driest place on earth because it's so cold-- there's no moisture in the air. And what is there comes out as snow, so they get some snowfall in East Antarctica. West Antarctica is actually some valleys and some mountains, and the ice just kind of makes it all look like it's the same as East, but it's a very different character because the glaciers there go under water like in valleys or fjords. I'm going to show you that in a second. So that's two parts, and then if you've been there on a cruise ship or expedition ship, you've probably been to Antarctic Peninsula-- that's where most people go. And Antarctic Peninsula is quite unique because that's where it's warming the fastest and the ice is melting the fastest. It's a pretty easy reason-- it's a little peninsula out in the ocean, and the ocean has more heat content-- because it's water-- than air, so the water has a lot more heat content. And of course, it's closest to South America, so from a pure transit standpoint from Osorno or Punta Arenas, it's easiest to get to. But we're seeing huge change there, and most of the press about the giant icebergs, like last summer I think it was, that broke off from the ice shelf. Again, now you appreciate that that iceberg calving doesn't affect sea level directly. But as the ice shelves disintegrate, the glaciers on land can then flow into the ocean and that will raise sea level. So it's confusing, but hopefully that breaks the code a little bit. So we have East Antarctica, West Antarctica-- woops-- then the Antarctic peninsula. And then the one other you should understand is the ice shelves. These large grey areas-- and there's a little one up here that that's where the big iceberg calved from. The ice shelves-- well, I have an image in a moment I'll show you. They're thick slabs of ice, but they're resting on the water mostly. So again, from a sea level standpoint, they behave more like an iceberg, but they add to the confusion. The place that we need to keep our eyes on are these six glaciers. This is kind of an aerial view of that 8:00 o'clock position where the red arrow was. The Pine Island Glacier or the Thwaites Glacier-- it's been in the news a lot recently. I don't know if you've seen it or not, but it's accelerating. They discovered a cavity underneath this glacier that was estimated to be 1,000 feet tall and to be the size of 2/3 of New York City was the visual that the article cited. And the NASA press release, in fact-- came out on January 30th. These six glaciers have three metres, or 10 feet of sea level, locked up in them. We do not know how quickly they're going to melt and slide into the sea. That is unknowable just for the same reason you go to the Alps in Switzerland tomorrow and ask about when the next late avalanche will happen, or if you went up to San Francisco and you said, OK, I've heard you had a big earthquake here 100 years ago-- when will the next one be? And in spite of the fact that we have 2000 strain gauges measuring tremors, nobody knows when the next big earthquake is going to come. Nobody's going to know when the next big mudslide will happen in any of the communities where mudslides are a risk. Those geophysical things where it's the crystal and structure and various nuances of water, and dryness, and so on. They don't model-- I mean, they model. They don't turn into precise predictions is the problem. We know these six glaciers by gravity will wind up in the ocean sooner or later. The challenge is we don't know exactly how much of them is going to make it into the sea by the year 2100, 81 years from now which is the benchmark used for climate change measurements which, frankly, I think is a bit misleading. We need to be thinking about 30 years from now. That's a home mortgage cycle, it's a generation. It's something we can look at. And by mid-century-- and Peter and I had dinner last night actually in Cambridge and talked about this. I mean, by mid-century-- every scientist is going to have their own interpretation, but most of us now think-- I'm speaking for myself, not Dr. Waters-- but most of us think we really could get a couple of feet or a metre of sea level rise by mid century. It doesn't sound very precise, but this is why. It is not possible to model-- the big glacier there is the size of Florida. We don't even know how warm the planet is going to be-- how could we possibly tell you the rate the glacier will melt and move if we don't know whether we're going to burn all the coal on the planet, or the tar sands, or go back to nuclear-- the big energy debate. So until you can tell me how we're going to make our energy, we can't possibly know how warm the planet is going to be. And if we don't know how warm the planet's going to be, how could we possibly tell you precisely how much ice is going to melt? And yet that's what we want to know. It's one of those things that's unknowable. I don't know how long I will live is a good metaphor. I like to use simple metaphors. My father recently died at 100-- I have good genes. I could get hit by a car, I could go to my doctor next week and be told I have a fatal illness. There's lots of things that could happen. Now from an insurance standpoint, that's OK, because they say, well, out of 1,000 people given John's history, et cetera, we think he'll live to 94 or something. And that's fine from an insurance stand point because it's an averaging thing with a big enough population. But nobody can tell me how long I'm going to live. I can make the case sometime between 68 and 100. Well, we're being asked to do that with the glaciers and sea level. We're saying tell me, Mr. Englander, how high will it be in the 30 year design life of this project? I can't do that. There's popular press articles. Antarctica is melting three times faster than just a decade ago. I need to speed up here-- I'm going off subject and I ramble too much-- sorry. That's the ice shelf in Antarctica I talked about earlier. Here's a good diagram that shows you the problem is the ice is being eaten away underneath about 25 miles back in-- 40 kilometres. And it eats way faster underneath because even though it's cold water, water is 800 times denser, therefore it has 800 times more heat in the water than a comparable quantity of air and it has an effect to eat away at the ice. So the result of all that is that sea level rise is now unstoppable. Now the truth is it happened before. Sea level rose 120,000 years ago. We didn't know that-- science tells us that. The ice age cycle is a fully natural cycle, has sea level cycling up and down 120 metres. If we'd known that 5,000 years ago, I'm sure we would've built our cities quite differently. We didn't. So the reason I know that sea level can't be stopped and the ocean heat is not going to go away, because at the level of 410 parts per million of greenhouse gas-- again, announced here 160 years ago. It's been calculated that the heat that we are adding to the ocean-- the extraordinary heat, the unnatural heat, if you will, that's there because we've added to the greenhouse gas level that has gone from 280 to 410-- is the equivalent of atomic bombs. Well, maybe I didn't say that right. It's the equivalent of 500,000 atomic bombs a day being exploded. That's 5 per second every minute, every day around the clock. Sounds impossible, but again the physics actually add up. By thickening or that greenhouse gas layer, like a sheet of glass, we're trapping heat. We've changed the 342 watts per square metre that come into the earth and that most of it was reflected-- we just changed it by a couple of watts per square metre. But just like my weight. If I know my calories in and how much I burn in a day, if I have more coming in than going out, I'm going to get heavier, and the reverse is true. We're in balance, or should be, or hope to be-- I'm not, but I hope to be. The earth is like that. The earth was in balance in space, as an ecosystem, as a geosystem, as a land-ocean system. We've now tipped it. Now the good news is we've got decades to begin adapting, but the problem-- it starts now. In fact, the problem was known 160 years ago, or certainly 50 years ago, and we keep procrastinating. So I bring you back to that slide because this single image-- and I've had a lot of leading scientists use this-- in fact, Dr. Hansen used it, and Michael Mann, who you've probably read about, who's very outspoken and controversial, uses this. It really helps to explain this to people who don't understand it, and I certainly commend it. I hope you use it. The projections for sea level rise are generally wrong as I alluded to. In blue is various projections going back to 1990. Then in green, we've added different projections which are a little bit higher and tighter that's happened with time. And then we can look back from the year 2015 and say how well did the projections do 10 and 20 years ago? Well, actual sea level is in gold and the smoothed out trend line is in red. I think that's a fairly simple graph. The simple takeaway, though, is that with various efforts to project sea level growth over time, just in the last 10 and 20 years both, we fell short. That actual sea level rose faster than the projections. Again, that reinforces what we talked about earlier. So the reports-- and this is the latest US government report-- actually, this was published the day before Donald Trump took office. NOAA happened to have published it January 19th, 2017, and it's interesting. They added another curve-- the red line there is 2.4 metres, 8 feet, 2 inches. That's their worst case scenario-- that's a new line that wasn't there three or four years before that. But here's the thing-- it's not going to follow any of those lines. I hope you understand enough now that these are just models. These are just things to say, well, if it's a half metre and if it's a metre, or of it's a metre and a half, based upon what we know, it could be any of these. But it could jump lines, because remember the three inflexion points? Sea level does follow bumps. It has abrupt changes. Now abrupt isn't like next week. But could we get a foot or two a decade? Yeah. The last time we had really sudden sea level rise was 14,000 years ago, and it rose in 400 years 65 feet. Think of that. That's an average of a half metre a decade-- foot and a half. And that was an average over 4 centuries. So it's safe to say some of the decades-- because again, it wasn't a smooth process. So can that happen in the next decade? No. I just do not-- if people say, oh, we could get 10 feet of sea level rise this decade. Not possible. Just-- there's no way the ice is going to change that quickly. But by mid-century, could we get a foot, or two, or three-- a metre? Yeah. Now a lot depends on what we do in the next 30 years, and we're not doing enough to slow the warming. The same sea level that is shown here in a red line-- that eight or 10 inches against 13 US cities here ranges from 46 inches to 30 to 14 and 4. The point is here that sea level will manifest differently in different places because the land moves up or down, and so that adds to the confusion. So in the high latitudes of Scandinavia or Alaska, the land is still uplifting because the ice receded there last, so there's glacial rebound. So the land is moving upward at half an inch a year and sea level is moving up at a sixth of an inch a year. So it looks like sea level is falling in Alaska and northern Scandinavia. Well, that'll last for another decade or two until the melt rates from Greenland and Antarctica take over, and they'll then see what sea level rise is. This chart by Dr. James Hansen-- and I want to give Dr. Hansen a lot of credit-- he's my kind of hero and guru. I think most of you heard his name. This is a chart from a presentation he gave somewhere not too long ago, but it shows 800,000 years of carbon dioxide and temperature. And it's interesting because it doesn't show the sea level directly, but you see how closely carbon dioxide and temperature have been linked for 800,000 years. But in the last century or so, look at how they're diverging. The carbon dioxide is moving much faster than temperature. It takes-- there's a lag time, and there's a lag time from temperature to sea level, and that fools us. People say, well, how come if CO2 is 410 parts per million, how come the sea hasn't risen proportionally? It doesn't work like that. You may have heard of the IPCC, a wonderful scientific enterprise-- part of the UN. Most people volunteer their time. 2000 scientists participate-- report comes out every five or six years. And the two things which it understates-- I don't think purposefully-- but are methane release and sea level projections. And it's a methodology problem, and a definition, and so on, and I don't think time allows here. But it's a point of confusion because they run four scenarios, and their extreme scenario says that we could get 92 centimetres or 32 inches of sea level this century in the worst scenario. Most people don't read the fine print and realise that excludes Antarctica. Does that make sense? I mean, actually, there's two inches in there from Antarctica in the worst case. The problem is they can't quantify it to their own requirements of being objectively derived, and provable, and so on, so they footnote it. Most people don't bother to read the footnote. So the key points are-- I don't know if you can read this or not, but make it really simple. The sea level will continue to rise despite greenhouse gas production. Surprising, disappointing, unfortunate, but it's truth. The scientific predictions for sea level rise tend to underestimate due to the uncertainty of precisely how much will occur by the year 2100. When you phrase it that way, it makes sense. Anybody can understand that, quite frankly, but nobody explains it that way. The two key components are glacier movement, collapsing in Greenland and Antarctica, both of which are accelerating. And we're headed back toward the situation that last existed 120,000 years ago, and this should really get our attention, because humans had no impact back then, and sea level got 25 feet higher than present. So even just being aware of the ice age cycles, we should be redesigning our coastal environment, even without the warming. I mean, that's a sobering thought, but again, truth is truth. And the fact is, we just didn't know that until we understood about the ice ages. In red here shows the areas that are vulnerable if all of the ice were to melt. It's surprisingly small. I mean, it's parts of Europe, and England, and the US, southeastern United States, but it's not like the world's going under water, and that's with 60 metres or 200 feet of sea level rise. That couldn't even happen for 500 years or maybe 5,000 years, but the point is there's lots of areas in the world are vulnerable, and we need to get a lot more specific. We need to start doing engineering creations. As I mentioned earlier, the Thames barrier, and the Rotterdam Harbour gates, the Maeslantkering, were both designed after the storm of February 1st, 1953, as an engineering response. But when they designed this, they planned on the worst-- a 10,000 year storm-- and the worst river flooding from the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Meuse that came together there. And then said, oh, and sea level-- let's plan on 30 centimetres-- a foot. Because when they designed this back in the '70s, coming out of the North Sea storm, a flood of 1953, that was the worst they could imagine. And yet the engineers have told me that if they were designing this today, it would be three metres higher because they didn't want to invest $800 million and have it outlive its design criteria. You've perhaps seen this rendering of London-- what it would look like under water or with-- I think it's-- what was this-- five metres? I can't remember. But cities all around the world are seeing real flooding. This is San Francisco, not a rendering. San Francisco, many of you have been there. Great embarcadero-- the ferry buildings, pier 39 with the sea lions and all that stuff, right? Well, that elevation was set 140 years ago and San Francisco doesn't have subsidence or uplift, so it's pretty much reflecting sea level globally. And they have a tide gauge there at the Golden Gate Bridge, which is one of the oldest-- is the oldest in America. And what's bothering them is that more days, the seawall is awash. And what are they going to do? They can't build it anew and lose the historic character, they need to get to the old piers. They're going to have to do something with their 7 and 1/2 miles of waterfront. Not easy questions. But it's not just iconic structures like that. This is a street in Florida and the neighbours have put up a no wake zone on the street. You heard that-- a no wake zone on the street so that when there's King tides or peak high tides, that the cars won't drive so fast to throw a wake and splash saltwater on the truck on the right-hand side there. But there's boats in the background there. Now this happens about 30 or 40 days a year, and as soon as the extreme high tide is dissipated, they take that sign down so that when they go to try and sell their house-- [LAUGHING] --that the prospective buyers don't say, why do you have a wake sign on the street? We live in a strange world-- it's changing in front of our eyes. There's some good things. Some technology will make a difference. This is from Saturday's news here in the UK. That a biomass plant experimenting about carbon capture to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It's at a place-- where does it say. I'm sorry, I should know that. Drax at North Yorkshire. And in the lower right is a scheme called spray-- it's a spray ship with the idea that if we spray saltwater up on the clouds and get marine cloud brightening, we may improve the planet's reflectance and create a cooling effect. It's an interesting idea-- should be explored and experimented. Not going to be that expensive if we even try it. Now it's not the solution, however, because even if that reduced the solar energy, ocean acidification is still taking place. And I didn't talk about that-- that's one of those ecological impacts, but carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean changes the pH-- makes it less alkaline. That has a really serious implication for the ocean food chain, starting at the phytoplankton up to the animals that feed on it. But there are technologies we should explore. We shouldn't be naive in thinking they're perfect solutions that are going to be painless and going to keep sea level where it is. I don't see any possibility of that, nor do any of my colleagues. There are new technologies. This Is from a company called Jupiter Technologies that is doing advanced climate and flood models. They're only a year old this month, but they're going beyond government efforts and academic efforts. They're hiring lots of them and they're coming up with higher resolution, down to square metres, and down to not only years, but months, but even hours on a short-term basis of flood prediction. And they're trying to improve our modelling, and that's really valid and useful. We can design cities like this one from the Netherlands-- or-- yes, from the Netherlands. This is of Vissingen, down toward the coast with Belgium. And they've designed the city to have about eight or 10 metres of safety between where the water is on the far right and the building levels. And the buildings have a wash through on the lower floors by regulation-- have no critical equipment that would flood. Interesting design. Dutch engineering company Arcadis came up with this design for the Netherlands where you could have a combination of a covered roadway which actually became a height addition to the seawall. Clever idea-- may work in certain places. This is from Hamburg, Germany-- actually the town of HafenCity. It's a new part of Hamburg. A great place. I went there two years ago and they have sudden big river flooding from the Elbe River from the North Sea that happens regularly. And they've designed ways to have an enjoyable city where there can be short-term flooding and the restaurants are protected on the ground floor and the houses are a little bit higher, et cetera. So interesting adaptations, and we need to do that. We're going to have certainly floating cities. People always ask about them. But we're not going to take the four million residents of Miami and put them on houseboats or yachts. Or Bangladesh or Vietnam to put it in honest terms. We really need to start getting ahead of this. It's unprecedented-- this hasn't happened in human history. We get a pass for our difficulty to believe it's going to happen. And I mean that. This is not just political. We get attached to places, whether it be Miami, or Nantucket, or Cornwall, or Liverpool, or wherever-- or right here on the Thames-- it's a tidal river. It's part of human nature-- we get attached to places. We like to go back where we were born, or we were raised, our parents were buried, or whatever. And it's tough to think that, for the first generation, we just got the short straw because sea level is going to rise. And it happened before naturally-- this time we've triggered it. But either way, the fact that the ocean is going to be metres higher-- 5 or 10 feet-- is really disruptive. It's sad-- so is getting older. I think there's three takeaways. That we need to reduce emissions-- it's very important. We're not doing enough. We need to find pricing mechanisms for carbon so that-- what we're talking about right now is just the beginning. That we get far more aggressive to be incentivized broadly to get off of carbon in the next few decades-- absolutely important. But regardless of our success with that-- even if we went 100% renewable energy tomorrow, no more coal or oil, we're still going to get sea level rise. That's the thing that most people don't know, or never bother to think about, or have been misled about. Thinking that if we just do the right environmental energy things, we can stop global warming and climate change. We can't stop it dead in its tracks. The oceans have a lot of heat, they're getting more heat by the day, and that heat is not going anywhere. And the sooner we begin to engineer for adaptation, the better. Tomorrow, I'm excited. One of the reasons I'm here this week-- although Sean facilitated the time of this talk-- but tomorrow at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute of Marine Engineers Science and Technology where I'm a fellow, that we're beginning some programmes to help engineers understand this so that they turn this into the kind of design criteria that will allow us to enjoy things for decades or 50 years out. We've got to do more. This is sobering stuff. Obviously, I get that and I try to get you to laugh a little bit, and you've been very kind. But there's risk and opportunity here. One of the things we have to do is find a way to think of the glass half empty and half full. I don't have the example here, I guess, but you know what I mean. We can always look at something and say is it half full or half empty. And there's certainly a problem here-- what we consider the glass half empty. But I can find a glass half full if I work at it, and so let me share it with you. One is, there could be a disaster tomorrow in the world where 200,000 people are again killed overnight by a tsunami. You can't plan for that. Earthquakes, volcanoes, that kind of thing. This can't happen at that speed. So a good thing about sea level rise is it's slow. We actually have 20 or 30 years to begin designing and building different, so that's an opportunity. The second thing-- and this is a novel thought I think to just ponder-- but the second thing is that, from a financial standpoint, even if we lose trillions-- some would say $10 trillion are at stake for going under water this century. That's as good a guesstimate as any. Again, we don't know-- we can't-- there's no way of defining that. But let's assume that $10 trillion by the end of this century will be flooded of assets. That's the problem, but here's the good news. Because it's slow and people can get out of the way, and will get out of the way-- with problems-- we are going to have to create new places to live-- new economies, new ports. We're going to have to re-engineer the coastal environment all over the world. This is not a Miami, and New York, and London problem. This is 10,000 coastal communities and every place that's on a tidal river. We have no choice. Somebody says, where is the money coming from. I say, I don't know where the money's going to come from, but sir, I know you're going to find it because it's not like-- well, do I want a better museum or do I want to deal with sea level rise. I'm not dissing museums at all-- don't misunderstand me. But the point is we can't argue with the ocean, we can't argue with a glacier. This is not an option. This is one of those things where [LAUGHS] it's not do I want to deal with it or not. Maybe you can leave it for your kids or grandkids to deal with. But I can turn that around and say it to you this way. Once we wake up to this reality and more people understand this-- and I'm going to tell you how you can help in a moment-- there's a huge opportunity because rising sea level-- multimeter-- let's just call it 3 metres for lack of a better number. 5 or 10 feet-- whatever system you want to look at-- is going to be the biggest economic driver in this century, because we are going to have to re-engineer, rebuild, relocate, change everything from ports, to Marina's, to beaches. In some places, we may be able to protect them with seawalls, but in places like Miami where it's porous limestone, the water's just going to come up through the ground-- I didn't talk about that. Every place is different. So like it or not, adapting to sea level rise-- and I know this is a little bit cheeky-- but it's going to be the biggest and best economic engine this century. Now that's strange to think of it that way, but it's important to put it as an economic opportunity and a creative one, because that's what engages people. And I gave a talk to some military engineering group, and they'd never heard of sea level rise like this and they got it. But we were in Jacksonville, Florida a year ago just before the hurricane hit there and flooded the whole city, in fact. And it was my third time I've predicted something happening and it happened, so I'm not going to make any more predictions. [LAUGHING] My book came out the week of Hurricane Sandy and I described it on page 121, and got a lot of press for that, fortunately. But just a freak kind of timing thing. But if you understand the physics and what's going to happen, you can start to predict things in effect and have them happen more often. So I was standing there in Jacksonville with 450 military engineers, and explained mostly what I did here. But then-- and they were silent and disbelief kind of. They had never heard this message-- one of the admirals said that. Said, we never heard that sea level could rise metres in a time frame of a century. And I said, but you know right here at the St. John's River right by Naval Station Mayport, it's really narrow. It's like 200 feet across. I said you could create a storm surge barrier there that, when you had a storm coming to town-- which on top of sea level would make it even worse-- you could actually block the storm from coming up the channel. Well, they loved that. All of a sudden, they're getting out paper and pencil and trying to sketch what the barrier will look like, and it's engaging them professionally. And that's good to do. We need to devise the adaptations. They will be done. Whether your firm or your profession deals with it or not, they are going to happen. This is not optional-- use that as a strength. I think I've covered all that. But the final point-- my daughter a few years ago with her friend at the beach-- is we have to rise with the tide. We really don't have a choice. I mean, the world's changed. I know social media is a problem with kids and there's all sorts of things, and drugs, and violence in schools. The world's a crazy place, but I hope the 300 people here tonight agree with me that the facts about sea level are about as simple as ice melting. It's a part of climate change that you can explain to anybody. I actually seek out the groups that are doubters-- explaining climate change to environmental groups is kind of like preaching to the choir, as they say. It's much more interesting to me to find libertarians or right-wing political groups that just have some predisposition to doubt. And I get to convert them, and almost with a total success rate. I mean, I would say less than 2% of the people leave the room doubting. And that's great, and you can do that too. And what I ask of you-- you've paid your dues to come in here tonight, and we appreciate that, and it's great to support the Royal Institution, which is a wonderful institution-- 220 years old here. But the thing I ask you to do beyond that is to explain this to three other people. We can change people's understanding of this, because you know that you know a lot more tonight now than you did when you came in the room, no matter what you knew. So share that. Share that with coworkers, with family, with investors, your company, church groups, town halls. Keep it simple. One of the things we tend to do with climate change is make it too complicated. You'll notice I didn't even use the word mitigate, one of the most popular words in climate discussions. And I don't do it for two reasons. It's not a commonly used word. The average person, as they say, with a sixth grade education who newspapers write for, doesn't use mitigation very commonly. But the second part is mitigation refers to reducing the warming by reducing the growth of greenhouse gases-- mitigating the warming. It also means to mitigate the flood hazard and reduce flooding which happens from the storms, the tides, and the sea level rise. So if in a conversation-- and I've been there in the states with NOAA and FEMA-- and they're talking about mitigate, I say, which mitigate did you mean? And they never thought of it that way. So we should use common words. So I like to say we need to slow the warming by slowing the growth of greenhouse gases and we need to reduce the flood hazards. Plain English really works. We tend to use jargon-- we love jargon. Initials, and letters, and mitigate, and so on. Good explanation is plain language. That's the work of our International Sea Level Institute which is our non-profit. And we are looking for not only sponsors, but we're actually looking for a home too, and it's been suggested to me and some who I work with the engineering societies that London has always been a Maritime capital of the world. Still has IMO-- International Maritime Organisation. There, I used initials. Lloyd's of London and so on here. And of course, with the historic British empire, there is global connections. So there is a decent argument for that, but we need to find support to do that to open an office and hire a dozen people perhaps. The second thing that I would make you aware of is that our institute is running a trip to Greenland in September that will be a part of fundraiser. People have to-- it's for the major donors, so I'm not pushing on you to attend. It's only got seven spaces left in the trip. But for those that are capable. And it's a way to support the institute, so I do encourage you to do that. And finally, I think Sean gave my Twitter address, johnenglander, but I'm on email. And I do a weekly blog. In fact, tomorrow's will refer to this meeting, so if you want to go online and get a few words about how I feel about this meeting which is very positive, of course, at johnenglander.net or Sea Level Rise Now which is the name of the weekly blog, I'm actually going to talk about this and some takeaways from this trip to London. So you won't see yourself in the picture, but I do-- perhaps there's a connection there. And it's a weekly subscription every Tuesday morning. It's free and there's no ads or anything. So if you want to stay informed about this topic, it's a place to go. With that, I will take questions. I know I'm a few minutes over time, but thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Info
Channel: The Royal Institution
Views: 292,484
Rating: 4.114717 out of 5
Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, climate change, climate catastrophe, rising sea levels, john englander, global heating, oceaonography, lecture, science, climate, nature, sea levels, flooding, floods
Id: MvqY2NcBWI8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 78min 2sec (4682 seconds)
Published: Wed May 29 2019
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