This undated photo courtesy of NASA shows Thwaites Glacier in Western Antarctica. (AFP PHOTO/NASA/HANDOUT)
U.S. and British science agencies Thursday announced
a multimillion-dollar research mission to study an enormous and
exceedingly remote Antarctic glacier, one that they say could hold the
potential for major sea level rise before the end of the century.
The
move suggests that even as world governments move to tackle greenhouse
gas emissions, their polar research arms are racing to get a handle on
perhaps the most sweeping potential consequence of a changing climate — a
large increase in global sea level due to the loss of polar ice — and
determine just how rapidly it could arrive. And they appear to have
singled out the number one point of vulnerability.
The glacier in question, named Thwaites,
is a linchpin of the West Antarctic ice sheet. It is larger than
Pennsylvania and presents a 75-mile-long front to the ocean, in this
case the Amundsen Sea, where recent studies
have suggested that warm waters at extreme depths are causing a major
glacial retreat that could be “unstoppable,” in the words of NASA. The
reason is that these Amundsen Sea glaciers are already sitting in deep
water, but if they break away further, the terrain becomes even deeper
behind them, threatening a runaway retreat.
“Recent studies
indicate the greatest risk for future rapid sea-level rise now arises
from Thwaites Glacier due to the large changes already underway, the
potential contribution to sea-level rise, and the societally relevant
time scales of decades to centuries over which major, irreversible
changes are possible in the system,” notes the joint research solicitation from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the British Natural Environment Research Council.
In
a press statement, the National Science Foundation suggested the cost
of the research itself will be $20 million to $25 million but that
“allocation of logistics support for field work would increase that
commitment significantly.”
While
it isn’t entirely clear yet how scientists would tackle Thwaites, the
logistical requirements are considerable. “I can envisage ships, I can
envisage camps on the glacier itself, there’s going to be aircraft
flying missions over, and possibly helicopters,” said Paul Cutler, the
program director for Antarctic Integrated System Science at the NSF’s
Division of Polar Programs.
“From the ships, there will probably be
autonomous underwater vehicles, underneath the ice shelf. It’s up to the
imagination of the scientists to make the best case, and we’ll work, to
the extent we can, to make that happen.”
Like many or most
Antarctic glaciers, Thwaites consists of both a large ice “shelf,” or a
floating part of the glacier that sits on top of the ocean, and then a
far larger area where the glacier rests firmly on the seafloor.
The
glacier’s “grounding line,” where it first touches the seafloor, is
currently at 300 and 700 meters below sea level, or just under half a
mile at most, according Robin Bell, an Antarctic researcher at Columbia
University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
But if Thwaites
were to retreat backward, there are regions of West Antarctica where the
ice rests more than 2,400 meters below sea level, or about a mile and a
half. A retreat has already begun: Between 1992 and 2011, the Thwaites
grounding line retreated inland 8 miles, a 2014 study found.
The photograph above shows an edge of the Thwaites Ice Shelf. (NASA photograph by Jim Yungel.)
Vast additional volumes of the glacier and the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet rest above sea level, and this is where the major contribution to
sea level rise would come from. According to NSF, Thwaites is already
contributing an astonishing 10 percent of all global sea level rise. The
fear is just how much this could increase.
Thwaites itself could
ultimately contribute around two feet to the global sea level if it
were to be lost entirely. But it also connects with the interior of the
West Antarctic ice sheet. The entirety of West Antarctica could
contribute more than 3 meters, or more than 10 feet, of sea level rise if it were to melt entirely into the ocean.
The
National Science Foundation’s Cutler said the reason this is such a
major initiative is that Thwaites glacier is extremely remote, and the
approach to it by sea is often blocked by floating sea
ice. “Geographically, there is no permanent station within about 1,000
miles,” he said. The U.S. has scientific bases on the Antarctic
peninsula and near the Ross Ice Shelf, but the Amundsen Sea is roughly
equidistant between the two.
The research initiative, although not yet finalized at that time, was discussed publicly at an annual meeting
of West Antarctic scientists in Sterling, Va., earlier this month. The
need for the study initiative had bubbled up from this group of
scientists, dubbed the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative, who had
increasingly reached a consensus that Thwaites is the glacier that could
really change current sea level forecasts.
At that meeting,
David Vaughan, the science director of the British Antarctic Survey part
of the Natural Environment Research Council, said the initiative is
“probably the biggest thing that’s happened in our area of science in
terms of a real opportunity to get out there and make measurements that
we’ve never been able to make before.”
The National Environmental Research Council has recently conducted an extensive study
of another very large glacier next to Thwaites, called Pine Island
glacier, which is also a major sea level risk and already retreating
substantially.
But Pine Island glacier has a much narrower front exposed
to the ocean and does not as immediately connect to the center of the
West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has led scientists to increasingly train
their attention on the wider and less studied Thwaites.
The
research solicitation says that $20 million or more will be spent on
five-to-eight research awards that will involve data collection in the
harsh and remote environment of Thwaites itself. Scientists must apply
for the research grants by describing how they would attempt to study
the glacier in such a way as to advance our understanding of how much
ice it could lose, and how quickly that could occur.
“The
resources provided by this initiative will allow intensive study of the
glacier that has perhaps the greatest potential to affect sea-level and
change on time scales relevant to human societies (decades to
centuries),” said Knut Christianson, an Antarctic scientist at the
University of Washington in Seattle, in an email comment on the new
initiative.
Christianson
added that “a large investment of resources, like this one, will allow
us to make substantial progress on understanding the components of the
Thwaites Glacier basin system that cannot be studied via satellites.”
Scientists
could learn more, said Christianson, about what kind of terrain it is
lying on, and how the ocean is contributing to its melting. Such
inquiries may — or may not — suggest reasons that Thwaites may find some
source of stability, rather than just continuing an unstoppable
retreat.
Getting “up close and personal” with the glacier, added
the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Robin Bell by email, will help
researchers close “critical data and knowledge gaps.”
“This
international program call will enable a focused effort to fill these
gaps by enabling a serious effort to get into the Thwaites regions,”
Bell continued. “The program is based on broad community input and is
the first step to improving our forecast of how fast sea level will rise
globally in the coming decades and centuries.”
“The evidence is
amassing that we really need to understand this better, so that we know
where we’ll be in people’s lifetimes, basically,” said the NSF’s Cutler.
We will soon see a three-peat of record hot annual global temperatures
July 2016 was the hottest month every recorded according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Photograph: GISS/NASA
We know the world is warming – no factor can explain it aside from
human emissions of greenhouse gases. Despite this, people who deny the
basic facts of climate change have tried to argue that the Earth is
either not warming or is only slowly heating. Well that just isn’t true anymore.
The last three years are the nail in the coffin of the deniers of
climate change. We have enough data this year to call 2016 as the
hottest year ever record – and we have three more months left to go.
So, just how hot is 2016? Well my early predictions are shown in the
graph below. I have taken temperature data from NASA and superimposed my
predictions for 2016 – it isn’t even close. And by the way, it doesn’t
matter whose data you use (NASA, NOAA, JMA, Hadley Centre) the results
are the same. 2016 is going to blow 2015 out of the water.
Average global surface temperatures.
A few things to note. First, these temperatures are surface
temperatures that are taken across the globe. But, you can measure
temperatures elsewhere and see the same result. Most importantly,
measurements in the oceans, where 93% of the extra heat is stored are
the best proof of global warming. I recently coauthored an open-access
paper on this very topic which interested readers can get here.
You
can measure sea level rise as the heated water expands, you can measure
ice loss across the globe, you can measure temperatures in the lower
part of the atmosphere. It doesn’t matter where; the story is the same.
What is the big deal? Well first of all, 2016 blows away 2015 which
was previously the hottest year ever and that had beaten 2014 as the
hottest year ever – call this a three-peat. Three records in a row and
the last two are by large margins. Does this mean global warming all of a
sudden has gotten worse?
No, surface temperatures fluctuate a lot – you can see that in the
figure. Temperatures will go up or down from year to year without
apparent reason. This is why we are interested in the long term trends.
This is also why we are interested in looking at other measures of
warming (especially in the oceans). All of our measurements agree with
each other – we know the Earth was warming long before this set of
records began falling in 2014.
One thing these temperatures can do is enable us to compare computer
models with measurements. We’ve seen that models have done an excellent
job of correctly predicting the rate of heating of the Earth. My own
research shows that in the oceans, the models are slightly under-predicting the rate of heating.
To compare models and measurements at the Earth’s surface, I’ve
borrowed a figure from Dr. Gavin Schmidt of Nasa and I’ve overlaid the
2016 surface temperatures. A star shows where 2016 will be. The star
should be compared to the three heavy dashed lines in the figure. The
upper and lower dashed lines show the uncertainty in the models and the
middle dashed line shows the average.
Global surface temperature observations vs. CMIP5 model simulations.
Is the 2016 data within the upper and lower lines? Yes it is.
Is
the 2016 data close to the middle dashed line? Yes again. In fact, the
2016 temperatures are above the average which means the models
under-predicted the temperature of 2016.
Before we get too anxious, it is almost certain that 2017 will be
cooler than 2016. In fact, we may not set another record for a few
years. But just as a few hot years doesn’t prove global warming, a few
cooler years wont disprove it. The long-term trend is clearer upwards
through and the models are spot on.
All this aside, there are still things we can do to bend the arc of
this curve. There are actions we can take as individuals and as
collectives to reduce our emissions and our dependence on polluting
fuels. That message is, and continues to be, the most important one.
But one thing we cannot do is deny facts.
The Oscar-winning actor and environmentalist
has spent the past three years asking a wide variety of people around
the world about climate change. His collection of interviews in the film
– ranging from Barack Obama and the Pope through to Elon Musk and Piers
Sellars – cover the science, impacts, vested interests, politics and
possible solutions.
Carbon Brief was invited to the European premiere of Before the Flood
last weekend. Before the screening in London began, DiCaprio took to
the stage to introduce the film. He said:
“Before The Flood is the product of an incredible
three-year journey that took place with my co-creator and director
Fisher Stevens. We went to every corner of the globe to document the
devastating impacts of climate change and questioned humanity’s ability
to reverse what maybe the most catastrophic problem mankind has ever
faced. There was a lot to take on. All that we witnessed on this journey
shows us that our world’s climate is incredibly interconnected and that
it is at urgent breaking point…I’ve been incredibly moved by so many
climate change documentaries in the past, but I never felt that I saw
one that articulated the science clearly to the public. I think people
grasp it, but it seems something distant, far off, intangible and almost
otherworldly. An individual doesn’t feel like they can make an impact.
The journey for me was to try and make a modern-day film about climate
change. I’ve been studying this issue for the past 15 years, I’ve been
watching it very closely. What’s incredibly terrifying is that things
are happening way ahead of the scientific projections, 15 or 20 years
ago…We wanted to create a film that gave people a sense of urgency, that
made them understand what particular things are going to solve this
problem. We bring up the issue of a carbon tax, for example, which I
haven’t seen in a lot of documentaries. Basically, sway a capitalist
economy to try to invest in renewables, to bring less money and
subsidies out of oil companies. These are the things that are really
going to make a massive difference. It’s gone beyond, as we talk about
in the film, simple, individual actions. We need to use our vote…We
cannot afford to have political leaders out there that do not believe in
modern science, or the scientific method, or empirical truths…We cannot
afford to waste time having people in power that choose to believe in
the 2% of the scientific community that is basically bought off by
lobbyists and oil companies. They are living in the stone ages. They are
living in the dark ages. We need to live in the future.”
Here, Leo Hickman, Carbon Brief’s editor, identifies seven key scenes in Before the Flood…
Setting the scene
In terms of box-office draw alone, Before the Flood is the most significant film about climate change since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
was released a decade ago. DiCaprio has made maximum use of his global
star power to bring together some of the world’s leading voices and
experts on climate change and package them up into 90-minute narrative
which drips with urgency, insights and emotion.
It opens with a surprisingly personal monologue by DiCaprio in which
he talks about the “nightmarish” painting which hung over his crib as a
child. “I would stare at it before I went to sleep,” he explains, noting
some of its themes – “over-population, debauchery, exodus”. Hieronymus
Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
was painted more than 500 years ago, but it speaks to today, he says,
with its “twisted, decayed, burnt landscape”. DiCaprio says the triptych‘s
final panel shows a “paradise that’s been degraded and destroyed”. The
film is named after the middle panel – Humankind before the Flood –
which, he says, acts as an allegorical warning to the world of what
could come next, if it fails to act on climate change.
DiCaprio then sets off around the world on his quest for answers: “I
want to see exactly what is going on and how to solve it.” But
self-doubt looms large from the off, even after he is named by Ban
Ki-moon as the UN messenger of peace on climate change.
“Try to talk to anyone about climate change and people just tune out.
They might have picked the wrong guy.” As DiCaprio says this, a montage
plays of clips showing his media critics, such as Fox News’ Sean Hannity, attacking him for his lack of scientific credentials and celebrity lifestyle.
However, DiCaprio is frank about how his fame has afforded him such a
privileged perspective: “First time I heard of global warming was when I
sat down one-to-one with Al Gore [in the early 2000s]. This is most
important issue of our time, he said. I had no idea what he was talking
about.”
After viewing tar sands in Canada by helicopter – “kinda looks like Mordor”
– and narwhal whales in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, DiCaprio explains
what, in his view, has changed in the time since he received Gore’s
climate lesson.
“Everyone was focused on small individual actions
[back then]. Boiled down to simple solutions such as changing a light
bulb. It’s pretty clear that we are way beyond that now. Things have
taken a massive turn for the worse.”
The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch from 1485. Photo: Damian Michaels via Flickr.
1) Prof Jason Box
DiCaprio is helicoptered onto the Greenland ice sheet, where he meets with Jason Box,
a professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS).
Box has spent many Arctic summers monitoring the stability of the ice
sheet, as well as, in more recent years, the way soot from forest fires
and the burning of fossil fuels has darkened the snow and, hence, the ice’s reflectivity, or albedo. As they both stare at a torrent of water rushing down into a moulin, Box’s concern about the long-term melting trend is palpable:
“We keep finding things that aren’t in the climate
models. That tells me that the projections for the future are really
conservative. If the climate stays at the temperature that it’s been in
in the last decade, Greenland is going away.”
DiCaprio gently mocks Box’s equipment for measuring the ice.
“This is a climate station? I was imagining a massive
igloo with all kinds of scientists and experiments. It really does look
like broken down pool equipment.”
Then he questions why there is a long spiral of plastic hose laying on the ice. Box explains:
“The hose went down 30 feet, but [the ice] has now
melted out. Five years of melt. Hundreds of cubic kilometres of ice
stored on land that has now gone into the sea.”
2) Prof Michael E Mann
No movie is complete without the bad guys. And DiCaprio is keen to
stress the role that “corporate interests” have played in spreading
“disinformation” about climate change.
A cast of villains is introduced ranging from right-wing newspapers and TV networks in the US through to politicians and “front groups”. All seek to cast doubt on the science and, in doing so, attack climate scientists.
No scientist has been more in the crosshairs than Michael E Mann, the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center who is best known for his famous hockey stick graph showing a recent spike in global temperatures.
Publishing that graph proved to be a huge turning point, Mann tells DiCaprio:
“I set myself up for a completely different life…I
was vilified…I was called a fraud. I was being attacked by Congressmen. I
had death threats, which were actionable enough that the FBI had to
come to my office to look at an envelope that had white powder [in it].
I’ve had threats made against my family. These folks know they don’t
have to win a legitimate scientific debate. They just need to divide the
public. All of that hatred and fear is organised and funded by just a
few players. Fossil fuel interests…finance a very large echo chamber of
climate change denialism. They find people with very impressive looking
credentials who are willing to sell those credentials to fossil fuel
interests. Front groups funded by corporate interests.”
DiCaprio’s frustration is clear: “If I were a scientist, I would be absolutely pissed every day of my life.”
Footage from Frank Capra’s 1958 short film for Bell Labs, The Unchained Goddess, which explains what impact burning fossil fuels will have on the climate, plays in the background.
“We’ve know about this problem for decades and decades,” laments
DiCaprio. “Imagine the world right now if we’d taken the science of
climate change seriously back then. Since then our population has grown
by five billion people and counting. The problem has become more
difficult to solve.”
3) Dr Sunita Narain
After a trip to Beijing to witness the smog and speak to experts
about how releasing pollution data to citizens has helped to change
public attitudes, DiCaprio arrives in India.
His meeting with Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment, provides, arguably, the key scene of the whole film. They discuss
the sweetspot of the climate conundrum: how do developing nations with
fast-rising populations raise standards of living for all without
emitting vast volumes of greenhouse gases?
“We are a country where energy access is as much a challenge as
climate change,” says Narain. “We need to make sure that every Indian
has access to energy.”
DiCaprio mulls on that: “From what I understand, there are 300
million people without power in India. That’s equivalent to the entire
population of the United States.”
As footage shows women in the village of Kheladi in Haryana burning uplas (cowdung cakes), Narain passionately lays out India’s predicament: SN: Coal is cheap, whether you or I like it or not.
You have to think of it from this point of view. You created the problem
in the past. We will create it in the future. We have 700m household
using biomass to cook. If those households move to coal, there’ll be
that much more use of fossil fuels. Then the entire world is fried. If
anyone tells you that the world’s poor should move to solar and why do
they have to make the mistakes we have made…I hear this from American
NGOs all the time. I’m like, wow. I mean, if it was that easy, I would
really have liked the US to move to solar. But you haven’t. Let’s put our money where our mouth is. LD: We have to practice what we preach. Absolutely. SN: I’m sorry to say this, and I know you’re
American, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but your consumption
is really going to put a hole in the planet. I think that’s the
conversation we need to have. I’ll show you charts from this
perspective. [Shows page from a book.] Electricity consumed by one
American at home is equivalent to 1.5 citizens of France, 2.2 citizens
of Japan and 10 citizens of China, 34 of India and 61 of Nigeria. Why?
Because you’re building bigger, you’re building more and using much more than before. The fact is we need to put the issue of lifestyle and consumption at the centre of climate negotiations. LD: Look, there’s no way I don’t agree with you.
Absolutely correct. Yes, it’s a very difficult argument to present to
Americans that we need to change our lifestyle and I would probably
argue that it’s not going to happen. If we want to solve the climate
crisis on, hopefully, that renewables like solar and wind will become
cheaper and cheaper as more money is funnelled into them, and we invest
into them, and, ultimately, we will solve that problem. But I… [Narain
shakes her head.] You are shaking your head, obviously… SN: I’m shaking my head Indian style, which means
“no”. Who will invest? Let’s be real about this. Who will invest? And
how will they invest? We are doing more investment into solar today.
China is doing much more investment in solar today than the US is. What
is the US doing which the rest of the world can learn from? You are a
fossil-addicted country, but if you are seriously disengaging, that’s
something for us to learn from. And it’s leadership that we can hold up
to our government and say if the US is doing – and the US is doing it –
then, despite all the pressures, then we can do it as well… But it’s
just not happening. People like us, we are rich enough to withstand the
first hit of climate change. But it’s the poor of India, it’s the poor
of Africa, the poor of Bangladesh, who are impacted today in what I
believe are the first tides of climate change…We need countries to
believe that climate change is real and it is urgent. It’s not a figment
of their imagination
The scene concludes with DiCaprio musing on his conversation with Narain:
“There’s no doubt we have all benefitted from fossil
fuels. I know I have. My footprint is probably a lot bigger than most
people’s. And there are times when I question what is the right thing to
do. What actions should we be taking? There are over a billion people
out there without electricity. They want lights. They want heat. They
want the lifestyle that we’ve had in the United States for the last
hundred years. If we are going to solve this problem, we all have a
responsibility to set an example. And, more than that, help the
developing world to transition before it’s too late.”
4) Prof Gidon Eshel
It is well known that DiCaprio has donated a significant proportion of his wealth and time to various habitat conservation projects, notably focused on oceans and tropical forests. So it isn’t a surprise that he visits such locations in Before the Flood.
He views dead coral with marine biologist Jeremy Jackson. (“We’re pushing this system really hard.”) He flies over Sumatran forests being cleared by palm oil plantations with HAkA’s Farwiza Farhan. (“I’ve never seen anything like this.”) He feeds baby orangutans at a rescue centre in the Mount Leuser National Park with Dr Ian Singleton. (“They are refugees from the burning forest.”)
The message is clear. Lifestyle choices are damaging these
carbon-absorbing habitats. Boycott companies which use palm oil to make
their products, urges DiCaprio. Switch from eating beef to chicken.
This particular suggestion is put forward by the next person DiCaprio visits. Gidon Eshel, a professor of environmental science and physics at Bard College in New York, was the lead author of a study published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It made headlines around the world and found that beef is about 10 times more damaging to the environment than any other form of livestock. Eshel says:
“Of all the reasons for tropical deforestation, the
foremost is beef. Beef is one of the most inefficient use of resources
on the planet. In the US, 47% of land is used for food production and,
of that, the lion’s share is just to grow feed for cattle. The things
that we actually eat – fruit, vegetables, nuts – it’s a per cent. Most
importantly, cows produce methane. And methane is a powerful greenhouse
gas…About 10-12% of total US emissions is due to beef. It’s
staggering…Maybe not everyone is ready to eat tofu 24/7. I get that. But
even if you just have to have some flesh between your teeth, if you
switch to chicken, you will have eliminated 80% of what you emit,
depending on where you are coming from.”
5) Elon Musk
DiCaprio in now looking out across Los Angeles from a vantage point up in the Hollywood hills.
“Every single light that you see has to be completely
different – has to come from a new power source. We need to build all
those things differently. All the cars that are on the road need to be
different. This is one city. If you zoom out to a map of the world at
night, you see electrification all over the world. And we’re fighting
powerful fossil fuel interests who basically want to keep doing business
as usual. How are we possibly going to turn all this around?”
Next he is in the Nevadan desert visiting the “gigafactory“, the latest project of Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Once at full operation by 2020, the vast factory aims to be producing
annually 500,000 electric vehicles and batteries/cells equal to 85 GWh/yr. Musk explains why this could be a game-changer: EM: What would it take to transition the whole world
to sustainable energy? What kind of throughput would you actually need?
You need a hundred gigafactories. LD: A hundred of these? EM: A hundred. Yes. LD: That would make the United States… EM: No, the whole world. LD: The whole world?! EM: The whole world. LD: That’s it?! That sounds manageable. EM: If all the big companies do this then we can
accelerate the transition and if governments can set the rules in favour
of sustainable energy, then we can get there really quickly. But it’s
really fundamental: unless they put a price on carbon… LD: …then we are never going to be able to make the transition in time, right? EM: Only way to do that is through a carbon tax.
[Carbon Brief has asked Tesla to explain how Musk arrived at this
“100 gigafactory” claim. This article will be updated, if a reply is
received.]
To drive this point home, DiCaprio then speaks to Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, who has long argued
for a carbon tax. (“Let me get this straight, you’re a Republican who
wants more taxes?”) During a “call to action” segment at the end of the
film before the credits roll, a link to Carbotax.org is shown.
6) Barack Obama
When you’re Leonardo DiCaprio you can request a meeting with anyone
on the planet. Which other filmmaker could include personal
conversations with the US president, the Pope and the UN secretary general in one film?
However, given the imminent entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change, it is DiCaprio’s exchange with Barack Obama at the White House which provides the most insight. BO: [Paris] creates the architecture. I was happy
with that. The targets set in Paris are nowhere near enough, compared to
what the scientists tell us we need to solve this problem. But if we
can use the next 20 years to apply existing technologies to reduce
carbon emissions and then start slowly turning up the dials as new
technologies come online, and we have more and more ambitious targets
each year, then we’re not going to completely reverse the warming that
now is inevitable, but we could stop it before it becomes
catastrophic…Even if someone came in [to the White House] denying
climate science, reality has a way of hitting you on the nose if you’re
not paying attention and I think the public is starting to realise the
science, in part because it is indisputable. LD: You have access to information. What makes you terrified? BO: A huge proportion of the world’s population
lives near oceans. If they start moving, then you start seeing scarce
resources are subject to competition between populations. This is the
reason the Pentagon has said this is a national security issue. And this is in addition to the sadness I would feel if my kids could never see a glacier the way that I did when I went up to Alaska. I want them to see the same things that I saw when I was growing up.
7) Dr Piers Sellers
There are very few people who can say they’ve had the privilege of being able to look down at the Earth from space. Piers Sellers,
the British-born astronaut, spent a total of 35 days in orbit in the
1990s on three separate flights aboard the space shuttle. But back on
Earth, he has spent much of his professional life modelling the climate
system at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Earlier this year, he wrote in the New York Times about how being diagnosed with terminal cancer has sharpened his thinking on climate change.
Sitting in front of a huge screen showing NASA visualisations of the Earth’s climate in motion, Sellers explains to DiCaprio how he views the current changes to the climate as a scientist. PS: I realised that, as the science community, we
have not done the best job, frankly, of communicating this threat to the
public. When you go up there and see it with your own eye, you see how
thin the world’s atmosphere is. Tiny little onion skin around the
Earth…[Sellers shows a visualisation.] Here’s an example of one thing we
can see – ocean surface temperature, as measured from space. You can
see the poles melting. LD: Wow. PS: This is the way to do it, man. This is the way to really see what’s going on. This is the Gulf Stream. Look at this. This is the motion of the ocean. LD: This is like a great piece of art. PS: It is, isn’t it? The biggest impact will be here. [Sellers points.] LD: In the Gulf Stream. PS: This current… the dumping of ice off Greenland
could stop this conveyor belt and the Gulf Stream would slow down and
stop its transport of heat from here to there and then Europe would get
cold toes because there is a lot of heat transport from across the
tropics, across the north Atlantic that keeps Europe warm. LD: Europe would get colder? A big misconception with climate change is that everything gets warmer. PS: And here’s the most advanced precipitation
satellite in the world. It’s very important, because we think the
biggest impact from climate change is the moving of the precipitation belts from the equator to further out. We’re already seeing more persistent drought… LD: …more drought in places that are already too hot? PS: Yes. And there are a lot of papers written in
the States and elsewhere about how that same drought has help to fuel
conflict in the Syrian civil war, Darfur, Sudan, all these places that are short of water and short of food. LD: Is just here or across the whole planet? PS: We are expecting elsewhere. Bits of India. In the US, in Oklahoma, the Dust Bowl region, we expect that to be much, much drier over the next few decades. LD: Oh my god. And what about my home state of California? PS: Not looking great, I’m afraid. Our models
predicted persistent drought in the Dust Bowl and here 50 years from
now. But we’re just seeing the worst drought in 900 years
here right now, so it’s coming a bit earlier than we thought. We’re
talking about this happening over the period of a few decades… LD: This is not great news. PS: People get confused about the issue, but the facts are crystal clear – the ice is melting, the Earth is warming, the sea level is rising
– those are facts. Rather than being, “oh my god, this is helpless”,
say, “OK, this is the problem, let’s be realistic and let’s find a way
out of it”. And there are ways out of it. If we stopped burning fossil
fuels right now, the planet would still keep warming for a little while
before cooling off again. LD: Would that Arctic ice start to then increase again? PS: Once the cooling started, yeah. LD: So there really is a possibility to repair this trajectory that we’re on? Interesting. PS: Yeah. There’s hope…I’m basically an optimistic
person. I really do have faith in people. And I think once people come
out of the fog of confusion on this issue and the uncertainty on this
issue and realistically appreciate it on some level as a threat, and are
informed on some level on what the best action is to do to deal with
it, they’ll get on and do it and what seemed almost impossible to deal
with becomes possible.
Before the Flood opens in cinemas on 21 October and will be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel on 30 October.
