[APPLAUSE]
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Thanks, Ern.
Thanks for giving
up lunch or whatever
you're giving up to be here.
I am just going to start by
introducing you to this fellow.
The book is sort of
arranged with 13 species
as their sort of focal point.
And this guy's at
the end, so I'm
giving away the end of the book.
But it doesn't really
have a surprise ending,
so I think I can do that.
So he's a Hawaiian
crow or an alala.
And there used to be several
species of Hawaiian crows,
which probably diverged from the
crows you see around New York
probably several hundred
thousand years ago.
So it's a case a bit
like Darwin's finches
where a very small
founder population arrived
on the Hawaiian archipelago.
We don't know how, because
Hawaii is really quite, quite
distant from the mainland,
thousands of miles.
And then they
speciated, radiated out
so that they could occupy
the different islands
and fill different
ecological niches.
But the difference
is that, actually,
most of the species
of Hawaiian crows
went extinct before
modern times.
And this one is also under
very, very heavy threat.
And in the '80s,
the state of Hawaii
realized that there
were only very few left.
They took them into captivity
to try to breed them.
Oh, thanks.
No, I'm good.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot.
And this particular
bird is a male bird
by the name of Kinohi.
And he was born at
this breeding center,
which is actually on Maui.
The bird is native
to the big island,
but this breeding
center's on Maui.
And he's a very odd
duck, as they say.
He doesn't really think
of himself as a crow.
We're not sure what
he self identifies as.
One woman who takes
care of him told me
that he once fell in
love with a spoonbill.
So he refused to mate
with any of the females.
At the Maui facility,
there's maybe 50 females,
100 birds all together.
And he refused to
mate with any of them.
But his genes are
really important.
So they took him to
the veterinary hospital
at the San Diego Zoo.
And there he came under the
care of a very, very experienced
reproductive physiologist,
who was really eager to get
a vial-- let's just put it this
way-- of his genetic material
to take back to Maui with her.
So every spring, when it's
breeding season on Maui,
she takes Kinohi on
her lap and strokes him
in a way that male crows are
supposed to find very, very
exciting, hoping that he's going
to deliver so that she can take
a vial of his
ejaculate back to Maui.
But at the time I visited,
he had not yet delivered.
So she was still at it.
And crows are really
smart, as you know.
And Kinohi can
imitate human speech.
And he says, I know.
That's his phrase, which is
really quite extraordinary.
And when I heard that, it
sounds kind of demented.
He has this demented sound.
But it seemed to
really encapsulate
a lot of the themes of the book.
On the one hand, the
incredible lengths that people
are going to to try
to save this species.
Meanwhile, though,
all of the forces that
brought the Hawaiian
crows to this point
are all still raging, and,
in fact, are being increased.
Because Hawaii-- there's
now avian malaria on Hawaii.
There didn't used
to be mosquitoes.
Now there are mosquitoes
with avian malaria.
And as the climate
warms, these mosquitoes
are moving up the
mountain slope.
So there used to
be refuges for some
of the native birds on
the tops of Hawaii's very
tall mountains.
And avian malaria is now
moving up the mountain.
So birds on Hawaii are
really, really in trouble.
So he is sort of the emblem,
in a way, for the whole book.
And he's the animal
that I end it with.
So I guess I'll sort of step
back and say what is the book.
What is the sixth extinction?
The implication
here, obviously, is
that there were five
other extinction events.
And that is true.
These are what are
called the big five,
the major mass extinctions of
the last half billion years.
And what you're looking at is
time is running from your left
to your right in
millions of years.
So 600 million
years ago to today.
And where you see
those dips, you're
seeing the number
of marine families.
This is from the
marine fossil record.
And you're seeing the number of
marine families on the y-axis.
And if you remember
from intro bio,
a family is the level
right above a genus.
So species, genus, family.
And if even one species made it
through this extinction event,
then this species is
considered a survivor.
So on the species level, the
losses were much, much greater
than they are even
on the family level.
And mass extinctions are just
defined as moments in time
when the diversity of life
suddenly and very radically
contracts.
One British paleontologist,
Michael Benton,
whom I quote in the
book, uses the metaphor
of the tree of life.
During a mass
extinction, he's written,
vast swaths of the
tree are cut short as
if attacked by a crazed,
axe-wielding madman.
So the first, number
one there, that
occurred about 440
million years ago
at the end of the Ordovician
Period when most of life
was still in the sea.
So that was very devastating
to marine organisms,
but not to terrestrial
organisms because there just
were no terrestrial organisms.
And number five, that's the
most famous, most popular,
if you will.
And that is the
extinction event that
did in the dinosaurs and
a lot of other groups
at the end of the
Cretaceous Period.
And there's a pretty
broad scientific consensus
that that was caused
by an asteroid impact.
I don't have a photo
I can show you,
but this is someone's best
guess of what that looked like.
So to say we're in the middle
or on the verge-- some people
would say we're on
the verge, some people
would say we're
already pretty deep
into-- the sixth
extinction is obviously
a pretty serious claim.
And this claim
arises from the fact
that we are changing the
world very radically and very,
very fast, so not unlike
an asteroid impact.
And in fact, I have
heard scientists
say that right now,
we are the asteroid.
So how are we doing this?
There are a lot of ways.
I'm just going to touch
on a couple today.
We're changing the atmosphere.
You all know this.
It's really simple stuff.
We drive our cars.
We light our homes.
And all of this, we're doing
with fossil fuels right now.
And there's 7.2 billion
of us on the planet,
so it adds up pretty quickly.
And what we're doing when
we are burning fossil fuels
is we're taking carbon that's
been buried underground
over hundreds of
millions of years
and we're shooting it back
into the atmosphere very,
very quickly in a matter of
centuries, quite possibly.
So we're basically running
geological history backward
and at a very, very high speed.
And so if you were an alien
and you came to earth,
you could actually
easily conclude
that what we're doing,
that the whole point
of modern industrialized
society is actually
to effect this transfer
as quickly as possible,
to see how much carbon we
can get out of the ground
and how fast we can throw
it back up into the air.
And if the aliens were
measuring this process,
they'd say we're actually doing
it as well as we possibly can.
We're increasing CO2
levels every year.
These are obviously our
measurements of this process.
I'm sure you're all
familiar with this graph.
This is the Keeling Curve,
measuring CO2 concentrations
in the air, once
again from Hawaii,
from the National Weather
Services Observatory
on Mauna Loa.
And that jig-jag pattern,
that seesaw pattern you see,
that's a seasonal signal.
Because when the
trees and plants
of the northern hemisphere
put out their leaves
for photosynthesis in the
summer, global CO2 levels fall.
And when they drop their
leaves in the winter,
then they rise again.
So that's quite a recent
reading, 396 parts per million.
You may recently have
read that CO2 levels hit
400 parts per million.
They did very briefly at
the end of last winter.
They're going to again
now, this winter.
And then they're
going to keep rising
in that seesaw sort of
way until they never
go below 400 parts per million.
Because obviously, we show no
signs of ceasing to emit CO2.
And if we want to see how we're
doing on a longer term way,
then we can look
back at ice cores.
Probably many of you have
seen this graph, too.
What you're looking
at here-- once again,
we have parts per million
of CO2 on the y-axis, time
on the x-axis, running
once again from left
to right, so from 800,000
years ago to the present.
You're looking at actual
bubbles of past atmospheres
that were extracted from an
ice core taken on Antarctica.
And all that the
Antarctic ice sheet is
is just layers of snow that
were laid down year after year.
So we can actually
see over time what
happened to the atmosphere.
And those jig-jag cycles that
you see, those are ice ages.
So when CO2 levels are low,
ice creeps down all the way
to the island of
Manhattan, which
was glaciated in
the last ice age.
And then it creeps back
up again into the Arctic.
And you're looking at
eight glacial cycles there.
You see where people emerged
around 200,000 years ago.
And you can see that
CO2 levels were never
above 300 parts per million
over the last 800,000 years
until very, very recently.
And now we're going up at what
looks on a scale like this
to be a vertical line.
And if we want to go
even further back,
we can tease out the
composition of past atmospheres
by looking at things
like the shells
of little tiny
marine creatures that
fell to the bottom of the sea.
And those have big error bars.
But it seems pretty clear
that to get CO2 levels that
are significantly
higher than today's, you
have to go back to
around the Miocene,
around 20 million years ago.
And at the rate we're going,
we could reach those levels
by the middle of the century.
And if we keep on going, we
could reach levels probably not
seen since the Eocene,
around 50 million years ago,
by the end of this century.
So obviously, what's significant
about this is on the one hand,
CO2 is just a greenhouse gas.
I'm not going to bore you
with a global warming spiel
because you all know it.
But I am going to just show
you this little video that NASA
has made.
It's just a re-creation
of global temperatures
over the last 130 years or so.
And what you need to
know to understand
it is that as the colors
get warmer-- so more
orangey and more yellow--
the world is warming.
That signifies
warmer temperatures.
So here we go.
So that stops in 2011.
So hopefully they'll
update it soon,
because it's a very powerful
visual representation.
And so what does that
mean for living things,
for the creatures
on this planet?
The polar bear
has sort of become
the icon of species that are
endangered by climate change.
Because the Arctic sea ice is
disappearing very, very fast.
And without minimizing
the problems
that the polar bears
are facing, what
I write about it in
the book, actually,
is that it's actually likely
that climate change is going
to have an even more profound
effect in the tropics.
And there are a couple
reasons for this, one of which
is just that the tropics are
where most things actually
live.
So in this slide, you're looking
down from about 12,000 feet.
We're in the Andes in Peru.
You're looking down that ridge.
And I went there
with a scientist
from Wake Forest who had
laid out these tree plots.
And each plot was exactly
two and a half acres.
And there were about 20 of
them arrayed down this ridge so
that each one had a
different elevation
and each one had a different
average annual temperature.
And they had measured,
tagged, and IDed
the species of every
tree in these plots.
And so they had come
up with, in this 20 two
and a half acre plots,
roughly 50 acres,
over 1,000 species of trees.
So in the entire
Canadian Royal Forest,
which stretches over
a billion acres,
there are only about
20 species of tree.
So here we see in
50 acres, in an area
roughly the size of, I
think, like Fort Tryon Park,
we're seeing 1,000
different species.
So that just shows
you that the topics
are where most species are.
That pattern is repeated over
most groups of organisms.
And one of the characteristics
of tropical species
turns out to be that they have
very narrow climatic ranges.
So one of the things this
guy said to me was-- we're
going down this ridge.
He said, you're going
to see like a leaf
on the path with an
interesting shape.
Focus on that shape.
Watch as we go down the path.
You're only going to see
that leaf for maybe 100
meters or so, because that's
the whole range of the tree.
This is the only
place where it lives.
And what they were
looking at was
as the Andes warm-- and
the Andes are warming
very quickly-- what
are those trees doing?
They can't move, obviously,
but they can seed themselves
at higher and higher elevations.
And that's what's happening.
You do see a lot of
species on the move.
But you also see
a lot of species
that are not on the move,
that are just sitting there.
So as the climate
changes, these communities
are going to clearly break down.
And new ones will
presumably form.
And the question
of what will happen
to all of the organisms that
depend on what's there now,
all of the birds and all the
insects and all the mammals,
is an open one.
It's very hard, obviously,
to track insects.
They don't respond well to
having these little tags nailed
into them.
But as the scientist, Miles
Silman, pointed out to me,
we're going to find out.
We're in the process
of finding out.
We are running this experiment.
We can only run it once,
but we're running it.
And we're going to find
out the answers to that.
So how else are we
changing the world?
Well, another very big effect
of carbon dioxide emissions
is the phenomenon known
as ocean acidification.
I suspect everyone
in this room is
pretty familiar
with how that works.
But I'll just give
you the basics.
And that is that the oceans
have absorbed about a third
of the CO2 we put up so far.
That comes to about 150
billion metric tons every hour.
The oceans absorb another
million metric tons of CO2.
And the net result is that
the acidity of the oceans
has increased by 30%.
So when CO2 dissolves in
water, it forms an acid.
That's just pretty
basic chemistry.
It's a weak acid.
You drink it when you drink
a Coke, but it's an acid.
And we are changing the pH of
the oceans very, very rapidly.
And what the effects
of that are going to be
are also not that
easy to anticipate.
Obviously, marine
creatures only interact
with their outside
world through the water.
But one thing that
seems pretty clear
is it's going to
impact anything that
has to build a shell
or an external skeleton
out the mineral
calcium carbonate.
It really affects the
energetics of doing that.
And lots of things do that.
These are tiny little
marine calcifiers
called coccolithophores.
You're seeing them under
high magnification here.
Common shellfish like clams
are calcifiers-- sea urchins,
starfish, coral reefs.
So lots and lots
of marine organisms
depend on the process
of calcification.
A couple of chapters in the
book focus on marine organisms
and how they will be affected.
A lot of people
trying to figure out
what the effects of ocean
acidification are going to be.
And this is a really interesting
sort of natural experiment
that I visited.
Now, you're underwater here.
We're in the Bay of
Naples in this area
where there's a lot of
volcanic activity, not too far,
actually, from Mount Vesuvius.
And it happens that
there's CO2 bubbling out
of the bottom of the sea
there and naturally acidifying
the water.
So I went out with a
British marine scientist
named Jason Hall-Spencer who
had gotten this idea that if we
looked at what happens
near these volcanic vents,
we sort of have a window into
the future of the oceans.
And what you're
looking at here--
I went with a National
Geographic photographer.
And he took this
wonderful picture.
And what you're looking at here
is we're away from the vents.
We're in a pretty ordinary
Mediterranean community.
You see there's a
sea urchin there.
There's all sorts of
this stiff seaweed,
which is also calcified.
There's calcifying seaweed.
That smear of pink
you see there--
that's a tiny little
algae that also calcifies.
So you're seeing lots and
lots of different creatures
there, different species there.
And now we're moving
near the vents.
You see the CO2 bubbling
out of the water.
And you see what it looks like,
that sort of lunar landscape.
So this is when we get
pretty close to the vents.
And in between, he
looked at every sort
of possible pH between these
two and came to the conclusion
that at the pH that oceans
are likely to reach,
all of the oceans
by around 2100,
if we continue to emit
CO2 at our current rate,
that about a third of the
species in the Mediterranean
dropped out at that pH.
They just can't keep up with it.
So another way we're
changing the planet--
and this is just the last one
I'm going to touch on today--
is by moving species
around the world.
Everyone's familiar
with this, the problem
of invasive species.
Oh, sorry-- I skipped over this.
Coral reefs are a huge concern.
Coral reefs are calcifiers.
This is just a quote from
some British marine scientists
that it's likely that reefs will
be the first major ecosystem
in the modern era to become
ecologically extinct.
Because corals turn out
to be pretty sensitive--
many, many species, at least--
to these changes in ocean pH.
So back to our invaders.
This is an Asian carp.
He's much in the news.
Asian carp is actually
several different species.
They're incredibly voracious.
They're filter feeders.
They just eat through
everything in the water column,
have a terribly devastating
effect on native fish.
There's just a
study that came out
from the Army Corps of Engineers
about what it would take
to keep Asian carp-- which are
headed toward the Great Lakes--
what would it take to keep
them out of the Great Lakes.
And the Army Corps of Engineers
put a price tag of $18 billion
on that one.
These are zebra mussels.
I don't know if people read the
story in yesterday's "Times."
They're invaders
from Eastern Europe.
They're also voracious,
voracious feeders,
have done incredible damage,
do commercial damage,
stick to everything that
they come in contact with.
And really, really have
devastated native mollusk
populations.
And there was a piece
yesterday about a scientist
who was trying to find
a biological agent,
like a bacteria-- in this
case, a bacteria-- that
could potentially
fight zebra mussels.
So we all have-- if
you have a backyard,
you doubtless have plants in
it that are not native species.
Some people have pets that
are not native species.
But most of our
nonnative species
these days are being
moved around unconsciously
and inadvertently.
And it's been
estimated, for example,
that 10,000 species
are being moved
every day around the world
just in ballast water.
And this is another
way that we're
sort of running geological
history backward
and at a very high speed.
So what you're looking at
here is the configuration
of the continents about
250 million years ago,
when they all crashed together
and formed one super continent,
which has become
known as Pangaea.
And then they drifted apart
owing to plate tectonics.
And we got the world
as we have it today.
So all of these things have
been evolving separately.
The species in South America and
Africa and India and Australia
have been evolving separately
for tens of millions of years.
And when we bring
them all together,
it has the effect of crashing
those continents back together
again.
And you sometimes
hear this phrase
that biologists use that we
are creating the new Pangaea.
And oftentimes, this
has no particular result
when you bring species together
that have been long separated.
And sometimes it has sort of
a not benign result, but not
very dramatic result.
They just sort of co-exist.
But every once in a while, you
get really disastrous results.
And when you think
about it, if you're
moving at least 10,000 species
around the world every day,
you don't need a
very high proportion
of those interactions
to be disastrous
before you have
quite a big problem.
So this is actually the species
that I begin the book with.
So we've worked our way sort of
from the end to the beginning.
It's a Panamanian golden frog.
It's a very beautiful
animal, as you can see.
It was considered a
lucky symbol in Panama.
It used to be printed on
lottery tickets, which
is rather ironic.
Because the golden frog-- and
really, all frogs in Panama--
started disappearing
in the 1990s.
And scientists
eventually figured out--
this is sometimes called
the amphibian crisis.
And it truly is a crisis.
And scientists
figured out that they
were being killed by a fungal
disease that had probably,
almost certainly, been ferried
around the world on frogs
by people moving animals
around the world.
And one theory which
has not been proved
is that it was moved around
the world on these frogs called
African clawed frogs, which were
used as early pregnancy tests.
Because if you inject a
female African clawed frog
with the urine of a
woman who's pregnant,
she will lay eggs
within a couple hours.
So obstetricians actually
used to have tanks these frogs
in their office.
And a lot of them were let go.
You now have
naturalized populations
of African clawed
frogs around the world.
So one theory is that the fungus
moved on African clawed frogs.
And anyway, it was
moving through Panama.
And it was this
interesting moment
where people could
actually watch it move.
They actually could see
the frogs disappearing.
And then they realized,
or they hypothesized
that it was moving east,
sort of along the way
that the rivers move.
And they decided to
try to get a population
of these particularly
beautiful frogs and also
some other species native
to central Panama out
of the rainforest and into some
kind of protected facility.
And they didn't have
any place to put them.
They went out and got
the frogs, but they
didn't have any place
to put them initially.
And so initially,
the frogs literally
had to be put up at a hotel.
Then they built this facility.
This is the El Valle
Amphibian Conservation Center.
You might be able to see
some little golden frogs
in those tanks.
And this is one
of the few places
that the golden
frogs exist anymore.
They're now extinct in
the wild, like the alala.
There are some in
zoos and there are
some at this
conservation center.
So I'm going to wrap up at
the beginning of the book.
You could, in some ways, say
that this is a heartening
story.
Like the alala, it
shows that people really
are concerned about
other species--
to use the words
of Rachel Carson,
that they care about what Carson
called the problem of sharing
our earth with other creatures.
And in the course of
reporting the book,
I did spend a lot of time
with people who have really
devoted their lives
to this problem.
A lot of them are
scientists, like the woman
who was trying to get
Kinohi to deliver.
But a lot of them were
also ordinary people.
For example, at the El Valle
Amphibian Conservation Center,
I met volunteers who had
come down from the States.
They'd paid their own way.
They were using
their vacation days
to help out because
they wanted to help out.
And obviously, even people
who are not directly involved
in conservation give a lot of
money to groups like the World
Wildlife Fund and the
National Wildlife Federation,
Defenders of Wildlife--
the list goes on and on.
And I'd like to be able to
end on that upbeat note,
that if more of us just got
involved in efforts like this,
then that would be sufficient.
But I'm going to
be frank with you
and say that's not really
where I come out in the book.
One of the central
points of the book--
really the central
point of the book--
is that our involvement, our
caring is not really the issue.
What's really the
issue are the many ways
in which we are
changing the planet.
And this is what makes us
comparable in our impacts
to an asteroid.
And unfortunately, unless
and until we really
confront that fact, the
magnitude of the impacts
that we're having, then
I'm afraid we're not really
fessing up to the problem.
So thanks a lot.
[APPLAUSE]
Howdy.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
You showed a graph earlier.
It was in animation where you
showed the different parts
of the world becoming warm
and cold and warm and cold.
And it ended with the north part
of the globe being very warm.
Was that relative temperature?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT:
That is off of a median
that they choose, some year.
I can't remember
exactly the year,
but yes, everything is
temperature deviation
from this median.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
Hi.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Howdy.
AUDIENCE: So you talked
about fossil fuel use.
That seems to be the big issue.
But there's also a lot happening
in the world moving away
from fossil fuels.
So first of all, are
there any other--
we do a lot of other
stuff besides burn fuel.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah,
and we burn a lot of fuel.
AUDIENCE: But is that sort
of a hopeful thing, that we
are starting to use
more green energy?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT:
It's a hopeful thing.
But in terms of
actual numbers, we
can go back to-- we're
using more renewable energy.
We're also using
more fossil fuels.
If you just look at
emissions trends,
they're not leveling
out worldwide.
They have leveled
out in the States.
But worldwide, they are actually
tracking them, very high end.
There are these scenarios
which people may or may not
be familiar with.
The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
had these scenarios,
like this is
what the future's
going to look like.
Here's low emissions future,
here's a medium emissions
future, here's a high
emissions future.
We are tracking the
high emissions future.
So until that graph levels
off-- on some level,
I don't want to say
it doesn't matter
if we're using more renewable.
Obviously, it does.
It's taking away from what that
trend line would look like.
But until we turn
that around, we
haven't really gotten a
handle on this problem.
So I do think it's very hopeful.
Obviously, look, if we
could convert our economy
to not running on fossil
fuels, that would be huge.
That would be making an impact.
That really would be.
But I don't see signs
that we're really
on that kind of an actual
transformative course yet.
How's that?
And I'm not alone.
It's not my pessimism.
I don't think anyone see
signs of that at this point.
AUDIENCE: I know this
was a short talk.
You've talked a lot
about the carbon cycle.
But do you also talk in
the book about nitrogen,
some of the things that
agriculture is doing?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I do not
get into the nitrogen cycle,
but I could have.
One of the kind of
interesting things--
if you want to call
it interesting.
I don't know what the
right adjective is.
I could have chosen
different ways in which we're
changing the world
on a planetary scale.
And the nitrogen cycle
could have been one of them.
We fix more nitrogen--
I don't know
if people remember their
high school bio, once again.
But you need to fix nitrogen.
Plants can't use the
nitrogen from the air
because it's bound
together in N2.
So we need nitrogen-fixing
bacteria to transform nitrogen
into a usable form.
And when people figured
out-- early in this century,
a German chemist figured out how
to take nitrogen from the air
and convert it to
ammonia and fix nitrogen.
And that was the beginning
of nitrogen fertilizer.
It's exactly a
century ago, in fact.
We just celebrated a century
of nitrogen fertilizer.
We now fix more nitrogen than
all terrestrial ecosystems
combined.
That has huge, huge
impacts on living things.
It's why, for example, we
have a dead zone every summer
in the Gulf of Mexico.
Because all that
fertilizer comes down
the Mississippi River.
It fertilizes the Gulf.
You get these huge algae blooms.
The algae dies.
It drops to the bottom.
And you have deoxygenated water.
And dead zones are
increasing worldwide.
And it's all a function of
nitrogen fertilizer runoff.
So that would be
a whole other way
that we could have
this conversation.
AUDIENCE: Speaking
of agriculture,
I read that even if we stopped
using fossil fuels for power,
the agriculture that
we used to produce meat
would still contribute more than
half of the greenhouse gases.
But not carbon dioxide--
different ones.
Is that accurate?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT:
I don't think so.
How's that?
Our cows and things like
that are burping methane,
for example.
That's one way that
agriculture just produces CO2
without actually
burning fossil fuels.
But I think maybe
what you're referring
to is studies have shown that
meat production in general,
which is pretty fuel intensive
and pretty crop intensive,
obviously.
And also has these other
effects of methane emissions.
They are a major
source of emissions.
So a lot of people,
smart people,
have sort of
advocated that we all
eat either a lot
less meat or no meat.
And that that would have
a significant impact
on emissions.
And I think it would.
It's not going to
eliminate the problem,
but it would have an impact.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm wondering if you've
encountered a lot of climate
change deniers or
human impact deniers.
And if you have, what sort of
arguments have swayed them?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well,
climate change denial
is such a weird sort of
counterfactual world.
Here's a graph
showing you what's
happening to CO2 levels
in the atmosphere.
And if you know CO2's a
greenhouse gas-- which we know.
We've known for
150 years-- and you
know you're increasing it very
rapidly and very radically,
you'd say, OK, well, I kind of
expect the world to warm up.
So we just have these
ridiculous arguments,
like it's cold in
New York this week.
So there can be
no climate change.
It's impossible.
Much smarter people than I have
spent a lot of time thinking,
how can you counter such
ridiculous arguments
at this point?
And it's very hard.
I don't have the
answer for that.
But in terms of
other human impacts,
interestingly enough,
you very rarely
hear people being ocean
acidification deniers.
It's either too complicated
or it's just irrefutable.
You increase CO2
levels in the air.
Very basic chemistry
tells us you're
going to be increasing carbon
dioxide levels in the oceans.
We can measure it.
We are measuring it.
The pH of the surface waters
of the ocean is declining.
It's pretty irrefutable.
And once again,
the list goes on.
We're obviously altering
the nitrogen cycle.
It's not really
possible to deny that.
So the weird way that we're sort
of fixated on climate change,
yes or no, I think is
a complete function
of a bunch of increasingly
embattled information sources,
which have been funded by
all the usual suspects.
All of that is
true that you read.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thanks for coming to
speak with us today.
That picture of the
stark differences
in what the ocean looks like is
almost enough to make someone
want to cry.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT:
Yeah, it should be.
AUDIENCE: And I think there
are a lot of smart people
who realize that
change is happening.
But it feels so impossible
to make any change happen.
And I guess my first
question to you would be,
what could change things?
But I guess, in thinking
about my question to you,
it's more a question of do you
think there's anything that'll
change this trajectory,
and what would that be.
Because it feels almost like
an insurmountable issue.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yes.
Yes, it does feel that way.
I think one of the reasons
I'm glad to be here and then
talking to you folks at
Google is because there are
very smart people at Google who
are very aware of this problem
and know what it takes for
transformative technologies
to enter our world
and really change
the way we think about things
and the way we do things.
And I think that that
is one possibility.
And there is one possibility--
some gentleman said
before, there are renewable
sources of energy out there
that are increasingly
being deployed.
And that is true-- not
in a transformative way
at this point.
But it seems to
be not impossible
that that could happen if very
smart engineers, like those
at Google, put
their minds to it.
It seems to me that
that is a possibility.
I am not an engineer,
so I don't claim
to know what that's going to be.
But there are very, very,
very big forces at work here.
There's 7.2 billion
people on the planet.
A lot of people want to raise
their standard of living, which
unfortunately right now tracks.
Global GDP and global
carbon track each other.
And until and unless we uncouple
those or decide to have a lower
GDP, we're in this cycle
where emissions are just
going to keep going up.
Impacts are just going
to keep increasing.
And I certainly
don't claim to have
the answer of how we're going
to break that connection
or if we're going to
break that connection.
But it doesn't seem to
me impossible that that
could happen.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious
about-- besides
domesticated and invasive
species, what kind
of animals or species are
benefiting from human impact?
And is that change in
scope or population count,
is that a big effect relative
to the first-order effects
of human impact?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: That's
a really good question.
And I don't have a
great answer for that,
but it's a really
interesting question.
For example, rats seem
to do really well.
All of the species that we know
benefit from human disturbance
seemed to do really well.
So rats have been taken
around the world by people.
They are now on islands,
like the Hawaiian islands
where they never were.
The Hawaiian islands
had no mammals.
They're on really
tiny distant islands
in the Alaskan peninsula,
where people never
bothered to settle.
But they left rats behind.
So rats are everywhere.
And one of the guys
that I went out
with in the book, a
British geologist, sort of
speculated-- and it
was tongue in cheek,
but only half tongue
in cheek-- that rats
will inherit the
earth, that that
will become a dominant group.
But I think it is a really
interesting question
because clearly, yes.
Ecospace that's being
emptied by other species
may or may not be being
taken up by species
that benefit from
human disturbance.
It's not clear that your
total biomass is always
going to remain constant.
So I'm sure there are people
doing interesting work on that.
But I can't give you any
great statistics on it.
Clearly, also,
domesticated animals
now make up a
phenomenal proportion
of the world's biomass.
MALE SPEAKER: Well, if
there are no more questions,
let's thank the speaker again.
[APPLAUSE]
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
