[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.
hat'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. [Laughter]
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]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] end