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Leonardo DiCaprio: Over the last 250 years we have, in effect,
conducted the largest science experiment in history.
Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution,
we have burned over 1.4 trillion tons of carbon
into the atmosphere.
It has changed life on earth as we know it,
especially in the Arctic.
The melting of the world's snow and ice
has now triggered multiple climate tipping points,
threatening the very existence of life on earth.
Yet this disturbing future need not be set in stone.
We have long had alternatives to fossil fuels.
But more recently, we have actually discovered
how to pull carbon out of the atmosphere,
giving us a chance at reversing climate disruption.
If we are able to reverse climate change in time,
it would be an unprecedented achievement in human history.
But the clock is ticking.
Scientists say we must implement these solutions immediately.
At this critical turning point, we must give a voice
to the impartial experts who have presented us
with the facts they have spent a lifetime to uncover.
It is their time to be heard.
They are the scientists, researchers and innovators
who have found the solutions
to preserve the very life of our shared world.
Jennifer Frances Morse: There is a couple different projects
that require manual sampling.
So one of them is the long-term CO2 record.
And the way it's set up, you still need a person
to come physically take the sample every Tuesday.
I'm the person that gets to go in the Sno-Cat
to take the measurements.
We want to keep that long-term record going
the way it's always been taken.
DiCaprio: Monitoring and tracking what we're doing to our atmosphere
is a serious and difficult endeavor.
For the last 50 years,
dedicated researchers from around the world
travel weekly to the same locations,
taking samples of greenhouse gases
that cause climate disruption.
So we're at about 11 and a half thousand feet at Niwot Ridge
in the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
And this is NOAA's long-term CO2 sampling site here.
It's the third longest in the world.
So, these are the flasks that we're gonna use
to collect our sample, made out of glass.
And after we're done today filling them with air, we'll ski 'em down to our office,
and then we'll take them down to NOAA's office in Boulder where they get analyzed
along with similar flasks from all over the world.
The reason we do it up here
and a lot of the sampling sites are high up in the atmosphere
is the air up here is well mixed
so you're getting a good sample of the whole atmosphere.
There's the little inlet on the roof.
When I turn on the pump,
it's gonna suck the air into these flasks.
This is actually the whole...
carbon cycle and greenhouse gases,
and CO2 and methane are the big ones.
When they took the first sample in 1968,
it measured 322 parts per million.
And now we don't know what this sample's gonna measure yet,
but it's probably gonna be around 408.
So, it's a little bit of an increase.
And now I'm just putting everything away
and getting it ready for next week's sample.
Patricia Lang: One of NOAA's missions since its inception
was to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
and other gases that affect the carbon cycle.
Two samples are collected every week
from around the globe.
So we're looking to see how these gases change with time.
And the way to do that is to continuously collect samples.
Currently, we have about 60 locations.
Most of the samples are collected in remote areas
away from population centers.
And we measure them on this set of instruments
for six gases that affect the carbon cycle.
Those gases are carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide,
molecular hydrogen, nitrous oxide
and sulfur hexafluoride.
This system runs five days and five nights a week,
24 hours a day.
So what I'm doing right now
is putting the air samples on the manifold
and start the measurements.
And then I can walk away.
Pieter Tans: I lead NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.
The aim of the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network
is to provide data that are fully calibrated,
carefully quality controlled and documented.
Data that will still be fully credible
a hundred years from now and longer,
so that as climate change is happening now
and in the future over the earth,
there will be information for scientists
that they can really trust
so that they can diagnose what actually happened
and how climate change actually happens, how it works.
So modern CO2 measurements
were initiated by Dave Keeling,
a description situation of oceanography.
Around 1956, he started measuring along the west coast.
He saw that during mid-afternoon wherever he was,
he found pretty much the same concentration everywhere.
And so it got into his head the idea that maybe
there's something that we can call
a background concentration.
He started continuous measurements then
at Mauna Loa Island of Hawaii
and on the coast of Antarctica.
The last ice age at the end of that glaciation
from 20,000 to 11,000 years ago,
CO2 increased by about 80 ppm
from 200 to 280, roughly.
It was very slow.
It took 6,000 years for CO2 to climb the 80 ppm.
Six thousand years!
In pre-industrial times,
so before 1850,
CO2 was close to 280 ppm.
And now of course we see 2 ppm per year.
That increase was due 100% to human activities.
The spike that we now see,
compared to most geologic history,
I call it an explosion.
( sighs ) It's...
It's like instantaneous in geologic time scale.
DiCaprio: Carbon has increased dramatically
since the Industrial Revolution.
But what does that actually mean for all of us?
What we have learned is that excess carbon
creates climate disruption.
It changes the weather patterns and life support systems
upon which society depends to survive.
Thom Hartmann: We have always known
that there's a toxicity associated with fossil fuels,
but we'd always thought that it was basically a toxicity
that would affect humans,
you know, or other individual life forms.
It's really only in the--
within my lifetime certainly
that it has become frighteningly apparent
that the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere
has caused it to warm up.
This greenhouse effect, this toxicity,
impacts the life systems of the planet as a whole.
And, you know, once I got that back in the mid-90s,
I had to start talking about it
and we've been talking about it ever since.
Dr. Michael Mann: When we talk about dangerous planetary warming,
we're referring to something akin to a two degree Celsius,
that's about three and a half degree Fahrenheit
warming of the planet relative to pre-industrial times.
That is where we start to see some of the worst
and potentially irreversible impacts of climate change:
substantial melting of the ice sheets
and associated substantial rise in sea level,
permanent droughts in mid-latitudes,
and the list goes on.
Well, catastrophic would be we melt the major ice sheets,
the Greenland ice sheet and the West Antarctic ice sheet
as all the major coastal cities of the world are flooded.
You've got less land.
You've got environmental refugees,
some people leaving those regions.
People leaving the tropics because it's getting too hot
for human habitation.
It's getting too hot for agriculture.
Crops in the tropics will decrease dramatically
in their productivity.
In short, you're looking at a world with less land,
less food, less water and more people.
And that's a recipe for a national security disaster.
Jim White: I work on the carbon cycle,
tasks that I've taken on for more than 30 years
and truth be told, I figured
we would have done something about this 20 years ago
and I could be off doing something else,
but I'm still doing what I'm doing.
If you think about the relationship
between carbon dioxide and sea level,
there's a couple of interesting points in that relationship.
One of them is when CO2 goes up to roughly 400 parts per million.
That is warm enough that we melt off chunks of Antarctica,
chunks of Greenland.
And those chunks are the chunks that are
what we call marine base.
So the base of the ice sheet in West Antarctica
is below sea level because it's pinned to the sediments.
And once it starts to melt,
it's one of these freight trains.
We don't know how this thing is gonna stop.
And we're dangerously at that point right now.
The other threshold is somewhere around
six to seven hundred parts per million CO2.
That's warm enough that there is no more ice,
land ice on the planet.
And you have about 80 meters higher sea level.
We are on our way
to six, seven hundred parts per million.
But I think that's one of those interesting threshold moments
in our relationship with the planet where,
are we gonna push the climate system
so far out of balance
that we threaten the melting of all land ice?
Guomundur Ingi Guobrandsson: Yeah, it has changed.
Icelandic nature is experiencing change
because of climate change.
This is quite visible in the south coast, for example.
Our largest glacier, Glacier Vatnajokull
or Water Glacier if you translate it directly,
has also retreated quite a lot.
There is one very interesting observation
that everybody noticed when they drive the south coast now
and that is that they drive over the longest bridge in Iceland,
almost one kilometer in length,
and there is almost no water under it.
So you think, OK, why building such a big bridge
for almost no water?
Well, this is just climate change.
The river changed its course
is because of the retreat of the glacier.
So now we have this sort of monument,
a symbolic thing of the past.
DiCaprio: The Arctic is a profoundly different place right now.
In the Arctic, the impacts of climate change
are the most extreme.
What scientists are finding is that what happens in the Arctic
has major impacts for the rest of the planet.
Catherine Lund Myhre: I am working with measuring greenhouse gases
at the Arctic location
and understanding how the greenhouse gases
are changing over time.
I am concerned about the increase of temperature in the Arctic
and the impact this might have on all the Arctic systems.
But what I think is extremely important to be aware of
is that with the sea ice reduction we have now
and all the other changes,
you might change the whole weather system,
and this has global impact.
We know that the changes that we see in Arctic
does not only stay in the Arctic.
Peter Wadhams: Yeah, I've been working on sea ice
the last 50 years pretty much.
And the whole Arctic has changed so much in that time.
Loss of ice, loss of not only a loss of area of ice,
but the loss of the appearance
of the great ice fields of the past
with huge pressure ridges and very, very thick ice.
Really dramatic ice scenery has all gone.
Last month I was up in the Barents Sea
on a research cruise in a region where
normally you would have quite a lot of multiyear ice.
We couldn't find any multiyear ice.
So the ice was all very thin, 30 centimeters thick.
The Arctic Ocean is no longer a continent of ice
but something that becomes just water in summer.
There is a real, a huge loss as far as beauty is concerned,
but also as far as the physics of how the planet operates.
The ice is disappearing because the climate's warming,
that's pretty obvious that will happen,
but there's much more to it than that,
because in fact you have
many other feedback mechanisms going on
which cause the effects on the planet
to be far worse than just the retreat of the ice.
So the Arctic's warming up
three times faster than the rest of the world
and the temperature difference
between the Arctic and lower latitudes
is getting less, and that means
that the jet stream is getting to be weaker.
And as it gets weaker,
it goes from being almost a straight line
to becoming big lobes reaching up north and south.
And with it, when you have a lobe like that,
it means that polar air can come down
to lower latitudes than it normally reaches in one sector,
and then in the sector to the east or west of it,
you've got warm air going up north
further than it should do.
So you're getting bizarre weather extremes
which of course everybody's been commenting on.
The trouble is where these air masses
are causing such extreme changes
happens to be the latitudes
at which you have the maximum food production.
Suddenly our ability to feed everyone
is being affected by these polar changes.
You can't take that amount of ice away
without affecting so many other things.
DiCaprio: The impact of our actions are starting to hit home.
Scientists' predictions are now coming true
sooner than expected.
We are tragically suffering through severe storms,
droughts, floods and fires
that are progressively becoming more intense
and more unpredictable.
Elizabeth Brown: Fires started almost simultaneously
in multiple places.
Over 7,000 structures were destroyed
and about 3,000 homes.
I think at the height in the early days of the fire,
maybe about 100,000 people were evacuated.
It's a collective trauma.
Fire Chief Tony Gossner: Sounded like a war zone, looked like a war zone.
They talk about the Hanley Fire, it took a day to get here.
It burned about the same footprint, but it took about a day.
It burned less than 200 structures.
This fire started at night,
made it to Santa Rosa in four, four and a half hours,
and there's no comparison other than the footprint.
Cal Fire Incident Management Team
came here to help run this incident
and he just shook his head and said,
"Man, I've never seen anything like this.
I've been doing this a long time."
So that's not terribly comforting,
but that's where we're at right now.
If we keep having these wind events,
how do we protect our citizens?
How do we protect our infrastructure?
What are the things that we can do
to make it as good as possible?
We've been through four, five years of drought.
That drought stresses all the brush, all the trees.
And the winds at Geyser Peak on one of the weather station
was clocked at 108 miles an hour.
And I don't know what you do with those kinds of winds.
When something catches on fire,
it's all you can do to try to figure out where it's going
and how fast it's gonna get there.
I never would have thought a fire
would come out of the hills and run the flats in Santa Rosa.
I really didn't.
Cars were being flipped over.
There were shoebox chunks of, you know, embers
that were being carried well ahead of the fire.
You'll see there's some trees
where all the limbs are just, they're snapped off.
They're not burned off, they're snapped off.
Brown: These natural disasters are so common now
that people know it's gonna happen to their community.
It's not like a matter of if, but when.
It is a wake-up call to everyone
that climate change is here
and that you need to plan for it.
DiCaprio: Climate disruption is causing a rise in extinctions today,
but this isn't the first time.
Scientists studying geological records have shown
there is a connection between spikes in carbon
and the past five mass extinctions.
There is a natural law
that the carbon cycle affects the fabric of life.
Every time there has been a massive increase in carbon,
the web of life weakens and sometimes collapses.
Daniel Rothman: I've been working on the way in which the carbon cycle
is associated with the occurrence of mass extinctions
and whether the carbon cycle can undergo instabilities associated with them.
So the carbon cycle is where life
and the environment interact.
You can think of it as one grand loop between photosynthesis,
which is a process that takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
and converts it to oxygen and plant matter or organic carbon.
And then the back reaction of the loop we call respiration
which is the process via which we convert that plant matter to carbon dioxide.
The grand loop of the carbon cycle takes about
a hundred gigaton of carbon out of the atmosphere and oceans every year
and it returns it each year.
So this is a hundred gigatons out
and a hundred gigatons back in.
But what we're contributing is on the order of about 8% from fossil fuel burning.
It's an 8% increase compared to what is normally going back and forth in a year.
It turns out to be more than what volcanoes are putting into the system.
Janine Benyus: The planet is constantly in the process
of rebalancing its cycles, like its water cycle
and its nitrogen cycle and its carbon cycle.
You've gotta think of it as it's in constant flow.
And part of the planet's doing that, you know,
was to take all the carbon that was in the dinosaurs and land plants
and press that into eventually oil and fossil fuels.
Over long periods of time it was sequestered
and we're a young species.
And we were curious and we dug up the carbon
that had been sequestered by the earth.
And we burned it, not knowing it was like
burning furniture in a house with its windows closed.
So what's happened
is that the planet is reeling from that.
There's an excess of carbon up in the atmosphere.
What it's doing is causing the living conditions
here on earth to go out of balance.
So as a biologist, when I look at climate change,
yes, I look at rising seas and melting polar caps.
Those are evidence for me.
But when we begin to look at what's happening
to the biological organisms in response to the warming trends,
they are already on the move.
They're moving towards the poles to get cooler.
They're moving from the lower mountains up in elevation,
meaning their ranges are moving.
They also sometimes move without their helpers.
A plant will move north and its pollinator won't make it.
This is called in our bloodless language of science,
it's called ecological disruptions.
So for me, if we change the very conditions
that gave rise to all of this,
and to us, we--
It's gonna get crazy.
Rothman: When the carbon cycle is unstable,
it moves into a realm that we don't understand.
Going back to geologic time is that occasionally
there are these essentially bursts within the carbon cycle
in which things change.
One of them which is widely known
as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maxima
55 million years ago.
And others which are decidedly worse.
They're destructive or catastrophic events.
They're mass extinctions.
The worst of them known as the Permian Extinction.
So that's the historical record
but what we're doing to the carbon cycle now
is another kind of problem
because now we know what's going on.
We know that we have been adding carbon dioxide
as a consequence of fossil fuels.
And then the question is, does that risk
engendering the kind of bursts that we've seen in the past
that could create what I would call
an instability in the carbon cycle?
That is one in which small changes
become bigger changes.
That's a precise scientists' definition of catastrophe.
When you get down to the individual level,
losing one's home to a flood is a catastrophe.
Mann: We can still avoid
breaching that dangerous limit of two degrees,
but if you do the math,
with each passing year of relative inaction,
it's getting more and more difficult
to limit our carbon emissions
and remain under two degrees Celsius warming.
DiCaprio: We know we have put too much carbon into the atmosphere.
But how much is too much?
Scientists have figured out what that amount is
and have created a carbon budget
that will create a margin for life.
This budget tells us where we are now,
how much more carbon we can burn
and how much needs to be removed
in order to sustain life on earth as we know it.
Ottmar Edenhofer: I would say the major challenge
is indeed dangerous climate change.
And if we want to avoid dangerous climate change,
well, then we have to accept that the atmosphere
is for humankind a limiting disposal space.
So roughly we can emit 800 gigatons CO2
into the atmosphere in this limiting disposal space.
And if you take into account that over the last five years
we have already used 200 gigatons,
so this basically means that over the next two decades
we have exhausted the limiting disposal space.
So in Paris it was very important
that the whole world and the whole world leaders
agreed on limiting temperature increase
to well below two degrees.
So that's the kind of safeguard line
and it's very important that
more than a hundred nations stand behind it.
So imagine the volume that is in this ball.
That's a kind of symbol for the CO2
that is still in the ground in terms of coal
or in the form of oil and gas.
So this is the amount of carbon.
And if we want to limit the temperature
to two degrees globally, we may only emit
this little amount of carbon into the atmosphere.
And to see that we have a lot more of carbon
still stored in the ground that we can emit in the atmosphere
when we want to limit the temperature to two degrees.
So therefore the question is, how does it fit together?
So, now for the next 20 years,
this is an enormous important time span
to transform our economies,
to decouple economic growth from emission growth.
And by middle of the century, we need zero emissions,
and after 2050 you need even negative emissions.
The carbon clock is just informing people where we are now.
What is the pathway how we exhaust
the limiting disposal space of the atmosphere.
And this is a huge challenge for humankind.
DiCaprio: Science tells us that our current climate crisis
is a problem we've created.
But it is also a problem we can fix.
Not only do we need to stop emitting carbon at the current levels
by switching to renewable energy,
but it is also critical to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
Climate change can be reversed if we act now.
Recently researchers have figured out what solutions
can draw carbon down, getting us back to pre-industrial levels.
Paul Hawken: There's only two things you can do about the atmosphere.
You can either stop putting greenhouse gases up there
or you can bring CO2 back down. That's it.
And you can do the first one by conservation,
energy efficiency and clean energy.
And the second one through photosynthesis,
whether it's on land, on farms, on forests, phytoplankton,
kelp in the oceans; there's only two things you can do.
So that actually sorts it pretty simply.
And in the past what has been done in terms of solutions
is that it's focused on energy.
Energy, energy, energy.
And the reason for that is understandable.
So it makes perfect sense to say,
"Well, let's stop putting that CO2 up there,"
excepting that in the process of emphasizing clean energy,
renewable energy, solar, wind, et cetera,
it's sort of occluded the rest of the solutions.
The purpose of Drawdown is to see
if the 80 solutions that we had modeled
would scale to the point where we could reverse global warming
within 30 years,
going from reduce to reverse.
The bend the carbon curve,
what Drawdown shows, is that we have choices.
And that if we increase the rate that we're scaling some of the solutions,
then we could achieve Drawdown at 2050.
And if you say the odds are long,
I agree, they're long odds.
I'll take 'em.
Linwood Gill: My name is Linwood Gill.
I'm the Chief Forester for the Usal Redwood Forest Company.
Usal Redwood Forest is a community forest,
it's owned by a non-profit, the Redwood Forest Foundation.
It's a 50,000 acre forest
which is dedicated to managing the forest
on a long-term basis
for the economic stability of the community,
as well as restoring the forest habitat,
restoring the fish habitat,
and also for sequestering carbon.
And carbon sequestration is a main part of our operations right now.
Carbon sequestration is an important part
of combatting climate change.
The Usal Redwood Forest is a very young redwood forest.
and redwoods can absorb more carbon
than any other forest type on the planet.
Redwoods store carbon
by absorbing carbon from carbon dioxide
out of the air into its needles
and stores it into the bowl of the tree,
the trunk or the roots, the branches.
To my knowledge,
this is one of the largest carbon projects
in the country, yes.
I am the Biochar Project Manager
for the Redwood Forest Foundation.
We're sort of at a perfect storm right now in California
where we have over a hundred million dead trees in the Sierra.
And we need to do something with that.
We have what is called the western pine bark beetle,
which makes its living by feeding on ponderosa pine, and other trees as well.
And these beetles have been around for thousands of years
and have lived in harmony and balance with the trees.
But unfortunately, because of climate change
and because of the long drought,
millions of trees are very weak
and have difficulty defending themselves against the beetles.
Biochar can definitely be one of the ways that we address the beetle damage
in the dead and dying trees of the Sierras.
Biochar is essentially the form of charcoal that is suitable
for use in agriculture
and in helping to build more healthy soil.
When you pyrolize woody biomass particularly,
about half of the carbon that is in that woody biomass
can be saved, is a residual charcoal.
And biochar is very much like coral for the soil
in that it can hold nutrients, it can hold water.
It's more of an architecture.
It incubates life.
You're saving about half of the carbon that's in that plant
and then can put it to better use and sequestering it in soil
for great benefit to agriculture.
We have all this biomass that we have to do something with.
They are a fire hazard and, as you know,
right now we have something like ten fires in California.
And by producing biochar we can return some of that material back into the forest
in a safe manner, or we can take some of that biochar
and take it down into the Central Valley,
which desperately needs water savings.
And one of the prime benefits of biochar
is that it can help to retain water in soils.
If we put biochar in just 10% of the world's soil,
we'll actually sequester 29 billion tons of CO2.
29 billion tons. That's on 10%.
And that's using only-- quote-unquote--
"surplus waste material," so that's significant.
Gill: And then we have the carbon offset credits.
And to keep those carbon credits coming,
we have to employ workers to do our forest inventories,
to work with the carbon verifiers
to make sure the carbon that we say is on the property
is on the property,
and then is maintained into the future.
I'd like to think that we're a model that others can join in
and do the same thing that we're doing out here.
This isn't rocket science.
The carbon storage, as we move into the future, is huge.
And we need more larger,
older forests, intact forests,
that we know will never be developed
and can continue into perpetuity.
Kate Scow: I'm Kate Scow, and I'm a professor
in Land, Air and Water Resources
at University of California, Davis.
And I'm a soil microbial ecologist.
So the carbon cycle on a global scale
involves aquatic systems and terrestrial systems.
So soil is a very important part of the terrestrial systems.
Soil actually contains two to three times
the amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere.
Soil is the place where primary productivity is supported.
That means all the vegetation that grows,
that fixes CO2 through photosynthesis
from the atmosphere,
what miraculous, like,
creating mass here on the ground
out of what? Air?
It's, like, still amazing to me.
That productivity brings all this carbon in.
The plant fixes the CO2, it dies,
it falls onto the ground,
and all that plant residue
now enters into the soil carbon cycle.
It's way bigger than the atmosphere,
what is residing in soil.
So organic farms obtain their nutrients
not from synthetic fertilizers.
The fertilizer is in the form of organic material.
That could be cover crops, or it could be compost
that's made of food wastes or yard wastes or animal waste
that you put in the soil.
So in organic systems, you may be putting
up to eight times as much carbon into the soil
compared to a conventional system.
So it's like part of it is really basic.
Benyus: Climate change gives us an opportunity
to really behave differently on this planet.
We see what we can do at our worst,
and now the question is,
if we were to consciously...
be a part of the healing...
it'll unleash, I think, our creativity.
You realize, "Oh my gosh, I have a back yard.
Oh my gosh, I have a park near me."
If we were to see ourselves as helpers
who could help the helpers heal this planet...
that is so much better than seeing ourselves
as disruptive toddlers with matches.
You begin to realize that all of us are somehow connected
to little bits of the solution.
Ietef Vida: Right now we live and direct at my mentor's house,
the OG, the organic gardener, Ron Finley.
I'm more inspired to always come here
and learn and figure out different ways
to how I can actually utilize a small plot of land
to grow the most that I can.
Culinary climate action is basically what I like to see,
when I'm growing the food and it's basically taking all that carbon out the atmosphere,
it's pulling it in.
And we also can see the fact
that we can put it back into the soil.
Now only at the same time it's creating green jobs,
you know, and also addressing things like diabetes and obesity
in my community, where I come from.
You know, there's a lot of plots,
there's a lot of city access,
there's a lot of water that's available.
This is really just a beautiful cause and effect.
We're literally pulling out all the harmful poisons
that we, like, literally just emit into our atmosphere.
And the best way that you want to transform that is by growing some food.
Put it on the roof. Put it in your window sill.
But we feel the heat rising.
You know, being a farmer is being futuristic.
There is no doomsday mentality.
You have to actually plant water
and think that you're going to reap what you sow.
So that's the conversation that I'd like to see
when we're talking about transforming the climate.
It's not gonna happen overnight.
But you do have to start now. Now is the time.
Bren Smith: My name is Bren Smith.
I'm the owner of Thimble Island Ocean Farm.
And we're here in the Thimble Islands in Long Island Sound.
And I was, I'm born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada,
high school dropout, and have fished all over the globe.
I fished in Gloucester up in Newfoundland,
and then I was in the Bering Sea for a bunch of years.
And, you know, that was the height of industrialized fishing.
We were tearing up entire eco-systems with our trawls,
chasing fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea.
So it was completely unsustainable.
In fact, a lot of the fish I was catching
was going to McDonald's for their Fishwich sandwich.
It really caused a wake-up call
for a lot of folks in my generation.
I was actually out in the Bering Sea,
and the cod stocks crashed.
And, you know, thousands of people thrown out of work,
canneries shuttered, and it really taught me
that you can build up an economy and a culture over hundreds of years
and if you don't protect the resources,
eco-system collapse can wipe it out in a matter of years.
And that's when we really begin to realize
that issues like overfishing, like climate change,
that they're not environmental issues
for a lot of us that work on the ocean,
they're economic issues. I mean,
there's gonna be no food, no jobs, on a dead planet.
When I realized this wasn't sustainable,
I went on this search for sustainability.
I remade myself as an oysterman.
And what oysters taught me was that Mother Nature
created these technologies millions of years ago
designed to mitigate our harm.
We don't need advanced technologies.
Mother Nature has seaweeds and shellfish
which sequester five times more carbon than land-based plants,
filter 50 gallons of water a day per oyster
pulling nitrogen out of our system.
I mean, my job as a steward of the ocean
is to take Mother Nature's technologies and grow them.
And it's pretty simple.
So the beautiful thing about if you grow just restorative species,
is there's zero inputs.
We don't need fresh water, we don't need animal feed,
we don't need fertilizer and we don't need land,
making it hands down the most sustainable form of food production
on the planet.
So kelp is this beautiful seaweed.
It's like the gateway drug to a new cuisine.
It's one of the fastest-growing plants on earth.
It soaks up five times more carbon than land-based plants.
It's called the Sequoia of the Sea.
But it's just the beginning.
I mean, we're starting with kelp,
but there are 10,000 edible plants in the ocean.
Part of the plant we can turn into kelp noodles,
but then this is just biofuel we turn into fertilizer
and we can turn into animal feed.
If you provide a seaweed diet to cows,
you get a 90% reduction in methane output.
It's stunning. And cows have been eating--
cows, sheep, goats, have been eating kelp for hundreds of years.
Hebrides Islands, Maine, all sorts of places.
You know, the volume's stunning.
We can do 10 to 20 tons of kelp per acre,
150,000 shellfish.
And you scale this up,
if you were to take a network of our farms
totaling the size of Washington State,
technically you could feed the world.
If you took five percent of U.S. territorial waters
and farmed in our style,
you could create 50 million direct jobs
and sequester the equivalent carbon of 20 million cars.
Our farms also help mitigate acidification.
The kelp creates something called a Halo Effect
which reduces the acidity in the oceans,
which then allow our oysters and other shellfish
to grow thicker shells
and not be as susceptible to acidification.
So, I mean, climate change was supposed to be
this 100-year sort of slow lobster boil.
And instead it's here and now.
Luckily, as fishermen,
we can transition to something that keeps that (indistinct)
and have the pride of helping feed my country,
and that's just so exciting.
I can be part of, you know,
the army that's going to help,
hopefully, save the planet.
If we put 10 units of CO2 in the atmosphere,
ten very large units of CO2 in the atmosphere,
about five stay in the atmosphere
and about two and a half go into plants
and about two and a half goes into the ocean.
So you've got an acidic ocean. So how do you deal with that?
Nature handles this problem by making more shells,
which is the marine snow idea,
that little beasties grow in the water,
they make calcium carbonate shells, so shells fall.
The problem with that is, the planet loves to operate
on time scales of millions of years.
And we don't.
So, question becomes, can you speed that process up?
DiCaprio: We have to investigate all our options.
There are more experimental hypotheses
that still need to be tested.
One solution may lie in a microscopic community of life called marine snow.
Stasa Puskaric: So, fundamentally, what do we need?
Well, we need this planet as it was,
we have to bring it in the state that it was 200 years ago.
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide,
they increase acidity of the ocean.
The oceans are losing their ability
to capture carbon from the atmosphere.
And we have to do something about it.
We have to help these systems
which cycle carbon between the atmosphere,
between the plants on the land,
and between the oceans.
And with marine snow,
it just needs a little help from us.
The main products will be removal of carbon dioxide
and the production of oxygen.
What we can do is
insert into the ocean very small,
minute amounts of iron,
but very, very little,
so it doesn't have anything to do
with that term "fertilization."
To give you a measure, we need altogether
about 6 kilograms of iron for initiating this process
on 100,000 square kilometers of the southern oceans.
The cells form organic matrix,
which is the foundation
for the formation of the marine snow.
It is then, when the matrix appears,
it becomes very attractive for cyanobacteria
and heterotrophic bacteria,
which colonize these particles, and then actively grow.
And then we just let them do their job,
because they can stay suspended
for a very long period of time.
We tracked these marine snow particles
for more than four months...
so they can float around and sequester organic matter,
and when they become heavy,
they simply sink down to the sea floor.
The speed of this change,
and increase in the concentrations and temperature--
we must act.
And we can.
I'm 100% positive that we can achieve
um...reorganization of human activities
to work together with nature, and not against it.
DiCaprio: Science has long proven we have existing technologies
that work, and they are already being implemented.
It's just become a matter of political will and scale.
We need a multitude of solutions moving forward simultaneously.
In order to solve this crisis,
it is critical we move to 100% renewable energy now.
Hawken: So, the top five solutions,
number two was onshore wind, and that wasn't a surprise.
Onshore wind, though, being much greater than solar,
was a surprise to us.
Solar was number eight in ten, actually.
Martin Hermann: The sun is the largest resource we have.
All the other resources pale compared to the sun.
We have known that for a long time,
we just never understood how to harvest it in an economic way.
That's what's different now.
Solar PV is in a stage where we're already lower than fossil fuel.
Well, solar has come a long way.
Carter in the '80s already installed solar in the White House.
Reagan tore it down later on.
And only in 2001,
when Germany started to deploy solar on a large scale,
we have been getting the benefit of economy of scale.
Eventually we will be able to power
the entire electrical grids with solar and wind,
and all we need is wind and storage, and solar and storage.
So, if you want to power the entire United States with photovoltaic,
we would need about 30,000 square miles in area.
That would give us enough to power
all the power grids in every state of the United States.
Mount Signal is a project that powers about 70,000 homes in San Diego.
The second phase, the power is going to be wheeled to Southern California.
The price of electricity that we produce at Mount Signal
is already lower than fossil fuels.
It's also a price that delivers fuel price certainty to the utility.
The price is flat over the next 25 years,
not something that you get from any other fossil fuel energies.
We have integrated so much solar in California already.
Ten years ago, people would've said, "No, that's not really possible."
Well, here we are, solar is covering already
up to 25% of California.
The rate payer had no material increase in pricing,
and we're still alive, it all works.
And we have been able to reduce carbon on the way there.
Over the last years we saw now
utilities volunteering to buy solar.
We see this mindset shifting.
We still under-appreciate the value that PV brings.
People do not comprehend that in five years,
we will have PV at much lower price.
We will be able to dispatch it at night,
and you combine that with wind, you get this paradigm
where we are truly living in a hundred percent renewable environment.
And this is feasible.
We don't need any new invention for that,
we know all the technology.
We just need to make sure that the people responsible
for the planning of resources, for the infrastructure planning,
understand that this is a different technology,
and it will get cheaper over time.
Donald Trump: Coal is coming back.
- Clean coal is coming back.
A hundred percent.
My administration is putting an end to the war on coal.
Gonna have clean coal, really clean coal.
Mann: It's difficult enough, sometimes,
to communicate science to the public.
Now, you take that challenge,
and you add to it
a concerted effort by fossil fuel interests
and the front groups that they fund
to pollute the discourse over climate change,
to confuse the public, to confuse policymakers.
We need to transform our energy sector,
move away from fossil fuel energy,
towards renewable energy.
Well, that's rather inconvenient
for the powerful fossil fuel interests
who have many millions of dollars invested
in our continued addiction to fossil fuels.
And they've fought tooth and nail
to maintain that addiction,
in part by attacking the science
linking climate change to that behavior,
the burning of fossil fuels.
A question that we get asked a lot is,
how do we know that the CO2 rise in the atmosphere
is because of human activity.
And the answer is that we leave fingerprints
all over the atmosphere.
And one of the fingerprints that we leave in the atmosphere
is via what we call Carbon-14, or radioactive carbon.
So when we burn coal, oil, and natural gas,
we leave an imprint on the atmosphere
of what we call negative Carbon-14, or less Carbon-14.
Because fossil fuels are so old,
there's no Carbon-14 left, it's all decayed away.
We can actually measure, very accurately,
how much fossil fuels we burn
by measuring C-14 in the atmosphere.
It is nature's verification system that we have.
Wadhams: They've persuaded enough people
and sowed enough doubt
that it's making it more difficult than in the past
to actually get anything done about climate change,
and that's really depressing.
Mann: And the fact is that the agenda
that many of these fossil fuel corporations,
and those who are running them are engaged in, is malicious
in the danger it's creating
and the havoc that it is wreaking on our planet.
Hartmann: So we've got a bunch of people
who are literally profiting off the death of life on Earth.
I think that some climate denial,
particularly the well-funded climate denial,
that is being done by people who know better,
rises to the level of a crime against humanity
that probably should be prosecuted in the Hague.
DiCaprio: While climate deniers have succeeded in delaying action,
a much more ominous problem has emerged.
Very recently, scientists have recorded
increasing levels of methane gas in the atmosphere.
Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas,
has the potential to increase temperatures even further.
Increased methane is a sign
that we are reaching a critical tipping point.
But where is it coming from?
And how much will it accelerate climate disruption?
Scientists are racing to find out.
Gabrielle Petron: So, we are in front of
the University of Wyoming Mobile Laboratory.
We have different instruments inside
that measure what's in the air that we are breathing right now.
It's doing that in real time.
And we are able, like that,
to chase emission sources and plumes,
and understand where sources of pollutions are located,
what activities are going on that lead to enhanced methane.
Inside of our lab, we have a couple instruments.
We have a proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight mass spec
to measure volatile organics like benzene, toluene.
And then we also have a Picarro cavity ring-down
to measure methane concentrations.
We can see data from these instruments in real time
due to an inlet we have up on our mast above the van,
which pulls air in and feeds into our instruments.
Petron: So, we found with aerial and road mapping
that we have more sources of methane in areas
where we extract the gas than we expected.
And to really pinpoint where there are leaks of methane,
you need to be very close to the sources.
And the mobile lab gives us the flexibility
to pinpoint where we see the largest leaks.
The company has drilled brand-new megapad,
22 wells in the middle of renewed urban development
in western Greeley.
This is a site that had a lot of contention,
given its size and its location.
So the local community, from what I've heard,
is not really kept up to breadth
on what's going on at the site.
There's a huge sound wall around the operation,
and the state is not really maybe doing its best
at facilitating the communication.
We saw operations going on with a lot of flaring.
It seems very large volume of gas.
The yellow color of the flame
tells you it's not complete combustion.
So, we are going to continue
doing those drives to understand those sources,
but also to track what the local population may be exposed to.
So some oil- and gas-producing regions
have such a large concentration of methane
in the atmosphere above them that you can see it from space,
and that's something that was described a few years back
for the Four Corners region,
and that's really the key for us to be like detectives
and map where we see the largest sources of emissions.
Don Schreiber: So in 2014,
NASA scientists in cooperation with NOAA,
University of Michigan, and other scientists,
identified a methane hotspot the size of Delaware
in the Four Corners region.
That methane hotspot
is the largest accumulation of methane gases
in the United States.
This ranch, this spot that we're on,
is approximately ground zero.
If you were able to identify a middle
for that Delaware-shaped cloud,
it might very well be right here where we're standing.
And it's closely identified
the cause of that methane hotspot
to be predominantly the emissions from drilling,
such as this site,
as well as coal and other fossil fuels.
So the methane hotspot is identified
basically because of the technology
that NOAA and NASA had
following the advent of the FLIR cameras,
which are the infrared cameras
that let us identify the leaks and vents and flares
that cause the methane hotspot to accumulate.
You have to think of it in its full sense,
and that is 60 years and more
of leaking, venting, flaring,
and careless practices here in the San Juan basin,
over a million acres, in total 30,000 wells,
that have caused that methane hotspot
to finally accumulate
and stand as evidence
of what natural gas drilling
ultimately results in.
People lose sight of the fact
that the conventional wells created the methane hotspot,
and that they are a daily culprit.
So, this is a conventional natural gas well.
This is very typical equipment throughout the San Juan basin
and many gas fields across America.
This one is leaking pretty badly
from some of the standard equipment that's on it.
This just requires, honestly,
a crescent wrench, a little bit of Teflon tape--
some attention will fix this leak.
If I had a single wish,
my wish would be to pull an investor in oil and gas here
and stand them where I'm standing, let them see that leak.
Let them see that times 18,000 in the San Juan basin,
and get them to stop obstructing a federal rule
that stays in place to protect my family,
to protect taxpayers across New Mexico,
and provide federal fair and equal protection
across the western states.
Let's get those guys out of the boardroom,
right here on this well location,
let 'em look at that leak that can be easily fixed.
And when I found out that the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt,
knew that the data had come in
that methane leaks and the chemicals that come with them
harm children to a greater degree than they did to me,
I was just outraged that he would try again
to roll back the federal protections for us.
You know, if someone came onto my ranch
with the stated objective of harming my children,
it would be over my dead body.
Hartmann: 250 million years ago,
sudden releases of methane
produced kind of a secondary effect
that finished off large chunks of life on Earth.
And one of the debates right now
is whether the methane that is buried in the Arctic,
whether the methane that is, you know, in the permafrost,
in the seas all over the world,
how rapidly that will be mobilized,
and how destructive that mobilization will be.
DiCaprio: The release of this ancient methane
may lead to exponentially more warming.
Will this methane create an apocalyptic scenario?
This is a question scientists are desperately trying to answer.
Jurgen Mienert: I'm the director of the Center
for Gas Hydrate, Environment, and Climate.
Here we have a team of 50 to 60 scientists
working on understanding the impact of methane
on the global climate system.
This methane is stored beneath the Arctic Ocean floor
in huge reservoirs,
at locations we sometimes know,
but we often do not know very much about it.
So, we are applying here geophysical methods
to quantify the methane hydrate reservoirs,
and also to see how stable
those methane hydrates are today, but also in the future.
Methane is one of the most aggressive greenhouse gases.
Methane has, fortunately, a shorter lifetime.
The Earth has a natural system for regulating input of methane
from the ocean into the atmosphere.
And this system is working quite efficiently.
But this system is also changing, because the ocean current system is changing,
the ocean temperature is changing,
the ocean chemistry is changing.
So, methane was in a kind of equilibrium for some time,
and during the last couple of years, we see quite a distinct increase in methane.
Do not know where this signal is coming from,
and at the present time, that, of course,
is putting a pressure on the scientific community
to give an answer to the politicians:
what is going on with the methane in the atmosphere?
Where is the methane coming from?
What is presently becoming more unstable?
Lund Myhre: We have done some very comprehensive
measurement campaigns where we have measured
at the sea floor, in the ocean,
at the sea surface, and in the air at the same time
to understand how methane is regulated in this whole system.
There is a lot of methane stored at the sea floor,
and this is so much that only a small change
might impact the ocean, or the atmosphere.
The balance here needs a lot more focus,
a lot more observations, and combining atmosphere,
ocean, climate, different kind of components together.
Pavel Serov: In my profession,
I'm interested in studying methane cold seeps in the ocean,
in the Russian Arctic, and also in the Barents Sea.
It's, well, basically,
streams of gas bubbles rising from the sea floor,
and those gas bubbles are mostly composed of methane gas.
First, it's gas hydrates, that's solid form.
It's basically ice-like structures.
Also, the gas can be present as free gas, which is gas bubbles.
Plumes of methane bubbles can vary.
In some areas in the Arctic,
we find gas seeps as tall as 800, 900 meters.
And the water depth in these areas,
a little more than 1,200 meters.
In shallower areas, we often find gas seeps
that are almost reaching the sea surface.
East Siberian Sea is definitely an area of concern for guys studying methane,
in particular because it's so shallow there.
So, those methane bubbles have really high potential to get to the sea surface.
Some areas, Spitzbergen,
we find the methane flares that are almost reaching the sea surface.
DiCaprio: We have warmed the atmosphere to such a degree
that we have hit the tipping point of a melting Arctic.
We now face the potential
for an abrupt climate change scenario.
Current models predict we will shoot way past the Paris Agreement,
to five degrees and more,
causing even more catastrophic tipping points to be activated.
Rothman: Warming might lead
to large injections of methane into the atmosphere.
It's something we need to be concerned about.
I would only add that it's one of many possible stressors.
We move into a high-risk situation
where we don't really have any experience
and we don't know how to deal with it.
Guobrandsson: The permafrost, and methane in general,
is of a great concern.
And I think that this is something
perhaps we need to pay more attention to methane in general,
in relation to the climate issue.
My concerns are that
there are great reservoirs of methane in the world,
in particular in the Arctic.
It is the risk of going beyond the tipping point
where it will be difficult to go back
and reverse the problem.
Tans: It's a very plausible feedback mechanism that in Arctic soils,
permafrost soils,
there's an enormous amount of organic material frozen.
And the amount that is available there, potentially,
to turn into CO2 and methane is maybe three times, four times
all of the fossil fuels that we have burned.
If we take all this material out of the deep freeze...
you very likely get large CO2 and methane emissions
on a huge scale,
over which we have no control.
Katey Walter Anthony: I study methane emissions from lakes.
We are in interior Alaska,
and we are in discontinuous permafrost.
The thing that we're looking at
is microbial methane.
This methane bubbling here behind me,
it's dead plant and animal remains
that were locked up in permafrost
for tens of thousands of years.
And as that permafrost is thawing,
the microbes eat that soil carbon,
and they turn it into methane.
This process of permafrost thawing,
and that thawing permafrost fueling methane production,
and then methane escapes into the atmosphere,
causes climate warming,
which causes more permafrost to thaw,
we call that a permafrost carbon feedback.
It is a natural process.
Our concern, though,
is that as climate warms
at a faster rate than it has in the last 10,000 years,
that permafrost is going to respond
by thawing a lot more quickly
and releasing, at a faster rate, methane gas.
Now every time I go to a new lake,
I attempt to light these gas pockets.
Because it's a very high concentration of methane,
it's highly flammable,
we see a positive flame test when they contain methane.
So it's a quick gas chromatograph on the lake
to tell us do we have a methane lake,
or are we dealing with a different kind of lake?
There are many new lakes forming that were not here
30 or 60 years ago...
and those lakes have 10 to 100 to 1,000 times more methane than the rest of the lakes.
They are a picture of the type of methane emissions
we expect to see in the next 10 to 50 years
as permafrost warms and thaws,
and that permafrost feedback cycle kicks in
and really accelerates.
Rothman: Now, is it methane, is it permafrost,
is it the dissolved organic carbon in the ocean which is suddenly remobilized?
These things are all intertwined with each other.
So, really what one needs to ask is:
are there positive feedbacks within the system?
The answer is yes.
So, it just stands to reason, purely by common sense,
the less you disturb it, the better off things will be.
DiCaprio: We have the solutions at hand, but the question still remains.
Can we mobilize and take collective action before it's too late?
Wadhams: There isn't the oomph in the world to do this.
They talk about, with the Paris Agreement,
how we must reduce our carbon emissions
and to keep temperature rise at some low level,
but in fact, of course, we won't be able to do that.
The technology that can save us is something
that would take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
So it ought to be obvious
that the biggest research effort that man is involved in
should be to develop direct air capture methods that work.
If we do that, then we can save the world,
and so why don't we do it?
Christof Gebald: Direct air capture is machines
which take in ambient air and extract the CO2 from this air.
For the last ten years, we have been working on direct air capture,
with the goal of making it with the least possible energy impact,
and ultimately with the best economics.
This machine consists of four 40-foot shipping containers,
and can be any size, there is no limit to it.
So we take in the ambient air here.
And inside, we have our filter structure.
We get the waste heat of the waste incinerated
to drive this plant.
Once the CO2 is captured,
this gas is then going to a greenhouse,
and this greenhouse is using the CO2
to increase the CO2 concentration
in the atmosphere of the greenhouse.
Which is done already nowadays, but with fossil CO2,
and from tomorrow on, they're going to use atmospheric CO2.
This plant will allow to close a carbon cycle.
So, of course, the CO2 goes into the greenhouse,
and goes to the tomatoes and cucumbers,
and once we eat them, the CO2 goes back to the atmosphere.
But since we recapture the CO2 from the atmosphere,
it's a closed cycle.
So, this can be a missing piece of the pie
in order to close a global carbon cycle
in the energy or transportation sector.
So, besides using CO2 in a greenhouse like this,
we can take CO2, we can take water,
and we can take renewable energy.
We can again produce fuels-- for example, jet fuel.
In order to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions,
we would need roughly 300,000 of the plants behind me,
which is of course a very high number.
But if you compare this to existing infrastructures,
it's a scale which humanity can handle.
So, it's definitely an achievable goal.
The next project is to bring a plant to Iceland
to capture CO2 from the air
and sequester the CO2 underground.
And in two hours, you literally turn CO2 into a stone,
which stores it in a permanent and safe manner.
In order to run the plant, we would use geothermal heat.
There's an abundance of it on Iceland,
therefore we would have low carbon footprint energy
available to drive the machine.
Jan Wurzbacher: So, today is a very special day.
We have brought CO2 capture plant up here to Iceland.
And we are taking CO2 out of the air,
and then pumping it underground,
storing it in the basalt rock formation
within the CarbFix project.
So, we extract CO2 from the air
and permanently remove it by turning it into rock.
And yesterday night was the first time
that atmospheric CO2 was injected into the ground.
We can go up to thousands, ten thousands,
hundred thousands, and even up to millions of tons of CO2
per year that can be extracted from the atmosphere.
That is actually, to our knowledge,
the first time ever in the world
that direct air capture of CO2
has been combined with underground safe
and permanent storage of CO2.
Benyus: Yeah, it's a new relationship with carbon.
Why can't we find a way
to make it an ingredient for something?
Why can't we put it in our plastics
or in our building materials?
Or through the help of carbon dioxide chemistry,
turning carbon dioxide into the things that we need every day?
I'm Daniel Nocera, the Patterson-Rockwood professor of energy at Harvard University.
These are my labs, the labs where we invented
the artificial leaf and the bionic leaf.
And what they do is a complete photosynthesis.
Sunlight, air and water, to fuels and food.
Think about photosynthesis.
If you think about what it really does,
it's the building block of life,
and its building blocks, literally,
are CO2, water, and sunlight.
And we build all of this, like this,
wood and food, and starch, and biomass.
That's a remarkable transformation.
This photosynthetic process, it's very complex,
but we really listen to nature.
And that, we finally ended up doing in 30 years.
And something that makes us really happy,
not only can I say yes, we can do it artificially,
I can do it ten times better than photosynthesis.
We made special catalysts that coated the artificial leaf,
and then they would split water to hydrogen and oxygen.
The second part of the invention is the bionic leaf.
It takes the hydrogen from the bacteria
and then it makes fuels.
And so, depending on what genes I put into the bacteria,
I could have the bacteria make materials,
they could make drugs.
We've shown they can make fertilizer.
We can work out of any water source,
including natural waters, sea water.
As long as you have my artificial leaf,
you can do it in your backyard.
We don't need to dig what's been down there and release more CO2.
The artificial leaf, working with the bionic leaf,
takes the CO2 out of the atmosphere,
uses sunlight and water, and we make fuel.
So, we don't add any more to the atmosphere, any more CO2.
And it's another issue, because the cost I'm up against,
the developed world has spent tens of trillions of dollars
to build what they now use.
It's kind of hard to walk away from
a multi-trillion dollar investment
that you've paid off.
So, that's what it's all about.
Therefore, you need policy and you need good partnership.
And the public informing them that they have options,
and that there can be this different world.
DiCaprio: This new world can be sustainable,
innovative, and profitable.
The green economy is creating millions of jobs,
and will create millions more.
It matches and will surpass
the economy of the fossil fuel industry.
The challenge to reverse climate disruption
opens up opportunity for everyone.
It is now more profitable than ever to be green.
Hawken: Up until recently,
the profit you could make from creating the problem
was greater than the profit
you could make from the solutions.
So, the solutions had to be done with subsidies,
which were rare and non-existent,
or altruism, or faith.
But people who are making the problems were raking it in,
raking it in, raking it in.
And I think we're at a crossover
where actually the profit you can make from the solutions
is greater than the profit from the problems.
And that is not well understood.
So it's not that altruism need not apply,
it's a great thing.
But actually, altruism will not be needed
in order to move towards a world where we reverse global warming,
because in fact, it's less expensive.
It's more profitable, more beneficial, more jobs.
It's the most amazing thing that's happened
in the last few years,
and it's going to do nothing but increase
as the years go by,
because engineers and designers,
and basically who are unknown and unnamed,
have been working diligently, and are working diligently
to reinvent a new way of being a human being
relating to this planet.
James Murray: In Orkney, we have a really strong maritime tradition.
And since the '70s, the oil and gas industry in Aberdeen
has been a major contributor to the local economy,
providing tens and thousands of jobs.
But really, in the last few years,
we've seen quite a big downturn
in terms of the oil and gas industry
and the price of oil.
But we've got lots of really experienced people
in offshore operations on our doorstep,
and they're finding new jobs in offshore renewables
and companies such as ourselves.
Tidal energy is almost an entirely untapped resource.
We think we have the potential around the world
for about 100 gigawatts of capacity, perhaps more.
And what that equates to is a low-carbon energy
for millions and millions of homes.
What we've got here is the world's most powerful
floating tidal energy generator.
We've got a floating platform
to which two rotors are mounted.
Worker: We start with the rotors turning,
which produces electricity,
which comes back up into the machine
where it's conditioned,
and then it gets transformed, and stepped up,
and fed back into the grid.
Murray: It's like a wind turbine on its side
with two rotors instead of one.
Chris Milne: Two weeks ago, we had great success.
First period of 24-hour continuous generation from the device.
It actually operated beyond expectations.
The device itself generated over 18 megawatt-hours of power
in that 24-hour period.
We're converging on more traditional methods
of renewable generation,
and really putting tidal out there
as a real competitive technology across the world
and the world's generation needs.
The tidal turbine is, it's 63 meters long in total.
We do all the power conversion within the device itself,
and it's ready, then, for export
right into the UK electricity grid.
So, you know, we're aiming for tens of thousands
of these tidal turbines,
but this, you know, fully integrated system
for producing low carbon energy, so we're very excited about it.
Neil Kermode: So, EMEC was set up as a testing laboratory,
because we know that there's a huge amount of energy
in the oceans all around the world,
and we're trying to find a way to harvest it.
And so, we realized that one of the most important things
was to have a test center which would allow us
to find out how to do this properly.
So, what we've got is a site here
where we've got cables that are out in the sea
that allow developers of these machines
to put these machines on to our cables,
and the electricity is then brought on to shore.
And that then feeds into our national grid.
So, this is real.
This is making electricity out of seawater.
So, at the moment, we've got a device called the Penguin,
and that's by a company called Wello Oy,
and their machine is effectively
a large pendulum inside a ship.
And as the ship moves,
this pendulum turns horizontally,
and that then generates electricity.
The sea is unrelenting,
and it will really try and damage equipment.
So, making the equipment as reliable, robust,
efficient, cost-effective, all these things
are the things that people are grappling with.
But the really clever thing is,
we have done that piece of alchemy.
We've actually turned seawater into electricity.
And that really is huge, because people are worried about
whether you can do this or not for years,
and we've just shown you can.
And that's a big step forward.
Lund Myhre: No one can say that the scientist has not warned,
has not told that we have to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.
That should be clear to many.
How much farther can we go?
How many more tipping points can we go
before we hit a tipping point
from which our civilization cannot recover,
or from which the life of this planet,
or a large portion of the life on this planet cannot recover?
We cannot allow ourselves to reach those points.
And we're so damn close to it.
Smith: We're at a turning point.
Either we can stay the course and drown, burn,
and starve ourselves to death
in the face of the climate crisis,
or we can come together, we can innovate.
Hawken: Where do we stand?
Is it possible? Is it game over?
Or is it, in fact, game on,
which is that we have at hand
the ability, capacity, and solutions
that can reverse global warming,
not mitigate, not reduce, not stabilize,
but reverse?
When you make your goals bigger,
it opens up possibility.
It opens up imagination.
It opens up innovation. It doesn't foreclose.
It actually does the opposite.
And so, it's not that there's one solution,
but together, you can achieve drawdown
by doing 80% of the solutions.
Every one of them has so many cascading benefits,
makes a better world for everybody.
So, we don't lose by understanding
that climate change is happening
and responding to it, so what's the problem?
DiCaprio: We are the first generation
to see the advance of climate disruption,
and the last with a chance to fix it.
In spite of all this evidence,
we are currently burning fossil fuels
at an ever-increasing rate.
We have heard from the scientists
who have told us the truth based on actual research.
It is time to end the delay, to listen,
and to implement the solutions at hand.
Time is running out. The ice is melting.
Decisive action must be taken now.
There is no other option.
This moment is within our reach.
Let us grasp it.
It is up to us, each one of us,
to save this unique blue planet for generations to come.
♪ Lord, if you're not listening ♪
♪ I'll stop praying ♪
♪ If you're not watching ♪
♪ Will you see me fall to my knees? ♪
♪ Lose it all ♪
♪ Lord, if I can't see it ♪
♪ I can't feel it ♪
♪ If I can't feel it ♪
♪ It's not happening ♪
♪ Love is light but ice keeps burning ♪
♪ Love and hope are just a fall ♪
♪ From your hill ♪
♪ Can you hear us calling again? ♪
♪ Lord, we're all lost ♪
♪ Is life worth living? ♪
♪ If you're not watching I'm not doing wrong ♪
♪ Hope and rain and ice is burning ♪
♪ Then you see us turn on a friend ♪
♪ Will you hear them calling again? ♪
♪ Lord, the world went dark ♪
♪ The wave came crashing ♪
♪ If we're all gone will you still carry on? ♪
♪ Love is light but ice keeps burning ♪
♪ Will you see us ride to the edge? ♪
♪ One last fall from the hill ♪
♪ Dear Lord ♪
♪ If you don't want me I'm not staying ♪
♪ Love is light light keeps burning ♪
♪ Let me know if I'm worth saving ♪
♪ We're almost gone ♪
♪ So if we fall again ♪
♪ Will you carry on? ♪
♪ If we're falling in ♪
♪ Will you catch us all? ♪
♪ Lord, just let me know if I'm worth saving ♪