Transcripts of movie

  

[Music]  Behold the Earth,   teaming with life,   ideally suited  for the development of human civilization.  It's no wonder that previous generations   held the fundamental belief  that the resources of the world were unlimited,  that our planet with this ideal environment for life  was provided for our benefit  and that we bear no responsibility  for ensuring that the Earth remains fertile  for the development of our civilization.  But as our population has grown,  our appetite for energy has increased  and in some cases we have misused our land.  We can no longer assume  that the Earth will remain eternally ideal  for the advancement of our civilization  or the quality of our life.  Rather we will forevermore  be called upon to heed that biblical admonition,  we need to be wise stewards of creation.  But how do we know what to do?  How does the Earth really work?  How could humans influence our climate or sea levels  or any other aspect of the habitability of our planet?  Fortunately,   as our technological civilization has grown  to where humans can affect the Earth,  we have also been provided with the tools to study the Earth  and understand it, predict its future  and determine the actions  that will be most effective to protect our future  for generations to come.  In the early 1980s,    we've been studying  the individual components of the Earth;  the atmosphere through meteorology  and atmospheric chemistry,  the oceans through oceanography,  the land and its biology through ecology,  but the Earth is more complicated than that.  The atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere, the cryosphere  are all coupled with complicated feedback mechanisms,  governing their interactions.  The Earth is not simply individual components.  It is an integrated system  that we need to understand is a system,  if we are to predict the future of the Earth.  In the late 1980s,   NASA embraced the concept of Earth system science  by bringing to bear the most important resource  for studying the earth as a system,  the global perspective of Earth  that is provided by orbiting spacecraft.  NASA undertook one of its most important programs,  the Mission to the Planet Earth  and the Earth observing system  with the Terra and the Aqua and the Aura satellites  as the principal observatories  for studying the Earth as a system.  Many satellites have been added to this fleet of satellites  observing the Earth  and these satellites are and will continue  to provide comprehensive observations  from which we can understand the earth and develop the models  that allow us to predict our future.  In tonight's program,  we are going to celebrate what we have learned  about the key components of the Earth systems  since we embarked upon Mission to Planet Earth  some three decades ago.  But as we celebrate, all that we have learned,  we need to be aware that we are in a race against time.  The Earth is changing.  Human civilization is influencing the Earth.  We need the best possible scientific understanding  of all the factors  that will influence the future of the planet  so that we can make wise policy decisions  to protect and to preserve this planet  on which our civilization depends  and if need be adapt to the changes that will come.  We need to become  and forevermore remain wise stewards of creation.  We begin this evening with Gail Jackson;  who will discuss the water cycle that is essential for life.  Then Lola Fatoyinbo will talk about the carbon cycle    which is driven by many events  including changing forest covers  and Thorsten Markus will examine the key ice sheets  of the Antarctic and Arctic  and their role in sea level rise  and finally Piers Sellers will wrap up with all the tasks  that still lie before us.  Gail!  

[Applause]    Thank you!  Our Earth is a water planet  from the oceans, ice, rivers, lakes and aquifers  to the water suspend in our hydrosphere,  our Earth is definitely a water planet.  Take a look at our lovely Earth?  Did you know that 99.5% of that water  is stored in our salty seas  or locked up in glaciers and other inaccessible locations,  leaving precious little fresh water  available to support our life on Earth?  So one of the vital signs of our Earth is the water cycle  and understanding it and knowing it  will help us to monitor our freshwater resources  and we can do this by measuring  where, how the water moves within our planet  and I will talk about that today.  This is a cartoon of our water cycle.   It shows the linkages between the surface water,  condensation, precipitation, and evaporation.  The water cycle is a complex system  that drives the movement of water  and actually heat and energy around our planet;  let's start by exploring the role  of our deep and vast oceans in the water cycle.  As you can see in this visualization of satellite data,  the ocean surface temperatures are not uniform  around the oceans.  The warm waters is in red and the cool waters is in blue;  drive the movement of water and heat  throughout the oceans  which can in turn then influence our weather patterns  such as might be saying during El Niño and La Niña Years.  Also, driving the movement of water in our oceans is salinity.  As shown in this visualization  of Aquarius satellite data from NASA  where evaporation occurs, our oceans get saltier,  it's shown in red,  where precipitation falls, ice melts or rivers discharge  our oceans get fresher as shown in the blue.  As your ocean water becomes saltier it becomes more dense  and settles down to the bottom of the ocean  and vice versa for the less salty water  which rises to the top.  Taken together, surface temperatures, salinity  and also the ocean winds, the winds above the ocean,  combine in a complex stance  that drives the ocean circulation patterns  as shown here.  The oceans also store massive amounts of heat  and are very slow to release it  which makes them a major driver in our Earth's climate system.  The oceans and the atmosphere actually work together.    Without the oceans, the water stays on surface  and we need the atmosphere as well.  For example, intense sunlight in the tropics  causes evaporation from the salty oceans  and that water forms in to massive clouds.  Those massive clouds,  that are moved by the atmospheric winds  to the mid-latitudes  where precipitation occurs  either in the form of rain or snow.  The only way to get a global perspective  of precipitation patterns  is to measure from spaceborne platforms.  Six months ago NASA  and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency  launched our joint  Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory Satellite  or GPM for short.  With two advanced instruments,   the Core Observatory for the first time  is able to measure all phases of precipitation  from very, very heavy rain to light rain to falling snow.  The GPM spacecraft serves as an anchor   to a domestic and international constellation  of satellite partners,  which collectively provide precipitation estimates  everywhere in the world every three hours,  in essence taking the pulse of the planet's precipitation.  This imagery shows one of the very first events  measured by the GPM spacecraft.  It was one of the late-season falling snow events  here in East Coast on March 17.  The resulting 7 inches of snow in the Washington DC area  may have affected your St. Patrick's Day plans this year.  Off the coast of the Carolinas,   the high cloud tops are icy,  down at the surface heavy rains shown in red  fell in the Atlantic Ocean.  Further North, overland,  the storm has much lower cloud tops  and they are composed of snow shown in blue  which fell at the surface  and we can see this information  because the GPM spacecraft has two advanced instruments;  one of them which I like to call the x-ray through the clouds  measures the precipitation all way through the cloud  and provides what I would call an x-ray at the surface.  It's a two-dimensional view of the precipitation.  The other instrument on board is what I like to call  taking a CAT scan of the clouds  and it takes layer by layer within the clouds  information about the precipitation  that's vital for helping us to understand precipitation  and weather forecasting and climate models.  So we're very excited about this data.   Where else but NASA with our partners,  are we able to achieve such success so early in the mission.  GPM also uses this data for applications  to provide societal benefit.  GPM observes hurricanes and blizzards  but as shown in the top two panels here,  we are also able to look at the conditions  that might lead to landslides and floods.  On the other hand for trial and water availability maps  as shown in the bottom two images,  we need to know how little it has precipitated over time  and GPM can tell us that too.  Emergency management then can use this data  in near real time to make evacuation plans.  Precipitation in the water cycle  influences every person, every day, everywhere,  may be one of the greatest impacts of NASA's data  is just used in improving weather forecasting models  and climate change models  for our everyday lives and our long-term future.  Now I would like introduce Lola  who is going to talk about the pulse of our planet's biosphere.  

[Applause]  The most visual manifestation of life on earth  happens every year when springtime comes  and fresh green leaves and grasses appear all around us.  The biosphere, our living world  is fueled by the seasonal pulse of energy  that the change in season brings.  In this visualization,  we can see the seasonal changes to plants on land  and in the oceans.  Using data like these,  we can estimate agricultural yield worldwide,  predict famines, fires and algae blooms  or help with land management.  This global view of our biosphere is also crucial  for studying the flow of carbon to the Earth system  and predicting the rate and effect of climate change  on our home planet.  In fact, the vegetation on land and in the oceans  are crucial component of the global carbon cycle  and climate change science.  Plants are the real lungs of the Earth,  absorbing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere  and producing the oxygen that we breathe.  Here we see what's call net primary productivity;  maps are aware and how much carbon is taken up  or released by plants on a monthly basis.  The colors are on these maps indicate  how fast carbon was taken in for every square meter of land  and you could see how most of the change  in carbon uptake and emissions  happens in the Northern Hemisphere  where majority of the land masses lie.  Maps such as these, allow a scientist  to routinely monitor plant's role in the global carbon cycle  and monitor how they're affecting and affected by  or changing climate.  Carbon is emitted into the atmosphere from natural sources   such as forest clearing, decomposition,  or volcanic activity.  90% of the non-natural emissions  result from power production, cement production  and transportation.  Over time 50% of that carbon that's emitted   stays in the atmosphere  while 25% gets taken up by trees and plants  and the remaining 25% is taken up by our oceans.  And in fact, we can measure the contribution  in vegetation growth and human's emissions on the carbon  that is stored in the atmosphere using satellite data.  So this visualization is a time series  of the global distribution and variation of carbon dioxide  in the atmosphere  as observed by NASA satellite since the year 2000. For comparison we've overlaid a graph  of the seasonal and inter-annual annual changed  increase of carbon dioxide  that was measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.  So these data sets show us  that the amount of carbon dioxide stored in the atmosphere  is steadily increasing  as we continuously pump carbon into the atmosphere  and decrease our forested and vegetated areas.  And even though we still see that  semi annual depth in concentrations  with the growth of vegetation in the springtime,  the increasing trend of carbon dioxide concentrations  is leading to the warming and changing of our planet.    The seasonal pulse of vegetation growth  is crucial for the well-being and balance of life on Earth.  This visualization of carbon dioxide concentrations  in the atmosphere  shows how every springtime when forests, grasslands and agricultural lands Green up  they suck up the carbon dioxide contained in the atmosphere  through photosynthesis,  but in the winter months  that photosynthetic uptake is not there  and the large amounts of carbon dioxide stay in the atmosphere  and in fact data from satellite sensors have shown us  that during the Northern Hemisphere's growing season,  the Midwest region of the United States  boasts more photosynthetic activity  than anywhere else on Earth.  But with changes in the distribution  and type of land cover on earth,  the natural cycle of growth and carbon dioxide uptake  is being disturbed  and more and more carbon dioxide is accumulating  in the atmosphere.  Forest fires are one of the leading causes  of vegetation change and land use change emissions globally,  but the cause of fires can be both natural or human induced.  In Africa forest fires are used to clear land  for agricultural activity  and the amount and timing of fires  is clearly linked to the seasonal changes  from healthy green vegetation to dry grasses  leading to these sweeping waves of fire  that move from south to north and north to south each season.  As these areas are getting hotter and drier  with climate change,  the intensity and amount of fire increases  leading to even more clearing.  But our satellite sensors don't just show us  the health and changes in vegetation on large scales.  We can also monitor the human impact on our planet  on the scale of the city or our neighborhood.  So this image series shows of the massive growth spurt  of Las Vegas since 1972.  Those large red areas are actually green spaces  such as city parks or golf courses  but now take a look at Lake Mead  we can see how with the influx of people into the area,  the water table is steadily decreasing.  These images from Landsat really show us   how we humans have changed our planet.  Here we see the impact of mountaintop removal  in West Virginia  from 1984 to the present.    In Saudi Arabia we're able to see how irrigation technology  has led to agriculture expansion in deserts  but also to water table depletion in nearby reservoirs.    All of these examples  are showing how we humans are changing the look of the planet and consequently significantly affecting its vital signs.  Our last example shows a recent map of a forest cover loss  that is highlighted the extensive changes happening  since just the year 2000.  These images show forest clearing from wildfires  in Colorado from 2000 to 2012  fueled by record temperatures and dry conditions.  In general, wildfires in the Western United States  are increasing in frequency and duration  due to higher temperatures and longer growing seasons  and this has resulted in twice as many acres burnt each year  compared to just 40 years ago.  These seasons are like the heartbeat of the planet,   fueling the growth of vegetation worldwide  and just as the seasons can affect the health  of forested areas,  they're also affecting the health of our ice caps  and glaciers  and on that note I would like to thank you for listening  and introduce the next speaker,  Dr. Thorsten Markus.  

[Applause]  Good evening, thank you Lola  and before I start I just wanted to say that Lola  couple of years ago won the Presidential Early Career Award  in Science and Engineering, super honor, congratulations.  

[Applause]  So anyhow yeah we so anyhow we have good people Goddard, incase you haven’t noticed.    So now, let's get to the cool part of this evening.  The ice or we scientists call it lovingly the cryosphere  or we use fancy words to make it sound better.  Now the bad news for the ice,  the earth is getting warmer and that's just a fact  and no matter what you think about,  global change, global warming etcetera,  it is getting warmer  and it's most pronounced at polar latitudes.  It's especially true for the Arctic.  We at Goddard, we have NASA I should say,  we like to include JPL sometimes,  we at Goddard and JPL  a study of the Arctic from the satellite.  It's a very hostile environment;  it's only with satellites that we have.  Now a data record of what's going on in the Arctic  and the graph behind me,  you see the temp of evolution of Arctic sea ice  during the summer.  In the early years of microsatellite imagery  it was relatively stable  and scientist detected a slight decrease and sea ice extent.  But over the last year this trend has increased,  the negative trend has increased tremendously  and there is absolutely no doubt anymore  from many scientist  that the Arctic sea ice is shrinking tremendously.  These trends are statistically significant.  To understand better what's going on  we need to understand that the ice, the Arctic sea ice,  it's completely different  from the frozen lake in your neighborhood.  It's a highly, very highly dynamic system.  It moves around like a pulsating living being  and you can see for example west of Greenland  and especially east of Greenland, these big streams,  current of thick ice, it is leaving the Arctic system  and it's way more than as I said a frozen lake.  There are constant openings and closing  and these openings where the heat from the ocean  is getting into the atmosphere.  It's a very complex system,  it's very beautiful too I have to say  and this is why it is so completed to predictions  and if actually I could do prediction  I would become a stock broker.  So if the ice is shrinking and thinning,    it's more subjective  to changes in the atmosphere and oceanic conditions.  The record minimum we observed in 2012  is largely driven by the storm  that developed over the arctic  that moved a lot of ice out of the Arctic ocean  and so we are seeing these interactions  between ocean atmosphere and ice more dramatically  than we have seen in the past  when we had a more consolidated pack of ice pack.  So we see these drastic changes in the Arctic,   on the other side you see the Antarctic  and people notice hey, what's going on,  the Arctic is changing,  the Antarctic is not changing as much.  As a matter of fact  we see a slight increase in the Antarctic.  The reason is these are completely different...  completely different climate systems.  For example, just to say one example,  in the Arctic, at the North Pole we have ocean  which is surrounded by land.  So the opposite is true,  in the southern hemisphere we have land mass  which is surrounded by ocean  and talking about land masses similar to the sea ice,  the ice sheets are dynamic as well.  Again it's not just a stable ice sheet.  The way ice sheets work is it's snows,  it's a center of the Arctic of the ice sheet Antarctica or Greenland  and this ice is slowly moving towards the edges  of the continent and breaks off as icebergs  and if the system is imbalanced,  the mass of snow equals the mass of the ice bergs  that are breaking off.  In addition to this though, we have seen increased melt,  we had a record melt in Greenland a year or two ago,  and in addition to melt itself  we know that some of the melt waters accumulate as ponds  on top of the ice,  can drain to the bottom of the ocean...  to the bottom of the ice sheet  and lubricate the interface  between the ice sheet and the bedrock,  causing an extreme acceleration of glacier flow.  Some of the glaciers especially around Greenland  accelerated for more than 100%.  We have satellites  that can actually directly measure the mass  of the ice sheets.  One of the coolest concept,  I mean as a physicist I think it's a really cool concept, it's Grace,  and Grace does not look upwards or downwards,  it actually just measures the distance  between itself, between the two satellites  and that with a precision with less of the width of a hair.  The first satellite goes over a field of high gravity    its accelerated ever so slightly  and the distance between the satellites increases  until the second satellite is over the same gravity hill  and the distance becomes equal again.  So using results from Grace,  we can actually determine directly  the mass of the ice sheets  and if you look at the time series  derived from Grace over Greenland,  we can see we have tremendous, tremendous losses.  We are losing right now  about 200 gigatonnes of ice every year, every year,    so I can, to provide an analogy,  it is a kilometer, by kilometer, by a kilometer of ice  is one gigatonne,  or 200 gigatonnes, I did some math on my way out here,  200 gigatonnes of ice  would cover the State of California roughly,  with half a meter.  So, we can add, half a meter every year for California.  If Senator Nelson would still be here
it is almost equal to area in, I think its equal close to the area of Florida.  So and then we launched ICESat-1 in 2003,  this was a first laser alternator that surrounded earth  and we got a much better view in terms of  how is elevation changing around Greenland, around Antarctica  and it provided the first measurement of Antarctica  as well as the Arctic sea ice.  Before then, we were very pretty much blind  of the third dimension of the ice sheets and the sea ice.  So it was a real cool mission and very NASA, I think.  ICESat-1 ended in 2009  and after that we started a campaign  called operation IceBridge.  The scientist, and fortunately, headquarters as well,  realized we cannot afford to be completely blind  to the fast changing conditions in the climate regions.  So we are flying twice a year,  over the key regions in the Arctic as well in the Antarctic,  and instead of showing more data,  I thought let's look just at some of the pictures  because I had the honor  and the privilege of flying on some of these missions.  It is just phenomenal flying over,  it's 1500 feet, 500 meters,  it is really close flying over the ice sheets and sea ice.  You fly over glacier  and you have mountains left and right.  In addition to lasers, we have radars that penetrate the ice,  so we can actually measure the ice thickness as well,  and then of course,  with all the objectivity of a project scientist, in 2017,  we launched ICESat-2,  which is so cool and so phenomenal,  and this is NASA at its best in my opinion,  because it is ground breaking technology  and ground breaking science.  With ICESat-1, we measured the earth every 150 meter,  roughly, if you think about football,  football seasons are started, basically in the end zones.  With ICESat-2, we measure with centimeter precision,  every yard line, which is really cool.  And it will be a really discovery mission,  and in addition to monitoring the ice sheets,  we will monitor the height of trees,  changes in the land, maybe tectonics,  height of the oceans etcetera.  It will be a real discovery mission,  I am very, very excited about it, and worked very hard.  When I was a young scientist, this is my last slide,  just ten years ago,  I went to Antarctica to measure sea ice thickness. This was then ten years ago, before ICESat-2 launched,  the only way we could measure sea ice thickness,  it was no other means.  We went there and drilled lots and lots and lots of holes.  It was great fun of course  and we do had some visitors as well,  as you could see at the top, what is it from your side,  top left,  isn't it amazing to just come out and look what we are doing?  So, I think NASA does really cool stuff    for cryosphere scientists  and we have come a long way since ten years ago,  when I went down there to take measurements of the ice  and with this, I want to give the microphone to Piers Sellers former astronaut and my boss.  

[Applause]  Thanks.  So I have to treat Thorsten with a lot of respect   because he reminds me of Arnnie Schwarzenegger with a PhD,  I don't want to get on wrong side of him.   So, okay, the view from orbit  really does put things in perspective  and as Senator Nelson has seen this with his own eyes,  so he knows what I am talking about,  I have enjoyed seeing the earth too  with my own eyes through a space supervisor,  and I am absolutely fascinated  by what a satellite instruments can tell us. We, that's NASA and all our friends at NASA,  are quite literally conducting a health check of the planet.  Okay, so these hands on working scientists  have dazzled with facts and data.  It's my job, as a grizzled bureaucrat  to drag this event over the finish line  and let you find your cars.  So I will try and be quick.  So here are a few closing thoughts.  What all of this means for science, for policy makers  and for the crew spaceship Earth, that's all of us.  Okay, this movie shows you what happens  when we combine the satellite data with computer models  and use a lot of physics  to fill in the gaps between observations.  Here we are on the space, this is not a snow storm,  these are solar particles blasting by the earth  but we are protected by magnetic field.  So the particles are diverted.  As we come down deeper,  and by the way this is a model  based on physics and observations  so there is fact and mathematics,  Isaac Newton is hard at work here,  here is the atmospheric flows,  again produced by a model,  circulation timescales here are on hours to days,  so we come a little bit deeper in to the world,  We see the surface winds.  Now we are looking at the surface, ocean circulation.  Ms. Gail said that's forced by heat, wind and salinity,  timescales of days and months and years.  Deep yet, and now I will talk with the French accent  like Jacques Cousteau,  the sub surface flows down to the deep ocean circulation,  timescales of a thousand years or more.  It's beautiful  and we get all of this for combining the satellite data with what we understand about nature  and putting it in to a computer.  This stuff is based on actual reality.  Not the Kardashian kind,  but let's get back to think about climate.  So here is a computer model simulation  of the earth's climate system,  this is not a picture, this is a simulation.  It's a toy world based on physics  and propelled by satellite data.  I guess when you look at the detail here,  the popcorn clouds, the winds,  or the planetary scale waves in the atmosphere.  The snow, the ice, the biosphere,  it's all right there.  It's all being calculated  and it's all being faithfully reproduced.  Now what is this all good for?  Well, models have got to the point  of providing weather prediction up to 72 hours reliably.  You can quite literally bank on it, most days.  This is going to be Hurricane Sandy,  this is actually a model prediction of Sandy  and as you could see the Hurricane  wandered around the Atlantic before turning sharply left  and whacking New Jersey and New York.  But accurate warnings were given out 72 hours ahead of time  and many lives and a lot of money was saved  as a result of these warnings.  By the way, speaking for us,  that's not counting all the people  up and down the East Coast  who did not have to evacuate,  because they knew the Hurricane  was going to miss them all together,  and hat counts for something.  Now the exact same physics  and many of the same observations  that we use for weather  are helping us to understand climate better.  And these climate models allow us to peer in to the future  and will help us make decisions about  energy, water and food resources.  Okay, this is a simulation   of what we think the earth will look like in 20 to 30 years.  Actually it's not.  It's the picture of the sun,  it's being taken by our heliophysical friends  using their satellites.  Besides being a really cool image,  it shows that we are keeping a close eye on the sun,  again using satellites and guess what,  we have found the sun to be not guilty  for the recent warming trend.  Now as I said we use the same exact physics   and many of the same satellite data  to be used in weather models  to build and test our climate models.  Now what these models do tell us  is the rate of warming depends very largely  on how much fossil fuel we use  and how much carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere.  I am now going to show you a graph  and it is very bad form for even like this  but in compensation  it may be the most expensive graph ever made  and thats not because of the colors.  This cost several years of effort  by thousands of scientists worldwide to put it together  and it tell us something, we didn't know until only recently.  It's something new and something very, very simple.  What it says is that the expected rise in temperature  is directly, linearly related  to the amount of fossil fuel we burn.  The X axis of the bottom  shows how much fossil fuel we burn  which makes the carbon dioxide  and the y-axis shows the temperature increase  that results from this extra Co2.  The zero point is roughly or a bit left to the zero point  is roughly when fellow in England in 1700  decided it was time to start an industrial revolution  and dug up the first pit of coal.  Now, if you look at the black line that ends at 2010,  you'll see that we burned about  500 gigatonnes of carbon since then  and a gigatonne of carbon is a brick of coal  about a kilometer on the side  so it is a big piece of coal  and that's give us about 1° C rise in global temperature  which is what we have seen  and that's led to some changes in the world  that my good friend I've just shown you.  Now we’ll likely to burn 1000 gigatonnes,  that's halfway up the graph,  that will give us two degree centigrade  to two and half centigrade increase in global temperature.  We definitely don't want to be up in the top right-hand corner,  four degree centigrade.  This look like a very different planet  than the current Earth that we inhabit  and we don't really know what that planet would look like,  how it would work,  so this is sobering, right?  but is it necessary going to be grim and nasty to the maximum?  Is this evening going to be a total down of few you all  if we don't count the refreshments?  I think not and there is some basis for my optimism.  Here is a picture of the ozone hole  that was discovered in 1979.  The blue color  shows that ozone is being eaten up by manmade chemicals, many refrigerants.  We saw the hole growing rapidly in the 80s and 90s  and this was bad news  because ozone protects most of life on Earth  from strong ultraviolet radiation from the sun  and that's bad for you.  But here is the good part of the story.  Governments all around the world took information seriously.  Here is a UN meeting where they are discussing the problem  on what to do about it.  It modeled on Goddard seminar.  Here are all the agreements that they cranked out  to reduce the chemicals that cause the problem  and here is two of Goddard's finest scientists  in the back row  providing solid science advice and eating chips,  there they are. Alright, and what happen   Here is a picture of two worlds;  on the left is world that we are likely to see  with the ozone depletion leveling off  and then slowly reversing  and on the right is what would have happened  if we didn't have all those controls and agreements  and blue here means no ozone which is bad news.  On right-hand side is the world we avoided.  That's the world with thinning ozone,  a world with damage to all living things  exposed to sunlight  and that includes the crops that provide our food,  the ocean plankton that makes our oxygen  and damage to us, people.  And now a news flash  today at four o'clock United Nations released a statement.  It reads, the Earth's protective ozone layer  is well on track to recovery in the next few decades  thanks concerted international action against  ozone depleting substances  according to a new assessment by 300 scientists.  So it can be done,  this is proof that people  and that's all of us and our political representatives  can use solid information, facts, models,  like every thing we have seen tonight  to make the right decisions.  Now sometimes it happens a bit later,  and it takes bit longer than we would like  but generally the right decisions get made.  Now there’s are a lot of people on this planet.  This is Christmas 1968   3 billion people on Earth and there they all are,  actually we or some of us are,  minus three because somebody has to take the photo.  Now here is a picture 2013 put together from satellite data.    Now there are 7 billion of us plus six on space station and we will top out at about 9 billion this century.  But again I think there is reason for optimism here  because people are actually part of the solution.  Every new human born is not just an extra stress on the world  but brings with himself or herself resources and answers.  This is an early picture of Len Fisk.  So I think,   I hope that with the ingenuity, the resourcefulness, the grit  that has got the human race so far  we can use these vital signs about the health of our planet  to figure out how to live long and prosper on this Earth.  Now before I close up I'd like to recognize  the great work done by the visualization team,  Ali Ogden, Wade Sisler, Rani Gran,Horace Mitchell and friends  who put all these beautiful pictures together  and of course a huge thank you for all speakers  and sponsors so put your hand together please.  

[Applause]  

[Music]    end