Original subtitles

[FAINT RHYTHMIC BEEPING]

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

STEPHEN EMMOTT: If we discovered tomorrow

that there was an asteroid

on collision course with Earth...

If we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth

on the third of June, 2080...

MAN: [OVER RADIO] Third of June, 2080...

EMMOTT: And we knew that its impact

was going to wipe out 70% of all life on Earth...

MAN: [OVER RADIO] ...wipe out... all life.

EMMOTT: Governments worldwide

would marshal the entire planet

into unprecedented action.

EMMOTT: We are now in almost precisely that situation.

Except that there isn't a date and there isn't an asteroid.

The problem is us.

[INTERRUPTED RADIO SIGNAL]

[SOFT MUSIC PLAYING]

EMMOTT: The single most important project

in my lab is to understand the future of life on Earth.

We already know enough to know that we're in trouble.

I think it's important that someone

from in the science community come out and say so.

LUCAS JOPPA: We really are just interested

in trying to figure out what are the impacts

of humans on the planet,

and can we make

valuable predictions about what's going to happen

a day from now, a year from now,

but probably more importantly, 10, 20, 30 years from now.

What does... What does that predicted future mean

for the fate of the human species?

MATTHEW SMITH: There is an enormous problem looming.

But it... The problems

for the vast majority of people now

are still too far off

to make you feel compelled

to do something about it tomorrow,

and that is the real problem.

It's kind of such an obvious thing that people don't think about it.

Um, that, you know, all the things that we throw away,

all the things that we buy and replace and, you know,

that there is another

seven billion people doing this,

and that's what you don't think about.

So I think it's more "ignorance is bliss."

DREW PURVES: We're just not

heading in the right direction at the moment.

All the problems are heading in the wrong direction

and we're showing almost no sign

of actually tackling these problems.

PURVES: There are a lot of people that feel that way,

but a lot of them won't say it publicly.

Stephen is in many ways braver

in terms of being willing to express

perhaps pessimistic views very honestly and in a very clear way.

EMMOTT: I've simply done my best

to paint as accurate a picture as possible

of what's actually happening.

But...

I'm shocked at the number of people

who just do not want to hear the truth.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

EMMOTT: If the film acts as a catalyst for a much broader debate...

Brilliant.

If not, I've failed.

Earth is home to millions of species.

Yet just one dominates it.

Us.

Our cleverness,

our inventiveness and our activities

have modified almost every part of our planet.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: In fact, we're having a profound impact on it.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: Indeed, our cleverness,

our inventiveness and our activities

are now the drivers

of every global problem we face.

And every one of these problems

is increasing as we

continue to grow towards ten billion.

[RUMBLING]

I do just want to point out that I'm a scientist,

not an actor, as is about to become

-all too painfully obvious. -[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

I'm here because I believe that we can rightly call

the situation we're in an "emergency."

An unprecedented planetary emergency.

And this is what I'm going to talk about.

We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago.

And in geological time

that's really, incredibly recent.

Just over 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us.

Just over 200 years ago, there were one billion of us.

Fifty years ago, there were three billion of us.

There are now over seven billion of us.

By 2050, your children, or your children's children

will be living on a planet

with at least nine billion other people.

And some time later this century,

there will be ten billion of us.

Possibly more.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

We got to where we are now

through a number of landmark events

that have fundamentally shaped the state of our planet.

Their legacy will continue to shape our future.

So it's worth looking at our growth

through the lens of these developments.

One of the principal reasons

we were able to grow

was the invention of agriculture

over 10,000 years ago.

What has become known as the "Agricultural Revolution"

started with the domestication of animals

and the cultivation of plants for crops.

And has developed into today's intensive industrialization

of the entire food production system.

It enabled us to go from hunter-gatherers

to highly organized producers of food.

And allowed our population to grow.

And this was also the start

of a fundamental transformation

of land use by humans.

It's 1930, there are now two billion of us.

And the impact of another revolution,

the Industrial Revolution, was being felt.

The world was being transformed

by manufacturing, technological innovation,

new industrial processes,

and transport.

But there's another story here, too.

The start of our lethal addiction

to oil, coal and gas

as our principal source of energy.

Thirty years later,

we've grown to three billion.

It's 1960,

and we're in the middle of the Green Revolution.

There were more of us, far more of us,

and we needed more food, far more food.

And the Green Revolution provided this extra food.

And it did so,

through the use of chemical herbicides,

chemical pesticides, and chemical fertilizers.

And an unprecedented expansion of land use

for agriculture.

But it was a revolution that came at a cost

in terms of loss of habitat, pollution and overfishing.

And it set in motion the start of the degradation

of entire ecosystems.

[CHAINSAW BUZZES]

By 1980, 20 years later,

there were four billion of us.

Green Revolution had produced more food,

much more food and that made food cheaper.

This meant we have more money to spend.

By the 1980s,

we'd well and truly started to spend

all that money on "stuff."

Televisions, video-recorders, Walkmans,

hairdryers, cars and clothes,

as well as holidays.

[SCREAMS]

And at the center of this astonishing spending spree,

was an equally astonishing growth of transport.

In 1960,

there were 100 million cars on the world's roads.

By 1980, there were 300 million.

In 1960, we flew

100 billion passenger kilometers.

By 1980,

we flew a thousand billion passenger kilometers.

And global shipping grew

at a similarly astonishing rate.

All of the stuff we were buying,

plus all of the food we were consuming,

plus all of the raw resources and materials

required to make everything

were increasingly being shipped

all around the world.

Just 10 years later, in 1990,

we'd grown to five billion.

By this point, the consequences of our growth

were starting to show.

Not least of these was on water.

Our demand for water, not just the water we drank

but the water we needed for food production

and to make all of the stuff we were consuming,

was starting to go through the roof.

And something was starting to happen to water.

We saw journalists

reporting from Ethiopia in 1984

about a famine of so-called biblical proportions

caused by widespread drought.

Ethiopia is turning

into the worst human disaster for a decade.

A disaster begun by nature but compounded by man.

EMMOTT: That, it seemed, was over there in Africa.

Except that it wasn't just over there.

Unusual droughts,

as well as unusual flooding,

were increasing in Asia,

Australia, the US and in Europe.

Water, a vital resource

we thought of as abundant and free,

was now something

that had the potential to be scarce.

By 2000,

we'd grown to six billion.

And by this point,

it had become abundantly clear

to just about everyone in the scientific community

that the climate was changing

and that we had a serious problem on our hands.

[RADIO OPERATOR SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

Now, obviously climate is not the same as weather,

but climate is one of Earth's fundamental life support systems,

one that determines whether or not

we're able to live on this planet.

It's generated by four components,

the atmosphere, the air that we breathe,

hydrosphere, planet's water,

cryosphere,

ice sheets and glaciers,

and the biosphere,

the planet's plants and animals.

And by now, our activities

had started to modify

every single one of these components.

Our increasing CO2 emissions

had started to modify our atmosphere.

And our increasing water use

had started to modify our hydrosphere.

Rising atmospheric and sea temperatures

had started to modify the cryosphere,

most notably, an unexpected loss

of Greenland and Arctic ice.

And our increasing use of land

for agriculture, cities,

roads, mining,

as well as all pollution we were creating

had started to modify our biosphere.

Or to put it another way,

we had started to change our climate.

There are now

over seven billion of us.

And as we continue to grow,

we continue to increase our need

for more water, more food,

more land, and more energy.

As a result,

our activities are now fundamentally

interacting with and altering the complex system we live on...

Earth.

We're spending 8 billion euros

at CERN

to discover evidence of a particle

called the Higgs boson,

to explain mass and provide a thumbs up

for what's called the Standard Model of particle physics.

And CERN's physicists

are keen to tell us

that it's the biggest, most important experiment, on Earth.

It isn't.

The biggest, most important experiment on Earth,

is the one we're all conducting right now on Earth itself.

Just want to take us on a tour of what's happening right now.

It turns out that doing so

is important to understanding where we're heading.

Right now, nearly 40%

of all the ice-free land on Earth

is being used for food production.

That leaves deserts,

towns and cities,

land used for the mining and extraction of Earth's

finite resources,

protected areas such as national parks,

and the world's remaining forests.

And let's put that into context.

Demand for food

is said to double by 2050,

increasing demand for more land.

So no wonder that there's a remarkable land grab

underway right now.

In the past 13 years,

there have been thousands of land deals

involving governments and corporations

buying up lots of land

in places such as sub-Saharan Africa,

Asia and South America.

Around 50 million hectares of land

are being traded.

That's an area approaching half the size

of Western Europe,

bought and sold,

in just the past 13 years.

But that's not the most important story.

Land use, land degradation,

loss of habitat, and pollution run-off

are now causing significant species loss.

The International Union

for the Conservation of Nature,

IUCN,

the world's leading authority on biodiversity,

estimates almost 31%

of all amphibians,

21% of all mammals,

and 13% of all birds

are threatened with extinction.

We're now, almost certainly,

starting to lose species at a rate at least a thousand times greater

than we would expect from ordinary background natural processes.

Indeed, we may well have embarked

on the greatest mass extinction

of life on Earth

since the event that wiped out dinosaurs

65 million years ago.

Now, when we think about loss of species,

some of us thinks about images of polar bears

on thin bits of ice looking as though,

"This is it."

But losing polar bears

is just the tip of the iceberg.

No pun, quite intended.

[SCATTERED LAUGHTER]

What we need to be a lot more concerned about

is the loss of biodiversity itself.

'Cause it turns out that biological diversity

is not just a nice thing to have.

It's the very diversity

of life on Earth itself,

the diversity that we are eroding,

which provides the things that we rely on for free,

like our water, our food,

and our climate.

The loss of biodiversity on a current scale,

is inevitably going to mean

degradation of these vital ecosystem services, as they're called.

Services that we all depend upon.

The loss of these ecosystem services

poses a very real threat to our survival.

You might not be surprised to learn

that food demand is increasing.

What might be surprising

is that food demand is increasing

faster than even population growth.

Why?

First,

is as more of us get richer, or are lifted out of poverty,

we consume more calories,

we simply eat more food.

Second, is that more of us are not only consuming more,

we're consuming differently,

and in particular, we're consuming more meat.

More importantly though,

the entire global food production system

is dependent on a stable climate.

And right now,

the climate is anything but stable.

And is set to become more and more unstable

every decade this century.

Think about this.

Food production accounts for nearly

30% of all greenhouse gases

produced by human activity.

That's more than manufacturing or transport.

Producing more food itself

is going to accelerate climate change.

But what's certainly true,

is that we really do need a food revolution.

Because without one,

billions of us are going to starve.

Our most recent food revolution

started in the 1950s.

It's known as the Green Revolution.

But it has come at a cost.

The first Green Revolution

focused on increasing crop yield.

But to increase yield, we had to introduce

chemical fertilizers

and breed shorter crops.

In breeding shorter crops,

we then had to compensate

by deploying chemical herbicides

to kill the weeds

that would have otherwise have outcompeted the crops

for light.

We also bred out crops'

natural defenses to pests,

because plants' natural defenses to pests

slowed their rate of growth.

But we then had to compensate for this

by introducing chemical pesticides.

We became reliant upon an agricultural system

that was ludicrously profligate with water.

The Green Revolution turns out not to be a story

about clever people who worked out

how to get more food from our fields.

The truth is the Green Revolution

is a story about how clever people

thought it was a good idea to buy

every extra unit of food

through energy and chemicals.

We do need a food revolution.

But it's one that will require

a radically new kind of science.

A science that enables us to no less

redesign the world's crops

for the world that we will be living in.

Right now, something like a billion people

are living in conditions of water shortage.

Yet our consumption of water

just continues to increase.

A staggering 70%

of all available fresh water on Earth

is being used for agriculture.

And I want to focus on just one important aspect

of increasing water use.

Hidden water.

Hidden water is water used

to produce things we consume, but typically

do not think of as containing water.

So just chickens, beef,

cotton, cars, chocolates,

and even mobile phones.

For example, it takes around 3,000 liters of water

to produce a burger.

Over 100 billion burgers

are likely to be consumed this year globally.

That's 300 trillion liters of water

to produce burgers in one year.

It takes around 9,000 liters of water to produce a chicken.

We'll probably consume 80 billion chickens

this year.

That's an astonishing 700 trillion liters of water

on chickens in just one year.

And it takes approximately 2,700 liters of water

to produce a single bar of chocolate.

This should surely be something

to think about while you're curled up on your sofa

eating one in your pajamas.

But I've got bad news about pajamas.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

Because your cotton pajamas

takes something like 9,000 liters of water to produce.

And irony of ironies, it takes something like

four liters of water

to produce a one-liter plastic bottle of water.

In short,

we're consuming water like food

at a rate which is completely unsustainable.

The term "peak oil"

is an increasingly familiar one.

It refers to the point at which maximum possible oil extraction is reached,

beyond which it starts to decline.

And a generally accepted claim

is that we've reached peak oil,

and that we're heading for some global energy crisis

in the next few decades as we start to run out.

But it's almost certainly not true.

There are enormous reserves of oil, coal and gas left.

And every year we're discovering significant

new reserves from Brazil to the Arctic.

And on top of that,

there's the so-called energy game-changing revolution

that is fracking.

So I'm not worried

about us running out of fossil fuels,

I'm worried that we're going to continue to use them.

'Cause doing so is simply going to accelerate

our climate problem even further.

But of course,

that's precisely what we're doing.

REX TILLERSON: It's very nice to see you again.

And it is a historic day for Exxon Mobil and Russia.

EMMOTT: Take, for example, Exxon,

a US oil giant.

In 2012, Exxon signed a deal with Russia

to invest up to $500 billion.

$500 billion

in oil and gas exploration

and production in the Arctic.

Why?

Because climate change is now making oil and gas

exploration production in the Arctic

economically viable

because the Arctic is no longer covered

in thick ice all year round.

It's worth reminding ourselves that our stuff

does not actually come from Tesco, Amazon, Wal-Mart, or Best Buy.

Our stuff comes from China,

Morocco, Brazil, Spain, South Korea,

whether it is asparagus, pajamas,

or consumer electronics.

[SHIP HORN BLOWING]

EMMOTT: Something like 500 million containers

of our stuff.

Stuff that we love to consume.

Plus billions of tons of raw materials,

metals, phosphates, grain, oil, coal and gas,

will be handled and transported

all around the world this year.

There are now over a billion motor vehicles

on our roads,

and more than two billion motor vehicles

have been produced since 1900.

Now, car companies keep telling us

that we can buy a car for as little as £8,000.

But that's not what a car really costs.

The iron ore forming the basis of the car's body has to be mined,

probably somewhere like Australia.

It's then transported on a very large, very polluting ship

to somewhere like Brazil, Indonesia, France

and made into steel.

That steel is then transported on a very large,

very polluting ship to a car factory

in, say, Germany.

The tires have to be manufactured

and the rubber will have been produced

in Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia.

That rubber then has to be shipped

to a country that manufactures tires,

then those tires shipped to a car factory.

The plastic for the dashboard

starts out as oil in the ground.

That oil has to extracted,

exported

to be made into plastic.

Then that plastic gets transported to a car factory

to be turned into a dashboard.

The lead in the battery has to be mined,

and then shipped to be made into batteries,

then those batteries are then shipped

to car factories in Germany, US or elsewhere.

And all of this is before a single car is even assembled.

Let alone, before the car itself

is then transported so that you can buy it.

And all that is before you've put

a single liter of petrol in your car to make

your own little contribution to climate change.

What's the real cost of the car?

An absolute fortune.

But you don't have to pay it.

Not yet.

That is the cost of environmental degradation,

pollution from mining, industrial processes and transportation.

The resulting degradation of ecosystems

and climate change.

What economists like to formally call "externalities."

But this cost, the real cost of a car

will have to be paid for.

Maybe by you,

more likely by your children.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]

EMMOTT: Finally, let's look

at the state of the climate right now.

In the last 30 years,

the volume of summer Arctic sea ice

has shrunk by 70%.

Greenland and Antarctica are losing between

300 and 600 billion tons of ice per year into the sea.

And to make matters worse,

probably much worse,

melting Arctic ice

caused by our activities

is now causing the release

of significant quantities of methane.

At the end of 2011,

scientists from the International Arctic Research Center

discovered for the first time

vast fields containing over 100 plumes of methane,

some over a kilometer in diameter.

Methane is many times more potent a greenhouse gas

-than carbon dioxide. -[GURGLING]

And if, as seems likely,

melting sea ice is now causing the release of this methane,

it will go on for decades, possibly centuries,

and we'll be completely unable to stop it.

It has every potential to accelerate climate change even faster.

This could be very big trouble

on a very big scale.

Almost all of the data that are emerging from the Arctic

are worse.

Far worse than even the most pessimistic

scientific predictions of even just 10 years ago.

And think about this.

Right now, every leaf on every tree on Earth

is experiencing a level of carbon dioxide

that has not been witnessed on this planet

for millions of years.

And how the planet's plants will respond to this

we simply don't fully understand.

But it's very important.

Because the planet's plants

are a fundamental component

of what's called the "global carbon cycle."

The global carbon cycle processes around 200 gigatons

of carbon every year.

And it does all seven billion of us

an enormous favor by slowing down climate change

because the planet's plants, soils and oceans

absorb around 50% of our CO2 emissions.

But this favor might be about to come to an end

because we are fundamentally modifying

every single component

of the global carbon cycle right now

through deforestation, urbanization, agriculture

and changes to the chemical and ecological composition of the planet's oceans.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: Moreover, the CO2 that the oceans are absorbing

is now having a serious impact

in terms of ocean acidification and deoxygenation.

The science

now points to the inescapable fact

that we are in trouble.

Serious trouble.

And right now we're heading into completely uncharted territory

as we continue to grow

towards ten billion.

But one thing that is entirely predictable

is that things are going to get worse.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: What kind of challenges do we face

over the coming decades as a consequence

of our growing population and our activities?

We are already using

nearly 40% of land on Earth for food.

The demand for food is set to double by 2050.

This means the pressure to clear

many of the world's remaining forests

for human use looks set to intensify.

Why?

Because this is the only land available

for cheaply expanding agriculture

at the scale that we need.

By 2050,

it's quite possible that some one billion hectares of land could be cleared

to meet rising food demand.

This is an area larger than the United States of America.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

[FIRE BLAZING]

EMMOTT: Meanwhile, by 2050, 70% of us are going to be living in cities.

Just worth mentioning. Of the 19 Brazilian cities

that have doubled in population and size

in the last 10 years,

10 are in the Amazon.

It is becoming apparent

that there is no known way of feeding a population of ten billion people

with our current agricultural system

and our current rates of consumption.

Because global agricultural productivity

actually looks set to decline,

possibly sharply,

over the coming decades.

There are three reasons for this.

The first is climate change.

As global average temperature continues to increase,

food productivity is actually predicted to decline.

Some of the world's most important crops

such as wheat could be worst affected.

And increasing frequency and severity

of extreme weather events associated with climate change

will increase the frequency and severity

with which we lose crops around the world.

The second reason is soil degradation and desertification.

Both of which are increasing

as a result of water run-off, pollution,

intensified agricultural practices and overgrazing.

And the third reason is water stress

from more frequent and severe droughts

and the rising consumption of water by billions more people.

If we want to get just a glimpse

of what we can expect

of the decades to come,

we need only look at the impact of heat waves

in Australia in 2008,

Russia in 2010

and the United States in 2012,

which destroyed up to 40% of grain and corn harvests

and killed tens of thousands of livestock.

[FLIES BUZZING]

In the heat wave of 2010, the Russian government

was forced to place an embargo on grain exports,

and this caused chaos in the commodities markets...

-[CROWD CHATTERING] -...and a massive food price spike.

This consequently led to food riots

across Asia and Africa...

-[GUNFIRE] -...and unrest that eventually led to the violence

that we now call the Arab Spring.

[CHANTING IN ARABIC]

[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]

[GUNSHOT]

Indeed, anyone who thinks

that the emerging state

of global affairs

does not have potential for civil and international conflict

is deluding themselves.

[SIREN BLARING IN DISTANCE]

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: It's no coincidence

that almost every scientific conference...

-[HELICOPTER WHIRRS] -...I go to about climate change

now has a new kind of attendee.

The military.

[SPRINKLERS WHIRRING]

EMMOTT: By the end of this century, large parts of this planet

will not have anything like enough usable water.

Billions of people

are likely to be living in conditions

of extreme water shortage

as a result of increasing climate change,

increasing food demand

and increasing population.

Our use of ground water, which is essential for irrigation,

is accelerating rapidly,

far faster than ground water is or can be replenished.

And fresh water supplies stored in the planet's glaciers and snow cover

are projected to decline alarmingly this century,

severely affecting up to one-sixth of the entire human population

in countries such as China, Pakistan and India.

Our water problem is unavoidably

going to have very adverse consequences

for agriculture, human health

and ecosystems.

You might not be surprised to learn that air traffic,

global car production and shipping

are all expected to continue to grow this century.

Well, for starters, we look set to produce

another four billion cars

in just the next 50 years.

Global shipping and air traffic

are projected to expand to transport more of our stuff

to more of us around the planet.

That's going to cause yet more problems

in terms of CO2 emissions,

more black carbon and more pollution.

Our emerging energy problem is also simple.

We are going to need to triple

energy production by the end of this century

to meet expected demand.

To meet that demand,

we would need to build, roughly speaking,

1,800 of the world's largest dams

or 23,000 nuclear power stations,

14 million wind turbines,

or 36 billion solar panels.

Or we could just keep going

with predominantly oil, coal and gas,

and build something like 36,000 new power stations that we will need.

Our existing fossil fuel reserves

are worth trillions of dollars.

Are governments and the world's major energy companies,

some of the most influential corporations on Earth,

really going to decide to leave all of that money

in the ground as demand for energy continues to grow and grow?

I really doubt it.

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: And so on to our emerging climate problem.

This problem is on an entirely different scale.

Because the problem is that we may well be heading

towards a number of tipping points

in the global climate system.

All complex systems are characterized by one important feature.

A very small change can lead to a very large effect

that can tip the system into an entirely different

and entirely unpredictable state.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

the IPCC,

has said that we need to aim to limit

global average temperature rises

to two degrees or less.

-The rationale for this target... -[THUNDER RUMBLES]

...is that a rise of above two degrees

risks catastrophic climate change

that would almost certainly lead to irreversible planetary tipping points

caused by events such as the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice,

the release of methane

from the Arctic and Siberian permafrost

or dieback of the Amazon.

But the fact is loss of ice from the Arctic and Antarctic

and the release of methane

is already happening now,

well below the two degree threshold.

And as for the dieback in the Amazon,

we're not even waiting for climate change to do this.

We're doing it right now through deforestation.

-[CHAINSAW WHIRRS] -[TREE CREAKS]

EMMOTT: And recent research shows that we actually

look to be heading for a larger rise

in global average temperature than two degrees.

A far larger rise.

It looks as though we're heading

for a global average temperature rise of four degrees.

And we can't even rule out a rise of six degrees.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]

EMMOTT: A four-to-six-degree rise

in global average temperature

will be absolutely catastrophic.

It will lead to runaway climate change

capable of tipping the planet

into an entirely different state,

rapidly.

[THUNDER RUMBLING]

[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]

EMMOTT: In the decades along the way

we will witness unprecedented extremes

of fires, floods, heat waves,

loss of crops, water stress

and sea level rises.

There almost certainly won't be a country

called Bangladesh by the end of this century.

It will be under water.

And the Amazon could be turned into savannah

or even desert.

And the entire agricultural system

will be faced with an unprecedented threat.

More fortunate countries,

such as the UK, United States, most of Europe,

may even look something approaching like militarized countries,

at least in terms of border controls,

to prevent millions of people from entering

who are on the move

because their own country is either no longer habitable

or has insufficient food of water

or is experiencing conflict

over increasingly scarce resources.

This people will be climate migrants,

a term I think we're going to have to get used to.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[CROWD CLAMORING]

EMMOTT: Even more worryingly,

there is now compelling evidence

that the entire global ecosystem

is not only capable of suffering a catastrophic tipping point,

but is already approaching such a transition.

[WIND WHISTLING]

[HEAVY WINDS SWIRLING]

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EMMOTT: We are the drivers of every global problem we face.

Climate change, ecosystem degradation,

mass extinctions,

alteration of the planet's global carbon cycle,

increasing demand for food, water, energy, and other resources.

Highly interconnected problems,

each one contributing to the other.

And as the human population continues to increase,

every one of these problems is set to grow.

Yet, we are failing to do much, if anything, about them.

What, then, are our options?

The first, is technologize our way out of it.

And this is the domain of what's known as the rational optimist.

And the rational optimist argument says that

past predictions of doom

such as those of Malthus and Ehrlich

have turned out to be wrong,

not least because our cleverness and our inventiveness

have enabled us to solve the population problem

on every occasion.

And a great example they show is the Green Revolution.

Now, setting aside the fact that we've technologized our way into these problems

in the first place,

let's look at the current ideas for technologizing our way out of them.

First is green energy.

Wind, wave, solar, hydro, bio fuels,

sometimes called renewables.

The fact is that green energy technologies

are currently highly unlikely to be a viable planetary solution

on the scale required or in the time required.

Even if existing green technologies were a global solution,

we would need to be embarking on a planetary wide

green energy program right now.

And we're not.

Even if we had embarked on such a program,

it would be decades before we could power the planet with green energy.

And in the meantime, almost all of our energy

will continue to come from fossil fuels,

from oil, coal and gas,

continuing to contribute to our climate problem

every year.

I never thought I'd say this,

but in the short term,

nuclear power would seem to be the only existing technology

for solving the energy problem.

But for nuclear power to be a solution,

we would need to be embarking

on a global nuclear power program right now...

And we're not.

Governments the world over are retreating from nuclear power,

because it's expensive, because neither government nor industry

wants to pick up the cost of decommissioning,

and because voters do not like it.

Next...

We could potentially solve some of our water problem

through the building of desalination plants

which convert sea water into usable water.

But again, such programs are not even on the horizon.

Next, geo-engineering.

This is essentially the notion that planetary scale engineering efforts

might be needed simply to mitigate the worst consequences

of the problems that we're going to face.

For example, putting massive umbrellas

into orbit around our planet

to reflect the sun's energy back out into space.

And I'll leave it to you to make of that as you wish.

The problem is all of the current geo-engineering ideas

are completely unproven.

All of them are extremely expensive.

And all of them are likely to come

with significant knock-on effects,

the long-term consequences of which are completely unpredictable.

So, as far as I'm concerned,

on current evidence,

technologizing our way out of this does not look likely.

So let's look at our second option...

Behavior change.

We're going to need to change our behavior radically and globally

on every level.

But to accomplish this

will almost certainly require radical government action.

But here, politicians are currently part of the problem.

Because the decisions needed to be taken

to implement the kind of behavior change needed

will inevitably make politicians remarkably unpopular.

And politicians do like to be popular.

So what politicians have opted for instead is failed diplomacy.

For example,

the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,

whose job it's been for 20 years

to ensure the stabilization of greenhouse gases

in the Earth's atmosphere...

Failed.

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification,

whose job it's been for 20 years

to stop land degrading and becoming desert...

Failed.

The Convention on Biological Diversity,

whose job it's been for 20 years

to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss...

Failed.

These are just three examples of failed global initiatives.

In Rio+20, COP18 in Doha, and COP19 in Warsaw,

all produced even weaker rhetoric than previous pledges,

conventions and commitments.

The world is expecting us to reach some kind of agreement

concerning climate change,

and not just continuing discussing procedure, procedure, procedure.

It looks like 20 years of words and inaction

is said to continue with another 20 years

of words and inaction.

And all the while, we're heading into deeper and deeper trouble.

And the way governments justify this degree of inaction

is by exploiting public opinion and scientific uncertainty.

It used to be the case of,

"We need to wait for science to prove that climate change is happening."

And that is now beyond doubt.

So now, it's that we need to wait for scientists to be able to tell us

what the impact will be, and what the costs are.

And then, we will need to wait for public opinion to get behind action.

But climate models are never going to be free from uncertainties.

And as for public opinion,

politicians seem remarkably free to ignore it when it suits them.

What about us? How can we change our behavior?

I confess, I did once find it quite amusing

to read in the weekend papers about some celebrity saying,

"I've given up my 4x4 and now I've bought a hybrid.

"Aren't I doing my bit for the environment?"

They're not doing their bit for the environment.

But in many respects, it's not their fault.

The fact is that they and we are not being well informed.

We're simply not getting the information that we need.

When we are advised to do something,

it's a token gesture that missed the fundamental fact

that the scale and the nature of the problems we face

are immense, unprecedented,

and possibly unsolvable.

The behavior changes that are required are so fundamental

that no one wants to make them.

What are they?

Well, consume less, but a lot less.

Less food, less energy, less stuff.

Fewer cars, electric cars,

cotton T-shirts, laptops, TVs, far fewer.

And the interesting thing is we know this.

Yet every decade, global consumption just continues to increase.

And it is worth pointing out here

that "we" simply refers to the people who live in the west and the north

of the planet, predominantly.

There are currently almost three billion people who need to urgently consume more.

More water, more food, more energy.

By the end of this century,

there will be billions more who'll need to consume

more water, food and energy.

So what about population growth itself?

Even saying, "Don't have children," is utterly ridiculous.

That said, the worst thing that we could continue to do globally

is continue to have children at our current rate.

'Cause if we do so, according to UN predictions,

by the end of this century, there will not be ten billion of us.

There will be 28 billion of us.

Only an idiot would deny that there's a carrying capacity to Earth.

And the question is...

Is it seven billion,

ten billion,

or 28 billion?

I think we've already gone past it, well past it.

We could potentially change the situation we are in.

Probably not by technologizing our way out of it,

but by radically changing our behavior.

But there is no sign that this is happening,

or that it's about to happen.

So I think it's going to be business as usual for us.

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EMMOTT: As a scientist, what I think about the current situation...

Well, science is essentially organized skepticism.

I spend my life trying to prove my work wrong

or look for alternative explanations.

I hope I'm wrong.

But the science points to my not being wrong.

As I said at the beginning, we can rightly call the situation we're all in

an emergency.

An unprecedented planetary emergency.

And why we're not doing more, given the scale and the urgency

of the problem,

I simply cannot understand.

We urgently need to do, and I mean do,

something radical to avert a global catastrophe.

But I don't think we will.

I think we're fucked.

If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid

on collision course with Earth,

we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth

on the 3rd of June, 2080,

and we knew that its impact was going to wipe out

70% of all life on Earth,

governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet

into unprecedented action.

Every scientist, engineer, university and business

would be enlisted to find a way of stopping it.

We are now in almost precisely that situation,

except that there isn't a date and there isn't an asteroid.

The problem is us.

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