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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-04-20
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcSrwgYyzxo
I'm the mmhm so I'm gonna talk to you today about climate change and I want to start with one picture and I'm gonna guess that you've probably seen pictures like this before what it shows is that global surface temperature of the earth as it's changed in the last hundred fifty years and the main thing I know about is that it's going up and this means that
the earth is warming and a few other facts we need to get out of the way our that humans are responsible for a least a good fraction of this because we admit %HESITATION carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and that even if we stop emitting those greenhouse gases today the climate gonna keep warming for awhile there's some more warming that we're in for no matter what
just because it takes awhile to to happen but we're not stopping omitting them because our whole economy runs on on fossil fuel still and so if we keep accelerating the keep emitting possibly will an accelerating even faster as we've been doing over recent decades then we're gonna see even more warming and this is going to have serious consequences for the planet now I'm gonna now assume
that we all know this and understand these %HESITATION facts but what you may not understand is why I'm standing here at an event about Broadway talking about climate change so the first answer is that %HESITATION I'm actually not gonna say much more about the science of climate change are really here to talk about climate change is a communication problem and as a a how we understand
climate change in the way that we need to and how that's related ultimately to storytelling problem but the other reason of course is that Broadway's in New York City and New York City of course is located here in planet earth like everywhere else in the upper right quadrant there and so %HESITATION so just like everywhere else on the planet we are exposed to the natural environment
we we are vulnerable to it and even though some of us who live here %HESITATION full time think that the map of the world looks like this sometimes this is a a subway map of New York for those watching at home who have who have never seen it %HESITATION even if you even if you think this is the map of the world as I sometimes do
I'm I'm from here as well there are times when it becomes impossible to maintain that illusion there times when %HESITATION when we experienced mother nature reasserting itself in our in our environment and %HESITATION the times when that happens most acutely are extreme events extreme weather events extreme weather events are the leading edge of climate there what we feel most sensitively and understanding something about extreme weather
events can help us to understand something about why it's difficult to do what we need to do about climate change so by way of making that point I want to illustrate that with a little discussion of one particular extreme weather event that anyone who's been here a couple of years ago will remember and thats hurricane sandy when hurricane sandy happened in New York City it %HESITATION
the infrastructure failed catastrophically the subways flooded the road tunnels flooded power went out for a large crack in the city and many neighborhoods were essentially destroyed and the question that %HESITATION many asked is why did this happen did we why do we build the city in such a way that one storm could do so much damage did we not know that it could happen and the
answer is we really didn't know that it could happen those of us who you know who study these things and pay attention and %HESITATION because we understand that this begin the city is built as pop on planet earth with the same you know with with the geography that inherited from the land that was there before the city and so instead of the subway map this is
another map of the city that shows what happened during sandy it's a %HESITATION only shows %HESITATION New York that and it shows what areas flooded anywhere everywhere that's blue is in place that flooded during hurricane sandy and the those regions are all historically either wetlands or barrier island as in the case in the Rockaways or landfill which means they're all places better naturally low to the
water and naturally close to being flooded anyway and so if you were to ask somebody before send it happened who knew about storms in about the city where what will be flooded her can this is these are the places that we would have told you would be flooded and but of course you know real estate expensive here everything gets developed and so we build there anyway
but %HESITATION if we really you know understood the risks maybe we wouldn't have the classic aw one classic case of that is here this is South Street seaport our streets flooded during South Street seaport in sandy and the South Street seaport water came up to about a couple blocks in from the East River up to street called Water Street and it's called Water Street because that's
where the Coast used to be before the Dutch and English built land fill out from it so no surprise that's where the water came back to now the poster child for our being unprepared %HESITATION when we should've been prepared was this %HESITATION this picture this is the south very station the new south very states which opened just a little while before sandy happen south Korea's down
of the southern in Manhattan that's where you get on the Staten Island ferry into the number one subway line and %HESITATION you could say I mean about the subway system flooding you can say well the subway system was built a hundred years ago so who knew anything about her came to see level rise then who who knew what we were in for but this was built
just before sandy so we certainly didn't know and %HESITATION to illustrate and by the way the cost of building this was about a half a billion dollars and the cost of repairing it is about half a billion dollars of the subway station was totaled total loss and was built into floods and we knew the flood zone and this is evidence that we know this is %HESITATION
report figure from a report written by the US army corps of engineers %HESITATION and the weather service in some local transit agencies in nineteen ninety five about %HESITATION the city infrastructure and to write this report they did some estimates of how high the water could possibly get and %HESITATION in in a big storm estimate the storm surge with computer models and drew lines of where the
water would get to in critical transit facilities and that's why you see the high water line there because of the old south very station which is literally a stone's throw across the plaza from the new one in the same floods on so we certainly didn't know in the station got built anyway and the question you may ask is why why do we if we know that
there's a risk from the environment science tells us why don't we prepare better for it and the answer this is really not a particular feeling in New York City this is not a criticism of of our %HESITATION city or state or region this is human nature the psychologists tell us that human beings have two ways of thinking we have one way of thinking that is %HESITATION
instinct if there's something that's we have happened to us many times in the were familiar with that we know how to react instinctively we don't really have to think and we're good at that but if a scientist tells us something's gonna happen far in the future sometime we don't know exactly when and we've never experienced that thing that even if we believe the scientist we think
they're credible it's very difficult for us as humans to use numbers and statistics to make investments ahead of time and this is a problem when it comes to climate change because climate change is also something that seems far off in the future and that's outside our experience but that we would really do well to make investments in ahead of time because if we could reduce our
carbon emissions now we can reduce the warming that we're gonna feel but once we admit it it's there for a very long time it's very difficult to take it out so the typical pattern of reacting after the worst has happened is really not going to serve us well in this instance and just to show that climate change is outside our experience that's what makes it that's
what makes it difficult we can we can't react instinctively because our instinct doesn't service we have experienced this is one statistic the last number I'm gonna show you and it's the a projection from the New York City panel on climate change which is a group of scientists that work with the city to project project what's going to happen an objection is that by the twenty fifties
the number of days in a typical year in New York City that are over ninety Fahrenheit is gonna be more than double what it is now %HESITATION so that's just to say the summers are gonna be hotter than ever you've ever experienced that's just one measure sea level rise and other things are serious but %HESITATION but this is to say it's gonna be outside our experience
so this is really %HESITATION not just a problem of that this problem of understanding something far in the future this is a story telling problems well the same reason that it's hard to %HESITATION visualize these problems and take action is appropriate because it's far in the future this is the same reason it's hard to tell the story of climate change some of you might have seen
this movie the day after tomorrow this movie was based loosely on are a real scientific scenario of course it was exaggerated and everything but it the idea that there could be a sudden %HESITATION freeze of the earth is based on some real science loosely what was really unrealistic was that they took something that this in if it were really happened would take decades or centuries or
longer and they made it happen in three days and or something what was a few days the reason they did that was because it's a movie and you have to have character development and plot and all that stuff if it takes decades to happen then you know it's too long for the movie so we need to come up with new ways to tell the story that
are faithful to this a little more faithful to the science of the people connect the story to what's really going to happen and I'm gonna just briefly give you my story I'm like many %HESITATION scientists on the comic book nerd so I think a good climate change movie would be to have storm from the X. men she's a to the super hero who control the weather
so I think it would be good if she could fight global warming there have to be some bad guys involved somehow but whoever makes movie can figure that out and since this is science fiction and comic books the way to solve the problem the climate change takes a long time is time travel and that way the climate change can be realistic and take the right amount
of time and everything else can be unrealistic and that's fine but that's just thank you Marvel Comics can have that for three nights on that's on me %HESITATION so but that's just my story so I know there's a lot of people involved here professionally in the telling of stories and I just want to encourage you to think about both as citizens what we do in order
to understand the changes that are coming in a way that enables us to take the actions that we need to take and that means both getting prepared for the climate change if there's No Way Out of gonna have sea level rise and keep everything in New York City and many other places and also as storytellers to think of ways to communicate the story in a way
